Katherine Murray – Page 3

‘Equals’ Is an Interesting If Not Especially New Portrait of Mental Illness

Drake Doremus’ dystopian science fiction movie, ‘Equals,’ presents a pretty good metaphor for mental illness – just not a very challenging one.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Drake Doremus’ dystopian science fiction movie, Equals, presents a pretty good metaphor for mental illness – just not a very challenging one.

Equals, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this year before coming to TIFF, is set in a future society where people have been genetically engineered not to have emotions. It’s strongly implied that this is the basis for the false utopia the characters live in, where they all wear the same clothes, and live in modular apartments, solving puzzles in the evenings, like so many rational Vulcans. It’s an interesting idea – I, for one, would have liked to hear the characters explain what the purpose of human life was, and why they bothered showing up for jobs, if they didn’t feel any way about anything – but the movie isn’t interested in how this civilization works. Instead, it’s just set up as vaguely bad and communist, in a way that borrows from Nineteen Eighty-Four and other works that came before it, without exhibiting the same interest in social critique.

Instead, the focus of Equals is on personal, idiosyncratic experiences of not fitting in, or being labelled deviant, ill, and outcast because you don’t feel the right way.

The action kicks off when the main character, Silas (played by Nicholas Hoult), develops a rare condition known as SOS. His genetic programming fails and his emotions switch back on, leading him to have a panic attack in his apartment. Trusting the system, he turns himself over to the medical authorities and learns that the prognosis isn’t good. There is no cure for SOS and, while medication can slow the condition’s progression, sufferers eventually become so unstable that they have to be quarantined inside an ominous facility known as the DEN. Living conditions in the DEN are so deplorable that most patients kill themselves within days of arriving and, in fact, they’re encouraged to do so, because the horror of living with emotions is more terrible than death.

Silas, bummed out by this diagnosis but trying not to be, lest he get sent to the DEN, begins to suspect that one of his coworkers, Nia (Kristen Stewart, in one of her best performances yet) is also suffering from SOS, but trying to hide it. The two strike up a friendship that turns into a romance as they bask in the relief of having someone else to talk to about what they’re feeling.

Unfortunately, physical contact of any kind is strictly prohibited in this randomly (and somewhat senselessly) dystopian society – for reasons that, again, I would have been interested to hear about – and, as soon as their fingertips brush, Silas and Nia are on the path to being discovered, with predictably tragic results.

Equals has amazing sound design and a handful of beautiful shots, but it’s not winning any points for originality. The setting is sketched out in pretty vague terms, and the plot doesn’t offer many surprises. If you’re feeling churlish, you can spend all 101 minutes asking why questions that don’t have any answers. Equals isn’t really interested in its own setting except in so far as it establishes the concept “People living here are suspicious of feelings.” And the reason it wants to establish that concept is because the story is really a metaphor for mental illness, designed to tell us that we are too quick to medicate and suppress people whose feelings aren’t normal.

The story in Equals is structured to cover as many contemporary attitudes toward mental illness as possible, and to explore the way that different characters relate to SOS. Nia, distrustful of the system and scared of ending up in the DEN, never tells anyone what’s she’s experiencing and deals with it herself. It takes all her energy, every day, just to act normal; to not let anyone see that she’s different. On the other hand, Silas trust the system and ends up a with a medical record that follows him wherever he goes, counting down the time until he winds up in an institution. Arguably, things are easier for him because he can take medication to suppress his feelings, but he goes back and forth about whether it’s worth it to do that.

Part way through the movie, he joins a support group for other people who have SOS, where each person has a different opinion about how to see the condition and how to live with it. Over the course of the film he goes on a journey where he starts out waiting for a cure and later comes to believe that SOS is a natural part of who he is, and that the real problem is the way everyone else is reacting.

The questions that Silas struggles with are really important and really integral to the lives of people with long-term mental health conditions – especially ones that affect personality development and aren’t going to go away. Is this me or a disease? What does it mean that I’m different from everyone else – am I worse, am I better, am I equally good this way? If someone could cure me tomorrow, would I want to take the cure? Who would I be, if I did?

The metaphor works really, really well. What’s more disappointing is that the movie doesn’t seem to have an interesting perspective on the answers to those questions. Instead of challenging us, it takes the easy way out by setting up a situation where Silas and Nia are clearly correct in their beliefs while everyone else is just… well, crazy. It’s much more like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest than Benny & Joon – Doremus and scriptwriter Nathan Parker make it easy for us to sympathize with Silas and Nia to the point that a lot of the complexities are lost. Of course it’s better to live in a world where people feel something rather than nothing. Of course people should be able to talk about their feelings with each other. Of course it’s good to fall in love with someone. There are never any negative sides to SOS except that The Man is against you.

This Right Side, Wrong Side, Fight-The-Power-For-Your-Right-to-Be-In-Love stuff not only makes the story less challenging – it also makes it less interesting. The story never swerves away from predictable plot developments and, like a train conductor calling out the stops before you arrive, Equals mechanically foreshadows each and every one, suggests the most obvious possible outcome, and then delivers that outcome on schedule. I’d make a joke about Chekov’s cure for SOS and the convenient six-hour lag time before it goes active, but then I’d be telling you how the movie ends just as blatantly as the director does.

Look – there are things to like about Equals. Kristen Stewart’s good in it, the editing is very well thought-out and emotionally evocative, the sound is really good, and, hey – the metaphor is really good, too. But I wish that the metaphor were in service of a message I haven’t heard before.

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

The Day Mindy Lahiri Ate Seashells and Called Me Immature

I like Mindy Kaling and I like her show, but the season premiere demonstrates how, like many series, ‘The Mindy Project’ has ambivalent feelings about what kind of sex is OK.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I like Mindy Kaling and I like her show, but the season premiere demonstrates how, like many series, The Mindy Project has ambivalent feelings about what kind of sex is OK.

In the season premiere of The Mindy Project, “While I Was Sleeping,” Mindy Lahiri falls asleep and has a nightmare about what her life would have been like if she hadn’t hooked up with her relatively more conservative boyfriend, Danny (who has meanwhile traveled to India to explain to Mindy’s parents that marriage is a flawed institution and not the right choice for him at this moment in time).

In the dream sequence, Mindy is married to a TV producer played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who lets her keep her South Park pinball machine in the living room and stops her from eating seashells when she mistakes them for candy. At first, this seems like the ideal arrangement, but Mindy soon discovers that she’s having an affair with one of the guys who works in her building. When she confesses the affair to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, he explains that he’s totally cool with it, because they have an open marriage. Furthermore, he’s bisexual, and he likes it when they have a three-way with another guy.

Confronted with what sounds to me like the perfect partner, Mindy recoils in horror, treating the three-way-with-a-dude element as the final nail in the coffin rather than the icing on a very delicious-sounding cake.

That much is fine. Not everyone wants the same things and, if Mindy wants to be in a monogamous relationship with a strictly heterosexual man, that’s cool – it’s her choice. I can see how this would be a nightmare scenario for her. But the way her reaction is framed turns it into a value judgement about any kind of relationship that isn’t strictly monogamous.

Rather than just saying, “Hey, this is not what I want – I’m in love with Danny and I want to have a more traditional relationship with him,” Mindy uses this as an opportunity to learn a lesson about how Danny’s positive influence on her has saved her from the fate of immature, hedonistic living. She complains to Joseph Gordon-Levitt that, if she had suggested something like this to Danny, he would have told her to “walk around the block and cool [her] loins” (a joke that pays off when this is, verbatim, what Danny says when she later tells him about this dream). After she wakes up, she also explains to Danny that the lesson she learned is that they make each other better people.

It’s true that Mindy and Danny have always had an opposites-attract relationship, the point of which has always been that they make each other better and more interesting people because they challenge each other to grow. However, I’m a little uncomfortable with the idea that being in an open relationship or having a three-way now and then is an example of Mindy being a “worse” person than she is with Danny.

The Mindy Project has always been a little bit weird about sex. On the one hand, it can be extremely sex-positive and often does the important work of showing us a world in which a woman who doesn’t fit the traditional standard of beauty is still considered desirable, and allowed to feel desire herself. There’s a weird but interesting episode in season three where Mindy discovers that Danny was a stripper at one point in the past (a plot point that seems to have more to do with Chris Messina’s background in dance than with organic character development, but fine). The whole point of that episode is about learning to treat your partner’s past as a fun, sexy surprise rather than something that threatens your relationship, and it includes a really rare example of the female gaze – we’re invited to see Danny as an object of desire without it turning into a joke and without either of the characters getting uncomfortable or embarrassed about it.

