Tag: Guest Writers

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: Aladdin

This review previously appeared at Bitch Flicks as part of our series on Animated Children’s Films.
This movie is about a princess and a “street rat” who fall in love and must overcome the evil Jafar to get married. This movie is also about generalizing non-Western cultures (mainly Middle Eastern cultures) and perpetuating cartoonish stereotypes of Arabic peoples. As an added bonus, this movie masquerades as a girl power film when in fact, it enforces the traditional gender role of men as active/women as passive.
The first time I saw this children’s movie was over this past summer, when I was the assistant director of a summer production of the musical Disney’s Aladdin. I was the only person involved in the production that had not seen Aladdin when I was a child. Every single one of the children (almost entirely girls, ages 9-12 with one 7 year old) came in with ideas of what the show would look like, because they had all seen the movie and they knew every single song. Because they knew the music, we had more time to work on choreography. For a marketplace scene, I asked the kids to strike a pose to freeze in during dialogue. I was looking for marketplace-y poses: two people talking, maybe gesturing to another person, walking poses, etc. They immediately put their arms up with their palms together so that their arms framed their face and their necks were moved to one side (a pose associated with “Arabia” in pop-culture). They all wanted to do their hair in the “I Dream of Jeannie” hairdo, because it was “so Arabian”. I wondered, where did they get such a stereotypical view of the Middle East? And then I saw the movie and all of those questions were answered.

 

My director thought that this was a girl power movie. Look! At the end, the Sultan declares that Jasmine can marry whomever she chooses, when she chooses! And she rejects all of those suitors because she’s “not a prize to be won”! Girl power yeah! No. This movie is producing yet another hetero-romantic story where women sit there and men pursue them. She was naïve before Aladdin shows her a “whole new world”—she is the passive learner while he is the active teacher. How does she help with the defeat of Jafar? She kisses him—using her body to be attractive to men—the rest of the time she just kind of stands there while Aladdin fights Jafar. Again, she stands there lookin’ sexy and being passive, he fights actively. Even their body stance around each other assumes a dominant/submissive look—Aladdin’s body is tall and upright, Jasmine is leaning into him or sitting behind him or being held in his arms. He is also physically larger, aside from her hair (her ponytail is thicker than her waist), she is extremely thin and takes up very little space when compared to Aladdin’s broad shoulders and muscular body. And of course, what other characters in this movie are women? Oh that’s right, they are all men. Because women can only be in stories to be the object of men’s affections, not to fill other roles. There are some background women in the dance scenes, but those are the “harem girls” and other sexualized women (because foreign=exotic and sexy!)
Essentially, all of the women are defined by their attractiveness to men. “Ugly” women, then, are used as comic relief. In one of the first scenes, when a woman opens the door and says of Aladdin, “Still I think he’s rather tasty!”, everybody in the audience is supposed to laugh. Aladdin looks at the woman (who is quite large) and jumps in surprise and disgust. Oh, silly fat woman, you can’t have feelings because you’re ugly! We’re supposed to laugh at how ridiculous her thinking Aladdin is “tasty” is—because fat women and ugly women are not supposed to have sexual desires. Only when the sexy women do this is it okay—nobody is laughing at Jasmine’s proclamations of love for Aladdin, because it doesn’t seem ridiculous now. Aladdin is attractive, she is attractive, so they can be in love.

 

So doing this story where every single role had to be filled by a girl made this an interesting production. Some girls told us they didn’t want to be a male character. Some girls who were cast into men’s roles started acting like men—they lowered their voices and changed their body language to reflect a stereotypical man. Some girls who were cast into men’s roles adopted them to be women’s roles—the girl playing Jafar, for example, had no issue with being a female Jafar. The girl who played Aladdin, the title character, made it clear that she was acting like a man—I, personally, thought that it would have been fine for her to be a female Aladdin (but the lesbian love story was not an idea that they particularly were comfortable with, which is interesting given how comfortable they were with heterosexual love stories).
In fact, I think it would have made the movie better if Aladdin was a girl (and if all the racism was taken out). Suddenly, “A Whole New World” takes on a whole new meaning—but these movies with antiquated gender roles would not have been as widely accepted into culture if the relationship it portrayed was queer.
When watching this movie, it’s hard to not get depressed about the fact that this is what little girls are told to aspire to. Watch something else instead.

This is an anonymous review.

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: Tangled

This review by Whitney Mollenhauer previously appeared at Bitch Flicks as part of our series on Animated Children’s Films.

Last Friday, I saw Disney’s Tangled with my husband.  I thought it was a pretty good feminist-y movie, especially considering that it was a Disney princess-type movie. Because I am lazy, I have written my review in bullet-point form:
  • Rapunzel’s father (the king) cries on Rapunzel’s birthday as he remembers his kidnapped daughter.  It seems like usually in these kind of movies, you see the mom crying and the dad consoling her; but here, it’s the other way around.  Win!  Men can express emotion, too!
  • Rapunzel sews and bakes, but she also reads, does astronomy, and paints like no other.
  • She is so awesome with her hair!  She ties the male protagonist up, lets herself down from the tower, and climbs everywhere.  Seriously, it’s very impressive.  She can do just about anything with that hair–it’s not just for show. 
  • Rapunzel ends up with short hair!  Okay, that’s just a little thing, but have you ever seen a Disney princess with a pixie cut before?  Even Mulan had longer hair!
  • So yeah, the mom is the bad guy because she’s vain/wants to be young forever, blah blah blah.  But I don’t know how they could have had a male villain or some other way for the mom to be the villain without straying too far from the original.  But at least she gets some jokes.
  • The frying pan proves to be a superior weapon compared to the sword!  This might be getting a little too psychoanalytic, but I saw the frying pan as symbolizing a kind of feminine/transgressive power, while the sword represents traditional masculine power.  I just thought it was neat.  You don’t have to be a swashbuckling dude to kick butt.
  • Her story and her adventure starts not because the guy “whisks her away” or something; but rather, she plans and schemes: she catches him breaking into her tower, and strategically decides to use him to reach her goal of seeing the flying lanterns on her birthday.
  • Spoiler alert: in the end, she’s not “saved” because of her compassion, but in spite of it–her compassion might actually have been her downfall.  Unlike other movies/fairy tales where a woman’s only redeeming quality is self-sacrifice, this ending suggests that self-sacrifice isn’t always such a good thing–or at least that it’s not solely the domain of women.  Men can be self-sacrificing too!  (Didn’t want to reveal too much here.  Go see the movie if you want to figure out what on earth I’m talking about.)
  • I liked the ambivalent nature of how it shows her mom’s and her relationship when Rapunzel leaves the tower for the first time.  She feels guilty, but MAN is she happy and excited and brave!
  • She doesn’t get married at age 18!!!!
  • In my opinion, the relationship was not even really a central feature of the story, but rather a sub-plot.  The main plot was getting away from her mother, figuring out her actual identity, getting to the flying lanterns she wanted to see.
  • I felt like it was good and feminist because it was a major improvement from how Disney usually is.  Also, overt sexism did NOT distract me from what was otherwise a visually appealing, witty movie (as it usually does).  And that is really saying something.
  • Even the rich, hypermasculine stereotype is challenged–the male protagonist reveals his true name/identity, as an orphan, and she says she likes him better than the fictional (hypermasculine) character that he aspires to be like.  
  • In the end, I think it makes a good case for women’s “proper place” NOT being just in the home, but out in the world/public sphere!  I’m not sure how you could get any other moral out of it.  Even in Mulan, after she saves China, she ends up returning home, and (we suspect) marrying the army captain guy, instead of taking a job with the emperor.  In Tangled, the movie’s premise is centered around the idea that it’s wrong and horrible to expect a woman to spend her whole life at home.
  • When the male protagonist breaks into her tower, she kicks his butt; she stands up for herself in the bar; and she stands up to her mother in the end (about having been kidnapped).
  • At the end of the movie, SHE dips HIM and kisses him.  (I always hated it when guys would dip me.  If I want to kiss you, I am going to kiss you, so just let me stay on my own two feet.)
  • Body image stuff:   Okay, so Disney’s not breaking down any boundaries here.  Also, infantilization much?  Rapunzel’s face is that of a two-year-old.  
  • So, I’m not very good at remembering specifics, but I DO remember not getting angry at seeing her needing rescuing again and again and again.  It seemed like mostly she was able to save herself, and the guy didn’t save her a whole lot.
  • In the bar, Rapunzel and the guy (Flynn) meet a whole bunch of rough guys.  They sing a song about how everyone’s got a dream: the one tough guy says to Flynn, “Your dream stinks,” referring to his dream of getting rich.  The other tough guys have dreams of becoming mimes, finding love, being a pianist, becoming a baker–and one made little tiny unicorns.  Even tough guys have nuance and feminine qualities!
  • Rapunzel’s animal companion is Pascal the chameleon.  Pascal is super cute, and is possibly named after Blaise Pascal the mathematician (suggesting that Rapunzel is a math nerd like me, though that could just be me reading too much into it).  Pascal can’t talk, and I felt like that was a good thing (feminist-wise), so he couldn’t show her up and become the hero (remember Mushu the dragon in Mulan?) 
My points are random and some are not very significant. But still, small wins!  And when it comes to Disney princess movies, any hint at feminist ideology is a HUGE win. And if nothing else, it at least passes the Bechdel Test:

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Whitney Mollenhauer is a graduate student in California where she studies sociology. She has an awesome husband who doesn’t mind her running feminist commentary when they watch movies together. And, she loves cereal. 

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’: Feminism and Crosscasting

This is a guest review by Barrett Vann. 
 
Initially, a feminist reading of Jesus Christ Superstar might not seem to turn out particularly in the musical’s favour. Although the ensemble is composed of men and women fairly equally, there is only one female character of any significance, Mary Magdalene. In addition to being the only named woman in the show, Mary is a prostitute, and in love with Jesus–the marks against her seem to add up. However, considering the show’s source text (the Bible, natch), this is not actually as bad as it sounds.

