Jack Nicholson – Bitch Flicks

Cute Old Ladies Who Talk Dirty in ‘Nebraska’ and ‘Philomena’

But Payne doesn’t seem to give much thought to Kate’s situation. In all but one scene Kate is called on to be testy and not much else. Even though we laugh as she chirps the cause of death of a late, but not lamented relative and we feel satisfied when she cusses out greedy members of Woody’s family, the character is more of an exclamation point than a person.

The women in the films of writer/director Alexander Payne are a mixed bag. I enjoyed his early film, Citizen Ruth but the contempt he seemed to have for most of the women characters seeped into–and made me hesitate to laugh at–the movie’s comedy. I hated Election in spite of a pre-stardom Reese Witherspoon in the lead and the cool, teenaged lesbian character in a prominent supporting role: what some other critics have called misanthropy in Payne’s body of work seemed to me more like misogyny.

I skipped About Schmidt because Jack Nicholson and Alexander Payne didn’t seem like a woman-friendly combination, a hunch confirmed when even male critics used the m-word to describe the film. I thought I’d also avoid Sideways with its manchild protagonist, but when I saw the movie, late in its run, I loved it: the same care had gone into developing the Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh characters as Payne had put into creating the roles played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. Payne’s next film, The Descendants had a comatose, unfaithful “bad” mother at its crux but also showed her willful, smart-mouthed daughters (Shailene Woodley played the older of the two) at their most vulnerable. So I went into Nebraska, nominated for a slew of Oscars including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Director, hopeful but cautious. But in this film Payne seems to be going not sideways, but backwards.

Will Forte and Bruce Dern in 'Nebraska' — Will Forte and Bruce Dern in *Nebraska*

The film’s focus is on the relationship between two men: addled, alcoholic Woody (Bruce Dern, nominated for Best Actor) and his son David (Will Forte, who many know from his days on Saturday Night Live). David ends up taking his father on a quixotic road trip to collect the money Woody mistakenly and stubbornly believes he’s won through a letter from a company that is very much like Publishers’ Clearing House. We see many scenes that demonstrate the challenge Woody’s drinking and encroaching dementia are for his son (who seems to be around 40 and able-bodied), but David never considers that the trip might be a chance for his own mother to have a break from being Woody’s sole caretaker. Instead, David repeatedly says he agreed to drive his father over two states because the trip might be the last chance for the two of them to spend some time together.

June Squibb plays Woody’s wife and David’s mother, Kate, and is the film’s nominee for Best Supporting Actress (she also played Jack Nicholson’s wife in About Schmidt). She has the kind of face that moviegoers are used to seeing everywhere but onscreen: an 80-something woman who doesn’t appear to have undergone any plastic surgery and doesn’t look like she’s just come from a session with a team of makeup artists and hair colorists.

Anyone who has known an older woman left alone to take care of a husband in declining health will recognize the exasperated tone and facial expression Kate uses whenever she speaks to Woody. David, in contrast, is unfailingly patient and calm, like a cross between a therapist and Mr. Rogers, when he talks to his taciturn and pigheaded father, perhaps because he knows when the trip is over, his father’s care will go back to being Kate’s responsibility and will remain so until he dies–or she does.

We can see that Kate, direct and bereft of tact, is supposed to be a refreshing change from the smiling, always forgiving grandmothers of yore, but seeing her yell and swear reminds me of every role Betty White has played in recent years, the same role that goes to many other actresses once they hit 65. Dern’s character is also often angry and uses crude language, but as limited as his character is we do see other aspects of him, both in Dern’s performance and in exposition from the other characters. So much of our time and focus goes to this character, we think that his opaque and maddening surface will crack so that he can can finally show some affection and gratitude toward his son or to his old girlfriend whom his son encounters in the town where he was raised, but Woody remains selfish, irascible and without redeeming qualities to the end.

A better and more interesting movie would have included more about Kate. In spite of the women all around us who take care of men when they get old and sick (even though these women are often not young themselves) we very rarely see movies about a woman who is a caretaker: off the top of my head the only film I can think of is Marvin’s Room. But Payne doesn’t seem to give much thought to Kate’s situation. In all but one scene, Kate is called on to be testy and not much else. Even though we laugh as she chirps the cause of death of a late, but not lamented, relative and we feel satisfied when she cusses out greedy members of Woody’s family, the character is more of an exclamation point than a person.

