Incest – Bitch Flicks

‘The Violators’ and ‘Wildlike’: Two Films Deal with the Trauma of Child Abuse in Different Ways

[Trigger Warning: for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault] To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways?

This is a guest post written by Holly Thicknes.

Trigger warning for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault.

Wildlike and The Violators: two independent films released on festival circuits to rip-roaring acclaim. Both are debut features from Frank Hall Green and Helen Walsh respectively, and both deal with the uncomfortable subject of the sexual abuse of teenage girls. Yet the two films left me with very different impressions.

To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways? If ever we are to believe that films can influence society for the better, surely we must look for critical self-awareness along with satisfying storytelling (where abuse is more than just a tool of the narrative that progresses the story). The guise of the art house genre has a history of being perceived as absolving films of the representational issues of rape as spectacle, as if the festival-to-independent-cinema distribution package amounts to an automatic stamp of approval (perhaps anyone seeing Gaspar Noé’s Love will take a moment to cast their minds back to the bitter experience that was his Irreversible, shown at Cannes in 2002). But explicitness — or as some might view it, uncut realism — in representing the sexual exploitation of women in itself is problematic if it serves no purpose other than the pleasure of spectacle. And so it is a delicate balance which filmmakers must strive to strike: an honest representation, made — crucially — for the right reasons.

Green’s Wildlike premiered at the Hamptons Film Festival in October 2014 and was the winner of over 40 Best Film awards at various other festivals. The film promises a scenic hike across Alaska, an unlikely friendship of substitution between a teenage girl and an older man and a tense chase by an abusive, ominously unnamed uncle. It delivers all three with invigorating authenticity: the photography and performances meld together to perfectly tow the line between documentary-inspired art house flick and melodramatic Alaskan road movie. The script and Green’s direction soar in moments of transition, where all the action is embedded in the faces of the characters (articulated with faultless performances all around, namely by Bruce Greenwood as male lead Rene) or else the gruff, ever-changing landscapes, and the contemplative essence of the story feels overwhelmingly all-encompassing. There is an endearing sweetness in the father-daughter friendship being cultivated with very little words but plenty of weighted glances. All the substance is there, evidently so, affording it its success and status as a breakthrough debut.

But for all of Wildlike‘s strengths, what I simultaneously can’t forgive it for nor realistically expect of it is the fact that the guesses feel clumsy around the depiction of the central female character’s abuse. They feel second hand, peripheral, flat.

In blatant contrast, The Violators is uncompromisingly captured from 15-year-old female protagonist Shelly’s perspective, and centered around the effects of the sexual exploitation she suffers. It is a film lovingly cultivated by acclaimed novelist and writer/director Walsh, who turned her hand to filmmaking for the first time with the kind of surety that relevant experience for the subject at hand affords you. She reached back into her childhood, where she grew up on the periphery of Cheshire, England, on the same streets and dockland walks we see depicted in the film, and drew out a story about a community of people suffering from the cyclical nature of abuse that forever seems to renew until someone or something finds the strength to break the cycle.

Through the eyes of Shelly, played by acting revelation Lauren McQueen, we see the people of this community play a daily game of chance with the hand they have been dealt. Exploring, as the story does, violation, no one person is made to claim all the blame and no one is absolved entirely, epitomized in Shelly’s complex character role of both sensible mother figure and misled, reckless child. Walsh hints at the details of an abusive father, in jail but possibly being paroled soon, to her and her self-sufficient siblings, and the prospect of it hangs like a spectre over everything so that current moments of violence feel grounded in her damaged past. True as the film is to real life, abuse does not change the centre of gravity of anyone else’s world, but instead informs the path that particular victim takes for the worse.

This perspective is where Wildlike falls down on the representational front, making it into a paternal film about a father-and-daughter-type friendship ever blooming in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness that sidelines the protagonist’s abusive experiences. To be fair, there is nothing insensitive about Green’s portrayal of MacKenzie (Ella Purnell), whose angsty teenager status is drawn onto her face with the filmic trope that is black eyeliner, but beyond this rightfully possesses no superficial traits that simply pigeonhole her character. The scenes of abuse are deliberately not treated as spectacle, but with impressive restraint and disgust-inducing visceral sound effects that imply rather than show (a storytelling technique that Green applies with great success throughout). But the effects of the incidents are observed from the outside, in manner of a concerned father who might look on at his daughter going through her troubled teenage years with genuine concern but bafflement. We are never invited into MacKenzie’s personal space to understand her motivations, and are instead left to second guess how messed up she must be from her experiences. Consequently, when she does break her sullen silence in a burst of emotion, the dialogue feels clumsily roped together in a bid to sound spontaneous but which comes off as whiny.

Unsurprisingly it is much easier to sympathise and identify with Rene, the recently widowed middle-aged male hiker that MacKenzie latches onto, firstly at the whiff of a meal ticket but then being tentatively drawn towards a kind and understanding father figure. Bruce Greenwood is a dream in the role, who we are introduced to in a moment when his defenses are down, in the rue of privacy whilst lying in bed, reminiscing about his late wife, without knowing that MacKenzie is actually hiding under his bed having snuck into his hotel room to nap for the night during her journey to Seattle. His male vulnerability in the wake of the manipulative uncle figure from whom MacKenzie is running is an instant catch: he is afforded an intimate look that we never get to see of her. A few silhouetted crying scenes do not cut it by any stretch.

Green has never claimed, as far as I know, to have made a film directly commenting on the lasting effects of sexual abuse on an underage girl in the hope of enlightening his audience. The meeting point of the two films is their examination of the resilience of vulnerable people in the face of attack. Wildlike does this beautifully — arguably more successfully than The Violators. But having seen both films at film festivals this year with directorial introductions, the contrast between representational intention is blatantly stark. Should films ever sideline child molestation? Should the primary victim’s account ever feel viewed from a distance? And should the issue even ever be used in a film by a male writer/director, one with undeniable storytelling skill, which gets the film into a bunch of festivals with its indie look, but uses the sensitive issue to invoke drama? It’s for everyone to individually make up their minds, but for my part I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling of having watched a film about teenage molestation and incest told superficially from the perspective of the female victim but in reality from the perspective of a man.

Holly Thicknes is a freelance film critic and editor of female-focused film blog Girls On Film. She lives and works in London, studies printmaking, and helps organise themed short film events for Shorts On Tap. She is particularly interested in the ways in which films help people carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly lonely society. You can follow Girls On Film on Twitter at @girlsonfilmLDN.

‘Viy’: Incestuous Mother as Horror Monster

'Viy' was the USSR's first horror film'Viy' was the USSR's first horror film — *Viy* was the USSR’s first horror film

Trigger Warning: Discussion of maternal incest, paternal incest and the rape of men.

Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol disassociated himself from his 1835 story Viy by framing it as an unaltered “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) folk tale, but it is actually a strikingly original, vividly visual and deeply felt Gothic horror that bears only slight resemblance to folklore. Though Mario Bava’s 1960 Black Sunday is officially based on Viy, the most faithful adaptation is a 1967 Soviet production with effects by stop-motion legend Aleksandr Ptushko. I’m analyzing this classic, not the recent remake.