On the flipside – while respecting that this is a comedy – the Danny-was-a-stripper episode stands out because discussions and depictions of Mindy’s sex life usually involve a lot of self-deprecating humour to the tune of “It’s not really sexy when she does this.” For example:

I have, over the years, devised a series of illusions and tricks so that my boyfriend never sees me naked when we’re having sex. I hide under the sheets. I pretend that I’m really into blindfolds. Sometimes, I hide in the shadows of candlelight and then I’m like, “boo!” Phantom of the Opera-style.

That’s a funny joke, but it’s part of a series of funny jokes that belie a certain amount of discomfort with the character’s sexuality. It’s the same kind of humour that underpins the joke where Mindy keeps telling everyone how hot she is – the subtext is that her arrogance plays differently because we wouldn’t “expect” her to think this about herself.

The piece de resistance in terms of “I’m not sexy” comedy, though, comes when Mindy imitates the whipped cream bikini scene from Varsity Blues while she video chats with her boyfriend. Instead of a bikini, she makes a modest one-piece swimsuit, and then falls off camera after getting attacked by ants.

Taken in that context, the alternate universe open marriage that Mindy finds herself in in “While I Was Sleeping” seems to be an extension of the idea that there’s something goofy and immature about the sexual situations Mindy gets herself into in the absence of a stabilizing influence like perpetual wet blanket, Danny. The scene isn’t mean-spirited or openly critical, but it takes for granted that the situation Joseph Gordon-Levitt is describing is not OK.

I don’t want to get into a debate about Mindy Kaling’s politics – though it’s safe to say she’s more conservative than I am in some respects, and that’s all right – but watching this scene also reminded me of the essay she wrote for Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? a few years ago, where she describes the difference between what she calls “boys” and “men” and why she recommends that women over 30 focus on trying to date more “men.” Quoth the essay:

Peter owned a house. It wasn’t ritzy or anything, but he’d really made it a home. The walls were painted; there was art in frames. He had installed a flat-screen TV and speakers. There was just so much screwed into the walls, so much that would make you lose your deposit. I marveled at the brazenness of it. Peter’s house reminded me more of my house growing up than of a college dorm room. I’d never seen that before. … I observed in Peter a quality that I knew I wanted in the next guy I dated seriously: He wasn’t afraid of commitment.

… I’m not talking about commitment to romantic relationships. I’m talking about commitment to things—houses, jobs, neighborhoods. Paying a mortgage. When men hear women want a commitment, they think it means commitment to a romantic relationship, but that’s not it. It’s a commitment to not floating around anymore. I want a guy who is entrenched in his own life. Entrenched is awesome.

… I want a schedule-keeping, waking-up-early, wallet-carrying, picture-hanging man.

That list of wants seems to describe the character of Danny Castellano pretty well, and it also seems to support the idea that Mindy (the character) learning to have a mature, responsible relationship with someone like Danny is a sign of personal growth – a sign, specifically, that she’s grown out of the stage where she’s “floating around” exploring possibilities and trying to figure out who she is. It’s a sign of entering the state in life where you start to foreclose on possibilities – a stage where you start to decide who you’re going to be and how you’re going to live, and those decisions get harder to change.

It’s true that there’s a certain extent to which this has to happen for everyone. Life is finite – time runs out. As you get older, you start to become aware that opening one door closes three others. It isn’t possible to do and be everything – you have to make choices.

At the same time, the degree to which we “settle down” isn’t universal. I’m older than 30, and I don’t want to date the guy Mindy describes as a “man.” I don’t want to be that guy, either. I like who I am now, but I also like the idea that I could turn out to be someone different one day. I want to be able to move easily, if that happens.

What does this have to do with a joke about seashells and having a three-way? It has to do with the cultural narrative we have about what it means to be a grown-up – the one that says “You have to foreclose on lots of possibilities as you get older, and one of the possibilities you have to foreclose on is having sex with anyone who’s not your spouse.” That’s the narrative that underpins the jokes in “While I Was Sleeping” – and I found those scenes unsettling not because they personally insulted me – they didn’t – but because I’m not sure I buy into this idea that, in order to be a good adult, I have to be excited for a mortgage.

Also, it feels like everyone I know on Facebook is now married with a house – but that’s a post for a different blog.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.

On Breathing, Not Breathing, and Forms of Abuse That We Don’t Have the Words to Express

‘Breathe,’ the second feature-length film from French actor and director Mélanie Laurent, offers an unusually nuanced portrait of abusive relationships – specifically through the lens of a toxic friendship between two teenage girls.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Breathe, the second feature-length film from French actor and director Mélanie Laurent, offers an unusually nuanced portrait of abusive relationships – specifically through the lens of a toxic friendship between two teenage girls.

Based on a YA novel of the same name, Breathe (also known by its French title, Respire) follows an average, decently popular girl named Charlie as she is befriended and then betrayed by the exciting new girl at her school, Sarah. Sarah at first seems to be the perfect companion – her attention makes Charlie feel special, and they become close friends very quickly. As time goes on, though, and Sarah gets bored, her easy-going always-affable mask starts to slip, revealing an angry, demanding, hypercritical face underneath. Charlie, shocked by these changes, scared and uncomfortable, tries to figure out what she did wrong, why Sarah is acting this way, and what she can do to repair their relationship. When her efforts fail, Sarah gets more and more hostile, until their relationship reaches a jarring conclusion.

What makes Breathe so fascinating to watch is that it gets the nuances of abusive relationships right. Sarah honestly believes herself to be the victim in this friendship, and her confidence and sense of entitlement are enough to make Charlie question her own judgement. It isn’t that Sarah’s cold and calculating – she’s not the smooth-talking criminal mastermind that sociopaths are often portrayed to be – she’s just so self-absorbed that whether or not she hurts someone else isn’t a blip on her radar. She gets closer to Charlie whenever she wants something, and callously disregards her feelings again once she has it.

In the film’s most notable sub-plot, Charlie’s mother is facing a similar situation with her estranged husband. Outside observers keep telling her he’s just an asshole, but she argues that he’s never hit her, so she can forgive him for all the emotional abuse. Charlie finds herself acting out the same scenario with Sarah – forgiving her, even once Sarah’s made it clear that she isn’t a friend, trying to explain why Sarah is this way – feeling pity and compassion for her, because of her terrible home life – trying to be the bigger person and move on. In both cases, it’s clear to the audience that these relationships should end, but the question Breathe holds out to us is “Why don’t they?” Why are Charlie and her mother so unwilling to cut these ties; why don’t they just walk away? Why don’t we have the right words to talk about abuse when it doesn’t involve physical violence?

The performances from Joséphine Japy and Lou De Laâge as Charlie and Sarah are what make the movie. Breathe is, for the most part, about subtle forms of emotional abuse – about how the way you say something carries a message; the way Sarah teaches Charlie not to have boundaries by turning a few degrees cooler every time she encounters one; the way she uses a condescending tone to say things that aren’t true. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the movie understated, but it’s patient and careful in the work it’s trying to do, and so are its actors. Even though the story moves forward quite slowly, we’re drawn in by the characters – we want to understand what’s going on between them almost just as much as Charlie does.

Laurent’s similarly patient direction creates an effectively dark mood, like storm clouds gathering on the horizon – something that’s also captured in the international trailer. It’s not accurate to say that this is a world you want to live inside, as you’re watching, but it’s a world that’s interesting enough that you’ll want to sit with it and watch events play out.

One of the issues the film grapples with well is what constitutes bad behaviour – at what point you can accuse someone of having wronged you – and its subtlety and ambiguity plays into that. Often, our standard for whether someone has done something wrong lies in whether they’ve done something they didn’t have the legal right to do, but so much of human interaction is subjective that it isn’t (and can’t be) a crime to be mean to someone. It would be very hard for Charlie to objectively demonstrate that Sarah’s behaviour is harmful – that all the little things Sarah does have damaged her in some way – but we can see very plainly, watching this friendship play out, that Sarah is slowly destroying Charlie’s entire life. We can see very plainly that she’s doing something wrong, though it may be hard to say what it is.

There’s also a sense in which, watching this film as an adult, you want to say, “OK, she’s not your friend. Move on,” but that would be missing the point. Breathe is about exploring relational dynamics that we don’t have a framework for talking about – it’s about following the characters into a murky area full of confused and conflicted emotions, and watching how that confusion works against Charlie to stop her from just dumping Sarah and walking away. If I’m honest, there was certainly a time in my life when I also believed – as Charlie seems to believe – that someone had to do something objectively wrong in order for me to decide we weren’t friends. It couldn’t just be because I felt bad when we were together.