It’s a matter of loose scriptural interpretation as to whether the Biblical Mary was a prostitute, but this version of her is. It’s never stated outright, but it is alluded to, surprisingly not in a disrespectful fashion. When Judas sneers at her that ‘It’s not that [he objects] to her profession, but she doesn’t fit in well, with what you (Jesus) teach and say,’ Jesus immediately (and angrily, for JCS’s Jesus has something of a temper) slaps him down as a hypocrite. ‘When your slate is clean, then you may throw stones/ If your slate is not, then leave her alone!’ It’s notable, and unfortunate, that Mary doesn’t speak up for herself in this scene, instead allowing Jesus to come to her defence, but her profession–which it’s implied she still practises–is never shamed by the larger narrative.

Further, though she may be in love with Jesus, it’s not a one-dimensional, love-interest kind of emotion. Indeed, the show makes plain that she has no idea what to do with it. In her song aptly titled ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him,’ she’s shown as someone used to being in control of a situation, in control of her own emotions. Again, her profession as a sex worker is referenced when she rationalises to herself that she’s had lots of men, she knows how to deal with men, Jesus ought merely be one more. But for some reason, he’s not, and that scares her. As the song goes on, she even says, ‘Yet, if he said he loved me/ I’d be lost, I’d be frightened/ I couldn’t cope/ Just couldn’t cope.’

Refreshingly, though we see the positive aspects of her love in her behaviour toward Jesus, it’s also portrayed as what love often is; an overwhelming emotion. Mary is an independent, rational, controlled woman with an inner life who is, frankly, freaked out and doesn’t know how to deal with her own reactions.

Mary (Yvonne Elliman) washes Jesus’s (Ted Neeley) feet in the 1973 film

Later in the show, Mary is the one who confronts Peter about his denial of Jesus, sure where he is scared, and in the film, they have a duet, ‘Could We Start Again Please?,’ in which they lament that things have gone too far, and beg an absent Jesus to let them start over and do it again. Although in the scene with Peter, Mary is the strong one, she’s still fallible and unsure, and while in previous scenes, she’s seemed separate from the Apostles, here she is Peter’s comrade.

So, for a show and film with only one real female character, not bad. Not amazing, but certainly not as bad as it could be. However, where JCS really becomes interesting is in other respects.

Though this is intended to examine the show through a feminist lens, intersectionality is key, and so mention must be given to race. Though the practise of colourblind casting has been open to some debate as to whether or not it’s actually a good thing (allowing, for instance, such un-self-aware gaffes as all-white productions of The Wiz with the argument that they’re being colourblind, they’re being progressive), in the 1973 film of JCS, it’s practised about as truly as I have ever seen. The ensemble of disciples is about as diverse racially as they are among gender lines, and of what one might term the ‘main’ cast, Judas and Simon Zealotes are played by black men, Mary Magdalene a woman of mixed Irish, Chinese, and Japanese descent, and the actor who plays Herod is Jewish. Somewhat ironically, come to that. Actors of colour are not relegated to unimportant side characters; they can be anyone.

Simon Zealotes (Larry Marshall) and a group of disciples encourage Jesus to a militant revolution against the Romans
 
Carl Anderson (Judas), Ted Neeley, and Yvonne Elliman on set
One of the things which I find most interesting, though, is that, due to the fact that many of the significant male parts are written for high tenors, the show has a not-insignificant history of crosscasting. I’ve seen productions in which Judas is played by a woman, another where Jesus is. I’ve heard of Herod being played by a woman. Something about the show means that people seem to feel no compunction about such castings, which raises the question, do they invite new readings of the core text, or simply emphasise qualities that are already there?

One such reading is the relationship between Jesus and Judas. In the show, Judas is the main character, flawed but sympathetic, a tragic tool of destiny. He is written explicitly as a foil to Mary Magdalene; they both love Jesus, but Judas is challenging, afraid, untrusting of Jesus’s ability to handle what he’s started; he even gets a reprise of her song, ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him,’ as if the comparison wasn’t already clear. JCS makes it clear that Judas does love Jesus. Whether or not the role is crosscast, his scorn for Mary Magdalene is often played as the result of his jealousy over her. Some people might say that a crosscast show makes a strained romantic or sexual relationship between Jesus and Judas more obvious, but I would argue that a queer reading of a non-crosscast show is just as valid, and indeed it is occasionally played that way. Productions have been known to make Judas’s betraying kiss less a brotherly brush of the cheek, and more a desperate, angry, farewell kiss on the mouth.

When Jesus is crosscast, that also has the potential to change the relationship between himself and Mary Magdalene, as the only two women in a crowd of men. It also, perhaps more significantly, makes the prophet and leader of a cultural and religious movement female. It is all too common for works of fiction, as well as real-life movements, to revolve around men, and changing such a male leader to a female one is making a statement about gender and power, not to mention the trope of ‘the chosen one,’ a character type almost exclusively male. Thanks to ingrained cultural conventions about gender, it also changes the dynamic of things like the reasons behind the Sanhedrin’s decision to arrest Jesus, or the scene in which Pilate has him stripped and flogged. If Jesus is a woman rather than a man, such scenes will almost inevitably read differently.

The answer to my question, then, would be: both. Some things, mainly the interpersonal relationships, have precedent in the text, and crosscasting largely affects only how queer they are or aren’t, whereas larger societal issues which may crop up genuinely are not there in the original text.

Ultimately, Jesus Christ Superstar is interesting and feminist not necessarily because of what the text of the show itself presents, which may change from production to production, but because of the convention it carries which allows for queering of the text, of changing the gender of characters, of being free with the race of those cast. It would be difficult to imagine that happening with a show like The Secret Garden or Les Miserables.

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Barrett Vann is an English and Linguistics student at the University of Minnesota. An unabashed geek, she’s into cosplay, literary analysis, high fantasy, and queer theory. After she graduates in December, she hopes to tackle grad school for playwrighting or screenwriting, and become one of those starving artist types.

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: Cinderella

This review by Olivia Bernal previously appeared at Bitch Flicks as part of our series on Animated Children’s Films.
Cinderella (1950)

I would guess that in its long years of making animated features, Disney has made a mint on the princess formula. There is always a brooding prince, handsome, but distracted by his more worldly pursuits (i.e. war, evil, magic, etc.). There is a beautiful yet tragic young woman who is either on-her-knees humble, completely unaware of her high-class lineage, or else common as dirt. It is this woman’s duty to make trouble—stubbornly, stupidly, and innocently; the prince cleans up her mess, the audience rolling their collective eyes, lovingly amused.
In the case of Cinderella, the silly mistakes of losing a shoe and ignoring an expiring spell bring Prince Charming to Cinderella’s doorstep, ready to find his mate no matter how long it takes. This comes after a long and emotionally torturous journey on the part of Cinderella. In its beginning scenes, we see her struggle with housework under the ridiculous demands of her evil Stepmother and Stepsisters. She washes floors while singing prettily, the bubbles harmonizing her melody. It is revealed to us that she used to be rich and spoiled, but destiny wringed her into this incarnation – selfless, lovely, and dutiful. She is the better for it; look what fate made of those Stepsisters – loud, obnoxious, and ugly.
We see the Stepsisters’ true colors when, having been promised by her Stepmother to attend the Prince’s ball, Cinderella pieces together a gown from her real Mother’s dress and beads and cloth trashed by the Stepsisters and collected by Cinderella’s animals friends. As she cleans and cooks (in her Stepmother’s attempt to make her too late to attend the ball), the mice and birds sew together something passable for her to wear. The Stepsisters, recognizing their discarded materials, rip it apart and flounce off, their bustles comically bouncing after them.
It is shocking to see such a comely, self-possessed woman ripped apart as such. But a fairy godmother replaces the dress with a blue, glittering number, complete with absurd ear-covering headpiece. Cinderella floats into the ball and the rest is history. Beauty trumps power once again.
Watching Cinderella again for the first time since I was a child, it was amazing to me that time and again Disney portrays women as either bitches or victims. Ursula, Maleficent, Snow White’s Queen, the Queen of Hearts and of course Cinderella’s stepmother Lady Tremaine are all evil women, jealous of the beauty and innocence of their younger counterparts. One by one they seek to quell romance, passion, and everything else good from the lives of the eventual princesses by seeking power, wealth, and beauty of their own. Only a man can save these women from their pitiful disputes, damaging though they are. Perhaps the notion of a man wielding this type of power over a young, beautiful woman was a little too akin to rape for Disney’s taste. Either way, the Disney-fication of evil into an older, vindictive woman promotes an attitude that women are either a victim or seeking to be a victim; a mentality that when unleashed in the real world leads to horrific statements like, “She was asking for it.”
Newer Disney movies rely much less on this format; I think of such movies as Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, and Pocahontas whose end result of marriage contradicts a much more liberated adventure. In 1950, however, romance, passion, and entertainment could only be accomplished via marriage. True love was confirmed by a man deigning to step from his elevated social status to marry a woman of common birth. (A scheme that, as it usually turned out, wasn’t necessary because said princess is in fact rich or royal or whatever.) And marriage was enough to fill a plot. Jane Austen’s scheming ladies were a prototype for Disney princess movies. The goal is love, sure, but wealth and security sweeten the deal, too.
The problem I have most with Cinderella, though, is in the sweet density of Cinderella herself. “Have faith in your dreams and someday
/Your rainbow will come smiling through/
No matter how your heart is grieving
/If you keep on believing/
The dream that you wish will come true,” Cinderella croons as she prepares herself for another day of back-breaking, selfless labor. This kind of ignorant rhetoric endorses a blind acceptance of the status quo. Cinderella does not believe she can affect change in her own life. She will wait with faith and something good is bound to happen. Of course, as Disney shows us, it does; Prince Charming really does come and all is happily ever after. It negates a choice and, above all, this is the importance of the feminist movement – to allow the Cinderellas of the world to say “Fuck you” to all the evil power-mongers and be on their way – Prince or no. If women had just kept on believing, their dreams would definitely not have come true. Action in the form of choice is the truest path to liberation.
It is no coincidence that Cinderella was made in 1950. It was the era of writing the standards for the modern housewife; principles of which were impossible for any woman to attain without depression or at least a nasty drinking habit. This archetypal housewife has become the subject of so many books and movies (see The Hours, Far From Heaven, Revolutionary Road, etc.). The era was the springing board for Second Wave feminism. As nostalgia, it is still fun to watch a movie like Cinderella. Perhaps, if nothing else, we can enjoy these movies as a relic of the era – a document of history and ideas that are, luckily, past.
 
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Olivia Bernal is a public school English teacher from Kansas. She reviews books at The Independent Book Review.
 