Trainee monk Khoma Brut “never knew his mother,” while the story’s vampiric witch (she drinks baby’s blood) is introduced in a maternal, housewife role. As Katherine Murray discusses on Bitch Flicks, “the substitution of witch for mom or giant for dad is a safe way of exploring children’s fears about their parents.” Gogol’s major source is Zhukovsky’s translation of Robert Southey’s “A Ballad, Shewing How An Old Woman Rode Double, And Who Rode Before Her,” where a monk reads prayers over his cursed mother’s corpse, while demons lay siege to the church. Though not literally mother, Viy‘s vivid witch is the archetype of horror’s monstrous mothers. In 1893’s The Death of Halpin Frayser, the hero blunders into the “blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!” While struggling with his undead mother in a haunted forest, Halpin dissociates and views events “as a spectator” before dying horribly. In Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 horror classic, Vampyr, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s alluringly lesboerotic Carmilla is reimagined as a menacing, maternal vampire-hag, while in “Lies My Parents Told Me,” (Season 7) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike vamps his mother and she accuses him of sexually desiring her, forcing him to stake her. The event is so traumatic that Spike can be controlled by it, until he defuses his trigger by facing the memory (contrast the show’s dismissive treatment of Faith’s attempted rape/murder of Xander in Season 3’s “Consequences” and Buffy’s violation of Spike’s stated sexual boundaries in Season 6’s “Gone”).

In her discussion of the female Gothic, “The Madwoman’s Journey From The Attic Into The Television,” Bitch Flicks‘ guest writer Sobia notes, “while male writers of the time were tackling subjects like rape and sexual assault head on, the women were using complicated metaphors to confront these issues. I would argue that for the male writer, given the distance they already have and maintain from these topics, it was easy to tell the story of the assault happening to an Other.” Just as Godzilla‘s semi-goofy lizard embodied Japan’s nuclear trauma, so Gogol’s fantasy creations are not necessarily trivial, as unreal displacements of real anxiety. Viy parallels the female Gothic’s allegorical approach to rape, contrasting sharply with unreal yet realist rape fantasies like Murmur of the Heart (flippant maternal incest for shock value), White Palace (Susan Sarandon’s rape of an unconscious James Spader, who refused consent before passing out, as romantic liberation), and Wedding Crashers (Vince Vaughn’s rape by Isla Fisher as hilarious).

Nikolai Kutuzov's witch transfixes Khoma — Nikolai Kutuzov’s witch transfixes Khoma

The boisterous tone of Viy‘s opening fades rapidly, as three seminary students, lost in the dead of night, draw up to a housewife’s misty gates and are allowed to stay on condition that they sleep separated. Leonid Kuravlyov’s robust and jolly Khoma beds down alone in a stable. His placid chewing is paralleled with the stable’s cow, reducing him metaphorically to livestock. Initially, Khoma views the looming witch as a joke: “It’s getting late, Granny, and I wouldn’t corrupt myself for a thousand in gold. *laughs* You’ve gotten old, Granny.” Gogol’s prose: “the sophomore [lit: ‘philosopher’] shrank back; but she still approached, as though she wished to lay hold of him. A terrible fright seized him, for he saw the old hag’s eyes glitter in an extraordinary way.” Filming the witch’s stare in uncomfortable close-up, the Soviet adaptation achieves a viscerally uncanny effect, intensified for hetero-male audiences by male actor Nikolai Kutuzov’s playing the witch, until the stumbling Khoma knocks the cow’s yoke symbolically onto his own neck. Khoma appears stunned. In Gogol’s prose, his reaction is more clearly tonic immobility, or freeze response: “the sophomore tried to push her away with his hands, but to his astonishment he found that he could neither lift his hands nor move his legs, nor utter an audible word.”

Finally, the witch grasps him and forces herself onto his back. After a dizzying aerial ride, Khoma drives the witch to earth by invoking Christ and beats her with savage anger, until she transforms into a weeping damsel-in-distress, who dies as he staggers away. The sexual dimension of the riding is clearer in Gogol’s prose: “his legs… lifted against his will… a wearying, unpleasant and at the same time sweet feeling… a demonically sweet feeling… suddenly he felt some kind of refreshment; he felt that his step began to grow more lazy… her wild cries… became weaker, more pleasant, purer.” Gogol uses supernatural paralysis and running motion to allegorically express concepts as crucial to understanding male rape as they are widely disbelieved: firstly, the effectiveness of sexual threat in inducing an involuntary freeze response and, secondly, the possible coexistence of “demonically sweet” arousal with traumatic mental repulsion and violation.

The eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley's undead witchThe eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley's undead witch — The eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley’s undead witch

Once dead, the witch can become youthfully beautiful, revealing her aged ugliness as a device to emphasize the unwanted and repulsive nature of the pseudosexual encounter. Khoma is forced to read prayers over the dead witch, as her dying request. Gogol’s witch is as pitiful as she is aggressive, crying a tear of blood and inducing Khoma’s guilt for killing her – “he felt as though those ruby lips were colored with his own heart’s blood” – before demonically rising to violate him again. Khoma is told of Mikita, a huntsman whose infatuation with the witch “completely sissified him” before he allowed her to ride him; he was “burned completely out,” leaving only ashes, proving the fatal seriousness of the riding Khoma has survived. The film’s church scenes are masterpieces of brooding Orthodox iconography, steadily ratcheted tension and jolting jump scares. As the witch rises from her grave, Khoma desperately draws a chalk circle around himself, bolstering its charmed impenetrability by fervent prayer as demons fumble for him.

The frail boundary of chalk serves as a powerful imaginary line of bodily autonomy that the hero desperately defends, and our anxiety over its penetration drives the film’s second half. Khoma is forced to return on the third night by threats and the promise of a thousand in gold (for which he earlier refused to “corrupt himself”), being caught as he tries to flee. After dancing in wild abandon, his macho bravado drives him to return to the scene of horrors, intoxicated, to prove that “Cossacks aren’t afraid.” Khoma thus strives for some sense of control by proactively inviting a seemingly unavoidable threat. This is a common response to chronic abuse. On the final night, gigantic grasping hands grope for Khoma, while a wild assortment of nightmare ghouls crawl out of the church’s woodwork. The witch orders them to bring the Viy, a stumbling grotesque with dangling eyelids, from under the earth. Ghouls raise the Viy’s eyelids, unveiling his glittering stare. Khoma swears he will not look, but cannot resist turning as the Viy’s heavy footfalls approach. The Viy immediately stabs his finger at him, ghouls descend and Khoma dies of fright beneath their grasping hands. In a coda, his friend declares, “If he had not feared her, the witch could have done nothing to him.” As with Spike’s vampire-mother, it is Khoma’s fatal fear of facing the buried monster that is his doom, not the supernatural itself.