Breathe, like many YA stories, is a bit like watching someone wrestle with life problems I’ve already solved, but it’s also an important attempt to articulate those problems in an understandable way – to bring them out into the open and give us a new lens to see them through, and a new touchstone that we can use to discuss them.

If you want to feel uncomfortable in a good way and sink inside this insightful, carefully-constructed film, Breathe opens in New York on Friday, Sept. 11, and in Los Angeles on Sept. 18.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.

‘Miss Julie’ Is My Very Worst Date, Nineteenth Century Style

It’s hard to avoid the sense that this is a story about how the rich are in decline – how complacency has made them helpless and weak enough for the poor to pull them down. It’s hard to know if we’re supposed to think that John has the right idea by using Julie as a stepping stone to move toward his goals – if we’re supposed to think she deserves what she gets because she was stupid and drunk and coming onto him. The play seems to think so – Chastain and Ullmann seem to disagree – the movie itself seems to be a confused mixture of the two viewpoints.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Now on DVD, Liv Ullmann’s adaptation of Miss Julie is a complicated, if not always very uplifting, exploration of the intersection between class and gender. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, there’s still a thin angry thread of hatred for women and poor people vibrating under the surface. Spoilers for a story that’s over a hundred years old.

Miss Julie is a pretty straight-forward story about class differences at the turn of the nineteenth century. Based on the 1888 play of the same name, the movie follows Julie, the daughter of a wealthy Baron, as she tries to seduce her father’s Valet, John. It isn’t a romance story – Julie and John don’t love each other. In fact, they kind of hate each other, but they’re two people who happen to be in close proximity, and they’re bored. Because it’s based on a one-room play, most of the action consists of watching two people argue with each other long past the point when most of us would walk away, and the drama consists mostly of trying to figure out which of them is The Worst.

The film moves through roughly four stages, marked by unexpected changes in John’s behaviour.

In the first, and best, and most palpably uncomfortable stage. Julie sexually harasses John in a style I’d like to call 50 Shades of Awkward and Unpleasant. In Jessica Chastain’s portrayal, Julie pretends to be more confident than she is. She wants John to like her – she wants him to be infatuated with her – and, because he isn’t, she abuses her power over him by ordering him to behave as though he is. There’s a creepy and overtly sexual moment when she makes him start kissing her boots, but there are also much sadder and mundane requests. She makes him dance with her, bring her flowers, and offer her a glass of wine. And each time he grudgingly, angrily does any of these things, she smiles and thanks him as though it were his idea, trying hard to pretend that it was.

Even at this stage in the story, there’s a pitiable element to Julie’s power. It’s true that she can coerce John into doing whatever she wants him to do, but it’s also clear that she doesn’t know what she wants from him at all. John’s much more worldly, and, behind his clenched, contemptuous expression, we can tell that he sees her much more clearly than she sees herself. He’s annoyed mostly because she’s playing stupid, childish games with him – not because he feels threatened by her presence. There’s an uncomfortable vulnerability to Julie in these scenes, even on the first viewing, because we can see that she’s exposing all her weaknesses to John without knowing.

The second stage of the story comes when John – quite suddenly, almost like he’s gotten fed-up and reached a breaking point – confesses that he’s actually in love with Julie. He has, in fact been madly, passionately in love with her for years, and that’s why it torments him so much when she teases him this way. Julie is surprised by this, but pleased, and there’s a bit of the normal Heathcliff what-will-your-family-think we-can-never-be-together stuff before they both cross a line and have sex.

In the third stage, John starts to look like a douchebag. He lies to and manipulates the kitchen maid he’s dating, and turns on Julie as soon as he has enough power to do so. Because she’s a woman, and this is 1888, she can’t ever tell anyone she had sex with a servant. Julie’s also afraid she might get pregnant, and she’s shocked that John would lie to her and pretend to be the perfect (which, in her eyes, means subservient) boyfriend just to get her into bed. John’s happy he wrecked her life and crows over the fact that she’s now just as gross as him. With the class barrier gone, he now has more power because of his gender, and he slut-shames her for, like, an hour in the middle of the movie. As Julie starts to get more panicked about what she’s done and what’s going to happen to her when everyone finds out, John tries to convince her that the only way to salvage the situation is to steal her father’s money and run away with him, so that he can start the business he’s always dreamed of. After a lot of coaxing, Julie goes along with this plan, but John changes his mind again.

In the final and shortest stage of the movie, the sun starts to rise and John sobers up and realizes that he’s been too ambitious for his own good. He doesn’t want to take the risk of running away with Julie anymore – he wants to stay in the comfortable little life he’s made for himself as the Baron’s servant. This is, after all, The Way of the World. Julie’s still in a state of total crisis, though, and he needs to stop anyone from finding out about what happened with her, so that he doesn’t lose his job. So, he convinces her to kill herself, and that’s the end.

Miss Julie is really obviously interested in the intersection of class and gender – like, obvious to the point that Julie and John do a little bit of dream interpretation, discussing how they’re always climbing or falling in their sleep – but, because the author’s take on the situation is kind of horrible, it’s hard to tell where the movie comes down. If you don’t want to read Strindberg’s entire introduction to the play (which I am told is even more misogynist in its original version), suffice to say that John’s a special kind of Poor because he wants to be refined, but he’s still dirty and ignorant on the inside, and Julie is a man-hating half-woman who’s destroying the fabric of society because she doesn’t know her place.

It’s also not surprising that Chastain had a tough time with the idea that Julie kills herself because John tells her to. I have a tough time with that, too, and I’m not sure I buy her explanation that it’s ultimately empowering because Julie was suicidal all along and wanted John to help her self-destruct.

Director Liv Ullmann seems to want us to understand Julie not as a horrible deviant, but as a victim of her circumstance, reacting in an understandable way. The film opens with a sequence in which we watch a young Julie wander bored and alone through her father’s mansion, and implies that her interest in John is born from the same lack of playmates, coloured by a strange naiveté that comes from leading a sheltered life. (Chastain is also much older than Julie, making her awkwardness and innocence seem like a psychological outcome rather than the product of youth).

At the same time, it’s hard to avoid the sense that this is a story about how the rich are in decline – how complacency has made them helpless and weak enough for the poor to pull them down. It’s hard to know if we’re supposed to think that John has the right idea by using Julie as a stepping stone to move toward his goals – if we’re supposed to think she deserves what she gets because she was stupid and drunk and coming onto him. The play seems to think so – Chastain and Ullmann seem to disagree – the movie itself seems to be a confused mixture of the two viewpoints. This version of Miss Julie isn’t so much a reaction against or dialogue with the original as it is a faithful performance that tries to sneak in a more empathetic worldview around the sides. It’s very interesting, but I’m not sure it completely succeeds.

Aside from the movie’s weird politics, Chastain and Colin Farrell are both very interesting to watch, but it’s a long haul. I wasn’t kidding when I said it’s mostly two hours of people fighting in the kitchen. That’s something that doesn’t work as well without the visceral immediacy of a stage.

All in all, I’m not sorry I watched this, but I enjoyed the first leg of the story, which seemed to be uncomfortable on purpose, more than I enjoyed the last legs of the story, which seemed like the playwright’s ghost was giving us the finger.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.

Five Amazing Movies I Just Made Up to Repeat the Same Magic as ‘Spy’

I would pay real money to watch any of these movies. The larger point though, is that I bet, if we actually tried, we could come up with amazing projects for lots of women in Hollywood that aren’t based on assuming that the only thing we want to watch them do is act sexy (or crazy). There’s no shortage of talent in the film industry, so, maybe rather than waiting for screenwriters to craft great starring roles for women at large, Hollywood could also take a closer look at the stars who are already there and custom build some awesome ‘Spy’-like films for them.

Written by Katherine Murray.

A few weeks ago on Pop Culture Happy Hour, Audie Cornish succinctly explained what’s so great about Spy: that it’s a movie custom built to use Melissa McCarthy’s talents, by a director she’s worked with for years. “The director showed us what he loves about her,” she said. Paul Feig was telling us, “Oh, I see something in this person that is so fantastic, and I’m gonna make it so the audience sees that, too.”

McCarthy shines in Spy partly because Spy was built for her to shine in – that’s not to take anything away from her performance; movies are tailored to fit A-list stars all the time. Finding a great actor and creating the right role for them is just as valid a strategy as creating a great role and then finding the right actor. That said, watching Spy reminded me that there are other female actors I’d love to see starring in custom-built projects – these are the first five that come to mind.

Emily Blunt as a True Detective
Emily Blunt has been improving every film she’s been a part of since The Devil Wears Prada. Despite being friendly and cheerful in interviews, she has a gravitas and intensity on screen that makes us believe she could be a hardened soldier who kills squid aliens. More importantly, she exudes a quiet, self-assured kind of confidence that doesn’t involve a lot of posturing.