That we, in the audience, aren’t as sick of the Grandma Who Talks Dirty trope as we are of the Magical Negro or the Sassy Gay Best Friend shows that the culture either isn’t paying attention or doesn’t care how older women are portrayed. Philomena is another Oscar-nominated film (for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Score) which features an older woman, and it left me frustrated for slightly different reasons.

Although Philomena is based on a true story about the title character (Best Actress nominee Judi Dench), it’s equally about the journalist, Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), who helps in her search for the son who was taken from her (sold to American “adoptive” parents) when she was a young, single mother. Philomena Lee was sent to a Magdalen laundry (run by the Catholic Church but also supported by the Irish state) to have her baby and afterward forced, along with many other girl and women “sinners”, to work washing clothes for years afterward with no pay–a part of Irish history which receives a more detailed treatment in 2002’s The Magdalene Sisters.

I understand why the film makes Sixsmith an equal player in the story (the film is, after all, based on his book and was brought to the screen by Coogan), and the culture clash between romance-reading Philomena and Oxford-educated Martin is mildly entertaining, but this film reminded me a little too much of films from the 1980s like Mississippi Burning and Cry Freedom, in which stories about Black people were told through a white-guy main character and savior. I had the feeling if Sixsmith’s character had taken his rightful place as a background figure no producer would have put up the money for this film.

In Philomena, we again have an older woman with a surprising vocabulary: I guess I should be grateful that a mainstream movie features a lead actress (especially one of Judi Dench’s stature) saying the word “clitoris,” but I wish the scene weren’t played for a cheap laugh. Philomena Lee embodies contradictions that many of us have seen in our own families: women who remain devoted to the Catholic Church after years of being mistreated by it (with the people now around them pointing out that mistreatment), whose ideals are also more liberal than the church’s dogma.

I wanted to see more of the women I knew in Dench’s performance, but she’s miscast. She doesn’t sound any more Irish than…Judi Dench (and though some Irish people of Lee’s generation who moved to England made sure to lose their brogues–Lee wasn’t one of them–they didn’t then adopt Dench’s Received Pronunciation). Dench doesn’t speak in the same rhythm as someone from Ireland, or even as someone whose parents are from Ireland (though Dench’s mother was Irish). So Dench’s portrayal of Lee’s faith and forgiveness also fall flat. I have not seen any other review that notices how wrong Dench (as great as she has been in other roles) is for this part, the same way straight critics never seem to notice when two women playing lovers in a film have zero chemistry together. We’re supposed to be sated by seeing these women characters in a film at all. We aren’t supposed to want older women in films to do what they do in our lives outside movie theaters: to charm us, to move us, to sustain us.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Travel Films Week: ‘Easy Rider’: Searching for a Free America That Doesn’t Exist

Easy Rider poster: “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere…”

“Although the masters make the rules / For the wise men and the fools / I got nothing, Ma, to live up to… For them that must obey authority / That they do not respect in any degree… My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards.” – “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” Bob Dylan

Written by Leigh Kolb

In 1967, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America told an audience that “we have to stop making movies about motorcycles, sex and drugs.”

Peter Fonda, who was in that audience, got an idea: “Suddenly, the lesson of the day came floating in… ‘No more movies about motorcycles, drugs and sex.’ And I went, ‘Boom! That’s it!’”

Wyatt (Peter Fonda), left, and Billy (Dennis Hopper) search for America.

Easy Rider, which, on the surface, revolves completely around motorcycles, drugs and sex, was released in 1969. Peter Fonda wrote the screenplay, along with Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern, and Hopper directed the film.

Easy Rider encapsulates a series of moments in American history–the counterculture hippie movement, the New Left, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the sexual revolution–that, at their core, sought to challenge and dismantle the status quo of the “Establishment,” the capitalistic white-supremacist male-dominated patriarchy.

While the film features gorgeous scenery, cool bikes, an amazing soundtrack and shows a multifaceted American landscape, it also reminds us that to eschew understood social norms can be deadly.

Wyatt (“Captain America”) and Billy ride toward what they expect to be the American Dream.