A frail circle of chalk is all that protects Khoma from gigantic grasping hands

Gogol’s earlier 1832 horror, Terrible Vengeance, shares deep parallels with Viy. Like Viy‘s beautiful witch, its sorcerer is superficially attractive, amusing crowds until a religious icon exposes his monstrous true face. The heroine, Katerina, fears the sorcerer and is ambivalently detached from her father, suffering horrifying dreams that he incestuously desires to marry her. Her husband, Danilo, eventually discovers that the father and the evil sorcerer are one, and are conjuring Katerina’s spirit from her body by night. That spirit’s statement that Katerina “does not know a lot of what her soul knows” remarkably suggests repressed memory and dissociation. Like Khoma’s pity for the weeping witch, Katerina feels bound to liberate her father even after realizing his true nature, yet simultaneously self-loathing for her inability to separate from him. Terrible Vengeance portrays a nightmare vision of intergenerational abuse, where ancestors feed forever on each other’s corpses in a deep abyss. The original sinner gnaws his own flesh and shakes the earth in his efforts to rise, eternally growing and distorting into a buried grotesque like the fearful Viy. In Mikhail Titov’s 1987 animated adaptation, Katerina, maddened by the loss of her husband and child, dances in wild, defiant intoxication, as Khoma does after his night terrors, even drawing a circle of fire to ward off her father, like Khoma’s of chalk. Such profound parallels between the quasi-maternal incest of Viy and the explicitly paternal incest of Terrible Vengeance send a clear message: it’s not about gender. Though Gogol’s sexually monstrous mother-figure has captured male imaginations and spawned imitations in a way that his sexually monstrous father has not, because of the overwhelming male authorship of our culture, yet both images are rooted in a potentially interchangeable empathy for survivors of sexual abuse.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEenjdEp8h4″]

Titov’s Terrible Vengeance. Triggery allegory

For women, male anxieties over female abusers combine great risk of demonization with great opportunity to forge connection. Men, like women, understand boundaries primally through their own bodies and identification. Rejecting one’s own abuse teaches one to fight against all abuse; excusing it teaches one to abuse. When Alex Forrest of Fatal Attraction spooked male audiences, we could have pointed out that her behavior is stalking, experienced by one in six women in the USA, and her attempt to force Dan’s paternity is reproductive coercion, experienced by 16 percent of pregnant women. Instead, Susan Faludi’s Backlash read Alex as representing the demonization of feminism. Yet, Alex is an abuser. As Stephanie Brown points out for Bitch Flicks, you may meet Alex as you progress through life. Society does not technically favor men over women in intimate relationships. It favors abusers over victims, and codes abusive behaviors as masculine. As for bad mothers, Freud’s Oedipal “seduction theory” was created under intense pressure from the psychiatric establishment, as an alternative to his earlier exposure of parental incest’s links to PTSD in “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” So, why do feminists apply Oedipal interpretations, that evolved by mirror logic from rape apologism, to dismiss texts like Viy? Ultimately, whatever nightmares they fuel, bad mothers are neither monsters nor demonically unnatural women. They are flawed humans. By resisting the gendering of abuse, can we evolve human understanding?

The paranoid repulsion towards female sexual aggression that pervades the work of Nikolai Gogol has seen him uncritically labeled a misogynist, by virtually all modern commentators. Yet, renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol formed intense friendships with women like Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset, corresponding on philosophical topics with rare respect for her intellectual equality, and addressing her as “drug” (“buddy”). Renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol wrote the 19th century’s most psychologically insightful and empathetic portrait of a female experience of paternal incest. Renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol understood abuse far better than mainstream feminism. Time to stop dismissing and listen to the boys. Time to face Viy without flinching.

See also at Bitch Flicks: “Child-Eating Parents in Into the Woods and Every Children’s Story Ever”

Brigit McCone freely admits to being a Gogol groupie, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and social justice warring.

‘Dogtooth’: The Blindfold of Socialization

By introducing the audience to a tight-knit family with a very peculiar upbringing, the film allows a glimpse into socialization, explores gender politics, and shows how art can lead to individualism.

This is a guest post by Janie Contreras-Johnson.

On a micro level, Yorgos Lanthimos’s film, Dogtooth, is a portrayal of one family’s socialization, yet on a macro level, it challenges its audience to reflect on the ways in which society accepts and perpetuates social norms. By introducing the audience to a tight-knit family with a very peculiar upbringing, the film allows a glimpse into socialization, explores gender politics, and shows how art can lead to individualism.

The film is set in a non-descript location that—only by the language spoken—the audience knows is Greece. The film revolves around a family wherein the parents employ bizarre methods to keep their three adult children safe and obedient under their roof.

Lanthimos immediately introduces the audience to the unusual development of this family; the first scene finds the three adult children listening to a taped recording of their mother giving a vocabulary lesson. We hear common words, but the definitions the tape is providing are inaccurate (“Highway: a gently blowing breeze”). It is one of the many times in the film Lanthimos establishes the childlike innocence and obedience that puts the children at the mercy of those meant to care for them. This sentiment is reiterated later in the film, when the father speaks with a dog trainer who explains that “dogs are waiting for you to show them how to behave.” The children live in a world where yellow flowers are called “zombies” and one is old enough to drive and move out on their own when their “dogtooth falls out.” Through this family, we are shown that we process information and beliefs by what we are told, whether that is from parent to child, or on a larger scale, government to society, or media to audience.

Initiating one of the children's many games and competitions — Initiating one of the children’s many games and competitions

The film also illuminates the perpetuation and acceptance of patriarchy in society. We see the parents show a great deal of concern with the male child’s sexuality, even going to the lengths of hiring the father’s co-worker, Cristina, as a sexual partner for their son. Yet never is there any concern for the two female children’s sexuality. The girls accept this as normal and do not attempt to exercise any form of sexual freedom. When Cristina offers to trade a headband for oral sex from the eldest, the eldest sister does not question her sexuality, and acts on the arrangement but only in a perfunctory manner, devoid of any insight into the act she’s being asked to perform. When the son’s arrangement with Cristina dissolves, the parents allow their son to choose which sister he would like to sleep with, and at the cost of their daughter’s sexual freedom, encourage incest to satisfy the son’s sexuality. Again, neither sister fights their parents’ or brother’s decision to dehumanize and objectify them, and instead the sisters accept it—like many other things in their upbringing—as normal.

Cristina, being carefully taken to the family's secluded home as part of the arrangement — Cristina, being carefully taken to the family’s secluded home as part of the arrangement

But the film acknowledges the possibility of escape from these norms by establishing how art can lead to critical thinking. The only child to make an effort to leave is the eldest sister. We see her capacity for free thinking expand throughout the film, beginning with art’s influence. She is loaned two videos—Jaws and Rocky—by Cristina. We know that these are the only films the eldest has been exposed to, as it is established previously that the only videos the children have seen are home videos, which have been viewed so many times that the youngest can mouth every word as they are played. The eldest is transformed by these new films: she no longer participates in the other children’s games, and instead chooses to re-enact scenes from the movies. She holds a sip of water in her mouth and mimes being punched in the face while channeling Rocky Balboa, then cites lines from Jaws while lunging at her brother in the pool. Finally, after being forced into incestuous sex, we are shown the culmination of this exposure to new ideas. She mouths a phrase that is neither from the films nor the sheltered world she was raised in, but is inspired by the language of the art she has seen: “Do that again, bitch, and I’ll rip your guts out. I swear on my daughter’s life you and your clan won’t last long in this neighborhood.” From then on, we witness the eldest navigate the strange milestones she has been taught. In a disturbingly gory scene, she uses a dumbbell to knock out her dogtooth, and attempts to escape. In the ambiguous conclusion, we are never shown whether this escape is successful, but are left wondering, contemplating how warped socialization occurs and whether anyone is exempt from it.

Janie Contreras-Johnson is a Mexican American feminist who loves books, music, and movies, especially Charles Bukowski, Courtney Love, and GoodFellas. She co-hosts Fifth Opinion, the movie podcast dedicated to dissent, discourse, disagreement, and debate.