So far, most of Blunt’s big roles have been opposite protagonists played by somebody else – Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow, Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Looper – but it would be great to see her as the central character in a similar high-concept science fiction movie. Even better, though, her grounded, more-beneath-the-surface stoicism could also make her the perfect candidate to star in a grimdark detective movie. Or, if you want my heart to explode from happiness – let her solve crimes (maybe partnered with Jessica Chastain) in season three of True Detective.

Zoe Saldana in Pirates of the Caribbean 6: The Sequel That’s Actually Good
Zoe Saldana is an awfully good sport. She was the hot alien in Avatar, the hot alien in Guardians of the Galaxy, and the hot human who meets aliens in Star Trek (2009). And, while I’m aware that she was also given the lead role in Colombiana, that was also mostly about being hot. Because I haven’t seen her earlier work, there’s a certain sense in which I’m taking it on faith that she has more acting chops than this but, as someone who’s been more than willing to pay $14 to see her be someone’s hot girlfriend a whole bunch of times, I’d also be willing to pay $14 to see her as something else.

The most obvious choice would be to make a better version of Colombiana – what Salt was to Angelina Jolie’s turn in Tomb Raider – an action movie that isn’t about looking sexy and stuff. But what I’d really like to see is – if we’re making a thousand million billion sequels anyway – a legitimate, well-written, exciting spin-off to Pirates of the Caribbean about Anamaria’s adventures on the high seas. I get that Johnny Depp is single-handedly the thing that saved Curse of the Black Pearl from sucking, but if they gave it an honest try and brought in Jennifer Lee as a writer, Disney could make this work.

Lucy Liu in a Quentin Tarantino Robot Movie or a Good Romantic Comedy (I’ll Take What I Can Get)
In the category of Missed Opportunities I Won’t Stop Complaining About, Lucy Liu, a thousand times over, should have been cast as Sherlock Holmes in Elementary. Ever since she showed up on Ally McBeal she’s had the rare ability to play a total asshole while making us all kind of love her. Also, we love her when she’s collecting people’s heads (NSFW). Despite this, she’s also shown us that she’s capable of playing warm and funny in addition to tough-as-nails, murderous, and cold.

One dream scenario would be for Quentin Tarantino to fully embrace his love of Asian cinema, and make that almost-all-Mandarin-Chinese-language action movie (set in the future, with robots) that you know he’s always wanted to make. Lucy Liu could totally go on a quest for revenge as the star of that movie. Failing that, I’d settle for a nice romantic comedy where Liu stars as a woman who’s smart and driven and a little bit acerbic, but doesn’t need to get over herself somehow or act dumb in order to fall in love.

Octavia Spencer in a Dark Comedy about Hollywood
Octavia Spencer spent a long time being typecast as “that crazy lady” before she started to land more prominent roles. Even in The Help, for which she’s probably best known, she was still kind of “that crazy lady (who has a legitimate reason to be pissed off about racism [but she’s so funny when she talks about it that we don’t need to question our own attitudes and beliefs]).” And, while I had no problem taking her seriously in Snowpiercer, it’s true that she has some serious comedy chops.

I think the ideal movie for Octavia Spencer is actually something close to Spy – something that takes the way she’s been typecast throughout her career, and then uses her range as an actor to turn those expectations around. Maybe a dark comedy about a seemingly crazy lady who has more depth and sadness to her personality – like Funny People, but not so on-the-nose. Hell, it could even be a self-referential dark comedy about the way black actresses are cast in Hollywood. That would be kind of amazing.

Mila Kunis in an Emotionally-Driven Russian Spy Movie
Before you say it – yeah, I know. Mila Kunis is already a huge star, and Hollywood already clearly believes she’s a box office draw. Even so, I don’t think I’ve seen her yet in a role that’s tailor made for her strengths as an actor – Black Swan (which took advantage of the confident, knowing vibe she gives off on camera) came close, but that was a supporting role opposite Natalie Portman. Last year’s Jupiter Ascending didn’t seem to know what a goldmine it had in either Kunis or Channing Tatum and wrote them both to be boring as hell while it focussed on special effects.

While Kunis got her start on That 70s Show, there’s an edge to her delivery that seems wasted on straightforward comedy, and she seems to get swallowed in sci-fi and fantasy movies. If I were building the perfect film for Mila Kunis to star in, I think it would be a complex, semi-realistic espionage movie where she plays a Russian double-agent. The story would be grounded somehow in the complicated feelings the agent had about Russia – more in the tone of The Debt than Mission Impossible. Her natural charm would make her an expert at getting close to her targets, but her unexpectedly warm heart would make it hard to pull the trigger.

I would pay real money to watch any of these movies – so, there you go Hollywood. That’s a guaranteed $14 you’ll get back from your investment. The larger point though, is that I bet, if we actually tried, we could come up with amazing projects for lots of women in Hollywood that aren’t based on assuming that the only thing we want to watch them do is act sexy (or crazy). There’s no shortage of talent in the film industry, so, maybe rather than waiting for screenwriters to craft great starring roles for women at large, Hollywood could also take a closer look at the stars who are already there and custom build some awesome Spy-like films for them.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.

‘Silicon Valley’ Adds Women, Convinces Me It Shouldn’t Add Women

Women aren’t really treated poorly by ‘Silicon Valley,’ but it’s weird that they’re treated as being so different from the male characters on the show. Where the men have recognizable – if exaggerated – human failings, motivations and personality tics, the women are much more inscrutable, like adults who’ve walked into the middle of a children’s game. It’s a pattern that exists outside of just this show, but it’s something that stops women from being full participants in the story even if they now, at least, exist there.

Written by Katherine Murray.

There’s no way that Silicon Valley can win this one, you guys.

Sitrep: Silicon Valley is a comedy on HBO about group of programmers who try to build their own company, only to discover that that’s really fucking hard. Despite being one of the funniest shows on television, it was roundly (and fairly) criticized in its first season for being passively sexist. The core characters are a group of five guys – Richard, the young visionary who comes up with a data compression code that could make him a billionaire; Erlich, the loud entrepreneur who owns a piece of Richard’s company; Gilfoyle and Dinesh, two programmers with an I-secretly-like-you-but-we-fight-cat-and-dog relationship; and Jared, an awkward business management/accounting guy they poached from a rival company.

Of the four supporting characters we meet, three are also guys – Gavin Belson, the head of the evil Hooli corporation; Big Head, Richard’s friend who works for Hooli; and Peter Gregory, an offbeat, socially awkward developer who sees Richard’s potential and invests in his company. That means that, out of the nine characters who regularly appear in season one, one of them is a woman, and she’s Peter Gregory’s assistant. Her name is Monica, she’s a straight man for jokes, and she really believes in Richard.

Aside from Monica, women are invisible in season one, except for a few who make appearances as strippers, professional party guests, and cupcake saleswomen who trick guys into building their aps. This is problematic partly because it’s a missed opportunity to show women working in the STEM fields, and partly because it feels weird against jokes like Big Head’s idea for an ap that points you to women who have erect nipples.

The good news is that it seems like the showrunners took this criticism seriously in season two, and at least made some attempt to show us that women also work in the tech industry. There are now female extras in the crowd shots at Hooli, female programmers and project managers, and women sitting on the company’s board of directors. Monica gets a promotion where she becomes responsible for managing her company’s interest in Richard’s start-up, and Peter Gregory (who sadly had to be replaced due to the actor’s passing) is swapped out for a socially awkward female boss named Laurie. Richard’s company, Pied Piper, even briefly hires a female coder, Carla, to work on the project.

It seems like they actually tried to do things differently. So, how did it turn out?

Not that well.

I don’t feel like Silicon Valley is hostile to women – but I feel like maybe the writers don’t have many female friends (yes, I know a couple of the episodes were actually written by women; maybe they don’t have female friends, either). Where the male characters are all really quirky and specific, the female characters are vaguely competent and bland – they fit into the comedy stereotype that says women have their shit together more than men do, and that means they have to act as a stabilizing influence, buzz-kill, or mom. It’s a stereotype that flatters women in some ways, and usually seems well-meaning, but also leaves us out of the fun.

Theoretically, Monica could have become a part of the core group of characters, through her increased participation in the board meetings. In practice, though, the board meeting comedy was driven by Erlich’s pompous, emotionally immature need to be the centre of attention, and a new character, Russ Hanneman’s need to be the biggest douche that ever was. Because she wasn’t written to have similarly loud and pronounced personality traits, Monica almost may as well not be there, and she fades father into the background as the season goes on.