 

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: James and the Giant Peach

This review by Libby White previously appeared at Bitch Flicks as part of our series on Animated Children’s Films. 

Based on the book by Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach has been a favorite movie of mine since childhood. After all, what kid wouldn’t love a cast of singing and dancing insects?
(Before I go into a review of the movie, I must state that I have never read the book, and do not know how closely the movie follows. Any comments I make are on the film alone, not the book.)
Directed by Henry Selick, the story revolves around a boy named James, who after the death of both parents, ends up a slave to his two cruel aunts, Sponge and Spiker. After an encounter with a strange man promising him “marvelous things,” James receives a bag of magical sprites, (crocodile tongues boiled in the skull of a dead witch for 40 days and 40 nights, the gizzard of a pig, the fingers of a young monkey, the beak of a parrot and three spoonfuls of sugar to be exact),  that inadvertently end up planting themselves within a barren peach tree. An enormous peach sprouts from the tree at contact,  which James later escapes into, turning into a claymation version of himself. Alongside a band of personified insects, the group sail across the ocean on the peach, encountering various trials as they head towards their destination in New York City.
The aunts, Sponge and Spiker, are two of the worst people to ever grace the silver screen, with their terrible abuse of young James setting the stage for the adventure ahead. They serve as the main antagonists of the story, chasing James across land and sea to recapture him.
The Aunts are horrific caretakers; starving, beating, and emotionally abusing James relentlessly. Mind you, this is a movie for children. And like in most children’s movies, the Aunts’ outward appearance reflects their inner evil. Both women are made to look terrifyingly cruel and yet simultaneously clown-like, dressed in orange-red wigs and slathered on make-up. During their first 20 minutes on screen, the two women participate in dozens of morally reprehensible practices, everything from shameless vanity to verbally attacking a woman and her children.
The fact that the villains are female does not bother me, nor that they are portrayed as greedy, selfish people. After all, women are just as capable as men of committing child abuse. However, while the style of the movie is very dark and Tim Burton-esque, I can’t help but wish that the Aunts’ appearances were not related to their evil.  Too often in the world of children’s movies a villain need only be identified by their ugly appearance, as if that is a symptom of inner ugliness. Just look at most Disney movies from the past century!
The women’s abuse of James was also very dramatic and purposeful, most likely so that the children watching the movie could understand James’ need for immediate escape. The film could have used the Aunts as an opportunity to delve into the other types of child-abuse, but instead meant to focus on the strong atmosphere of fantastical adventure. (With a story that involves death by Rhinoceros, skeleton pirates, and mechanical sharks, it is easy to understand why the people themselves are wildly unrealistic. The world itself is wildly unrealistic.) 
Transformed by the sprites themselves, James finds a group man-sized insects living within the giant peach, each with a unique personality that relates to their species. There is a smart, cultured grasshopper; a kind, nurturing ladybug; a rough-talking, comedic centipede; a neurotic, blind earthworm; a poetic, intelligent spider; and a deaf, elderly glowworm.
The spider, glowworm, and ladybug are all female, each very different and yet immensely likeable. It’s great to see several types of female personalities represented, though perhaps they are a little clichéd. Miss Spider is the typical sensual seductress, the Ladybug a doting mother-figure. The glow-worm has no real part except serving as a lantern inside the peach, and occasionally mishearing a phrase for laughs.
James: “The man said marvelous things would happen!”
Glowworm: “Did you say marvelous pigs in satin?”
Miss Spider in particular is a great female character; strong, smart, and willing to stand up for herself and those she cares about. Despite her reputation as a killer and cave-dweller, she repeatedly defends James and wards off the assumptions the other insects have made-about her.  From the moment she is introduced in her personified form, you can’t help but like her. She doesn’t take anyone’s crap.
Ladybug comes off as an older, traditional woman, complete with a flowered hat and overfilled purse. She is kindly, though strict about manners and being polite. When describing what each bug hopes to find in New York City, Ladybug is most concerned with seeing flowers and children. And while Ladybug does resemble an Aunt of mine to disturbing proportions, I felt like she had no purpose in the story other than to serve as James’ replacement mother/grandmother. While the other insects are having swashbuckling adventures and near death experiences, Ladybug is just scenery, screaming and cheering in the correct places. Which is odd, because every insect has a large amount of screen time devoted to their stories and transformation, minus the glowworm and ladybug. Both female characters. In the end, it was James, Miss Spider, Centipede, Earthworm, and Grasshopper who repeatedly saved the day. Ladybug was just there to reassure James of himself whenever fear or doubt overtook him.

Despite this unfortunate exclusion, I still would highly recommend the film to anyone who is interested. It is visually stunning, undoubtedly original, and teaches a lesson about family that is quite touching.
From a feminist perspective, my favorite thing about the film is that it doesn’t pay any attention to sex at all. At no point are the Aunts’ criticized for being a disappointment to the name of maternal women. At no point is Miss Spider treated differently because she is female. No, almost every character has an inner and outer struggle, each reaching a defining moment in the plot where they must test themselves to save those they love. Together, the insects and James form a makeshift family, each working equally with one another to build a happy life in their new home. (And the boy who plays James is too cute for words, all his emotions and inner growth come off as genuine. You can’t help but cheer for him as he finally stands up to his aunts.)
Overall, James and the Giant Peach is an excellent movie, and I would suggest it to any parent or person who likes stories of adventure and fantasy. Any warnings I would give would refer only to the dark nature of the beginning of the film, and to any people who may be afraid of giant, rampaging rhinoceroses.

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Libby White is a senior at the University of Tennessee, studying Marketing and Spanish full-time. Her parents were in the Navy for most of her life, so she got to see the world at a young age, and learn about cultures outside her own. Her mother in particular has had a huge influence on her, as she was a woman in the military at a time when men dominated the field. Her determination and hard-work to survive in an environment where she was not welcomed has made Libby respect the constant struggle of women today.

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: ‘Singin’ In the Rain’

This is a guest review by Deirdre Crimmins.  

Singin’ In The Rain (dir. Stanley Donan & Gene Kelly)

Though my first love in cinema will always be horror films, I have such an affection for musicals. The glitzy costumes. The aggressively perky and optimistic characters. The song and dance that always seems spontaneous, and from the heart. This odd, and utterly fabricated world, is always both the complete antithesis, and the perfect compliment to the grimy underbelly of film in which I typically dwell. In fact, you will even find an umbrella just for Gene Kelly nestled in my tattoos amongst the zombies and vampires.

While the genre can whisk you away to foreign lands, and domestic bliss, it is also historically problematic when it comes it its representations of women, and gender in general. Though the men are singing and dancing, they are always men’s men, expressing their gender through ruggedness and emotional unavailability. The women are often window dressing, and pawns in the plot, rather than autonomous people who have actual emotions and ambitions. Singin’ In The Rain suffers from some of the same issues that many musicals have with their treatment of genders, but it does have a surprisingly progressive character as well.

First, we must cover the unfortunate representation of women in the film. Even within the context of a film released in 1952, but portraying the invention of the talking pictures in 1927, it has some nearly inexcusable moments. The worst of which is the “Beautiful Girls” number. The title of this song, crooned by a matinee idol, is just the beginning of my issues with it. The song follows a man describing all of the latest fashions for a modern woman as we see each of these outfits modeled by woman in dioramas to showcase the fashion as it would be worn in the world. Each of the women is frozen in place, to mimic a lifeless, soulless, mannequin, with varying degrees of success in not fidgeting. This transformation from people to objects is enough to put many people into a gender misrepresentation-spin, but my issues with the sequence does not stop there. The culmination of this sequence is when the modern “girl’s” life hits its highest point: the wedding dress. The music soars, and it is clear that all of her outfits and activities have built towards this final costume. When this gown is revealed all of the women come to life, and then surround the singer to frame him as he belts out those last lyrics. Clearly this sequence in particular is communicating the end all, be all of a woman’s life is her wedding. After that there is no more soaring musical numbers, and no more fancy outfits to be had. While this sequence does have major problems ideologically, it is unfortunately not too far from how women are portrayed today as well. If you browse any modern newsstand you will still see these framed female bodies, each frozen in their own dioramas of life with the perfectly corresponding outfit. You will also see the great white wedding dress being sold as the most important object a woman will ever buy. This is why I hesitate to be too critical of the film–we are not too far from these representations. It by no means validates these portrayals, but it does put them in perspective. 

Somehow, in the sea of women (all of them far past the age of being called “girl), swaying next to the crooner is our heroine, Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds). Kathy is by far one of my favorite, and the best characterized, women in musicals of this era.

We first meet Kathy when Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) jumps in to her car to escape a throng of overzealous fans. With Kathy driving herself we instantly associate her with independence. And unlike the pursing fans, Kathy can act logically and contain herself.

Inevitably Kathy and Don fall in love, and spend the rest of film ensuring that they are able to stay together while growing their careers.

The thing that I find unique about Kathy’s character is that she is so balanced. She is never a caricature. She is able to keep up with Don and his buddy Cosmo (Donald O’Connor), but she never veers into becoming “one of the guys” by sacrificing her femininity just to match them in comedic timing. She also dances and sings along with them, but never as a partner who is put there to make Don look better. And it seems no matter what else is thrown at her, she remains herself. Being so self aware and content is not always shown for characters in musicals. Frequently the women are shown as aggressive career women who sacrifice themselves for their careers (Majorie Reynolds in Holiday Inn) or women who are put there just to be romanced by the main character. Kathy is strong enough to not only know who she is, but also can be true to herself and pursue both her personal life and her career. 

It is this intersection of career and love which makes the final scene in the film heart wrenching. At a film premier Kathy is called upon to continue providing the voice for the shrieking silent film star Lina (Jean Hagen), at the expense of her own burgeoning career. Singing for Lina again would mean giving up any hope for singing herself, but both the head of the studio and Don are threatening her with ending her career if she refuses. She begrudgingly agrees to help them, but tells Don that she can’t love him if he asks her to sacrifice her career for his. Though their love is so strong, Kathy knows that what Don is asking her to do is selfish, and goes against what her desires are. She is clearly pained by the decision, which is refreshing to see. She wants both love and career, and knows that she should not be forced to choose between the two. In the end, Don and Cosmo expose Lina for what she is, and Kathy’s career and love life are saved. I have no objections to the fact that Kathy is saved by the men of the film. Conversely, I celebrate that Don needed to find a way to save Kathy’s career in order to win her back. He could have just let her run away, and then attempt to woo her back after the fact, but in order to win her heart again he needed to prove to her that he took her career as seriously as his own. Had he not prioritized her career, their relationship would be ultimately doomed.