When is This Movie Going to End? or, Extended Adolescence and Meta Moments in ‘Freddy Got Fingered’

I know the nineties are over, but I’m still a fan of Tom Green and his eccentric brand of humor. When critics and filmgoers dismiss ‘Freddie Got Fingered,’ I feel it’s for the wrong reasons; to pass the movie off as a cinematic abortion of sorts is narrow thinking. People probably still wonder, “Who gave Tom Green money to make a movie?” I know, it’s like writing a kid a blank check and sending him into a candy store. However, if we’re not receptive enough to uncover the ideas and themes Green presents, and to assess their relevance to Hollywood ideals, celebrity status, and family politics, we need to re-evaluate how we watch film. There’s good stuff to be found in ‘Freddy.’

Written by Jenny Lapekas.

I know the 90s are over, but I’m still a fan of Tom Green and his eccentric brand of humor. When critics and filmgoers dismiss Freddy Got Fingered, I feel it’s for the wrong reasons; to pass the movie off as a cinematic abortion of sorts is narrow thinking. People probably still wonder, Who gave Tom Green money to make a movie? I know, it’s like writing a kid a blank check and sending him into a candy store. However, if we’re not receptive enough to uncover the ideas and themes Green presents, and to assess their relevance to Hollywood ideals, celebrity status, and family politics, we need to re-evaluate how we watch film. There’s good stuff to be found in Freddy.

In the trailer for Freddy, Green tells us, “If you like acting, then you’ll like Freddy Got Fingered.” The film itself works as a commentary on the movie-making process and essentially laughs in its face. Green’s declaration is meant as a sneer at the generic nature of not only popular film, but the reasons behind that popularity: that many viewers hold low expectations when evaluating movie quality. The mantra throughout Freddy seems to be “I’m a 28-year-old man”: Green’s character asserting his maturity to his parents, who are well aware that their baby is still very much a baby at 28 years old. While his mother would prefer her baby boy to stay at home, Gordy’s father (played by the incomparable Rip Torn) wants to see his son succeed and make something of himself.

When Roger Ebert reviewed this film, he had this to say: “This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. The movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.” Then why mention it? It’s clear that Green doesn’t want to be taken seriously. He spends his time satirizing movie tropes and evading the cinematic qualities that define film as a meaning-making process. To discuss Freddy alongside Hollywood blockbusters is apples and oranges.

Even the film’s cover–Green mimicking the gesture filmmakers use when describing their creation or cinematic vision–pokes fun at itself.

When we meet Gordy, his placement as an overgrown child is solidified when we watch him laying in bed, describing the absurd backstories that accompany the comics he’s drawn, which are actually quite good and show a great deal of artistic talent. Gordy’s job at the cheese sandwich factory is a satirical commentary on the struggling artist who works the meaningless, manual labor job while attempting to aspire to something greater in this life. Gordy’s departure from this job also serves to confirm his authentic identity as an animator.

The comical depiction of extended adolescence, especially in men, is seen often in film (see Step Brothers, Slackers, and Young Adult), yet it rarely seems tackled as a topic for discussion. Green’s lunatic brand of surrealist humor (see Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and The Mighty Boosh) and viewers’ not so warm reception of his film are a reflection of people’s desire for logic and the comfort we find in the assurance that gravity still exists each day when we wake. In an interview on the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Green even explains that he was trying to make the “stupidest movie ever.”

Green pokes fun at the “feel good” moments we come to expect in films, the moments that inspire us and evoke tears. We see such a moment when Gordy spontaneously delivers a baby and has a revelatory moment about his life (see Mixed Nuts and Saved!), and again when Betty (Gordy’s love interest) invents a rocket-powered wheelchair.

Signature of Green’s absurd humor, he shows up at a swanky L.A. restaurant to track down bigwig Dave Davidson (Anthony Michael Hall) to see if he can score his own television series based on his drawings, all dressed as an English bobby.

The head of Radioactive Animation Studio patiently explains to Gordy, “Your drawings are pretty good, but it doesn’t make any sense, OK? It’s fucking stupid,” which incidentally describes Green’s humor as well as the general theme of Freddy. We have these moments of raucous laughter, but we can’t explain the bizarre satisfaction we gain from watching Green’s stunts, which includes a fair amount of physical comedy in the same vein as Jackass, such as crashing into people and doors as he awkwardly moves around in the film, very much resembling a clumsy, pubescent boy. When Davidson tells him that his characters are lame, Gordy pulls out a gun and puts it in his mouth: more satire relating to the extreme measures artists take when their art goes unrecognized or they fail at becoming rich and successful (see Airheads).

"I'm a loser! I wish I was dead!!!" — “I’m a loser! I wish I was dead!!!”

Freddy is a hyperbolic look at the consequences of extended adolescence, and several scenes exemplify this theme, particularly those involving Gordy and his dad. When Gordy is forced to move back home, he insists he’s going to eat a fast food chicken sandwich at the dinner table after his mother has made a lovely roast beef dinner. He argues with his father, citing his age as the reason that he can do as he pleases–a sure sign of adolescence–and his father sarcastically tells him how “impressive” it is that he can eat the food he chooses independently. This scene of family dysfunction is so telling and significant; the child-parent relationship is just that: between parents and a temperamental child who desperately wants to convince his parents that he’s not worthless. Gordy’s insistence to his father that he’s an adult and can make his own decisions–at the very least, what he chooses to eat for his dinner–serves as proof that he’s in fact not an adult at all.

Amongst his antics, Gordy dons scuba gear in the shower, where he pretends he’s diving for buried treasure, and he dresses as “the Backwards Man,” a tragic inversion of the savvy businessman his father dreams he could become.

When Gordy decides to quit the “sandwich business” once and for all to fulfill his dreams of becoming an animator, his father even tries grounding him and sending him to his room. Ironically, Gordy’s fed up dad propels his son into success by showing up at his pitch and trashing the office of Davidson, who’s under the impression that it’s all a creative act. Although Gordy spends most of his million dollar check to drug his father and bring him to Pakistan, he finally proves himself by selling his “doodles” and taking on a job.

Aren’t we thankful there’s a movie out there where we can see Rip Torn spanking Tom Green like a naughty child?

The title, admittedly, has very little to do with the plot of Freddy, if we can get away with claiming that the film does indeed have a plot. Gordy accuses his father of molesting his brother, Freddy, which is, of course, untrue. In accordance with this theme of extended adolescence, the 25-year-old Freddy–ambitious and cocky, and hence Gordy’s polar opposite–is taken into custody by Child Protective Services, and we see him in an orphanage watching television with young children. Gordy also makes sure to downplay his little brother’s success by telling him over breakfast, “You work at a bank. Am I supposed to be dazzled? You live in a tiny little shit hole, and you can’t afford breakfast, so you come here and eat for free.” Gordy has a point and manages to cast doubt on Freddy’s pride and sense of accomplishment. Despite Gordy’s talent as a troublemaker and Freddy’s work ethic, Gordy somehow remains the favored of the two sons.

Gordy tries to impress Betty by pretending he works as a stockbroker. — Gordy tries to impress Betty by pretending that he works as a stockbroker.

