Immigration – Bitch Flicks

Ladies and Gentlemen, ‘Master of None’ Is the Series We’ve All Been Waiting For

You don’t have to look further than the comments section on any website to see that people with more power routinely try to decide what people with less power have the right to complain about. It’s something that happens in every discussion about inequality, but it’s so rare for that to be the topic itself that I was actually shocked when it was in “Ladies and Gentlemen.”

Written by Katherine Murray.

If you haven’t had time to catch up on Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series yet, prepare yourself to be delighted.

Ever since it dropped in November, Master of None — created by Ansari and Alan Yang — has racked up critical praise. The comedy follows Ansari’s character, Dev, as he navigates his dating life and fledgling acting career in New York City. But what sets it apart is the diversity of its characters, and the insight it offers into day-to-day microaggressions related to race and gender. Master of None offers us a point of view that’s hard to find on television, and does it in a smart, entertaining way.

One of the episodes that has attracted the most attention is “Parents,” which focuses on first-generation Americans trying to navigate relationships with their immigrant parents. Ansari cast his real-life mother and father in the episode, and the story struck a powerful chord with viewers who had never before seen their own experiences as children of immigrants reflected in popular entertainment. Another episode, “Indians on TV,” highlights racist stereotypes and casting in mainstream media, calling out real-life examples, both obvious and subtle.

Master of None has received less attention for the way it approaches gender, but the first season shines on that front, too. Dev’s group of friends includes funny, smart people from many different backgrounds, including a straight white man and a Black lesbian woman who have roughly equal importance in the story. His relationship with his one-night stand turned girlfriend, Rachel, is respectful and emotionally mature – they act like equals at all times, and like each other because they have the same sense of humor, interests, and values. In the episode “Hot Ticket,” Dev agonizes over setting up a date with a really attractive waitress, only to discover that he hates her personality. It’s an idea that could have gone wrong, but the character and her awful personality idiosyncrasies are so specific that it doesn’t come off as a statement that beautiful women are X, Y or Z, so much as a statement that it’s not possible to know whether someone is a desirable date until you’ve spent time talking to them.

The most feminist episode of the first season, though, is “Ladies and Gentlemen,” in which Dev is surprised to learn that his girlfriend and female friends are constantly the targets of aggressive behavior from men. Like “Indians on TV,” “Ladies and Gentlemen” starts by highlighting broad, obvious forms of aggression, before drawing attention to subtler types of discrimination that even well-meaning people engage in.

“Ladies and Gentlemen” opens with a scene that cuts back and forth between Dev and one of his female co-stars leaving a cast party at night. Dev and his male friend, Arnold, share a pleasant conversation and cut through the park to save time. Dev’s co-star looks like she’s in a horror movie and ends up getting followed to her house by some asshole who tried to buy her a drink earlier and got mad when she turned him down. He hammers on her door demanding to know why nice guys like him never have a chance.

After Dev finds out about what happened, he hears similar stories from all the other women in his life. The stories are based on the real-life experiences of female staff writers, and they’re completely familiar to any woman watching the show, right down to the detail where you can’t post a picture of eggs on your Instagram without some strange guy showing up to harass you.

Armed with this new information, Dev and his female friend, Denise, make a citizen’s arrest when they catch a man jerking off on the subway. Dev becomes a hero to all the women at the bar, who start buying him drinks and telling him about the awful things that guys have done to them. Later on, while he’s still basking in the glow of being an upstanding feminist, one of Dev’s male coworkers stops by the table and introduces himself to all the men, while ignoring the women completely. Rachel and Denise point out the sexism of the situation and Dev dismissively tells them that they are being too sensitive and making a big deal out of nothing. He’s then confused about why Rachel is upset with him.

What follows is an amazing scene – also based on real-life experiences – where Rachel and Dev walk home together and she explains in an articulate but believable way, why it’s hurtful and offensive for him to tell her that her own assessment of a thing that just happened to her is wrong. It’s like the final scene in the Louie episode “So Did the Fat Lady,” except without being so problematic. In the end, Dev concedes that Rachel knows more about what Rachel just experienced than he does, and says he will try harder to listen, from now on.

It’s one of the single greatest moments I’ve seen on a TV show – and maybe the only one to directly address this exact, frustrating, aggravating, hard-to-articulate issue head-on. You don’t have to look further than the comments section on any website to see that people with more power routinely try to decide what people with less power have the right to complain about. That very act – that presumptuous attempt to unilaterally define the boundaries of what is and isn’t up for discussion; what we can and can’t feel offended by; what we can and can’t disagree about – that very act is, itself, an attempt to protect and reinforce the power structures we were trying to complain about in the first place. It’s something that happens in every discussion about inequality, but it’s so rare for that to be the topic itself that I was actually shocked when it was in “Ladies and Gentlemen.”

Non-traditional networks like Netflix and Amazon have opened new frontiers in terms of what a TV show can be and whose stories are profitable enough to be worth telling. Master of None is an example of the very best these new frontiers have to offer – a funny, insightful, well-produced series that broadens the range of experiences depicted on television and adds something new to the cultural discussion.