With Kathy’s level-headed portrayal in Singin’ In The Rain it is easy for me to long for other women characters in modern film to be like her. It is her self-assuredness, and strength without stubbornness that make her believable and admirable. And any woman who can effortlessly keep up with Gene Kelly should be considered heroic.
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Deirdre Crimmins lives in Boston with her husband and two black cats. She wrote her Master’s thesis on George Romero and works too much.

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: The Little Mermaid

This review by Ana Mardoll previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on May 9, 2012. 

 

Disney. The word is so synonymous in my mind with “animated feature films” that it’s like using “Kleenex” for “tissue.” When children come to my house, as they sometimes do, they’re invariably drawn to my huge selection of “Disney movies,” only about 70% of which are actually affiliated with Disney in any way shape or form. I enjoy most of them, or I wouldn’t own them. They each have their own problems, but a good many of them have something truly positive that I treasure. And what better way to start a deconstruction of animated feature films with the one I knew first and loved best: The Little Mermaid?

The Little Mermaid is possibly one of the most contentious movies I’ve ever loved. It was created in 1989, and has been specially beloved by many children in general and by myself in particular since then. I must have watched the movie eighty squintillion times as a child; it was one of the few videos I loved enough to manage to convince my parents to buy, and I watched it until the video literally broke from use. By that point, Disney had locked the reel in their “appreciate for value” vault and when they relaunched the movie in theaters in 1997, I was there to see it on the big screen. I have never been able to watch the movie without sobbing straight through from opening titles to end credits.

I sometimes feel like everyone I meet online has seen this movie at least once. Almost all of them have an opinion on the movie. Most of the opinions are strongly polarized: either Ariel is a free-thinking young woman who bravely rejects racism to forge her own destiny and create a lasting peace between two cultures or she’s an idealized anti-feminist icon, complete with Barbie-doll figure and shell bikini, completely willing to throw away her family, her culture, and her own voice for the sake of a man she’s never even met.

Those who fall between these two views tend to stay out of the flame wars. I don’t blame them.

I like The Little Mermaid. I like a lot of things that are problematic, and I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with liking problematic things as long as a certain awareness is maintained that Problems Abound Therein. Art is complicated like that. But I like The Little Mermaid and I think it’s compatible with valuable feminist messages. Certainly, it was my first introduction into a feminist narrative and I have always considered the problematic romance storyline to be camouflage for the real story. But we’ll see whether or not you agree.


Please note that everything I say from here on in is just my opinion.

For me, The Little Mermaid is the story of an Otherkin girl living in a world that is hostile to Otherkin. Ariel is a human born into a merperson’s body, and in a culture that routinely lambasts humans for the very same things that the underwater world does: eat fish. (Seriously. That shark at the beginning who chases Ariel and Flounder is clearly trying to eat them. These are not Happy Vegetarian Fishes.)

For me, The Little Mermaid is the story of a feminist girl living in a world that is hostile to feminist ideals. Ariel is a headstrong young woman who wants knowledge and growth and her own voice, but these things are being systematically denied to her. The only form of learning her father permits is that of patriarchy-approved women’s pursuits: she may study music, but not other cultures.

For me, The Little Mermaid is the story of a culture-conscious girl living in a world that mandates insularity. Ariel wants to learn about cultures and peoples and practices and histories different from her own, but she lives in a world that holds even third-hand study of such things to be utterly forbidden because the power structure believes that the populace is safer if they are steeped in fear and ignorance. (Fearful merpeople won’t try to make contact with the humans, and thus fear maintains their secrecy.)


And now I’ll walk through the film and explain why I feel these things.

The opening titles air over singing humans as they work on the local prince’s pleasure ship / wedding ship / fishing ship. Well, there are three ships in the movie, and they all look pretty much the same to me, so I’m going to assume that Prince Eric has a fleet of all-purpose boats and this is one of them. But the sailors are singing while they collect fish in their nets and Eric (and the audience!) is learning, and here are a couple of problematic things up-front. 

One, everyone in this universe is white. (We’re going to be seeing this one a lot in the Disney deconstructions.) Two, this is not a working class universe. Oh, the fishermen are fishing, but this is really the only work you’re going to see in this movie outside of a quick shot of laundry-washing and some cooking. I think Eric’s kingdom is supposed to be one of those picturesque smaller ones where the royalty aren’t far removed from the common folk and don’t mind getting their hands dirty, but it’s kind of a muddled message and it only gets worse when we get to Triton’s kingdom. Let’s just place a big sign over the deconstruction that these are Privileged White People with the inherent issues that inevitably follow. 


We pan down under the sea to the King Triton’s Schmancy Music Hall and Combination Throne Room just in time to see Ariel completely fail to show up for a music gig that was intended largely to glorify her father while his daughters display themselves to the populace and use their vocal talents to praise his name. I can’t imagine why a young woman might think she had better uses of her time than to be a public ornament to her father, nor why she might refuse to come to rehearsals (as Sebastian tells us). And when her father realizes that Ariel has failed to show up for the concert, his eyes literally turn red with rage. Yowza. 

And here is an important point: Ariel’s dad is abusive. Oh, I think he doesn’t try to be, and I even think he doesn’t want to be, but he is. And I really do think it’s a function of The Patriarchy Hurts Men, Too. You see this clearly in the scenes with Triton and Sebastian: both men shore up each other’s will to be harsher than they otherwise individually would be inclined to be, and they do this because they think it’s expected of them. When Triton is alone and when no one is looking, his face softens, his expression is sad, and he sighs and weeps for the decaying relationship he has with his daughter. It’s when others are looking — notably, Sebastian, the only other adult male in Triton’s scenes — that Triton is at his most abusively fierce. 

I don’t think this is a coincidence. Triton isn’t monstrous and Sebastian doesn’t callously bring out the worst in him; they both reinforce each other’s commitment to harmful patriarchy ideals, because they’ve been raised to believe the patriarchy expects them to. Neither is it a coincidence that Triton’s final act of redemption comes after he and Sebastian have revisited a previous conversation and they’ve admitted that they were both wrong and that their actions were harmful. But now I’m jumping ahead. 


By giving Triton this characterization, Ariel is immediately given a rich and sympathetic background before she even swims onto the stage. She’s living in a deeply patriarchal and oppressive community where her status as “princess” is largely ornamental and wholly subject to the whims and wishes of her father. While she probably had moments of tenderness between her and her father, particularly when she was younger and could be indulged as a child instead of punished for being a woman, their relationship is strained by his insistence on publicly conforming to aggressive and abusive parenting models whenever anyone is looking. These shifts in emotional tone probably confuse and frustrate Ariel: why is her father so kind at times and yet so harsh at other times? She’s coped with the on-and-off abuse by literally withdrawing. By forgetting rehearsals and the concert and pulling back into her cavern of collections, she’s not passively asserting herself or deliberately catering to the patriarchy; she’s trying to carve out a safe space, mentally and physically. 

We are introduced to Ariel who, at great personal risk to her safety — both from the sharks who seek to eat her and from her father who could severely punish her — she is scavenging human items from old shipwrecks. And this… is amazing! Our protagonist is an explorer. What’s more, she’s a scientist, going to a direct source (albeit a bad source, since the seagull is actually ignorant of human affairs, but Ariel has no way of knowing that) to be educated on the items she finds. She wants to understand the humans, and to study the things they do and the items they create. She has a whole secret museum dedicated to all the things she’s collected over the years. 


Words fail me in describing how incredible I find this. In another movie, or in a book, there would be more time spent on just how incredibly subversive Ariel is being and has been, for literally years and years. This isn’t a trivial hobby or a girlish obsession; she’s the only person in her culture who is both willing and privileged enough (due to the fact that Triton might not blast his own daughter into tiny bits for breaking his laws) to almost single-handedly set up an entire cultural museum of study on a race of people right outside the kingdom’s doorstep. The sheer bravery and gumption and intellectual devotion necessary for Ariel to have done what she’s done is amazing: she’s essentially created her very own Human Studies department right under the king’s nose because studying other cultures is important, dammit. 

I dare you to bring me a Disney heroine who has demonstrated similar levels of bravery, intellect, scientific pursuit, and proactive awesomeness within the first 15 minutes of her own movie. 

Then we cut over to Ursula, and… I have mixed feelings about Ursula. On the one hand, she’s a fat woman and a villain in a movie that has problematic body portrayals. Ariel’s sisters are almost uniform in body type, expect for Adella who kind of sort of maybe looks a little bit bigger than her sisters, in the Lane Bryant model sort of way (i.e., same breast and hip proportions, just slightly bigger all over) and who was promptly slimmed down for the sequel because Disney got the memo that fat people are not sexeh because DEATHFATS. The only other fat women in this movie are the castle servants, who are fat in the non-threatening happy-servant kind of way, and the fat woman in the Ursula song who “this one [is] longing to be thinner.” And — rage! — the fat merwoman’s tail extends up and over her breasts like Ursula’s does, but the thin incarnation of the fat woman has the bare-stomach shell-bra combo that Ariel sports. Because nude fat stomachs are obscene and ugly, but thin fat stomachs are normalized and pretty! Grr, Disney. 


But! Ursula is sexy. Her breasts! Her butt! The way she moves! Her voice! I don’t honestly remember really… noticing this as a child, but it’s there and it’s largely treated as… normal. Ursula isn’t evil because she’s sexy, nor does she seem really to be evil because she’s fat. She’s just evil and fat and sexy, all in the same package, and I guess that’s kind of cool? I’m not sure. But then when I noticed that in this viewing, I realized that this movie is actually VERY filled with women’s bodies. Can we say that about any other Disney movie? 

I don’t just mean the bikinis and the tummies; the women’s bodies here move. Ursula struts realistically around her cave and gods but those breasts and butt are there and they move. And — skipping forward a bit to Ariel’s “I Want” song — Ariel shakes her hips when she sings about “strolling along” the street; she undulates her whole body sensually when she imagines being “warm on the sand.” There are bodies in this movie! And… while they are sexy bodies, I don’t feel like I’m being clubbed with Male Gaze. I like it. I like how it seems to normalize women’s bodies as real, as things that come in different sizes, as things that can be uncovered and sexy and yet not objectified into T&A without a head or a personality needed. I’m just sorry that we have to leave the 1980s in this regard. 