The role of Gordy’s love interest, Betty, is interesting. Betty is in a wheelchair and is called a “retard slut whore” by Gordy’s dad, representing a demographic that mistakes physical disability with mental impairment. Gordy purchases a ridiculous bag of jewels that he presents to Betty after stepping off a helicopter on top of a building, and she rejects them, claiming, “I don’t care about jewels. I just want to suck your cock.” We’re confronted with an image of female sexuality that many viewers find problematic; disabled female characters tend to be desexualized in film and TV, and we’re also faced with the challenge of negotiating Betty’s voracious sexual appetite with our own misgivings about kink, foreplay, and sadomasochism.

While attempting to give Gordy a blow job, Betty finds his umbilical cord taped to his stomach, a clear reference to his permanent infantilization, which he seems to simultaneously embrace and loathe.

So why watch Freddy? How does the “stupidest movie ever” redeem itself for viewers unwilling to understand surrealist humor? The meta moments we find in the film culminate in the grand conclusion that “the Hollywood movie” can be interpreted as a pretentious joke, and Green is not taking his own film seriously enough to even stumble upon any form of success. Green’s treatment of this concept undermines critics’ ability to evaluate his film.

If you’re still skeptical, watch Freddy if only for Julie Hagerty’s performance. Hagerty, who’s always fabulous as “the mom” (see Just Friends, She’s the Man, and Storytelling) plays Gordy’s nervous, overprotective mother, even though Gordy is practically 30 years old.

At the advice of Gordy, Julie Brody leaves her husband and begins sleeping with Shaq.

Green explains that the point of the movie was to be polarizing and that he found further humor in the highly divisive viewer responses. Green makes us question our own sense of rationality and how we’ve constructed reality thus far in our lives. Freddy is funny for its unpredictable and nonsensical nature, not its inability to paint a picture of logic and reason. If viewers feel violated after watching a subversive film that simply cannot be explained away or dismissed, there are plenty of movies that contain tired tropes and stereotypes (see The Women–Bechdel Test, anyone?–and every Tyler Perry movie ever).

In the film’s trailer, Green even tells us, “I don’t really know how to make a movie.” When Gordy shows Davidson his drawings, he schools Gordy on narrative structure: “There actually has to be something that happens that’s actually funny. What the fuck is happening here?” We may ask that very same question about Freddy. What’s going on here? Using surrealist humor to question social contracts and deride an audience that is too entrenched in the trite, the cliche, and the creatively irresponsible, that’s what.

Moments before the film ends, a self-deprecating meta reference.

Any “hard-hitting” criticism of Freddy or movies like it is like judging the lasagna some nut brought to the National Pie Championships. Ebert was right: Freddy doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel, because Tom Green is too busy wearing the barrel on his head and making everyone uncomfortable to notice. Green’s movie inherently resists critique, which in fact makes this review, in a certain philosophical sense, nonexistent.

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Jenny holds a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at a community college in Pennsylvania. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. She lives with two naughty chihuahuas. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.

Prom and Female Sexual Desire in ‘Pretty in Pink’ and ‘The Loved Ones’

In this piece we focus on prom as a densifying trope for teenage female sexual desire in many cultural representations (think of ‘Carrie,’ ‘She’s All That,’ ‘My-So-Called Life,’ or ‘Glee,’ to name just a few). We are doing so by complementing John Hughes’ rather classic romantic-comedy and “Brat Pack” movie ‘Pretty in Pink’ with the horror/torture movie with comedy elements ‘The Loved Ones’ directed by Sean Byrne – two examples of female desire as imagined by male writers.

This is a guest post by Ingrid Bettwieser and Steffen Loick for our Representations of Female Sexual Desire week.

Girls want relationships, boys want sex. The notion that adolescent girls don’t act on their own sexual desires (and just look sexy) still seems to be a prevailing cultural organizing principle perpetuated by many media illustrations. For us the concept of “Prom” brings together – in a pop-cultural genealogy – diffuse notions of (predominantly) heterosexual teenage desire, depictions of romantic love and binary coupling combined with teen-horrors of social exclusion, acknowledgement and coming-of-age. Prom epitomizes the time and place where sexual subjects/objects of desire are ordered normatively. Individual freedom (not to go to prom but fall out of the place of acknowledgement) and social force (go to prom but subject to normalizing scripts) are negotiated accordingly.

In this piece we focus on prom as a densifying trope for teenage female sexual desire in many cultural representations (think of Carrie, She’s All That, My-So-Called Life, or Glee to name just a few). We are doing so by complementing John Hughes’ rather classic romantic-comedy and “Brat Pack”-movie Pretty in Pink (1986) with the horror/torture movie with comedy elements The Loved Ones (2009) directed by Sean Byrne – two examples of female desire as imagined by male writers.

Pretty in Pink: Prom and female heterosexual desire economized

In Pretty in Pink we follow Andie Walsh, a white working class high school student, whose symbolic entrance into upper class is negotiated in a romantic Cinderella narrative. As the story unfolds it becomes evident that Andie is motivated by economic desire that she can only satisfy through a makeover. In this process she turns from quite independent but socially marginalized teenager to coupled with a “richie” but silenced.

Due to a scholarship Andie attends a private high school and falls for yuppie Blane. The two start dating despite Andie’s geekish best friend Duckie (also a so called “mutant” e.g. working class member), who follows her around quite intrusively and whose love for her is unrequited since she doesn’t show any romantic interest in him. Duckie even warns Andie of the potential sexual motives Blane might have: “He is gonna use your ass and gonna throw you away!” But regardless of any peer skepticism, Andie assumes that hating people because of their money would be some kind of reversed injustice.

Pretty in Pink: Duckie is no object of Andie’s desire — Duckie is no object of Andie’s desire

After a disastrous date, where Blane’s rich friends humiliated Andie at a party, Blane asks Andie to go to prom with him. This important question leaves Andie utterly speechless and she kisses Blane right away in front of his BMW. Only as soon as she enters her house she screams out loud and tells her father, “I can’t believe it happened!” As if Andie is not entitled to have sexual feelings on her own, she uses a passive voice without seeming to be involved in any action. Being asked to prom and the couple’s first kiss intermingle to a single event that alludes to the sexualization of prom.

But in due course Blane stops answering Andie’s calls and freezes her off because of peer pressure and out of his own doubt in the relationship. After dramatic events, Andie decides to go to prom nonetheless to prove that “they didn’t break” her. Moreover Andie bonds with her elder friend Iona, a strong and creative record store manager, who advises Andie to go to prom in the first place when she questions the necessity of it being a “stupid tradition.” Iona stresses it would be essential in later life: “It was the worst, but it’s supposed to be, you know, you have to go.”

Lamenting her wasted creative talents, Iona asks Andy in another situation, “I am good in bed, should I be a whore?” It becomes clear that sexual abilities are to remain outside the realm of economic usability. In the course of events Iona goes through a transformation from punkish and outstanding to “mom-ish” in order to progress in her own cross-class relationship. When she is dating a “yuppie” she aligns the criteria for her happiness: “He is so nice, he is employed, he is heterosexual.”

Pretty in Pink: Andie cares for her part-time working father — Andie cares for her part-time working father

The desired combination of nice/employed/heterosexual is combined with a degrading of working class masculinities in homophobic modes as inefficient and therefore undesirable throughout the movie–Andie’s father, who hangs around the house during the day, is taken care of by Andie herself as he doesn’t get over the abandonment by her mother; Duckie, who doesn’t seem to be interested in finishing high school is mistaken for a male sex worker in one scene (the character’s sexual orientation/gender is still speculated on as supposedly “effeminate” or “gay”). Iona has an argument with her obviously incapable partner who demands not only house-work and sex but also transportation services and even Blane is “degraded” by his upper class friends as a “faggot” when seen with Andie.