The good news is that Master of None was just officially renewed for second season, expected to show up in 2017.

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

One Immigrant’s Thoughts on ‘Brooklyn’ and Western Privilege

From the thousands of immigrant stories that could have been told, that Hollywood chose a heterosexual love story between two white Westerners in the 1950s is telling — that critics and audiences have lauded and lavished it with praise is even more so.

This guest post is written by Fernanda Cunha. | Spoilers ahead.

I watched Brooklyn in the same week my Facebook newsfeed flooded with reports of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the country. In December, I had both heard and read of the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to raid and deport Central American families, at the same time, the John Crowley-directed film Brooklyn continued playing to rave reviews. As a first generation immigrant whose main self-identifier is native of Brazil / immigrant / foreigner, I deliberately and adamantly seek stories about the immigrant and diasporic experience, and I’m excited when they manage to permeate mainstream culture and media. In some ways, this was also true for Brooklyn — though my excitement was not the same as discovering Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah or Cristina Henríquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans, both contemporary novels about different immigrant experiences — as I looked forward to watching a young woman’s migrant journey. In retrospect, having now seen the film, I am not entirely sure how I ever thought I would relate to the film’s premise. In its desperate attempt to tell a universal story (which is unsurprisingly white and Western), the film only ends up feeling false, and ultimately falls short.

Released to select theaters in November 2015, the recently Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn (based on the novel by Colm Tóibín) stars Saoirse Ronan as Eilis Lacey, who migrates from Ireland to Brooklyn in the 1950s, the story begins with a hesitant, and nervous Eilis preparing for, and somewhat dreading, her journey to the United States, and ends with her triumphant Brooklyn “homecoming,” after returning to her original hometown of Enniscorthy and feeling trapped by her surroundings and her sister’s sudden death.

Visually, the film delivers — the cinematography looks pretty, and the production and costume design both succeed in building a believable 1950s visual story. It’s in Ronan, however, that the film finds its backbone. Her performance makes what could potentially be unrealistic and false scenes feel sincere and raw. The film’s idealistically brief moments of homesickness and grieving become the most touching scenes of the film through Ronan’s physical translation of a weak and lacking screenplay. And lacking it is. Eilis’s experiences as an immigrant take a backseat in her newfound love for an Italian-American man, and the immigrant’s story I was so looking forward to is lost in the film’s attempt at Western appeal and universality. From the thousands of immigrant stories that could have been told, that Hollywood chose a heterosexual love story between two white Westerners in the 1950s is telling — that critics and audiences have lauded and lavished it with praise is even more so.

Besides Eilis’s laughably brief moment of homesickness and her inability to be home for her sister’s burial, none of her experiences as an immigrant felt familiar to me. She does not get made fun of for her accent — she does not even have to struggle with learning English, and in turn does not have to spend most of the next two years in the United States in silence, embarrassed of the ways her tongue cannot seem to master the language. She relates to Americans easily, and there are no mentions of deportation. Despite a small disappointment at not seeing myself reflected on screen, I am okay with this unfamiliarity. I am sure hers looks like another immigrant’s story, and I understand that the immigrant experience is not monolithic and manifests differently for every individual.

I struggle, however, with Hollywood’s choice to tell and so openly embrace this kind of immigrant’s story while the United States continues to deport Central American immigrants to mostly widespread silence. I worry about the continued invisibility of native Latin American peoples in the United States, especially undocumented ones, when their dehumanization persists through a proliferation of Latin American xenophobia and hate speeches of public figures like Donald Trump. Representation is meaningful and powerful, and the lack thereof is just as salient. I wonder what it means for others to not see these representations, to be so sheltered to stories of undocumented immigrants that society perceives their actions and existence as inherently and automatically criminal.

In today’s social and pop culture climate, it’s not difficult to wonder how differently critics and audiences would receive a film like this if told from a Latin American woman’s perspective. It probably would have never been made. In the miraculous chance that it had, I wonder if audiences would have viewed Eilis’s decision of accepting an opportunity in the United States as stealing, taking something that was not hers. I doubt Eilis’s actions of marrying an American before returning to her home country where she rekindles a friendship with another man and flirts with the idea of staying would have been well received. Audiences would have no sympathy for a woman like that. I can imagine the kinds of names she would have been called, and the implications others would discern in her actions.

In some ways, I am glad this story doesn’t exist, not only because I found the film uninteresting and lazy, but because it would be a disservice to the kinds of stories I experienced and heard as an immigrant. Still, the disappointingly simplistic story Brooklyn tells beats the reality of not having our stories told at all. I would rather see a simple and two-dimensional love story between a Latina immigrant and an American man than watch another movie set in Latin America in which crimes and violence dominate, and all perpetuated by the Latin@ characters. Stories in which the American characters suffer tremendously in a ruthless foreign land — the creative voices behind those films receive praise endlessly for their bravery, and the Latin@ voices continue to be ignored and silenced.