Coming back to the movie, Triton yells at Ariel for missing rehearsal. He cuts her off multiple times in this scene, and calls humans “barbarians” which is a nice bit of othering to throw onto the pile of objections to Triton’s character. He then tosses a tone argument at Ariel, which effectively cuts off not only what she was going to say but also punishes her for reacting realistically and legitimately to his bullying. Then Triton tells her that as long as she lives under “my ocean,” she’ll obey “my rules,” which is totally not controlling or an abusive conflation of kingly privilege and parental privilege. And then Triton and Sebastian decide that Ariel, who is a young woman budding into her sexual awakening, needs “constant supervision.” Patriarchy for the win. 

And then we have Ariel’s “I Want” song and it still gives me shivers. The opening lines — “If only I could make him understand. I just don’t see things the way he does. I don’t see how a world that makes such wonderful things could be bad.” — reinforce that Ariel is not only longing to be human already, but she’s also inherently more open-minded than her close-minded and prejudice liege-father. Her fantasies of being human conflate with her fantasies of living in a feminist-friendly society where she can speak her mind freely and grow intellectually: “Betcha on land, they understand; bet they don’t reprimand their daughters. Bright young women, sick of swimmin’, ready to stand. And ready to know what the people know; asking my questions and get some answers.” 

MORE WOMEN! The picture of fire and the wind up toy that shows dancing both have women in them. The parallel is obvious in that Ariel wants to be these women, but I’m still blown away looking at how many women are in this film in places where I frankly think nowadays they’d be edited out. Maybe it helps that this movie wasn’t made or marketed with the All Important Male Demographic in mind, I don’t know. 

Sebastian tumbles out and informs Ariel of what she already knows: her father would be furious if he found out about the museum. Which makes so much sense, really, that his racial hatred of humans extends so far that he would deny his subjects the ability to even study them, if only to come up with more effective ways of avoiding the humans, because studying leads to understanding and understanding leads to compassion and compassion doesn’t mesh well with racial hatred. And, yes, I know they’ve woobied him up with two decades’ worth of backstories and personal tragedy, but I think that waters down the message that sometimes even people we love can be racist assholes. 

We zip up to the surface for Ariel to see Prince Eric and for some character establishing shots. And I have to say that Eric is probably my favorite Disney prince. He’s hanging out with his working class and while that could be seen as slumming, he doesn’t seem to mind getting rope burn on his hands and he knows how to steer the boat, so he’s at least not adverse to learning. And he goes back to a fiery burning ship to save his dog. 


Ariel saves his life. 

They didn’t have to do it this way. They could have had Ariel and Eric catch a glimpse of one another and fall in love that way. Ariel could have been singing in a quiet grotto and Eric could have been drawn to the sound and seen her for a split moment before she disappeared. It would have been pretty and feminine and sweet. But they didn’t do that. They had her proactively search the burning wreckage of a ship, and drag an unconscious man to safety on the shore. And that tells me two things. One, in 1989, being saved from death by a woman didn’t emasculate you forever in the eyes of the (probably) male screenwriters. Two, in 1989, saving a handsome man from drowning was considered an acceptable female fantasy with all the strength, verve, and determination that accompanies that.

Haha, no, there’s totally not a backlash against feminism today in 2012. IT’S ALL YOUR IMAGINATION. 

Sebastian tries to convince Ariel that life under the sea is better than life as a human. He has a jazzy musical number and Ariel gives him quirky yeah-I’m-not-buying-it looks before it becomes clear that she’s not really needed for this song routine and goes off with Flounder. And here is a big ol’ world-building mess because apparently the fish neither work nor eat, and they all live off of plankton delivered to their doorstep every morning by magic. Or so Sebastian seems to think from his position of Privilege? I dunno. This is why deconstructing movies with talking animals is hard. 

Triton calls Sebastian into his throne room and interrogates Sebastian while cheerily pointing his weaponized triton at the little crab. Haha, that is not scary at all! Sebastian breaks down and tells Triton about Ariel’s museum, and Triton shows up and brutally destroys it all while she weeps and begs him to stop. And this scene? Wrecks me every time. The bit with Triton building himself into a rage — “One less human to worry about! … I don’t have to know them — they’re all the same. Spineless, savage, harpooning fish-eaters, incapable of any feeling…” — is both horrifying and priceless because it really gets through how xenophobic and racist Triton truly is. He doesn’t care that he’s frightening his daughter; the rage has built in him to a point where terrorizing her makes more sense to him than actually talking to her or doing anything other than abusing his position as both king and father. 


And this scene is so utterly valuable. Because now Ariel will go to the sea witch and trade her entire life away (and her voice) to go chase after a man she’s never met. Remember that anti-feminist message referenced way back up there at the beginning? But that’s not what she’s doing, not really. As much as Ariel laments in a moment that “If I become human, I’ll never be with my father or sisters again,” her father has driven her away. Ariel isn’t safe under the sea, not emotionally or psychologically. Her life’s obsession with studying and understanding and educating herself on human culture will never be accepted — and if she persists in trying to do so clandestinely, it will only be a matter of time before someone discovers her secret, betrays her to the king, and all her work is destroyed. She knows that fate is inevitable, because it’s just happened not ten minutes ago. 

Ariel can either go home and be a good mermaid and play with her hair and go to voice rehearsal and marry a merman who will never share her interests or understand her and she can live and die frustrated and unfulfilled. Or she can take a chance and become everything she’s ever wanted: a human. And she can become that human by finding true love — “Not just any kiss,” Ursula cautions. “The kiss of True Love.” — with the first human she’s ever met, a man who attracts her with his courage and bravery and adventurous spirit. It’s a gamble, and possibly not a good one, but it must seem like the one hope for happiness left available to her. 

Human! Ariel washes up on Prince Eric’s beach and is taken for a traumatized survivor of a shipwreck, which seems plausible enough. And while I’m not 100% sure I like Grim pressing Eric to woo the traumatized survivor of a shipwreck rather than, say, provide for her education and psychological care and place her in the best possible position to choose how she wants to live the rest of her life, I do love that Eric is shown as being highly reluctant to treat Ariel with anything less than courtesy and respect. A privileged man who doesn’t react to a pretty half-naked woman washing up on his beach like Christmas has come early? Yes, please. 


There’s a scene with a French chef that is so heavy on the cultural stereotypes that I don’t even know what to say. I was going to say that this was one of the only animated feature film songs that features a foreign language, but then I remembered the Charo song in Thumbelina, which is also heavy on cultural stereotypes. *sigh* 

Then Eric and Ariel go on a tour of “his kingdom,” which seems to basically be this one decent-sized town, and Ariel is in complete Manic Pixie Dream Girl mode, but for once this makes sense because everything she sees is literally new and exciting and amazing and a dream come true. And then he lets her drive the carriage and she loves it and clears an oddly-placed death-defying jump and once the panic passes, Eric settles back like this is the good life and Ariel is clearly having a ball. I think that’s sweet, frankly. 

And then there’s a lot of singing and near-kissing and Ursula showing up to ruin things and Ariel being towed out to the ship which is not nearly as awesome as her swimming out there under her own power, and I get that it makes sense that swimming-with-legs would be something she’s not mastered, but still it feels like the Feminism Power has run out, and then Ariel and Eric reunite just in time for it to be TOO LATE and Ariel is a merperson and Eric does not care even a little bit because Eric is not a racist asshole like Triton. And then Eric saves Ariel’s life with a harpoon while Triton watches, and this is hilarious given Triton’s earlier rant about humans-who-wield-harpoons. 

After the exciting showdown scene, Eric recovers slowly on the shore while Ariel watches from her rock. Triton and Sebastian watch from further out, with Triton realizing that she really does love him and that this hasn’t all been About Him and her special butterfly rebellion. Gee, ya think? Sebastian tells him “children got to be free to lead their own lives” and Triton references as earlier conversation where Sebastian said the opposite. And this is the moment where everything is unspoken, but for me it seems like they’re saying yeah, this whole Patriarchy thing is garbage and we were wrong. And then Triton gives Ariel her legs back, she marries Eric, and there’s a new era of peace for both kingdoms, and it is awesome. 

And… yeah. It ends in a 16 year old marrying a guy she’s known all of three days. (Assuming we don’t go with the standard handwave that between cuts there could have been years and years of dating that we didn’t see. Because movies don’t work like that.) And, devoid of context, that is Very Problematic. Hell, even with context, it’s not something that gives me warm fuzzies. I do not like the Mandatory Marriage at the ends of these movies, or the implication that it’s not a Happy Ending without one. And I like the Mandatory Marriage even less when it happens to two teenagers (or one teenager and one guy in his early twenties) who’ve known each other only over the course of a few adrenaline-packed and hormone-driven days. I don’t feel like this is a healthy formula. So there’s that.

But it’s also one of the few movies I can think of where an Otherkin protagonist gets the form she’s always felt was really hers. And it’s a movie where a brave young woman defied the racist and xenophobic laws of her homeland in order to create a greater understanding between two cultures and almost single-handedly engineer a peace between both kingdoms. And she did all this while she was sixteen, as a young woman in an abusive family where she was only valued for her ornamental status. She held on to her inner essential self and managed to forge her own path without ever once beating herself up for the abusive things that others did to her. Throughout the movie, the entire narrative seems to scream that being strong-while-female is not a bad thing: it’s okay to defy your racist asshole dad, it’s okay to save the life of the handsome guy who won’t then turn around and act all emasculated and shun you, it’s okay to own your “acceptably feminine” talents in ways that make you happy, social expectations be damned. And for a movie that is now over twenty years old, that seems kind of awesome. 