Not so decent Benny and Steff — Not-so-decent Benny and Steff

Andie’s sexually decent behavior is contrasted by upper class Benny, who is obviously sexually active and in one scene tells her boyfriend Steff that she would be “one more step away from virginity” for which he labels her a “slut.” Andie’s character, however, doesn’t seem to be sexually motivated at any time and instead rather marked by protestant chastity. Female sexual desire is not absent here; it is told as economized and rationalized desire that can be satisfied through expressive self-entrepreneurship and working – even on a prom dress. Material wealth as represented here is therefore fetishized but corrected in its moral degeneration via Andie’s display of female sexual decency and DIY diligence. In order for her not to be labeled a “slut,” she cannot display sexual agency.

Andie's father gives her a pink prom dress — Andie’s father gives her a pink prom dress

In the end Andie creates herself an outfit out of two pink prom dresses–one of them given to her by her father, the other one being her friend Iona’s old dress. After days of working Andie goes to prom alone where she is met by Duckie and they walk in together as friends. As soon as Blane spots Andie he comes along and tells her he would’ve always believed in her whereas she didn’t believe in him. (Which is pretty implausible considering his behavior.) With Duckie’s approval, Andie finally follows Blane to the outside parking lot without many words. The movie ends with their final uniting kiss.

Prom and the monstrosity of female sexual desire: The Loved Ones

The Loved Ones (1999) could have been the ultimate feminist revenge-fantasy I have long craved. I imagined the film to be an utopist notion against the always similar plot-narrative of prom night as a heterosexist spectacle of the male desire. The heroine does not transform into a beautiful “swan,” the mandatory happy ending does not occur, and the anticipated couple does not find each other. Instead, a nerd-stereotyped boy experiences in a subplot that the reality of actually going to prom with the female object of desire is sad, awkward, and leaves a hollow feeling.

The film torpedoes the classical structure of the prom night narrative from the beginning: The female main character Lola, who is orchestrated to appear as unimposing and weird in her first scene, asks her crush, the melancholic school-bad boy Brent, to the ball herself. She is active and autonomous and waiting for a boy to ask her seems not to be an option. After Brent rejects her request, she secretly observes him having oral sex with his girlfriend in a car. Lola’s face is rigid and empty. In the next scene we find her sitting in her pink-colored room, gluing Brent’s yearbook-picture into her scrapbook. She even paints a heart around his face. While doing this Lola listens to a song of the singer/songwriter Kasey Chambers, which might become the hymn of the next generation of sad teenage girls: “Am I not pretty enough? Is my heart still broken? […] Why do you see right through me?”

One finally realizes that this self-dramatization as the sad outsider girl is just a performance when her father gives her a pink dress with matching shoes as a present. Unlike in Pretty in Pink, the dress scene takes places in a very early stage of the storyline, but it’s also one of the most important scenes of all. Thrilled Lola tries on the dress in front of her mirror, while her father – whom she tells to stay – watches her from the door. This two-sided lustful action, posing and watching, marks Lola via the insinuation of father-daughter incest, one of the most far-reaching narrative taboos, as sexually monstrous.

The moment of transformation: Lola and her dress

The pink dress simultaneously initiates her transformation: Lola shifts to a bloody prom queen and anti-heroine who acts out sadistic desires in a series of violent acts against Brent’s body. They are all bizarre persiflages of prom rituals. She carves her initials into Brent’s chest, after the obligatory posing and picture-taking and pretends to dance with the enamored boy, whose feet are nailed to the floor while her father showers them in glitter.

These tableau viands of violence begin with the annexation of Brent: The drugged and kidnapped boy wakes up wearing a smoking jacket in a kitchen tied to a chair. The room is decorated with balloons, there’s even a disco ball at the ceiling. Lola moves close and injects him something that suppresses his ability to talk. Brent, by the way the actual hero of the story, becomes a victim; he has to remain silent and subject to Lola’s haphazard power. This increases Lola’s lust and her desire to put him at the center of her enactments of torture, pain, and degradation.

A grotesque version of prom night pictures

Unfortunately this is not about taking revenge for all the rejected high school girls. The film points out clearly that father and daughter have done this before and that especially Lola is a sheer monster. Not because her violence seems to have no boundaries–Lola is finally portrayed as completely monstrous when she becomes less sexually devoted to Brent, who starts to resist her. In the course of them dancing together, she admits to her overwhelmed father: “Your are the prince, that’s why I can’t find what I want. It’s you, it has always been you, Daddy.” The indicated kiss between them is stopped by Brent, who escapes and kills Lola’s father, what finally marks the restoration of sexual normativity and social order respectively.

In the end Lola represents abnormity, because she has violently abandoned her family. She not only cut the ties to her mother, like Andie does in Pretty in Pink, she also lobotomized and killed her. Lola’s sexual desire toward her father led to his death by Brent’s hand. When she is eventually killed by Brent and his girlfriend, it seems like the only plausible solution: disappointment. Not only is The Loved Ones not a feminist film, it’s also not a revenge-fantasy or even a film about a cool, crazed, pink female killer. It’s about a path of ordeals of a young man, who finds – after rightfully killing his sexually deviant female torturer – his long lost place in society with a more or less silent girlfriend.

Steffen Loick is doing his PhD on the relationship between gender identity and body optimation at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, German. Ingrid Bettwieser just finished school and works as an extracurricular educator at a memorial in Berlin, Germany.

Consent, Taboo Reading and Vanity: Lifetime’s ‘Flowers in The Attic’

If you were once a certain type of precocious, fanciful preteen girl chances are you encountered ‘Flowers in the Attic.’
Maybe it was the cover drew you in, the face of a young girl, pale and uncertain, peering through red shutters, and when you opened it, three other eerie blonde children huddled together under the spectral form of a sinister old man. Who were these strange beautiful children? And why was unquestionably evil figure about to crush them with his bare hands? If you saw the cover, surely you had to wonder.

Lifetime promoted their 2014 TV movie with full knowledge of the book’s significance to readers

If you were once a certain type of precocious, fanciful preteen girl chances are you encountered Flowers in The Attic.

Maybe it was the cover drew you in, the face of a young girl, pale and uncertain, peering through red shutters, and when you opened it, three other eerie blonde children huddled together under the spectral form of a sinister old man. Who were these strange beautiful children? And why was unquestionably evil figure about to crush them with his bare hands? If you saw the cover, surely you had to wonder.

And then you had to read it, in secret most definitely, huddled under your covers gasping, passing it around at a sleepover, maybe you snooped through your parents’ or other sister’s copies or pursed through it at the house where you babysat. Or that one loud friend who gave you all the facts on sex recapped the story over school lunch.

The famous keyhole cover for Flowers in the Attic — The famous keyhole cover for *Flowers in the Attic*

Even if you didn’t read it, a lot of us did. First published in 1979, V.C. Andrews’s trash-classic has since sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and spawned 4 bestselling sequels known as the Dollanganger series. It also was the beginning of a ghostwritten empire of family saga books, full of Andrews’s favorite themes: incest, child abuse, rape, imprisonment, slut-shaming and beautiful girls wandering around in flimsy peignoirs.