The second opportunity to add a woman to the group came when Pied Piper hired Carla to help with the programming, but her primary trait was being Smurfette, and her contribution to the comedy was being a thing for the guys to react to in funny ways. She had a little bit more of an edge than Monica, but she was still portrayed as mostly competent and bland – above getting into childish fights with Gilfoyle and Dinesh, and focussed on doing her actual work. She was only in the show for a few episodes before she was written out completely.

Women aren’t really treated poorly by Silicon Valley, but it’s weird that they’re treated as being so different from the male characters on the show. Where the men have recognizable – if exaggerated – human failings, motivations, and personality tics, the women are much more inscrutable, like adults who’ve walked into the middle of a children’s game. It’s a pattern that exists outside of just this show, but it’s something that stops women from being full participants in the story even if they now, at least, exist there.

So, what should Silicon Valley do stop being a show about dudes?

Probably nothing.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, we just had a whole season that proved to us that adding women to the show – in the way that the writers are capable of adding women to the show – isn’t going to make much difference. I sincerely appreciate the effort – and it went a long way toward reassuring me that the show has good intentions, but I’m not sure a funny, juvenile, well-integrated female character is really in the cards for Silicon Valley. Melissa McCarthy can only do so many projects at once.

In order to integrate women more into the cast, there would have to be a real desire to do that and an introspective awareness of gender dynamics that hasn’t been present so far.

But, even aside from whether the show can add women, it’s not clear to me that it has to. It would be nice if it did. It would have been outstanding if, when the series was first conceived, someone had pushed it beyond the stereotypes that first come to mind when we think of the real Silicon Valley. But, we don’t have a time machine to go back and tinker with the DNA of the show when it was first created, and, in fairness to the writers, the mix of characters they did end up with works really well. That’s not to say that another mix wouldn’t have worked equally well from a comedy standpoint – just that, if we view its success partly in terms of whether or not it’s funny, Silicon Valley succeeded in being funny.

At this stage, I think that, rather than focusing on what should have been, or could still be different about Silicon Valley, this is a good opportunity to learn some lessons for next time. I think it’s okay for dude shows about dudes to exist – but it should serve as a reminder that we also need more shows about women, and shows about both men and women, together. Silicon Valley wouldn’t be such a sore spot for people if women weren’t underrepresented on TV in the first place and, while I don’t think it’s up to this series to solve that problem, it’s an example that can still play a part in the discussion. What’s striking about women’s invisibility – or women’s later responsible buzz-kill status – on Silicon Valley isn’t anything about the show itself, but the way it fits into a larger pattern.

So, let the dude show be about dudes. But let’s also have shows that aren’t about dudes – or aren’t just about dudes – to balance things out in the end.

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

The Three Questions That Divide ‘Breaking Bad’ Fans and What They Tell Us About Masculinity

‘Breaking Bad’ is one of those well-written, well-acted shows that somehow inspires people to scream at each other in CAPSLOCK. The debate about Walter White and his wife and their drug-trade boils down to your answers to three deceptively simple questions that act as a rorschach test on masculinity in American culture.

Written by Katherine Murray as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

Breaking Bad is one of those well-written, well-acted shows that somehow inspires people to scream at each other in CAPSLOCK. The debate about Walter White and his wife and their drug-trade boils down to your answers to three deceptively simple questions that act as a rorschach test on masculinity in American culture.

Is Walter selfish or is he looking out for his family?

Walter starts cooking meth after he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, and his stated reason for doing it is to provide for his family after he’s gone. In fact, for five seasons, his stated reason for doing most of what he does is to protect or provide for his family. Traditionally, we’ve seen this as part of husband and father’s job, and it’s understandable that Walter doesn’t want his wife and kids to be poor or to depend on the generosity of strangers when he’s gone.

On the other hand, Walter’s cancer goes into remission after a while, and he keeps cooking meth. He also keeps cooking meth even after it becomes clear that he’s endangering his family by getting involved with drug cartels, and after he he and his wife have a whole storage unit full of dirty money (the Internet says $50 million). By the end of the series, his increasingly antisocial behaviour has also alienated him from his wife, son, and sister in law, and his dealings with the cartels have led his brother in law to get killed. So, if his stated mission is to do a good thing for his family, it’s not entirely clear that he succeeds.

With that in mind, is Walter basically an all-right guy who tried to do a good thing with mixed results, or does he have a darker motivation? Breaking Bad seems to tell us it’s a little bit of both.

It seems like Walter’s initial motivation is to help his family, but we quickly learn that there are other things going on, too. He feels like he’s been cheated out of the wealth and status he should have had. He’s a brilliant scientist, but he somehow ended up as a high school chemistry teacher. He was pushed out of his share in a company that went on to make billions of dollars. As someone who played by the rules and feels he was penalized for it, Walter gets a sense of power from being a drug dealer – his biggest grievance, for most of the series, is that he can’t brag to anyone about how good he is at organized crime.

Although it’s probably true when he says he loves his family and that he’s trying to do (what he sees as) his job by providing for them, he loses sight of what that means in the process of trying to feed his own ego. He doesn’t just want to be the provider because it means his wife and children will have more resources – he wants to be the provider because it makes him feel better about himself. To Walter, it’s emasculating to be a normal school teacher – and whether or not you agree with him will colour how you see the show. Is it reasonable for Walter to feel that he’s a failure because he isn’t rich and powerful? Is it reasonable for him to feel like he’s a failure because he and his wife live in a dual-income household – because he can’t cover all of their expenses on his own?

The question of whether there’s actually something wrong with Walter’s life in episode one, and whether he’s motivated to change it by altruism or ego is the first fork in the road where we end up watching different shows.

Is Heisenberg cool or is he a loser?

This question follows pretty closely from the first one. When Walter starts selling drugs, he invents an alter-ego for himself – Heisenberg, named after a Nazi. Walter feels pretty good about being Heisenberg, and, at least some of the time, the show feels pretty good about it, too. In season five, there’s even an episode called “Say My Name” in which the pivotal scene is a hell-yeah moment (pictured above) where Walter confronts a group of drug dealers and brags about how great he is before demanding that they call him Heisenberg as a way of acknowledging his legend.

There’s an element of escapism to Walter’s story, where the audience is encouraged to identify with him and imagine what it would be like to be this total bad-ass. He gets to give these big speeches about the amazing things he’s done, like murdering people, and blowing shit up, and he sounds really confident when he does it. The most confident speech he gives, and probably the most important one in the show, is in the episode “Cornered” where he screams, “I am the one who knocks!”

That scene encompasses everything about who Walter is and who he wants to believe he is – as well as the distance between those two points. The context is that Walter’s wife, Skyler, has just heard that another meth cook Walter works with was murdered, and she’s worried that the cartel will come after him next. What she doesn’t know, and what he tells her in this scene, is that he was the one who ordered the murder. In his selective account of what happened, he builds himself up, expressing his disgust at her worry for him – as if she sees him as weak and helpless, when really he’s the one calling the shots. He makes it sound like the situation was totally under control and he was nothing but strong and capable – willing to make the hard calls, willing to do this terrible thing and live with the consequences. He even makes it sound – when he says, “I am the one who knocks” – like he was the one who went to the door and murdered this person.

The audience knows, though, because we saw what happened, that this knocking stuff isn’t entirely accurate. Walter realized almost too late that the cartel was planning to replace him with another cook because he and his business partner, Jesse Pinkman, were unreliable and hard to work with. His motivation for taking this other guy out – this other, relatively innocent, perfectly nice guy – was completely driven by fear. The cartel picked him up in the middle of the night and took him to a secluded place to kill him, at which point he screamed into his phone for Jesse to run to the other cook’s house and murder him instead. Jesse did it, out of loyalty to Walter and concern that he’d be next, and it was something so hard to live with that it basically destroyed him.

In Walter’s version of the story, that all comes out as, “I was a total bad-ass.”

I would be lying if I said that I didn’t sometimes buy into this idea that Walter is awesome. It would be disingenuous to pretend that I was always coldly analytical while I was watching, or that I sat there saying, “Nay, he is a criminal who treats his friends and family poorly, and lies to himself about his motivations – I cannot cheer for him.” There are moments where you’re really like, “Hell yeah!” when you’re watching this show, even if what Walter’s doing is categorically wrong, or the legend he’s telling about it doesn’t quite make sense.

I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t have critical thoughts about it. Walter gets pushier with his wife in direct proportion to how much she threatens his image as bad ass. The other important thing about “I am the one who knocks!” is that the reason he’s angry with her is that she makes him feel uncool. She keeps trying to insert herself into the drug dealing business, and have a say in what’s happening, and she keeps reminding him – intentionally and unintentionally – that she doesn’t see him as this mysterious, amazing, hyper-competent hero he wants to be. To her, he’s still the fallible science teacher she married. He hates that and he lashes out whenever she does it (and so do a lot of the fans).