Ana’s Happy Feminism Fuzzies Scorecard 
– Otherkin narrative where protagonist proactively gains the form she wants 
– Feminist narrative where protagonist longs to be taken seriously as a cultural researcher 
– Intellectual narrative where protagonist values museums and cultural study 
– Racial/Cultural narrative where protagonist demonstrates that Racism Is Bad 
– Body Positive (with caveats) narrative where women characters abound of different body sizes 
– Patriarchy Hurts Men narrative where good men are abusive because of patriarchal expectations 

Ana’s Sad Epic Fail Scorecard 
– Narrative that is entirely cast with white people and has a Angry French Chef stereotype 
– Narrative that contains muddled class portrayal and is largely about privileged people 
– Narrative that contains no openly QUILTBAG characters 
– Narrative that ends with a teen marriage between two almost-strangers  

Final Thoughts: The Little Mermaid is — like most Disney movies — rife with issues of class, race, hetereonormity, and body portrayal. But in my opinion it’s ironically one of the least problematic movies in the set (“ironic” because the current cultural narrative is that we’re now BETTER at those things than we were in the 1980s), and if you’re a white heterosexual class-privileged girl living in an oppressive patriarchy — as I was when I came to the movie — it may just resonate with you. Maybe.

As a final link, here is a picture of Disney Princesses dressed as the villains in their movies. I like the Ariel/Ursula swap so very much.

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Ana Mardoll is an avid reader and writer. She loves cats, fairy tales, and intense navel gazing. She blogs on a near daily basis from an undisclosed location in the wild, untamed, and astonishingly dusty Texas wilderness. Her photo-realistic avatars are a gift from best friend and invaluable writing buddy, J.D. Montague.

To read more of Ana’s writings, including her snarktastic literary deconstructions, visit her website at www.AnaMardoll.com.

‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’

This review by Jessica Critcher previously appeared at Bitch Flicks as part of our series on Animated Children’s Films.

 

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

 

This Halloween my husband and I stayed in and cuddled up with Funfetti cupcakes and a movie. We capped off our week-long 90’s Halloween movie marathon with a favorite from my childhood, The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’ve probably seen this film a hundred times. I know all of the songs by heart. I remember watching it on VHS when it first came out, which is making me feel increasingly old. But as is the case with several things from my childhood, some of the nostalgia wears thin when subjected to critical analysis.

 

For one thing, as I would love to describe to my five-year-old self, the film doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. To refresh your memory, passing the Bechdel test means a film has to have two female characters (with names) who talk to each other about something besides men. That’s it, and yet even this very basic requirement is usually too much for Hollywood to handle. Sally the rag doll and Shock, the witch trick-or-treater, only talk to men. According to Wikipedia, the two witches aren’t given names in the film, only later in a video game. But even without the name part, they only talk to and about Jack. This sends the message to boys and girls alike that female characters do not have anything substantial to contribute to the dialogue or the plot of the film. Girls and women do not, apparently, have anything interesting or relevant to say to one another, and children internalize that very deeply. While this was probably unintentional, the effect is still the same.

 

Shock
Maybe you’re thinking that’s a bit harsh. After all, the named female characters do seem to have quite a bit of agency. Shock is frustrated with her “dumb” cohorts and seems to be the brains of the outfit. She is quick to point out flaws in their plans and ultimately decides the best method to kidnap Santa Claus. But her development as a character ends with that scene. Shock is a naughty child motivated by nothing apart from her desire to do mischief. While there is nothing wrong with this type of character per se, there is something wrong with the fact that she represents half of the named female cast. And, while Shock is admittedly fun, I feel she does not do justice to Catherine O’Hara’s talent.

 

This brings me to Sally, also voiced by O’Hara. On the surface, Sally is the perfect heroine. She is constantly outsmarting her doddering caretaker, Doctor Finklestein. She repeatedly slips “deadly nightshade” into his food, putting him to sleep so she can wander free. Her knowledge of herbs and potions is a serious inspiration to Jack in his quest for the meaning of Christmas. He even asks her to make his “Sandy Claws” suit, because she is the only one “clever enough” to do it. She has the foresight to know his plan will be a disaster, so she tries to stop Christmas with fog juice. Then, she rushes to the aid of Santa Claus, leading him to tell Jack, “The next time you get the urge to take over someone else’s holiday, I’d listen to her! She’s the only one who makes any sense around this insane asylum!” Jack eventually realizes that he was a fool not to listen to Sally, or notice her affection for him.

 

Sally
So, my five-year-old self loved Sally mostly because she is smart and resourceful. But Sally isn’t defined by her intelligence. She is defined by her relationships to the men in the story. Five-year-old me never bothered to question why she was the property of her creepy father in the first place. And while Jack is motivated by his role in the community and a quest for self-discovery, Sally is only driven by her desire to be with Jack. After Doctor Finklestein declares Sally to be too much trouble, he sets about building a new female companion who won’t disagree with him or run away. Sally’s world, which revolves around being with Jack and taking care of him, is at peace when he finally notices her and wants to be with her.

 

I still like the film. It gets me feeling all fuzzy inside and it serves the double purpose of celebrating Halloween and getting me amped up for Christmas. But I’m not five anymore. We live in a very complicated world where many changes need to take place, and girls and boys need to see these changes in the media they consume. Maybe someday Tim Burton could revamp the film and have Sally take over as mayor of Halloween Town (because seriously, that guy is an incompetent idiot). Maybe Shock could apprentice under the two witches and learn a useful trade to put her wits to better use. Maybe somewhere in Halloween Town, two women could talk to each other about something—anything—and the town could join us all in the 21st century. That sounds more like a Halloween classic I would want children to see.

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Jessica Critcher loves to write about feminism and gender issues, and she is a regular contributor to Gender Focus. While she loves living in Boston, she often misses Honolulu, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in English (and forgot that there was such a thing as snow). 


Women and Gender in Musicals Week: ‘Chicago’

This is a guest review by Clint Waters.

“From just some dumb mechanic’s wife, I’m gonna be Roxie. Who says murder’s not an art?”

Roughly ten years ago, the Broadway musical Chicago was adapted for the silver screen by Bill Condon and directed by Rob Marshall. This film is oh-so appropriate for Women and Gender in Musicals Week because it explores the darker side of an era when First-Wave Feminists had recently won the right to vote and were continually fighting for equality. However, instead of picket lines and hunger strikes, the women of Chicago manipulate sexuality and violence to gain the upper-hand over their male counterparts and for a myriad of other less-than-pure intentions.

Roxie Hart, our lady protagonist played by Renee Zellweger,

dreams of stardom and celebrity whilst toiling away the hours at home as a housewife. For this reason, the songs and dances within Chicago take place on the fantasy stage within her mind. She enters into an affair with a man who says he can get her into show business. However, the deal goes sour. Very sour. Eventually, he tires of her constant hints and nudges and reveals he was just stringing her along to get into her flapper dress. She proceeds to shoot him with her husband’s gun, wailing “You lied to me!” This begins a trip down a glitzy yet slightly sleazy rabbit hole of fame. Apparently, before television, the citizens of Chicago relied on actual murder stories and court hearings for their daily dose of drama. For this reason, Roxie’s trip to the Cook County Jail provides her a slew of new murderous friends, including Vaudeville star Velma Kelly (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones). 

Roxie also crosses paths with Mama Morton (played by Queen Latifah).

Mama Morton is a fascinating facet of femininity, as she appears motherly and kind. However, not long after meeting her do we find that she manipulates her inmates’ needs for affection and contraband (cigarettes, magazines, etc.), as well as the city’s desire for court drama by charging the murderesses for phone calls to lawyers. As her big solo song goes, “When you’re good to Mama…Mama’s good to you.” She is a shrewd businesswoman to say the least, allegiances and favoritism leaning where the money flows.

An unforgettable number, “The Cell Block Tango,” occurs during Roxie’s first of many nights in Jail. As the lights go out and she sobs herself to sleep, the cells come alive with individual sounds that form a Stomp-esque intro to the song where several inmates detail what brought them there. Each of them is in for the murder of a lover or husband.

Here, we have an interesting blend of shades and hues labeled “femme fatale.” Most are revealed to have killed for seemingly silly reasons and others for being scorned by adulterers. What makes the number unforgettable is their sheer crassness toward their victims, yet they still cling to their pleas of not guilty: “I didn’t do it, but if I done it, how could you tell me that I was wrong?” This scene also has some very striking visuals and imaginative uses for red cloth representing blood/death:

(“Some guys just can’t hold their arsenic.”)

Not that female murders are anything new, but I enjoy that Chicago features nothing but. While we’re on the subject, there are exceedingly few main male characters in the film (one being Roxie’s dope of a husband and the other being a smarmy lawyer out for money), which is awesome and doesn’t happen all that often in movies dealing with murder. Let alone a musical movie dealing with murder. However, where I believe the film falls short is the fact that none of these characters has redeeming qualities. Although lovable and down-right cool for their sass and attitude, the main three women of the film don’t really have that much depth. Both Roxie and Velma have committed their crimes, but the film reveals them to be less bloodthirsty killers and more attention-grabbing children. All of their actions are motivated by this desire to hog the spotlight. One scene has Velma asking Roxie to do a duo act with her, which could be seen as a bit of verisimilitude, but it’s really just her pining after Roxie’s soaring fame. Eventually, in the end, the two girls learn to get along and reap the benefits of being accused of murder and getting away scott free…which is oddly to become stars of the stage what kind of people lived in 1920’s Chicago anyway?!). 

However, this is a cheap bit of characterization and more of a resolution to their movie-long catfight than it is anything deep.

I don’t mean to say that I dislike this movie. In fact, you will never hear me say that. I LOVE this movie. Although it may not be the deepest of films, it knows what it is and does it well. Aesthetically speaking, it is a gorgeous film with gorgeous women and takes a lot of strides to make everything look and feel Vaudevillian. As I mentioned earlier, the songs take place in Roxie’s mind, so the creative directors spared no expense on blending stage effects with surrealism. (For example, the audience, while played by real people, sits motionless like wax figures because after all, the show is about Roxie. In another scene the members of the media are literally represented as the puppets that they are.) 

Personally, I enjoy the fact that it is a female-centric film that doesn’t fall into the Chick-Flick, Feel Good or Romcom genres. It’s about women who know what they want and beg, borrow, steal, sing and kill to get it.

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Clint Waters is a creative writing major, German minor at Western Kentucky University. He is in his final year and hopes to pursue any career that remotely deals with writing in a creative fashion. Visit his blog at redintooth.tumblr.com.