Flowers is the story of four children hidden away in their grandparents’ attic so their mother can inherit a fortune from her father, who will disinherit her if he ever learns she had children with her late husband, her father’s brother and her half-uncle.

Like any book that couples salacious elements with overwrought highly purple prose, it’s both chilling and laughable, part fairytale, part gothic horror story, and as its success makes clear, it’s a delicate formula. The 1987 film adaptation starring the original Buffy (Kristy Swanson) and Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) was reviled by fans for excluding one element they felt crucial to the story: the incestuous relationship between brother Chris and sister Cathy. So when Lifetime announced plans for a TV movie remake they were quick to note their version would keep the incest intact.

Despite poor reviews, ratings-wise it was a huge success; according to the Hollywood Reporter , 6.1 million viewers tuned in to the film’s premiere Saturday night. The 1950s-set drama was also the highest rated basic cable TV movie since 2012.

Like the book, the film is full of heightened emotions. Every other line is delivered with a slap and an exclamation mark and the acting vacillates between wooden and frighteningly animated. Mad Men ’s Kiernan Shipka (maybe someday we’ll see her in a modern day role) who plays Cathy does as well as she can with a poorly paced script and clunky dialogue, often lifted directly from the book. It’s really not such strange territory for Shipka after playing Sally Draper through her difficult adolescence. Mason Dye as her onscreen brother/lover and Ava Telek and Maxwell Kovach as twins Carrie and Cory gave unremarkable performances, with the twins just hovering around the room not given anything to do.

Ellen Burstyn gave a nuanced performance as the children’s grandmother

As the children’s cruel grandmother, Ellen Burstyn gave her character some degree of ambiguity and humanity, particularly in her reaction to the children’s Christmas present. Burstyn allows the grandmother to become an interesting character when she visibly struggles with her affection for the children and at the film’s end, her own fears of the attic. I’ve gone back and forth on Heather Graham’s portrayal of the children’s mother, Corrine. Her line reading range from flat and vapid to manic and bug eyed with no sane middle ground, but if it’s an acting choice, it may be a good one as it does suit the character.

The Grandmother teaches the children a lesson about disobeying her by showing them their mother’s whipped back

For a story about people tempted to inflict and endure suffering for the promise of wealth, the film has cheap production values and poor effects (such as the whip marks on Corrine’s back that look like lipstick streaks) and never shows viewers the house’s glamour or gives the sense of opulence that gave the children their hopes even in the darkest moments. We are also informed of the passage of time, but never truly feel it, so it becomes difficult to relate to the characters’ ordeal. Though most of the creepy elements from the book are there: the beatings, the taring, the poisoned doughnuts, the film never becomes creepy as it should. For all its Gothic dressing, it’s still a Lifetime movie, cheesy and tonally awkward.

There are interesting ideas about vanity and appearance carried over from the book that become more significant in the film as a visual medium. The book’s premise, that Corrine refuses to work to support her family after her husband’s death, is given more sympathy in the film thanks to the constant reminders from the backdrop and clothing that the film is set in the 50s where this would be difficult for a woman.

Corrine explains why she needs her parents’ money

Born wealthy and raised to be a wife, she is also given a sad Daisy Buchanan quality, absent in the book, as she tells the children, she can’t support four children because she only knows how to look pretty. Her assertion in the book, that her incestous marriage was not sinful because her children are not physically deformed and are “perfect” is given more weight as the viewer can actually see the children and their grandmother’s appraisal of them. Here and in Cathy’s refusal to cut her hair when given the choice of cutting it or allowing herself and her siblings to starve, vanity is heightened to hubris as it leads Chris and Cathy into their relationship, which shows they are far from the perfect children their mother had assured herself they were.

There are some changes from the original story, the addition of electric fence as a pointless obstacle, the heavy handed symbolism of the deer being shot, but the most problematic (though it does make the film easier to watch) is the change of the main incest scene from a rape into a consensual encounter between siblings. I have to wonder if Lifetime felt they could tell story of incest and imprisonment, but that incest and imprisonment punctuated by rape (a Lifetime staple) would make the story too dreary.

Chris and Cathy engage in consensual romance

Though Chris explicitly acknowledges that it was a rape in the book, Cathy forgives him saying it was her fault because she could have fought him off if she didn’t want it, leaving it unclear to young readers what they supposed to believe about Cathy’s rape and who to blame in real life. A blogger who writes as The Fifth Dollanganger runs the blog, The Complete Annotated VC Andrews Blog-o-Rama frequently posts the search terms readers use to access her blog. Some of them include things like “flowers in the attic chris and cathy make love” and “flowers in the attic sex excerpt”, showing at least some readers misinterpreted the dynamics of the scene. By making a rape scene into a love story, Lifetime lessens the gothic horror of the story, as well as romanticizing and confusing the abusive conditions Cathy faces. Though there is one scene where Chris is rough towards Cathy and grabs her wrists, he stops quickly when he is asked to, suggesting Cathy has the power in the situation and could indeed stop him if he wanted to hurt her, a very problematic message for the film to give.

The removal of Chris’s aspiration to be a doctor from the film takes away the authority the book allows him, adding power imbalance to the conditions leading up to the rape. As a would-be doctor, he approaches the removal of the tar from Cathy’s hair as an experiment and gives the excuse of clinical interest for his fascination with Cathy’s naked body and developing breasts. Whittled down to such easy gender roles, Chris and Cathy are starkly contrasted as boy doctor doll and girl ballerina doll. In caring from their young siblings, Chris’s aspiration towards this ideal 50’s husband profession casts him as the ideal masculine father, paired easily with ballerina Cathy as a feminine mother. It also allows his to take over from his father in his authority over his sister, as he frequently knows more about Cathy’s body than she does. It is Chris who tells their mother to buy bras and pads for Cathy and instigates the sex talk between mother and daughter. Cathy’s relationship with her father is given an incestous element in the film as she refers to the ring her gave her as a promise ring, a deeply creepy custom which allows him guardianship of her virginity. As Chris becomes the male head of the family, her also takes “ownership” of Cathy.

We’ll have to see what happens with the upcoming sequel based on the second Dollanganger book, Petals on the Wind, which Lifetime green-lit even before the first film aired. The book includes three additional rapists as love interests for Cathy.

Corrine lounges on the legendary swan bed, living in luxury while her children suffer

But I have to wonder who is meant to enjoy this movie. There’s no fun at all if you have no familiarity with the material, be it nostalgia or morbid curiosity. Though its suggested for teens on Lifetime’s website, the film has a mature content warning and airs on a channel targeted to older women. And anyone who read the books when they were younger is at that stage where their former interest amuses or embarrasses them, to watch it and talk comfortably about it, I think you need a mix of both.

Flowers in the Attic is ultimately the kind of story you’d act out with your Barbies, it’s appeal belongs in your youth, before you’re too self aware, too conscious of reality, the workforce and job training, of sex and money. They belong to that time when you think adult women just lie around in silks and feathers, eating pastel candies and periodically putting on gowns and dancing with gentlemen. They have to pass into your consciousness like a young girl’s daydream, Cathy’s salacious horror, her sexual curiosity, her bright ambition for attention and beauty and love. When you encounter it you have to be the type of girl who reads too much, plays elaborate fantasy games at recess and runs through long scenarios in math class of what she’d do with millions upon millions of dollars. A girl who wanted to be a ballerina, then an actress, then an artist, then a witch and then an impossibly glamourous authoress lounging around in marabou heels and furs. A girl who puts on Shakespeare plays in the backyard and wears cat’s eye sunglasses, a feather boa and jean shorts and it never occurs to her to find it crazy.