Fernanda Cunha is a native of Brazil living in the U.S., a writer, and a student of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her writing focuses on the humanization of immigrants, often done through a feminist lens. Her writing has been featured in The Feminist Wire.

Mina Harker Should Have Her Own ‘Dracula’ Adaptation

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, is an epistolary novel and the equivalent of found footage horror movies today. The protagonists, including Wilhelmina “Mina” Harker (née Murray), are tech-savvy and modern, using resources and skills such as phonographs and shorthand in their efforts to find and vanquish Dracula. As far as heroines of Victorian novels written by men go, Mina is a pretty decent heroine – smart, resourceful, (relatively) observant, and eager to protect those around her – particularly her best friend Lucy and her fiancé/husband Jonathan Harker. Mina reflects the “modern” woman of the time, as she is an employed young woman who is ambitious, determined, and an excellent archivist, gun brandisher, and coach-driver (I can’t overemphasize how big a deal that last one is!). She rightfully demands respect from her husband and the other male characters. She also treats others with respect, even the mentally ill, who were and are looked down upon by society. Due to her respectful treatment of the insane asylum inmate, Renfield (one of Dracula’s minions), he in turn gives a warning about Dracula’s plans, including the vampire’s dangerous plans for Mina.

Judi Bowker as Mina in "Count Dracula" (1977) — Judi Bowker as Mina in *Count Dracula* (1977)

Something not often explored in film and TV movie adaptations is that Mina and other female characters are often inadvertently endangered by the pride of the male protagonists. It is out of misguided respect for Mina that the male protagonists try so hard to protect her, and yet fail so miserably. They fail so miserably that when I first read the novel, I confused my family by laughing out loud at Bram Stoker’s (what seems to be unintended) irony (and I learned that laughing out loud at a classic horror novel tends to raise eyebrows).

Allow me to summarize one particular section of the plot:

Male protagonists: “Let’s go hunt Dracula at his house, which is right next door to where we are!”

Mina (the female lead): “Yes, let’s go!”

Male protagonists: “No, Mina! We want to protect you by leaving you all alone and vulnerable in a house right next door to Dracula’s! All of us demand that you stay here! And try not to think about the warning Renfield gave about how Dracula, a being far more powerful than any of us combined and who can literally get into a room through a crack in the floor by turning himself into mist, is going to target you!”

Mina: “Fine! Ugh!” (Curls up in bed, trying not to feel paranoid.)

(Male protagonists show up at Dracula’s house.)

Male protagonists: “Well, here we are at Dracula’s house. ‘Guess Dracula’s not home. Weird. ‘Wonder where he could be. Ah, well. Good thing we protected Mina!”

(Male protagonists return home to find an ill-looking Mina unconscious with two puncture wounds in her neck, and mist everywhere.)

Male protagonists: “Aw, look! Mina was so worried about us that she cried herself to sleep. So cute! It’s a good thing we decided to protect Mina instead of treating her like an equal.”

Thus, the male protagonists inadvertently provide Dracula with the opportunity to assault Mina – which is oh just sort of reminiscent of how everyday sexism and benevolent sexism both directly and indirectly support rape culture. The very people who claim they desire to protect (White) women are the ones contributing to the danger. They have faulty logic, which can be funny at times, and yet that faulty logic is clearly harmful.

Louis Jourdan's Dracula encourages Judi Bowker's Mina to "feed" from him/please herself, encouraging her to "come" (pun implied). — Louis Jourdan’s Dracula encourages Judi Bowker’s Mina to “feed” from him/please herself, encouraging her to “come” (pun implied).

The novel is heavy in racist, colonialist, and anti-immigration messages. Stoker heavily implies that Northern-European and American White people, especially if they’re Catholic (Stoker’s religion), are awesome, and they should totally be welcomed everywhere. Literally all other peoples (especially those who want to immigrate to Northern-Europe or America)? F*** those guys. (Especially if they’re “dark,” and certainly if they’re Roma.) Stoker demands that (White) men protect their (White) wives and love interests against “dark” men, particularly immigrants (in Dracula’s case, from Eastern Europe). These men are so sinisterly hedonistic in their values, they may actually corrupt a Victorian woman’s purity not only through sex, but by sexually pleasing the woman and not just themselves! (Gasp! Female orgasms?! The horror!) The chauvinism of the (White) male protagonists (three British, one Dutch, one Texan) and their masculine need to “protect” Mina nearly lead to her death, and almost result in her going full vampire.

Peta Wilson as Mina in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (2003) — Peta Wilson as Mina in *The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen* (2003)

Hollywood has a trend of attempting to make female characters seem more important to the story by making them more “badass,” and while I have no problems with the idea of seeing Mina hack up vampires, or seeing a heroic Vampire!Mina (thank you, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), another way of empowering women and combating sexism other than positive representation of women is to point out everyday and even “benevolent” chauvinism. This is exactly the kind of sexism the male characters exhibit in Dracula – even Dracula himself, to an extent, with the female vampires who live in his castle and for whom he provides.