Breaking Bad seems divided on how much it buys into Walter’s legend. Is he an insecure loser who’s making up a tough persona for himself, or is he, like, an action hero, criminal mastermind, super amazing gangster? The show seems to be giving us a different answer at different moments, and how much you buy into The Legend of Heisenberg, as a viewer, will colour your interpretation of the story.

Is it better to be Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde?

This is the most fundamental question that drives Breaking Bad, and it’s one we’ve been struggling with for over a hundred years. To recap, The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886, is a story about a civilized man who invents an alter-ego for himself so that he can act on his base, violent, savage desires with impunity. In the end, he likes it too much and can’t go back to civilized life; the only way to protect the people he cares about and innocent bystanders from the destruction he leaves in his wake is for him to end his own life.

One of the underlying assumptions of that story is that Mr. Hyde represents our basic human nature – that without the civilizing influence of society (specifically, British society, since it was written in a more xenophobic time), without education and the rule of law, we’d all be barbarians, hitting each other with sticks, doing whatever we felt like, whenever we wanted to, without any regard for whether it’s right or wrong. That’s an assumption that might be right – much of human history is just a long list of horrible things that powerful people did because they wanted to, without any regard for whether it was right or wrong. Even in countries where we have human rights legislation and relatively low levels of violent crime, this isn’t something that’s totally stopped.

The idea of being Mr. Hyde appeals to people who feel constrained by society. Those of us who feel we don’t have power over our lives, that all of the rules are holding us down – those of us who can at least entertain the idea that we’d do better in a system where we could just stab people we didn’t like – we all have days where we want to be Mr. Hyde, and some of us want it a lot.

The fantasy that Breaking Bad trades on is the fantasy of a man who’s been emasculated by the modern world – who’s hen-pecked by his wife, who has a crappy job, who’s never received all the things he thinks he deserves – who turns things around by ignoring society’s rules, getting rich from selling illegal substances, and solving his problems with violence. It’s the fantasy that says, “Everything would be OK, if you could just Hulk-out like a caveman. That’s what you’re supposed to do, as a man, and they’ve taken it away from you, my friend.”

Of course, the series is more complicated than that, and Walter creates six new problems for himself for every one that he solves with violence and drug-trade – he makes a choice to live and die by an outdated form of masculinity that ultimately wrecks his life – but it looks like he’s having fun. It looks like he’s at least in charge of what happens to him. Breaking Bad ultimately doesn’t seem to believe that Walter made the right choice when he started selling meth, but it speaks to a very real dilemma that American men have to wrestle with in life. They’re being measured against a vision of masculinity that comes out of the dark ages, but they’re living in a society that discourages them from doing any of the things that vision says to do.

We’re living at a time when the idea of what it means to do a good job at being a person – or being a man or being a woman – is changing, and just like in all times of change, there are some people who still see things the old way, some people who see things the new way, and an awful lot of people who are confused and believe a little of both. Breaking Bad is an insanely relevant story about masculinity precisely because it seems to be confused about what it believes. Is Walter’s life an emasculating horror show before he starts dealing drugs, or is it actually all right and he just loses sight of that? Is he really cool when he starts being Heisenberg, or is he grasping at straws to try to save his self esteem? Do we actually wish we could be like him, or is his behaviour deplorable? There are times when any of the answers to those questions could be true.

Breaking Bad lets viewers explore the fantasy of this return to a type of masculine identity and pride that’s based on shooting people in the face (or taking credit for the time your business partner shot someone in the face), but it doesn’t present that fantasy as an unqualified success. It leaves us on our own to decide what we think of Walter’s decisions, and whether we think he’s being an awesome dude or a total asshole. Your opinion of Walter, and your reading of his story arc on Breaking Bad ultimately depends on How you think a man should Be. You’re watching a totally different show, based on you’re answer to that.

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

How Upset Should We Be About Rape Plot Lines on HBO?

Let me start by saying that the title of this post is a little disingenuous – I’d never tell you how upset to be about the rape plot lines on HBO. You feel how you feel, and you get to make your own decisions about what you do and don’t watch. I do, however, find it interesting that rape’s showing up so often on TV, and I wonder whether that’s a good thing (because we’re finally talking about it) or a bad thing (because we’re slowly getting desensitized to it). I think it’s a little of both.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I remember that, when Game of Thrones first aired, and I watched the first episodes, not really knowing what it was, I was very uncomfortable with the story line where Daenerys gets sold to a warlord who rapes her repeatedly before they suddenly fall in love. I remember thinking (and writing) at that time that I was afraid to live in a world where depictions of rape were so common that they no longer had the power to shock us. I think I likened it to the festering animal corpse we saw in episode one – something that would have really freaked me out when I was younger, but that I barely even noticed on Game of Thrones, since I’m so used to seeing gross stuff on TV.

In the intervening years, I was annoyed that Game of Thrones used rape so often as a way to raise the stakes in a tense situation – during the battle of Blackwater we learn that the noble women have soldiers standing guard to kill them if the city falls, so that they don’t get raped; a bunch of total randoms try to rape Sansa because that’s what they do during riots in Westeros; we know that all the guys stationed at Crastor’s Keep are total fucking dicks because they want to rape every girl they meet; we know that a bunch of other guys in the Night’s Watch are total fucking dicks for the same reason. One of the worst examples is when we spend what feels like hours and hours of season three watching Ramsay Snow torture a male character named Theon, often in sexual ways, apparently just to impress upon us that torture is really bad news.

On the flip side of that, season three also includes the only rape plot line I’d mark as kind of legitimately good. In that plot line, Jaime Lannister slowly becomes friends with the only female knight on the show, Breinne of Tarth. When they’re both captured by mercenaries who try to rape her, the show is very clear in presenting this as a situation in which sexual violence is being used as a way to dehumanize her, punish her for gender non-conformity, and treat her as less than a person. Because Jaime’s come to see Brienne as an equal and a full human being, we see that his perception of rape changes in that moment, and that he starts to appreciate that she’s had to fight a much harder battle than he has, just to receive basic rights. (The show later destroys that character arc by “accidentally” having him rape his sister, but that’s another story.)

For me, the stuff with Brienne worked well because that story didn’t treat rape as something that inevitably follows from being female – it contextualized rape within society, culture, and power relations, showing how rape is used as a tool used to oppress people with lower status. That’s important – and it’s something worth dramatizing in fiction.

The latest rape-related plot line – the one that, weirdly, is the flashpoint for anger over rape on Game of Thrones, after everything else that’s happened – falls somewhere between gratuitous let’s-raise-the-stakes stuff and thoughtful cultural commentary, but much closer to the former. It’s easy to see why people are upset. Sansa is a likable character, Ramsay is a bastard (in every single sense of the word), and watching him viciously attack her on their wedding night doesn’t tell us anything about the characters, the situation, or the dynamics of sexual violence that we didn’t already know. It wasn’t my favourite moment, either. But is this a sign that we’re not taking rape very seriously? I’m not sure.

HBO has a pretty uneven history of using rape story lines – sometimes for good, sometimes for something a bit less than good, and sometimes for something that’s hard to parcel out.

Back in 1997, HBO launched its first hour-long drama series, Oz – a theatrical, experimental and often scathing indictment of the US prison system. Oz arguably paved the way for the renaissance of HBO original programming that followed, and it introduced a lot of the things we’ve come to expect from premium cable – lots of f-bombs, frontal nudity, graphic sex and violence, people taking drugs, and (of course) people doing crimes. Its thesis, at least in the beginning, was that it’s inhumane to lock people up in a cage and watch them tear each other apart. Its attitude toward rape, at least in the beginning, was that rape is used by dumb people with poor social skills as a way to punish, humiliate and control those they see as their inferiors. The main story arc in the first season asks the audience to identify with a man who’s raped and tortured by a white supremacist, and to watch as he slowly loses his humanity. It’s very uncomfortable, but it’s also a powerful depiction of what’s wrong with something that a lot of people see as being a normal part of prison and have the bad taste to make flippant jokes about.

Oz ran for six seasons, though, and things got weird toward the end. The show seemed to learn the wrong lessons from itself (and from The Sopranos, which launched two years later) about what was successful with viewers and, rather than being a focused piece of cultural commentary, it turned into The Super Gross-Out Everyone Rapes and Stabs Everyone Hour with subplots ripped from the headlines, in which the prisoners became telemarketers and seeing eye dog trainers. Meaning, if we take Oz as a whole, it was both a valuable examination of a serious issue that wasn’t often talked about and a crass attempt at turning sexual violence into a shocking and sometimes titillating spectacle. It didn’t score 100 percent in either category, and many of the premium cable shows that followed have also been a mixture of the two things.