Cathy looks out the attic window, uncertain if she will ever be free

I think the film’s real failure is in its removal from the forbidden environment of taboo consumption, presented onscreen and sanitized for grown-ups where there’s nothing to fear in engaging. As with the books, the only way to give the story its enduring significance is to watch in secret, imposing your prepubescent imaginings over the narrative. It’s the type of story that needs the constant fear that someone will burst in the door and find you, engaged in the literary equivalent of masturbation.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

‘Stoker’ and the Feminist Female Serial Killer

Move poster for Stoker

Written by Amanda Rodriguez

Spoiler Alert

(Read my fellow Bitch Flicks writer, Stephanie Roger’s, review of Stoker here.)

The first time you watch Stoker, it’s something of a perplexing experience because the narrative is such a genre-bender. I spent at least half the movie wondering what kind of movie I was watching. Not to toot my own horn overly much, but I’ve got a bit of an eye for formulas and am pretty good at spotting them. A film that can keep me on my toes like Stoker did is a rare, commendable animal. The direction Stoker did end up taking was also surprising, unique, and oddly feminist.

Ultimately, Stoker is the coming-of-age tale of a blossoming female serial killer. A “true” female serial killer is not only rare in cinema, but in real life as well. You’re probably thinking, “What the hell is she talking about? There are a slew of female serial killer movies and real-life figures I can think of off the top of my head.” In truth, women serial murderers kill for reasons different from their male counterparts. Typically, women kill for money or revenge, targeting people they know or to whom they’re related. Whereas male serial killers tend to predominantly kill strangers with the motivation being sexual in natural. To clarify, male serial killer motivation surrounds power and usually displays itself in sexualized killings or in the sexual response the killer has to his murders. Not only that, but some of the world’s most famous female serial killers work in partnership with a male serial killer, thus simulating that psychosexuality inherent in their murders.

India Stoker (portrayed by the amazingly talented Mia Wasikowska) meets her creepy serial killer uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), and the more strangely he behaves and the more evidence India has of his murderousness, the more attracted she is to him.

Finds housekeeper’s dead body in the basement freezer. Starts hanging out with Charlie more.

Their unsettling, incestuous flirtation culminates in their joint murder of India’s classmate, Whip. The boy and India make out in the woods, and when she decides she’s had enough of him, the boy tries to rape her. Charlie swoops in to rescue her, and, together, the two kill India’s assailant. The movie makes it clear that Whip is an utter piece of shit and totally has it coming, so there’s little moral ambiguity in this kill, which differentiates it from Charlie’s prior murders (the housekeeper, an aunt, and, at this point, we suspect India’s father). India’s actions of self-defense and the shittiness of the victim leave the lingering possibility that India is not, in fact, serial killer material.

The following scene is the classic post sexual assault shower scene with a twist. We see India hunched over and whimpering in the shower intercut with flashbacks to the assault and Whip’s death. It gradually dawns on the audience that India isn’t weeping, she’s masturbating. This scene is pivotal and is, in fact, one of the major climaxes of the film, which makes the structure of the film itself more feminist. Feminists have noted for many years that the typical story structure with the single climax near the end of the film followed by the denouement more closely resembles the pattern of male sexual pleasure. A more feminist structure would allow for multiple climactic scenes, which Stoker does. (There are more climactic moments nearer the end of the film, which I’ll get into shortly.) Not only is the film’s first climax a scene that ends with a woman actually orgasming, it is a masturbation scene wherein India is pleasuring herself.

That’s a boat-load of female agency right there.

India comes to realize in yet another climactic, pivotal scene that Charlie is mentally ill (perhaps even more than she is herself), that he wants to take her away with him, and that he has always wanted to be with her. Not only that, but the film reveals to the audience what India strongly suspects: Charlie murdered India’s father in order to be with her.

India goes through the stack of Charlie’s letters addressed to her over the years. She realizes that though Charlie claims to send them from around the world, in fact, they’re all sent from a mental institution.

Despite her realization that Charlie is insane, India agrees to leave with him because his presence and guidance have triggered her coming-of-age and shown her that she isn’t alone in her proclivities. It turns out, though, that a prerequisite for running away with Charlie is allowing him to kill off her mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman). Because India and Evelyn have a difficult relationship in which they don’t relate to one another with no love lost between them, Charlie supposes this is an easy enough task to get out of the way before spiriting his beloved India away. While he brutally strangles Evelyn with his belt, India calmly puts her rifle together, aims her sights (at who? Evelyn or Charlie?), and fires.

Let’s take a quick second to examine Charlie and India’s choice of weaponry. Charlie favors a belt, stolen from his brother/India’s father, with which he strangles his victims to death. India, we learn, favors her hunting rifle. Not choosing the tool of her mentor differentiates her from him, allowing her an identity unique to him despite their overwhelming similarities. Not only that, but you could get all psychoanalytic on this shit and view their weapon choices as a form of gender role reversal. Charlie’s belt, which encircles and constricts could be viewed as vaginal, while India’s gun with its shape and its firing of bullets is a common phallic symbol. Within our world that views masculinity and masculine symbols as superior, India’s weapon of choice subtly establishes her dominance over Charlie, a fact that is further reinforced when she kills him.

In spite of the sexual connection India has with Charlie, in spite of their shared interests and secrets, in spite of the estranged relationship she has with her mother, India chooses to save Evelyn and nonchalantly shoots and kills her uncle. I admit I was worried for a minute because it’s not a very strong feminist statement when a young girl must essentially murder her mother in order to come into adulthood and into her sexual identity, even if we’re talking about a budding serial killer. India, unlike her mother, does not choose a man fresh on the scene over the woman with whom she’s been sharing a home and life for 18 years. Neither, though, does India stick around to live out the rest of her life trapped in a mother-daughter dynamic wherein neither one of them is capable of loving the other. Instead, she takes off in her new black pumps wearing her father/Charlie’s belt with her rifle and her uncle’s flashy convertible. If it’s unclear which path she’s chosen, we have a final climactic moment in which India shoots the sheriff (har, har) who pulls her over for speeding.

India with the rifle

The more I think about this movie, the more I like it, and the more feminist tropes I see in it. The Freudian parallels, genre subversion, and feminist subtext (or just regular text?) didn’t happen by accident; director Chan-wook Park is meticulously deliberate about his imagery, symbolism, and delivery of dialogue. The strict, generally accepted, masculine definition I gave above for what constitutes a serial killer is, in itself, a gender-biased, sexist definition that gives legitimacy and near rockstar status to men who murder multiple people (predominantly women) in order to feel a sexualized rush of power. By this definition, serial killers are an elite boys club of He-Man Woman Haters who don’t allow female participation. Trying to make a woman fit into this masculine mold is a dubious honor, but I can’t help but appreciate the deft skill with which Park makes this a believable possibility. Not only is India a multifaceted character, but she is strong, smart, independent, and finds her own path while creating her own moral code outside the patriarchal strictures that Charlie attempts to impose upon her. India may transition from heroine to anti-heroine throughout the course of Stoker, and she may be a scary-ass serial killer, but she is, nonetheless, a powerful, feminist figure.