Winona Ryder's Mina is the reincarnated wife of Gary Oldman's Dracula in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992) — Winona Ryder’s Mina is the reincarnated wife of Gary Oldman’s Dracula in *Bram Stoker’s Dracula* (1992)

More Mina representation seems to be on its way, with the reboot of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen evidently to be “female-centric.” Hollywood is always cranking out more Dracula adaptations, but just how many have there been that point out benevolent sexism? How many feature Mina getting frustrated with the male protagonists, delivering them an angry monologue in which she points out all the ways they’ve almost led to her death? Instead of this, Hollywood has been repeatedly attempting to make Dracula, her attacker, redeemable – a tragic anti-hero, often on a quest to find the reincarnation of his long-lost love, who is revealed to be Mina. Wait, so reincarnation is supposed to justify sexual assault? No, Hollywood. No. Nor is stalking romantic (even if it’s done through the magic of musical theatre, Frank Wildhorn).

As this book review points out, there are no films entitled with Mina’s name, while there are many with Dracula’s and at least one with Van Helsing’s. Though not the only protagonist to be left out of titles, most notably Jonathan (the leading male protagonist), Mina deserves a film completely centered on her. And hopefully this Dracula adaptation, unlike most (if not all) adaptations (I’m looking at you, Dracula Untold), finds a way to rid itself of the novel’s racist, colonialist, and anti-immigration messages.

Millenials These Days

Masthead for Chicana From Chicago, Christine Davila’s blog

This is a guest post by Christine Davila.

If you hear someone utter, “Kids These Days,” it’s usually in a disapproving tone toward the younger generations’ fresh attitude or their breaking with tradition (or their tendency to speed while driving). When I think about Kids These Days, though, it is in sheer awe. I am so impressed by their confidence and transcultural expression with which they carve out their bold self-individuality. I don’t remember ever being that loud and proud in my teens. I, like most, just wanted to fit in. But the Millennial generation has spoken: Assimilation is out; non-conformity is in.

As a first generation Mexican-American I’m naturally drawn to bi-cultural narratives because they relate to my own culture dash – American clash. Speaking Spanish at home, making tortillas with abuelita, and my parents’ late night dance and Tequila parties, blasting Sonora Santanera or the passionate cries of Vicente Fernandez, all formed a very specific childhood. There is something really powerful about seeing a reflection of your roots in a contemporary context in the biggest form of entertainment: the movies. You may have read the numbers; there are 55 million+ Latinos in the country, making us the fastest growing and youngest demographic. Brands clumsily chase after this market and miserably try to coin terms to define us like New Generation Latino, Young Latino Americans, Hispanic Millennials. The term Latino attempts to encompass far too many diverse ethnic and social cultures that it is a useless denomination, a limited view failing to recognize the fluidity of our social zeitgeist in the 21st century.

It is critical to adapt with the changing times and engage the new generations of our immigrant nation. It’s time to reframe our notions and classifications on race and identity. Más American is my humble attempt of doing away with outdated and ill-defined terminology like Hispanic or Latino. It is meant to convey the real, inclusive and radical reflection of society’s eclectic fabric found in fiercely independent filmmaker voices. More aptly, it speaks to the transcultural identity and non-conformist spirit of today’s characters and narratives. It’s not necessarily confined to speak about people of “color.” It is about all kinds of shifting identities, from conventional, traditional and sociocultural norms to a more progressive evolution. It is about gender – equality, reversal of roles, gender variant. Filmmakers are out there telling these unique perspectives through independent film. These stories are out there. I can attest to that with some authority because of the volume of screening I do for film festivals year round. Films from underrepresented communities usually have an outsider/insider perspective, which in turn provokes highly original and compelling narratives by its very nature. This emerging class of individualism is what embodies American spirit.

Más American also speaks to the influence Latinos have on non-Latinos. You don’t have to have the blood in order to appreciate or acquire a sensibility of the Latino experience. Many non-Latino filmmakers have made extraordinary films capturing the US Latino experience. It’s only natural considering the countless generations who originate from before the Hidalgo treaty was signed. We are your neighbors, friends, colleagues, lovers, wives, husbands, in-laws, in each of the 50 states. Indeed, a long time ago my mom and I learned to stop talking trash when out in public about non-Latinos in proximity realizing that many people understand some Spanish.

Más American

And so it is with much pleasure, and gratitude toward the filmmakers, the Más American conversation on Seed&Spark is rolling out. These films purely conceive of characters and a world more reflective and authentic of our reality. Perhaps the freshness comes from a subconscious in which they derive and embody a defiant individuality, outside of any identity politics. Más American hopefully is a starting point for a more forward and richer conversation toward genuine, original and underrepresented narratives. I hope to add more titles to the mix in this Conversation, championing filmmakers who get America’s evolving sense of cultural self-identity and who are on the pulse of the rapidly shifting zeitgeist.