The movie poster includes the caption, “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere…”

It is this reality–that the nebulous idea of “America” (freedom, possibility, liberty and adventure)–that permeates the film. This idealized America doesn’t exist, even among the beautiful natural landmarks and infrastructure.

In the end, it’s not running drugs that gets the riders killed. It’s their propensity for moving against the current, for having long hair.

The themes of socially defined and limiting masculinity throughout Easy Rider go hand in hand with the theme of an elusive America. In fact, the idea that this idyllic America can be found is as entrenched in our mythology as the idea that gender performance is set and rigid. Both are myths that are central to our being as a society, and both are myths that are incredibly destructive.

Fonda’s character, Wyatt (called “Captain America”) wears a large American flag stitched across his leather jacket, with a flag on his helmet and bike. His hair is long, but he looks the part of an American hero. His foil, Dennis Hopper’s Billy, wears fringe on his leathers, wears a weathered cowboy hat and has flames painted on his bike. His hair is longer and disheveled, and he’s consistently irreverent and mouthy, while Wyatt is contemplative and reserved.

Their journey takes them across the Southwest and South. Their destination is New Orleans, and they want to make it in time for Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras itself represents tradition somewhat turned on its head. The roots of the holiday are firmly religious, but the celebrations typically include hiding one’s face, dressing without gender norms, and over the years, increasing substance use. Their goal was to make it there–a celebration representative of both being free and out of control before lent begins, which is all about control.

On the way, they stop at a ranch for a tire fix and dinner. Wyatt is clearly taken by the “simple” life of the rancher and his wife and children. The rancher notes, after learning that Wyatt and Billy are from Los Angeles, that he set out to go there long ago, but “you know how it is,” he says, indicating that he got married and had children instead. His “settled” life isn’t maligned, but is shown as a respectable choice. Wyatt tells the rancher he should be “proud” that he can live off the land. They eat together and are connected by this communal act.

Wyatt and Billy pick up a hitchhiker, and he takes them to his commune. This is a largely feminine space–the women are leaders and nurturers, and have sexual agency. While they are attempting to create an idyllic society, it’s clear that they have substandard soil and questionable farming expertise. Wyatt is optimistic about their future (while Billy thinks they don’t have a chance). The two swim with two women, and they are nude and playful. Male nudity is more present in this baptismal scene than female, and it’s clear that they are having fun. The women are not objects in this film–they are supporting characters, but they are individuals. Throughout, the female characters’ names are more prominent than the men’s, which indicates their individuality.

The women in Easy Rider are nurturers, caretakers, mothers and lovers. Two of the soundtrack’s most prominent songs–“It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “Born to Be Wild”–address women. While we often think that a story like this is made possible by the male privilege of being able to be safely alone on the road, it’s clear that that notion is supposed to be challenged.

When Wyatt and Billy arrive in a small town, they are arrested and thrown in jail for riding along in a parade. While their stops so far have been welcoming and seem to embrace diversity, this all changes as they enter the “civilization” of a small town. George (Jack Nicholson) is in jail with them, as he was drunk the night before. George is a southern lawyer who has worked for the ACLU, and immediately jokes with Wyatt and Billy about how they look like outsiders. He notes that the townspeople here took “rusty razor blades to long hair.” He also says he imagines they can get out of jail easily if they haven’t killed anybody–“at least nobody white.”

George has an influential father in town (the sheriff promises to not tell his father he was so drunk), and it’s clear that he has a strong desire to be an activist and effect change, but he’s stuck in between his father’s footsteps and alcoholism, feeling like he can’t move forward because people are so backward. He is another model of American masculinity, not quite fully counterculture, but enough to feel excluded. In jail, he says to Wyatt and Billy, “We’re all in the same cage here.” For these three, that cage is a white patriarchy that has strict social norms that they do not adhere to.

George goes along with Wyatt and Billy (wearing a football helmet–his mother thought he should save it to give to his son someday, even though she hadn’t wanted him to play football, showing mixed messages of what it means to be a man) toward Mardi Gras. He says that he’s tried to go there “six or seven times,” but never makes it across the state line. He shows them a card for a brothel in New Orleans and jokes about the women there. He’s enough of a good-old-boy to see women as objects. To Wyatt and Billy, George represents the Establishment in a congenial way. He’s not threatening to them, but he has short hair and privilege; he fits the mold–to an extent–of what a man should be. His inability to fully function without binge drinking shows how damaging those expectations can be.