It bears mentioning that a few shows have actually just been a mixture of the worst kinds of things. At the shallow end of the entertainment pool, True Blood scored a hat trick by: a) including gratuitous, shock value rape that served no purpose in the story; b) acting like it’s impossible to rape a man because men are always up for sex; and c) acting like rape can be a funny joke under the right circumstances (for reasons that I don’t understand, those circumstances are: if the victim is promiscuous and if the rapist has a weird personality – WTF?). On Showtime, Shameless has also gone the route of it’s-impossible-to-rape-a-dude-and-it’s-kind-of-funny-if-you-try, and I’m told that the current Starz series, Outlander, is basically built from rape fail of the isn’t-this-sort-of-erotic variety.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Sopranos episode “Employee of the Month” is routinely cited as one of the best in the series, and that’s an hour all about the rage that Tony Soprano’s therapist, Dr. Melfi, feels after the man who rapes her is released on a technicality. She struggles with the ethical decision of whether to use her mafia connections to exact some vigilante justice, and the audience understands how she feels. We can debate whether or not the show “needed” the attack on Dr. Melfi to be rape, or what it means that that was what was chosen so that we could sympathize with her position, but it’s a good piece of television. And it’s a good piece of television from a show that also has no problem setting its scenes in a strip club and using women’s bodies as a backdrop to the action.

In that context, Game of Thrones reads more like Oz and The Sopranos than like True Blood, Shameless, or Outlander, to me. Sometimes it’s contributing something of value; sometimes it’s indulging an ugly desire to see people suffer for our entertainment; sometimes it’s uncritically replicating our conflicted cultural attitudes toward rape – it’s a mixture of all of those things – so, how should we feel about that?

There was a time, not long ago, when rape was basically Voldemort – you couldn’t say its name without making everyone uncomfortable, or risking that they’d blame you for making them uncomfortable, by speaking the forbidden. When rape was a stigmatized topic and had the power to bring an uncomfortable hush, it arguably seemed like a more serious subject. But, because it brought that hush, and because we didn’t talk about it – because it was shrouded in so much shame and secrecy – we couldn’t have the conversations we’re having now about what consent looks like, and what it is and isn’t OK to expect from a partner. We couldn’t talk about rape culture – we couldn’t talk about the way that rape relates to other forms of violence against women; we couldn’t publicly discuss the systemic reasons why it happens. We couldn’t even say, “It’s a form of misogyny.” It was just shadows peeling out of the dark – a horrible, inexplicable thing that just happened without any explanation, or any way to make it stop.

Now, it’s at the top of our cultural radar. Now, it’s lost some of its power to hush, and we’ve gained more power to speak about it. We’re at a stage where we have to confront rape somehow, and we’re watching that confrontation play out on TV – it’s a confrontation that isn’t over yet. It’s a confrontation that’s really just starting.

The reason there’s so much rape on television now is that we’ve realized the issue is important. It occupies a place in our minds – it’s something that we’re actively struggling with, and that’s good. It’s better than accepting rape as normal; it’s better than treating it as some big mystery thing that nobody can ever talk about or change.

At the same time, when we didn’t talk about rape, we could all sort of silently believe that we agreed with each other about how it worked. Now that it’s holding more space in public discourse, we have more opportunity to encounter ideas about rape that offend us. If the presentation of rape on TV seems schizophrenic – if it seems like it’s this weird, random mixture of insightful observation, crass enjoyment, gross misunderstanding, sympathy, minimization, titillation, gender theory, cultural criticism, ignorance, spitefulness, and confusion – that’s because, culturally, we have a fractured, complicated, self-contradictory relationship with this topic. It’s actually possible for the same person to be kind of turned on and kind of grossed out by rape scenes – it’s possible for the same person to think it’s wrong for men to rape women and that’s there’s nothing you can really do about it because it’s just something that happens. It’s possible for somebody with really good, enlightened, thoughtful views of gender to just not notice sexualized violence against women, because we’re all so used to seeing it.

It’s also possible for someone to be a straight-up misogynist dick bag, and we get some of that, too, but the point is that we’re in the middle of a discussion that it’s worth our time – all our time – to have.

To say the least, it’s absolutely annoying – and, for some people, hurtful and traumatizing – to feel that you can’t watch TV anymore without risking that the story will suddenly turn against you by presenting sexual violence – violence that you may have experienced in real life – as something that’s either Not A Big Deal or is Kind Of Fun To Watch – but it’s also an opportunity for dialogue that we weren’t always able to have.

I would be more disturbed if every depiction of rape on TV were dismissive, normalizing, gratuitous, or uncritical, but we’re fortunate enough that that isn’t the case, and fortunate enough to live in a time when audiences have an unprecedented ability to publicly respond and speak back to what they’ve seen.

It sucks to be reminded that not everyone has a very sophisticated view of how gender and power dynamics influence rape – it sucks to be reminded that there are some people who’ve literally never had to think about this at all, and others who have to live in fear and think about it all the time. But it’s also amazing, because at least now we’re talking about it. Now, no matter how little you usually think about gender, you’ve heard the words “rape culture” before. Now, no matter how little you usually think about TV, you’ve had to ask yourself whether you think it’s right or wrong to have a plot line about rape – and why, and what makes it that way, and what having that plot line says about culture.

It’s up to you to decide how upset you are about any individual plot line on any individual show, but the pattern, I think, is not so discouraging. The pattern shows that this is a subject that’s become important to us – that it’s something we’re trying to understand. That we find it worthy of our attention. The discussion is still really messy, and it includes ideas that are pretty off-putting at times, but I think it’s a positive sign that we’re talking about this at all.

Links of interest:

Dominick Mayer on confronting rape culture (The Daily Dot)
Zerlina Maxwell explains that rape culture is a real thing (TIME)
Alyssa Rosenberg on how rape plot lines have changed to focus on women’s experiences (Washington Post)
Eliana Dockterman on TV confronting the long-buried problem of rape (TIME)
Todd VanDerWerff’s analysis of “Employee of the Month” (Onion AV Club)

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

WIGS’ Flagship Series, ‘Blue,’ Offers a Surprisingly Powerful Look at Sexual Violence

‘Blue’ is either an amazing bait-and-switch or (more likely) a series that changed its mind about what it was part way through. Either way, what began as an inferior, online version of ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl,’ has grown into a powerful, subtle, and well-acted drama about the long-term effects of sexual abuse, and the shadow that misogyny and the threat of violence casts over women’s sexuality in general. It’s also a big achievement for the WIGS channel, whose mission is to create more female-led programming.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Blue is either an amazing bait-and-switch or (more likely) a series that changed its mind about what it was partway through. Either way, what began as an inferior, online version of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, has grown into a powerful, subtle, and well-acted drama about the long-term effects of sexual abuse, and the shadow that misogyny and the threat of violence casts over women’s sexuality in general. It’s also a big achievement for the WIGS channel, whose mission is to create more female-led programming.

I wouldn’t blame you if you’ve never heard of Blue – I hadn’t heard of it until CTV starting promoting it as part of its online video service this winter. The series began life in 2012 as a group of short webisodes on the WIGS YouTube channel, before switching to an hour-long format and moving to Hulu in its third season (in Canada, it’s now on CTV Extend, along with several other WIGS series).

WIGS, in itself, is pretty cool. It’s a free, online channel that offers original programming, focused on female leads. In addition to Julia Stiles, who plays the title role in Blue, WIGS has produced shorts and web series led by Anna Paquin, Jenna Malone, and America Fererra, among others. Blue seems to be the one that’s got the most traction, and it’s fair to say that it’s WIGS’ flagship show.

The premise of Blue (and it’s not a great premise, so bear with me for a minute) is that Stiles’ character is a single mom who sometimes resorts to prostitution in order to make ends meet. All of the commercials and advertising for the show feature a clip from the series’ first webisode, where Blue, in sexy lingerie, explains to a client, “I gotta provide.” During the early episodes, there’s a sense that Blue is going to play out a lot like Secret Diary of a Call Girl – that is, it seems like the point of the show is to voyeuristically peer inside a middle class version of sex work. We watch Blue interact with a wide range of clients who are all set apart by peculiar habits and fetishes, and we watch her cagily hide this part-time job from everyone else in her life. It seems, at first, like the only major conflict the show’s setting up is a love interest slash frenemy of Blue’s who learns the truth about her job, and might spill the beans to her family. Otherwise, the story doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere until late in the first season, when suddenly it goes everywhere – to places I haven’t seen many shows go at all, let alone in such an honest, thoughtful way.