In THE CRUMBLES, written and directed by Akira Boch, the acting talent naturally inhabit LA’s Echo Park hipster artist scene in such a sincere and rocking way. The lead happens to be a Latina and her co-lead happens to be Asian. Their color is so not the center of the tragicomic slice-of-life. Yet it does make them who they are: badass rock ‘n roll girlfriends who resist quitting on their dream of hitting it big with their band.

In THE NEVER DAUNTED, writer/director Edgar Muñiz explores the toll and cross a man must bear who can’t conceive, in such a profound, heartbreaking and uniquely creative way. The film explores a modern masculinity more open to vulnerability, clashing with the Western stoic cowboy machismo image imposed on men from boyhood.

GABI – director Zoé Salicrup Junco’s impressive NYU thesis film – centers around its titular business-smart, sexy and confident 30-something woman living an independent and successful life, whose main conflict is the reminder that, in her hometown, her success represents a failure within the context of the marriage, kids and housewife model.

Seed&Spark logo

In all of these stories, new definitions of traditional norms are celebrated, and scripts are being flipped. I’m thrilled that with Seed&Spark the public at large can discover these rebellious voices.

I want to thank the filmmakers for sharing their inspiring non-conformist narratives on Seed&Spark and for, whether they know it or not, breaking type.

Christine Davila is film festival programmer, festival strategist, script consultant and blogger (chicanafromchicago.com). As a first generation Mexican-American from Chicago, she loves multi-cultural stories and has the privilege of screening hundreds of US Latino and Spanish language films throughout the year as a freelance programmer for film festivals like Sundance, Morelia, Los Angeles Film Festival, San Antonio’s CineFestival, among others. In her blog, Chicana From Chicago, she focuses on the diaspora of American cinema made by people with roots/origin/descendant in Mexico, Central & South America, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. You can follow Christine @IndieFindsLA.

‘Elysium’: A Sci-Fi Immigration Parable

Elysium Movie Poster

Written by Amanda Rodriguez

I was surprised that I not only liked, but was impressed by Elysium. I had my doubts because it’s a Hollywood blockbuster, and their interpretation of the tenets of sci-fi usually leaves much to be desired. Also, I just really, really don’t like Matt Damon and his…face. The film centers around a poverty-stricken dystopian Earth and the lavishly constructed off-world satellite habitat, Elysium, where only the rich and powerful are allowed to live. Elysium doesn’t do much that’s interesting with gender, but its focus on class and race relations, particularly on immigration, is the heart and soul of this film.

There are only three women of note in Elysium. Matt Damon’s character, Max, is an orphan raised in a religious orphanage. There is one nun who doesn’t see him as a hopeless trouble-maker with no hope of a future. The film implies that many impoverished children who turn to crime have little in their home lives to bolster them and give them a sense of self-worth. This nun instills in young Max a sense of purpose, insisting that he has a destiny every bit as important as anyone on Elysium. Though this nun is compassionate, she exists primarily to show why Max is at his core a good person despite the hardness of his life and in spite of his path of crime.

Then there’s Alice Braga’s Frey, a nurse who was Max’s childhood sweetheart. Frey has “made something of herself” and has a daughter, Matilda, who is dying. Frey, too, exists only as Max’s love interest and a symbol of motherhood. Frey is constantly under threat of rape by psychotic ex-military Kruger (played by Sharlto Copley) and his men who have kidnapped her in order to force compliance from Max. The looming threat of sexual violence only exists to showcase the effect such an eventuality would have on our hero. Frey would also risk everything to get her daughter to Elysium where healing machines are readily available in every home to cure her daughter of her terminal illness. The selfless, sacrificing mother is not a new or even interesting trope in cinema.

Frey becomes increasingly distressed as her daughter slips into a coma.

Finally, we have Jodie Foster’s Delacourt, Elysium’s Secretary of Defense. Delacourt is cold and casually cruel. Her power is not only emasculating, but she is a dangerous nationalist who resorts to illegality in order to protect the purity of Elysium from “illegals” who land on the satellite’s surface in rogue shuttles before scattering in the hopes of blending with Elysium citizens or at least acquiring medical care before being deported back to Earth. Delacourt has a great deal of power that she exercises freely, and she is extremely intelligent and even brilliant in the machinations of her overblown patriotism. However, the severe, emotionless, tyrannical female power figurehead is also not a new trope, and there’s little that makes Delacourt a complex or engaging character.

Jodi Foster’s sterile white pantsuit blends with the sterile white walls of Elysium’s “Administration.”

What is interesting about Elysium, however, is its overwhelmingly non-white cast. Most of the characters are Latino or Black, and it seems the primary language on Earth is Spanish. Our Earth setting is Los Angeles. Many of these disenfranchised inhabitants of Earth (including Max) are employed in manufacturing, spending their days making the very robots that secure Elysium against them. (They were pretty fucking cool robots, though.) Aside from Matt Damon, most of the white characters are either privileged people of wealth or figures of authority who are shown in a negative light. In fact, all the white characters with speaking roles are coded as “bad guys.” The racial dynamics in this film crystallize its sci-fi allegory for immigration.

Technological genius and champion for immigrant citizenry, Spider, proposes a dangerous job to Max and his friend Julio.