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: Bros Before Hoes, or How Kidnapping Makes for Great Dance Numbers: on ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’

This is a guest review by Jessica Freeman-Slade. 
When Bitch Flicks first put out the call for a review of the movie musical landscape, this was the first movie that came to mind. It has all the elements of a great movie musical: the hummable ditties of Kiss Me, Kate, the buoyant dance sequences of West Side Story, and the Technicolor treatment of the great Pioneer experience of Oklahoma! But when you add blatant misogyny, barn-raisings and male bravado, and taking women by force as the ultimate romantic gesture, you get Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The 1954 movie, directed by Stanley Donen (Singin’ in the Rain) with music by Saul Chaplin and Gene de Paul and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, with choreography from the great Michael Kidd, is often overlooked when considering the movie musical genre. There are, admittedly, many musicals that enjoy examining the battle of the sexes, and most old-school romantic comedies start with a Dude™ and a Chick™ squabbling over their differences. But very few of those ever let the man be so backwards that he equates courtship and conquering, or has a woman responsible for civilizing and subduing men’s worst impulses. It’s like Lysistrata and The Hangover got together and held a barn dance–a big, beautiful Crayola-colored extravaganza.

In 1821, Oregon Territory, Adam Pontipee (the impossibly rugged Howard Keel) is looking to fetch himself a wife—not for the purposes of high-falutin’ romance, family, and lifelong happiness, no. “I’d like best a widow woman that ain’t afraid to work,” he says, at the general store, where he’d just as quickly pick up a mate as he would 25 pounds of chewing tobacco. “There’s seven of us men, me and my six brothers. Place is like a pigsty, and the food tastes worse….” Adam is out for marriage in the purest economical sense: in this new territory, there are ten men for every woman, and so Adam’s priority is availability, not compatibility.

 

“Bless Yo’ Beautiful Hide,” he booms, and it’s not until he sees Millie (Jane Powell, strong of axe and soft of heart) that he knows he can go out and buy with gusto. She makes great stew, so that’s half the battle, and she is used to tending men in a boarding house, so he considers her the perfect bride.

He offers marriage, she accepts (as she’s fallen for him on first sight), and off they go in his wagon back to his cabin in the mountains, where she meets his six red-bearded, bullish brothers. Millie bristles at caring for her brother-in-laws without some control, and so she withholds a hot breakfast and newly washed clothes until they promise to shave and settle down like gentleman. It seems that what this house has longed for is not an extra hand in the washroom, but a gentle and firm guide to proper etiquette.

What Millie discovers, as she gets to know these boys, is that they long to go out and snatch up girls of their own—which they do, in spectacular fashion, at the town’s barn raising. The brothers Pontipee, all in primary colors, demonstrate through dazzling choreography how dashing and desirable they can be, and sweep the girls off their feet. Just watch how leapfrogging, arm wrestling, log-rolling, and balletic machismo pays off. (This is the most spectacular sequence of the movie, and it’s impossible to watch without a slaphappy grin. Jacques d’Amboise and a very young Russ Tamblyn steal the show as Ephraim and Gideon, defying gravity with every move.)

But of course, the boys get into a fistfight with the girls’ other suitors, and soon they’re back on the farm, suffering through the early days of a long winter. It’s lovely to see these men pining, something so rarely explored outside of the musical theater realm, while maintaining their rugged outdoorsmen personas. (This is, of course, expressed through the delicate art of ax ballet.)
The enlivening force of Seven Brides is male longing, and it makes for great theater. The Pontipee brothers have lived hard, but falling in love is what softens and civilizes them. But all that civilization is for nothing when Adam, modern man that he is, devises a brilliant scheme, pulled straight out of Millie’s copy of Plutarch’s Lives. Why not do like the Romans did with the Sabine women?
And then comes the merriest song about rape ever.
The brothers are shaken out of their depression by the chance to reassert their manhood, and off they go to town, snatching up their girls from backyards and front porches and carrying them off, squealing and crying. An avalanche falls as they are passing through the mountains, preventing the angry families and boyfriends from reaching the Pontipees. Millie, horrified to discover what the boys have done, reasserts her right over the house (the one territory that has become completely hers to control) and sends the boys to the barn for the entire winter, taking the girls inside and keeping them under close watch.

This ends up being a bit of a tease, since the girls get their own dance (about marriage, natch), and Millie discovers she’s pregnant. And though the girls start warming up to the brothers (peeking through windows, running around in their skivvies), the snow that blocks the pass never melts.

Once it does, we get lovely sequences of the girls and boys frolicking together with baby farm animals (no, this movie is not subtle), and Adam stays holed up in his hunting cabin, resentful of Millie’s banishment. But once he learns he has a baby—and at that, a baby girl—Adam breaks down and returns home to be the man he’s supposed to be. Though their families come to retrieve them, and the brothers are ready to set them free, the girls refuse to leave, claiming the newborn as their own. For better or for worse, we get a group marriage of a finale, and a whole bunch of color-coordinated couples once more.
So what do we make of such a strangely backwards story of frontier courtship? For one, that men, without the guiding impulses of a good woman, will behave like savages. Whether they demonstrate that savagery at the breakfast table or at a barn-raising, it’s clear that the Pontipee brothers have impulse control issues, and they just can’t help themselves. Their needs—for food, for dominance, for love—trump almost everything reasonable and refined, and they have been taught, as pioneers of this new and uncharted territory, to take when they can. Though Adam is charming and sexy as hell—seriously, George Clooney and Howard Keel could have a smirk-off—he treats Millie like a servant at best, and property at worst. “It wouldn’t hurt you to learn some manners, too.” she remarks at the barn-raising. “What for?” he counters. “I already got me a wife.”

You can argue that Millie should’ve seen this unfair exchange coming when Adam first walked into her boarding house—and she had no real incentive to get married. Gainfully employed, resourceful, well-liked and respected by her community (especially by the women), Millie could’ve easily stayed on her own in this new country. But she, too, is softened by love, and so she is the one that understands the brothers’ plight, not Adam. You can fault the captured girls a little less than Millie, at least initially—but they too get their attic ballet-in-bloomers about the dream of summer weddings. We are expected, no matter if our house or barn needs tending, to wish for a pairing-off, and the frontier certainly looks less terrifying if you are facing it alone.

But ultimately this is a movie that asks where male compassion comes from—and the last few scenes seem to conclude that it’s when sexual politics are made personal. Holding his newborn baby girl in his arms for the first time, Adam says, “I got to thinking up at the cabin, about the baby. How I’d feel if someone came creeping in and carried her off. I’d string him up the nearest tree. I’d shoot him down as I would a thieving fox.” It’s when Adam has to think about another man out there, treating his daughter like she was property just waiting to be taken, to stir him to a nobler state of mind. Just imagine if a Seven Brides scenario applied to every zealot or backwards politician who questioned a woman’s right to her own body and state of security, if all their wives and girlfriends were subjected to sexual scrutiny. We’ve be living in a very different universe—and this ain’t even Oregon territory.
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers can certainly leave you feeling ambivalent, and possibly wondering whether this lovely closing marriage sequence is a symptom of Stockholm syndrome. But what it mostly offers—spectacular dance sequences, memorable songs, and an interesting take on what it means to be “civilized” by love—makes for a rollicking good musical, and an underappreciated classic.
———-
Jessica Freeman-Slade is a writer who has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She works at Random House as a cookbook editor, and lives in Morningside Heights.
    

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: Mulan: The Twinkie Defense

This review by Karina Wilson previously appeared at Bitch Flicks as part of our series on Animated Children’s Films.
Much has been written about Mulan since its release in 1998, largely because the intentions of the film-makers are so obvious, and so crass.  If you buy into the movie’s ethos, you’ll believe that Mulan is a truly border-crossing story, bringing the best of classic Chinese culture to a global audience with – gasp! – a female action hero at its center.  You can quit the revolution now, kids, ‘cos Disney says that post-colonialism and post-feminism are here to stay.

If you watch the actual movie, as I did, as a European expat teaching in a Hong Kong international school and grappling with cross-cultural questions on a daily basis (you try teaching A Bridge To Terabithia to a class of city-dwelling Chinese boys) — not so much. Mulan has always been a problematic text for me because it tries so hard to be culturally sensitive and gender-aware that it positively creaks, and those creaks can be heard by the least-savvy member of the target audience.  Its sins are not the sins of historical omission of, say, Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, but are all the more egregious because they come from a place of awareness.  Mulan is an attempt to fix something that was perceived to be, if not wrong, unbalanced.  This clumsy attempt to wedge The Ballad of Mulan into the rigid, alien form of a Disney narrative (which, among other things, demands musical numbers, a comic sidekick and a Prince Charming to come home with at the end) doesn’t fix anything, and only serves to remind us what is broken about our global culture.  The road to hell is, as ever, paved with good intentions, particularly when it heads from the West to the East.

Back in the mid-1990s, Disney had a very specific agenda when it came to China.  They wanted to get back into the regime’s good books after the PR disaster that was Kundun.  They wanted to replicate the success of 1994’s The Lion King in the region.  And they wanted to soften up the government and local politicians when it came to breaking ground on Hong Kong Disneyland, and paving the way for the Shanghai park.  What better way to win friends and influence people than by honoring a popular Chinese legend in the form of a Disney film?

So, ever mindful of the accusations of racial insensitivity that had been tossed at Aladdin and Pocahontas, and anxious to get it right this time, Disney sent key artists on the movie to China, for a three-week tour of Chinese history and culture.  Three weeks! You can totally “do China” in three weeks.  This was enough to give them all the visual reference points they needed, and the whistle-stop, touristic nature of their impressions is very much in evidence on the screen.  Every Chinese guided tour cliché is tossed into the scenery hotchpotch, from limestone mountains to the Great Wall to the Forbidden City.  This isn’t so bad – other Disney movies are set in a vague Mittel-Europe of mountains, forests and lakes – but the loving attention paid to trotting out the visual truisms of courtyard complexes, brush calligraphy, cherry blossoms et al is just window-dressing.  Mulan does look like China, but only if you’re leafing through your holiday photos back in your Florida office.