Wyatt, George and Billy get out of jail free–but not quite.

When the three stop at a diner, a booth full of teenage girls respond excitedly to the three men, but a booth of men react with homophobic, sexist and racist slurs against them. They mock their long hair and call them “Yankee queers.” These men operate under the guise of protecting white southern womanhood, which played a large part in racist violence–including lynchings–throughout modern history. When the girls follow the men out to their bikes and want a ride, the trio knows that to take them would be a sure death sentence.

Wyatt, Billy and now George by association are otherized because they don’t look or behave like “real” men should. The three are attacked that night at their campsite, and George is killed. This violence would surely be justified by the entrenched idea that the townspeople were protecting their women, or even protecting the order of their town by eliminating those who don’t fit.

A local says, “I guess we’d put him in the women’s cell, don’t you reckon?”

Before he’s killed, George talks to the other two about freedom. George says that Wyatt and Billy scare them because they represent freedom. When Billy argues that freedom is what it’s all about (“it” being their lives, and America), George responds:

“But talkin’ about it and bein’ it, that’s two different things. I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ’em.”

They don’t run from fear, though, they get “dangerous.” Resistance to civil rights, to women’s rights, to questioning gender norms–this resistance is typically violent, and is bred by fear of disrupting the social order (that is, the white-supremacist patriarchal order).

Wyatt and Billy make it to New Orleans, and go to the House of Blue Lights (the brothel that George had been excited about). There is heavy religious imagery in this scene–the Latin “Kyrie Eleison” (“Lord have mercy”) as a soundtrack and images of Madonna and child, the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ are everywhere.

While Billy is awkward yet eager with Karen, a prostitute, Wyatt seems uncomfortable and disinterested in the woman he’s “chosen” (her name is Mary–of course).

The four wander into the streets, where Mardi Gras is in full force. Out in the crowded streets, Wyatt kisses Mary and lifts her up, finally feeling comfortable and free.

The four split LSD in the cemetery.

The four take LSD, and the iconic scene at the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 gets under way. The sounds of construction are a backdrop to children reciting Catholic prayers as the four characters strip, have sex, weep and trip their way around the cemetery. This is America. Wyatt cries and begs atop a statue of the Virgin Mary (Hopper had directed him to act like he was speaking to his mother, who committed suicide when he was a child). A film critic calls this scene a “eulogy” to the 60s, the end of the hope and optimism that drove liberation and counterculture movements. The trip is chaotic and disappointing.

Wyatt weeps in anger over his mother.

Wyatt and Billy camp out, and Billy is ecstatic about their journey. “We’re rich man, we’re rich.” Wyatt responds, “We blew it,” without the same pride and excitement for their future. “You go for the big money and then you’re free,” Billy says, encapsulating the American Dream. “Goodnight man,” Wyatt says, rolling over so the large American flag on the back of his jacket is prominent.

They continue riding across America, through its towns and countryside, with shipyards, industry, bridges, factories and the automobile as reminders of the American landscape.

Billy’s defiance and his death.

Two locals drive by, wanting to “scare the hell” out of Billy. Billy flips them off, and the man asks him why he doesn’t get a haircut. He then shoots him point-blank. Wyatt turns around and promises to go for help as he drapes his flag jacket over Billy. The America that Wyatt has been searching for is lost. As he rides away, the same truck turns around and shoots at him, and his bike erupts in flames.

The camera slowly pans out, so that the speck of fire becomes less and less prominent in the beautiful countryside.

The murder of Wyatt and Billy at the end of the film is senseless, and based in the fear that George described and also the killers’ desire to prove and establish power and dominance. This death is symbolically a death of a hope in an America that is truly free and worth finding. The disappointing freedom of Mardi Gras has made way for the rigid control of lent.

In the almost half a century since Easy Rider was released, it’s chilling how much of the rhetoric and violence against non-conformity and social progress still exists. This dream of an America that Wyatt so desperately wanted to find–a place of freedom and equality where you could live as you desired and “do your own thing in your own time”–went up in flames, just like his flag-emblazoned bike.

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.