After showing the desolation of Earth and the dire, unequal plight of its inhabitants, what is the solution Elysium poses to the so-called “immigration problem”? Indiscriminate citizenry for all. The tale becomes a fantasy of upending a brutal system that favors the wealthy few over the needs of the many, of destroying a government that privileges whiteness, denying rights and quality of life from people of color. That is a powerful, subversive fantasy that strikes very close to home. That, my friends, would mean revolution.

It certainly bothers me that Hollywood thinks our hero, Max, must be a white dude in order for his story to resonate with audiences, in order to lay bare the atrocities of the U.S’s immigrant situation (with Mexico in particular) in such a way that audiences can understand it. Without completely shifting the racial dynamics, Elysium becomes a version of White Man’s Burden, assuming that audiences can’t empathize with a hero of color and cannot put themselves in the hero’s shoes unless they can racially identify with him. There are two fallacies in this notion, 1.) that the default human being is a man, and 2.) that the default human being is a white man.

Elysium orbits Earth.

I can only hope that one day, Hollywood will realize it’s wrong about its insistence on white male leads in films…and that Hollywood will actually be wrong about it. Hey, a blockbuster that wears its immigration agenda on its sleeve is something you don’t see very often, so maybe we’re getting closer to the day when we don’t have to hide behind genre to tell a topical political tale and the day when we don’t need to have a white man tell us such an important story.

Wedding Week: Do or Do Not

This is a guest post by Emily Campbell.

Here’s some sobering news: if you’re not a U.S. citizen, same-sex marriage isn’t going to score you a green card. And, unless you can make sense of immigration legalese and have overwhelming amounts of luck on your side, seeking asylum as an LGBT individual probably isn’t either.

Sure, you can marry your spouse in some states and everything is perfectly legal, but good luck getting them a green card or permanent residency because surprise! The federal government says no. State-federal alignment, what state-federal alignment? And you can totally apply for asylum, but first you have to prove you’re queer enough, that you’re in danger of being persecuted for being queer in your country of origin, and you have to do this within a year of arriving in the U.S. or it’s straight to deportation.

I’d been reading about cheerful things like the obstacles faced by LGBT asylum seekers and all the creative ways U.S. immigration law manages to avoid actually granting asylum when I first heard of I Do. An indie film bearing the vaguely ominous tagline “Two words can change everything” and promises of a plot centered on a playing-it-straight green card marriage, it sounded right up my alley. According to director Glenn Gaylord:

The film touches upon some very profound issues of our time, the Defense of Marriage Act, and how even though gay people can get married in certain states in this country, immigration is a federal right. So even if a gay person legally marries someone, it doesn’t grant citizenship, because of DOMA. All told, despite its hot-button topicality, this is the very human story about a man who has to decide whose life he’s living.

Movie poster for I Do

Intense, right? Essentially, my first thought was “I need to see this yesterday.”

I Do kicks off with some narration from our humble protagonist, Jack (David W. Ross): “I do believe in fate. I do believe in family. I believe in telling the truth and that your actions have consequences.”

Please note the strategic repetition of “I do.”

Jack’s life is kind of tragic. He’s a transplant from England who’s been living in the U.S. since he was 17 and (spoiler) his brother bites it within the first five minutes of the movie. This happens right after said bro announces over dinner that his wife Mya (Alicia Witt) is pregnant, and isn’t that a wonder since he only married her for a green card. There’s always that one family member making really tasteless jokes at the table. Jack politely congratulates him anyway, then politely bears it when his bro talks about sometimes wishing he were gay because–get this–those intrepid bohemian homosexuals have no responsibilities or ordained path, and he feels like he’s conforming to societal norms by being married and having a kid. Right, then.

We fast-forward a few years, and Jack’s doing all right for himself. He works as a photographer’s assistant and fills his off hours by being the greatest gay uncle ever for Mya’s preposterously sweet daughter and the greatest BFF ever to his coworker Ali (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), who also happens to be a lesbian. Then things get sticky when Jack’s work visa is denied. The explanation? Everything’s harder since September 11, which means he can’t just renew his visa. Instead, he has to go back to England and begin the whole process again, and even then he might not be eligible for another since he has a denial on his record. Leaving his life in New York to wait things out in England is just plain out of the question, as is remaining in the U.S. illegally and risking deportation.

Jack (David W. Ross) and Aly (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) bonding and providing some equal-opportunity objectification

But, his lawyer conspiratorially tells him, he can still get his hands on a green card if he marries. A woman. And he has just two months to figure out what to do.

Fortunately for Jack, Ali’s girlfriend recently dumped her and made her move out, leaving her newly single and with nowhere to live.

Enter fake marriage. Don’t ask why Ali goes along with it so readily; I’m not sure either. But it means we get to see her being quietly conflicted about helping a friend and potentially going to federal prison for it, which entails lots of lingering shots of her doe-eyed, adorably accessorized visage. So there’s that.