It’s a shame the screenwriters weren’t sent on the same tour.  Mulan is peppered with crass jokes about Chinese food orders (because that’s what Americans can relate to about Chinese culture, right?), disrespectful references to ancestor worship, superficial homage to Buddhist practice and some kung-fu styling, of the Carradine kind.  Given that Wu Xia is a rich, diverse, centuries old storytelling tradition, it also seems a shame that the writers didn’t draw more deeply on those perspectives.  Instead, they send Mulan on a tired, Western Hero’s Journey, plugging her variables into the 12-step formula tried and tested by countless Hollywood protagonists.  She doesn’t ever think like a Chinese woman.  She’s never more American than when her rebellious individualism (bombing the mountaintop) wins the day – her filial obedience was only ever lip service paid as a convenience in Act One.  Even in Han Dynasty China, it seems, it’s best to follow the American Way.

There’s nothing particularly Chinese about Mulan herself, who is so brutally meant to be not-Disney Princess and not-Caucasian it hurts to look at her for long.   Poor little Other.  She’s shown wearing Japanese make up, and has a facial structure more suggestive of Vietnamese than Chinese (Disney really was embracing post-colonialism). For half the movie, she also has to be not-female.  The lack of detail on a 2-D Disney face meant the animators had to design her as able to switch between genders via her hair – and something subtle going on with her eyebrows.  The resulting face evokes, more than anything, a pre-op kathoey who hasn’t yet taken advantage of Thailand’s booming plastic surgery clinics in order to make zer gender-reassignment complete.

Oh, Mulan.  She’s meant to be non-offensive, and she ends up being not-anything.  Despite claims to the contrary, she’s not a feminist hero.  She has to dress as a boy to achieve selfhood, and refuses political influence in order to return to the domestic constraints of her father and husband-to-be.  The movie itself doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test, if you consider that the only topic the other female characters discuss is Mulan’s marriageability – a hypothetical relationship with a man.  The final defeat of the antagonist is achieved by the male Mushu riding on a phallic firecracker, as Mulan flails helplessly at his feet.  Positive female role model? Case closed.

Nonetheless, Mulan did brisk business worldwide – apart from in China.  It perhaps had most impact on second or third-gen Asian-Americans, who could relate to the over-simplified view of China, and feel a connection with this stereotypical version of “their” culture, lacking many other reference points.  For Asian-Americans across the board, not just Chinese-Americans, Mulan’s brown, angular features represented something vaguely familiar, which made a delightful change.  For Chinese-Chinese, Mulan was a thoughtless Western blunder.  For Asian-Americans, particularly little girls, Mulan was a rare screen representation of aspects of their selves.  Mulan drove the story, at the center of almost every scene, instead of pushed to the periphery as a “typical Asian” shopkeeper, geek, or whore.  They could even purchase Mulan merch – although it’s still impossible to buy a doll, a t-shirt or a pin showing Mulan in warrior mode, she’s always got her hair down, and is wearing her hanfu frock.  For a generation of Twinkies, Asian on the outside, American on the inside, Mulan was significant, a role model in the Disney pantheon of princesses.  It didn’t matter that she was a bit low-rent (no castle, not really a princess), and she hadn’t snagged a proposal by the end of the movie (that happily ever after is a ‘maybe’), she allowed Asian-American girls, many of them adopted, to hold their heads high.  And for that alone, you have to love her.

Mulan wouldn’t seem like such a frustrating, failed attempt to push gender and cultural boundaries if it had been followed up by other stories of empowered female warrior heroes.  A Disney version of Joan of Arc or Boudicca could have been a blast.  Unfortunately, since 1998, it’s been pretty much princess as usual.  On the bright side, Disney achieved some of their other goals with Mulan.  Hong Kong Disneyland (itself the subject of accusations of crass cultural insensitivity) has been doing brisk business since 2005, thanks to a US$2.9billion investment by Hong Kong taxpayers (of which I was one).  The majority of tourists are from mainland China.  They come to marvel at Western icons like Mickey, and an all-American Main Street that’s a replica of the one in Anaheim.  Thanks to the ubiquitous presence of Mulan images, they stick around.  It feels a tiny bit more like they might have a stake in the happiest place on earth.

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Karina Wilson currently lives in Los Angeles and works as a writer and story consultant. She reviews movies for Planet Fury, writes about horror literature at LitReactor and horror films at Horror Film History. Her teaching site, Mediaknowall, has guided media studies students for more than a decade.

 

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: The Funny Face Always Gets the Big Number: on ‘Funny Girl’

This is a guest review by Jessica Freeman-Slade.

I imagine that at least once a day somewhere in America, some little Jewish girl (or girls with big noses, close-set eyes, skinny legs, and less than model looks) has a benevolent mother, sister, or aunt who pops in a DVD and tells her to sit down. She squirms a bit, but her mom says “Just trust me.” And then up on the screen pops a wildly unself-conscious, funny, brazenly self-confident woman with a voice to stop traffic. Even though she’s seen Glee and watched Lea Michele emote her way through many of these songs, nothing compares to this other creature, the one and only Barbra Streisand, in her debut film, the incomparable Funny Girl.

The 1968 movie is legendary, almost impossible to remake due to Streisand’s unforgettable turn (recreating her role from the 1964 stage musical), and with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill. It’s based on the true story of 1920s entertainer Fanny Brice, one of the major attractions in the golden age of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies. Fanny knows she’s a star, but is constantly told that her unconventional looks will keep her off the stage (or as her neighbor puts it, “If a girl’s incidentals/are no bigger than two lentils/then to me it doesn’t spell success.”) But Fanny stands out, because she’s hilariously funny and has a golden voice, and so fame, like anyone who watches the movie, finds her irresistible. What the movie has at its core, is a message about female self-confidence, about self-reliance, about how the world reacts to strong women, and how, ultimately it’s all about chutzpah. Which Fanny (and Streisand) has in spades.

Streisand had only appeared in one Broadway show before then, a small but memorable part in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, and she was far from the only candidate to play Fanny. When Jule Styne consulted Steven Sondheim about the development of the show, Sondheim had major qualms about potentially casting a marquee star like Mary Martin. “I don’t want to do the life of Fanny Brice with Mary Martin. She’s not Jewish,” he said. “You need someone ethnic for the part.” And Streisand was ethnic, especially when put up against a bevy of chorus girls that looked like they’d stepped straight out of Beach Blanket Bingo. The other contenders before her included Anne Bancroft, Martin, and Carol Burnett, but Streisand took the ugly duckling premise and turned it on its head every time she sang. (Fanny’s first line to a skeptical producer says it all: “Suppose all you ever had for breakfast was onion rolls. Then one day, in walks… a bagel! You’d say, ‘Ugh, what’s that?’ Until you tried it! That’s my problem—I’m a bagel on a plate full of onion rolls.”) And she stood out among the other Broadway stars at the time, in the same way Fanny did in her day.

Of course, therein you meet the first problem with Funny Girl—that to buy it, you have to believe that Barbara Streisand is ugly.

Yes, I know. You have to believe that this girl…


…is considered unattractive, uncastable, and undesirable.

The real Brice had big gummy features–a clown’s face. And though Streisand looks gorgeous in every shot, even in Fanny’s pre-fame days (check out those amazing nails), she doesn’t lose her undeniably ethnic look. She stands out, especially when surrounded by all the Aryan thin-nosed beauties of the Ziegfeld follies. And so the premise of Funny Girl, of almost every joke, rests on whether you believe that Fanny, despite her face, earns every drop of success because of her extraordinary talent. Each joke has the same structure: someone throws a derogatory comment Fanny’s way. Fanny volleys, with wit and acid and intelligence. The movie provides a model to every girl out there (no matter how attractive she is) about how to deal with a world that doubts you because of your appearance, because of your difference. When everyone’s a critic, especially in the entertainment industry, and you know you’re something special, they will have to accept you as you are, and fall in love with you for what you bring to the performance. Just watch Fanny’s first performance for a theater, and how she bends the audience to her will:

By the time she’s backstage, she’s won over the crowd…and within it, her future love interest, the dazzlingly handsome Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif.)

Then the joke changes—how could a guy as perfect and beautiful as Arnstein fall for a gummy-faced girl like Fanny? Because he knows what the rest of the world doesn’t—that she has a spark, she stands out, and that’s a sign she’s going to be a star. But the movie, as it traces Fanny’s rise to stardom, constantly returns to the presumably unassailable fact that she can’t hold Nick, or anything, in place simply by being female and beautiful. And so the movie becomes a commentary on what an unconventional woman does to keep herself successful in a world that doesn’t immediately recognize her talent.

Fanny, blessedly, has little time for people who insist she behave conventionally. Even when she lands the dream job, as a featured player among the glittering chorines of Ziegfeld’s follies, she balks at behaving like any other starlet. When Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon) puts her in the star spot in the closing number, she says, “I can’t Fanny: I can’t sing words like: “I am the beautiful reflection of my love’s affection.” I mean… Well, it’s embarrassing… If I come out opening night…telling the audience how beautiful I am, I’ll be back at [my first job] before the curtain comes down.” When he refuses to do so, Fanny concedes, but finds her own special twist for the number:

And of course it pays off—Fanny becomes a huge star, but it doesn’t change the kinds of jokes thrown our way. When Nick finally attempts to seduce her, every line of his advance is played for laughs. Pitting Nick’s debonair style against Fanny’s neurotic dodging is meant to underline just how unlikely this pairing is…and to make the viewer as skeptical as Fanny.

 Even when Fanny hooks Nick, and even after she gets to sing a ditty about how great it is to be “Sadie, Sadie,” married lady, the story continues to treat Fanny as a liability. When Nick finally starts showing his shortcomings as a card shark, he is too insecure and prideful to ask Fanny to bail him out. He is thrown into prison, and Fanny gets the news just as she’s heading out of the theater for the night. “You still love him, Miss Brice?” the reporters shout. “The name’s Arnstein,” she replies defiantly. This is a woman who refuses to let her critics define her—even if it means putting the joke on her.

What ultimately carries Fanny, and Funny Girl, as one of the greatest musical comedies ever (and makes Fanny one of the best characters, male or female, ever written for Broadway) is that her weapon is always her strength, her self-reliance, that aforementioned chutzpah. Fanny truly believes that she can do or accomplish anything, including saving her own doomed marriage, if someone just gives her the chance. When she and Nick decide to separate after his release from prison, she is utterly heartbroken. But even in that moment, she pulls herself up and delivers a superb performance, looking more beautiful and elegant than ever. And that’s where the message of Funny Girl really sings out: NOTHING is as radiant as self-confidence.

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Jessica Freeman-Slade is a writer who has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She works at Random House as a cookbook editor, and lives in Morningside Heights.