Jamie-Lynn Sigler as Ali in I Do

And this is where the real problem comes in. We’re clearly supposed to feel bad for Jack’s plight and the DOMA-fueled injustice being heaped on him. But as things escalate and Jack suddenly falls for Spanish architect Mano (Maurice Compte), the casual viewer is more likely to feel bad for Ali, who has to deal with him gallivanting all over the place and not even trying to make their relationship seem remotely realistic. Her future is on the line right along with Jack’s, but Jack never seems to have an inkling of just how big of a risk they’re taking for his sake.

There’s also the fact that the chemistry between Jack and the newfound love of his life is anemic at best, but we’re supposed to believe it exists for the sake of a plot point. And while this could just be my own personal bias about what constitutes romance and what constitutes creepy, Mano showing up (unannounced and unsolicited) with coffee and changes of clothes for Jack and Mya while they’re staying the night in a hospital reads as more of the latter than the former. Especially considering Jack and Mano have met all of twice at this point.

Mano is also sketching their future dream home by the third date and promising to go to England with Jack if he gets deported. And he happens to conveniently be an American citizen. However, as Jack’s lawyer points out, Manu can marry Jack legally in New York and it still won’t make a difference since immigration is a federal issue. In case those of us following along at home missed anything, she spells it out for them and says point blank that they don’t have the same rights as a straight couple.

Ali, meanwhile, is petrified of going to prison for being Jack’s fake wife. Then immigration officers show up while Jack is out with Mano generally being the worst fake husband ever even though their relationship is weirdly unbelievable.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. There’s one scene where Mano tells Jack the scar on his chest is from when his father caught him in bed with a neighbor’s son, which has the potential to be very poignant. Or it would be if the theme of family being important hadn’t already been hammered home time and time again. And since the linchpin of Jack wanting to stay in the U.S. is his own adopted family of Mya and her daughter, this makes his eventual resolution incredibly jarring.

It all wraps up with another earnest monologue from Jack. “I believe in family. I believe in fate. I believe we should all have the freedom to love. I believe in love. I do.”

That said, there are bright spots amidst all the doom and despair. Alicia Witt is excellent as Mya, trying to make ends meet and move on with life, simultaneously loving Jack and hating him for being alive instead of her husband. And Mickey Cottrell is great as Jack’s mentor, Sam, who at one point confides in Jack that the only reason he ended up with his partner of 32 years was because he knew he was the one and went for it. But at the end of the day, I Do takes a hot-button issue and waters it down immensely. If you want an engrossing story about gay marriage beating the legal system, read about the awesome lesbian couple from Pakistan who took a vacation to the U.K., got married, and immediately filed for–and won–asylum there. Someone really needs to make a movie about that.

Emily Campbell is approximately three fifths finished with this cup of chai and five fifths finished with grad school. She has previously reviewed Cracks and War Witch for Bitch Flicks.

The Exploitation of Women in Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Children of Men’

Movie poster for Children of Men

Written by Amanda Rodriguez for our theme week on Infertility, Miscarriage, and Infant Loss.

I like Alfonso Cuarón’s bleak, dystopian cinematic interpretation of Children of Men (based on the PD James novel) wherein the world collapses after an infertility pandemic strikes, causing there to be no human births for over 18 years. It poses remarkable questions like, “What do we value about life?” and “What do children mean to humanity’s sense of longevity and continuity?” and “Does the future exist if humans won’t be around for it?” Though this film appeals to my sci-fi post-apocalyptic proclivities, its treatment of women, children, and reproduction leaves much to be desired.

Children of Men immediately draws critical attention to this futuristic declining world’s tendency to turn women and children into symbols. The opening scene shows droves of people mourning the death of the youngest person in much the same way that celebrity deaths are mourned, setting up the 18-year-old man as a symbol of youth and a reminder of humanity’s impending extinction. The activist immigrant rights group, the Fishes, sees young pregnant Kee (portrayed by Clare-Hope Ashitey) as a symbol. She is not only a West African immigrant, but also the only woman to become pregnant in 18 years. She is a symbol of the humanity of immigrants, the salvation of the human race itself, and of a coming revolution. It is also made clear that women are forced to submit to fertility tests or face imprisonment, rendering these survivors little more than failed symbols of reproduction and shamed symbols of infertility. Though the film overtly critiques this desire to turn human beings into symbols, it indulges in it quite a bit.

The scene in the abandoned school is pregnant (pun intended) with symbolism.

“As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in.” – Miriam

As the young Kee sits alone on a rickety swing set, the camera pans the dilapidated building and Miriam recounts her experiences as a medical midwife at the beginning of the pandemic. The scene mourns imaginary children who never existed along with an imaginary future that proves likewise illusory. The empty school reinforces the crushing absence of children, which in turn represents the absence of a future.

The film apparently resists turning pregnant Kee into a symbol by showing that the only sane response to her pregnancy is that of Theo’s overwhelming desire to get her to a doctor so that she can receive necessary medical attention. However, when Kee reveals the fullness of her pregnant stomach to Theo, it is nothing but indulgent symbolism. She takes her shirt off in the middle of a barn full of cows, her posture of one hand covering her breasts and the other cupping her belly simultaneously one of modesty and fecundity.

Kee is dehumanized and symbolized

This image of the pregnant black woman amongst livestock paired with the swelling music that evokes apotheosis is particularly offensive to me. Her humanity is transcended into grotesque female-coded symbols like earth, goddess, fertility, and nature. Her blackness is racistly used to reinforce the nature symbolism as well as the birth and beginning of mankind. The deliberateness of these symbols is even more apparent when the original PD James text The Children of Men is considered in which Julian (played by middle-aged white Julianne Moore) was the character with the mystical pregnancy. Though it is impossible to not read some symbolism into Kee’s pregnancy, her “revelation” scene is exploitative and is done dramatically and specifically to benefit the male viewer in the form of Theo.

Which leads us to the next issue I had with Children of Men: Most of the female characters are peripheral or marginalized. The midwife Miriam is portrayed as a religious nutcase who does some kind of spiritual Tai Chi, chants over Kee’s pregnant belly instead of using the hard science she learned in medical school, and believes in UFOs. Janice, the wife of Jasper (played by Michael Caine) is catatonic. Marichka is a Romanian woman who doesn’t speak English, babbles a lot, and has a bizarre relationship with her dog.

The unsavory Marichka driving Theo & Kee to a filthy room for the night

Julian, though a strong woman, is too often shown from Theo’s perspective as the beautiful, unattainable bitter ex-wife and forever mourning ex-mother. Not only that, but she dies suddenly very early on in the film. Her death itself is the most important thing about her because it’s an inside job, showing that the so-called immigrant rights activist group has questionable morality and can be trusted no more than the oppressive government regime. Therefore, Julian’s death is highly symbolic and paradigm shifting.

The Fishes scorn Julian’s non-violent methodology and murder her in order to exploit Kee’s baby as a symbol for revolution.

Not only were there few representations of non-symbolic women, but the entire film, a film about fertility, motherhood, and childbirth, is told from the perspective of a man. The most flagrant example of a marginalized female character is Kee. She is a child herself with no true agency, who knows nothing of pregnancy and motherhood, who must rely on the experience and protection of Theo. Kee’s lack of agency and complete reliance on Theo set up yet another patriarchal iteration of genesis wherein the rebirth of the human race isn’t due to Kee and her baby girl, Dylan; it’s due to the perseverance of a lone man whose ideals may be jaded, but he feels compelled to “do the right thing” no matter what noble sacrifices it might require.

Theo sacrifices his own life to protect Kee and her baby, ensuring they make it to safety first

Not only is Theo the martyr and savior of this film, but he knows more about motherhood than Kee does. He delivers the baby, coaching Kee on how to breathe and push, motivating her when she is overcome. He then delivers Kee and her baby to the so-called safety of The Human Project (a secretive group purporting to be searching for an infertility cure).

I ask you, why is this story told from Theo’s perspective? Why isn’t Kee our heroine? She’s the one with messianic qualities and an epic quest who undergoes a mystical pregnancy, sneaks her way out of West Africa only to become a hunted “fugee” in Britain, before traversing war-torn areas only to give birth in a filthy flophouse before escaping via rowboat to the elusive, mythical Human Project. Why is her tale told once removed in the form of Theo? Her femaleness along with her Otherness as a black woman and her status (in our current day culture) as a pregnant woman apparently give Cuarón license to strip her of real humanity and complexity. Her lack of agency in her own story and the way that she’s relegated to supporting-character land make it easy to inscribe meaning upon her, to turn her into a symbol in a way that Theo and his friend Jasper aren’t really because they’re men…children of men.

Kee’s pregnant body is turned into an icon.

In the novel version, it is the male sperm that becomes nonviable, causing the infertility pandemic. In the movie version, it’s the women who are suddenly infertile after repeated miscarriages. This puts the blame on women for the pandemic while identifying men (i.e. Theo) as the solution to the problem. It even makes me wonder if the way that the film depicts infertility as full of despair (as if civilization must collapse if we can’t make babies) is some sort of derailment of a masculine ideal, wherein reproduction and the passing on of one’s genes is a vital component of manhood. Yes, it would suck if humanity’s extinction was imminent, but the implosion of cultures and societies does not necessarily logically follow. Even now, we destroy our environment and use up our resources at an unsustainable rate, and first world countries do not fail because of it. The slow march toward extinction is one we’re increasingly familiar with as war over oil spreads across the globe and our climate Hades-heats up.

Children of Men‘s depiction of women as props, tools, symbols, or cardboard underscores the notion that women’s true purpose is reproduction, and when women can’t reproduce, they’re not only useless, but society itself collapses under the burden of their neglect of duty. Despite many of the intriguing themes this film explores (including a scathing denouncement of the treatment of immigrants), Children of Men ends up falling in line with its mainstream contemporaries to assert that women are merely bodies, that a woman’s value lies in her ability to reproduce, and that she has and should have no control over that body or that ability to reproduce.