Late in season one, after some foreshadowing has prepared us, we learn that Blue was sexually abused by one of her mother’s boyfriends when she was in middle school, and that there’s a good chance that guy is the father of her son. That revelation cracks the story wide open and, from that point forward, Blue is a lot less about watching Julia Stiles be sexy, and a lot more about watching her struggle with the long term effects of trauma – the way it interferes with her relationships, the way her lack of boundaries shapes the dynamic she has with her son, the way she blocks things out and dissociates under stress.

Blue is a series that builds up slowly, over time, rather than dropping everything on us at once. The complex social and psychological dynamics between the characters are like sediment, accumulating layer by layer, until the third season feels like a careful, complex dissertation on human behaviour.

When Blue’s abuser returns to the picture, it’s disturbing that she doesn’t stand up to him – that he still has so much power over her – but it’s also realistic. So is the way he explains, with no trace of shame, anger, or guile, that he didn’t do anything wrong, and he’s the real victim, because she’s let other people convince her that he’s a bad person, when they both know the truth is different.

The show also takes its time in revealing how Blue’s own memory of these events is fragmented and hard for her to access. In one scene, she’ll struggle to remember anything about her childhood, and come up short on details when someone asks. In another, she’ll have a sudden emotional outburst, as she remembers that her mother betrayed her trust by leaving her alone with the man who raped her. After that, she’ll forget the outburst happened, and wonder why her son suddenly seems to be so careful and delicate about her feelings.

Depicting a character who doesn’t have a constant sense of self and doesn’t understand her own feelings, or remember her own experiences consistently, requires a great deal of patience and restraint on the part of the writers, directors, and actor. Julia Stiles has always been a pretty understated actor, and it works for her, here, as a character who’s built a protective shell so strong that it separates her from her own emotions. Blue never tells us how to interpret the characters’ feelings, but it has a keen eye for detail in how trauma can be expressed through words and behaviour, and there’s at least one sequence in which sound and video editing are used to create a pretty convincing impression of dissociation, which no explanation needed.

In the third season, Blue expands its view of female sexuality through two new characters: Blue’s sister Lara, and Lara’s girlfriend, Satya. Season three is a winner on all counts, but the introduction of these characters allows the show to add a few more layers to its sediment, and flesh out the themes that are already there.

Satya, played by Canadian singer-songwriter Alexz Johnson, is a bad news musician who systematically leaches off her partners in lieu of getting a job. When we meet her, she’s leaching off Lara (which means leaching off Blue, by proxy), and trying to track down a lowlife who owes her some money. The most terrifying scene in the show comes where Satya and Lara confront the lowlife’s friends, looking for the money he owes them, and realize too late that they’re in a locked apartment with guys who want to rape them. The scene is a lot more low-key that what you’d get on HBO, but that’s what makes it scary – a normal conversation suddenly tips into something more sinister, and, before anyone makes a move toward them, Lara runs to the door and starts screaming for help.

It’s a moment that’s powerful and disturbing, and underscores the threat of violence that runs underneath interactions between men and women. When I started writing this review, I was going to say, “Blue is bad at being a show about prostitution, but it’s good at being a show about sexual violence” – in retrospect, I think maybe it’s good at being a show about prostitution because it’s good at being a show about sexual violence, and presenting a world where no one’s choices are ever fully disentangled from the misogynist threads in our culture.

There’s an argument that says, in order to be sex-positive people, we need to stop stigmatizing prostitution, and challenge the idea that women only get into sex work because they’ve been kidnapped, coerced, or abused – that we instead need to promote the empowering idea that women can be sex workers because they choose to be, in an utterly untroubled way. And, while it’s true that some people get into sex work without any trauma or exploitation and, while I’m happy for them if they have a positive experience, the reality is that, at this point in history, most prostitutes don’t enter the profession because things are going so well in their lives. While it’s fine to have Secret Diary of a Call Girl – while that’s a legitimate experience that can be explored – it’s also important to keep telling stories like this – stories that highlight how even sex work that looks, on the surface, like it’s voluntary, is still an artefact of the same culture in which women are disproportionately the victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. Sex work doesn’t exist in a separate reality where none of the other bullshit about sex and gender affects what goes on.

On a less ideological level, Blue also pulls off a pretty risky narrative feat by building up Satya’s talent all season long – telling us that she’s this amazing musician, who’s obviously special, and captivates you as soon as you hear her play – and then delivering on that promise, when Johnson sings a song that she wrote for the show in a clear, strong voice that instantly shows us why all of these characters see something special in Satya. That doesn’t seem like such a hard thing to pull off, but look at all the times Smash and Glee tried to tell us that someone was good at singing, and see how that turned out.

If you are intrigued by complex characterization, explorations of sexual violence, or convincingly good singer-songwriter stuff, you can catch up on Blue at the WIGS website, on Hulu in the United States, or on CTV Extend in Canada.

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

The Love Quadrangle with 10 Million Views: Julie Kalceff Answers our Question about Her Lesbian Web Series, ‘Starting From… Now!’

In recent years, web series have emerged as a platform for LGBT stories – so much so that that Bitch magazine named 2014 the summer of lesbian web series. Just as technology has helped to democratize other forms of story-telling, the falling price of video and audio production, and free delivery platforms like YouTube, have created a world where content that would be a tough sell for network television can find a niche audience online. The crowd-funded Australian web-series ‘Starting From… Now!’ provides a good example of how creators can connect with fans through content, despite their budget limitations.

Written by Katherine Murray.

In recent years, web series have emerged as a platform for LGBT stories – so much so that that Bitch magazine named 2014 the summer of lesbian web series. Just as technology has helped to democratize other forms of story-telling, the falling price of video and audio production, and free delivery platforms like YouTube, have created a world where content that would be a tough sell for network television can find a niche audience online. The crowd-funded Australian web-series Starting From… Now! provides a good example of how creators can connect with fans through content, despite their budget limitations.

In terms of niche markets online, Starting From… Now! falls somewhere in the romance > lesbian > angst > love triangle > PG-13 category. Its central character is Steph, a young graphic designer who moves to Sydney, Australia, and immediately falls in love with her friend’s long-term partner, Darcy. Believing that nothing can happen with Darcy, she soon starts dating a friend from work, placing herself in the corner of what will shortly be a love quadrangle where everyone gets hurt.

The first (and slowest) season hangs on whether or not Steph and Darcy will have an affair – no prizes for guessing that they will. Seasons two and three, though, focus on the fall-out from that decision, and the dynamics between the characters. It isn’t clear how much of an age difference exists between Steph and Darcy, but there’s a sense of realism in the way that Steph, the younger of the two, is convinced that she and Darcy are at the start of an epic love story, and the careless willingness she has to burn her bridges in pursuit of what she sees as the great, forbidden romance in her life. There’s also a sense of realism as we discover that Darcy, the older of the two, is in the middle of an identity crisis that has nothing to do with Steph, and that she might be using Steph as a way to escape from having to face conflict with her partner more directly. It starts to seem less like Steph is someone Darcy could fall in love with, and more like she’s a way for Darcy to implode her existing relationship, without having to end up alone.

Starting From… Now! is at its most interesting when it explores Darcy’s motivations for behaving the way she does, and when it forces Steph to face the consequences of being careless with other people’s feelings.

Partly supported by crowd-funding from viewers, the series now has 18 seven- to 10-minute episodes and over ten million views, with a fourth season in pre-production. Bitch Flicks had the chance to interview writer/director Julie Kalceff about the series, her plans for season four, and the character development we’ve seen so far.

What has the interaction with viewers and fans been like?

The interaction with fans has been amazing. It’s been one of the highlights of making the series. What’s surprised us is not only how passionate some of the fans become about some of the actions and choices of the characters, but also how much the series has meant to some audience members. We’ve received a number of messages saying how having access to lesbian content online has made them feel less alone.

How has releasing Starting From… Now! as a web series shaped the content of the show?

There’s a certain degree of freedom you have in making a web series that you don’t get when making a television show. You have far more creative control when making a web series. What you don’t have, however, is the budget of a television series. This means that a number of your choices are affected by the amount of time and money you have in regards to both production and post-production. We’ve worked hard to try and overcome these constraints. The goal from the start was to try and produce a quality show that still looks good, despite the budget constraints. If you have strong, complex characters and you build drama through the actions of those characters, then you have a chance of creating a compelling series, regardless of time and money.

With the exception of a couple of office workers in minor roles, there aren’t a lot of male characters on the show. Is that a deliberate choice?

This wasn’t a deliberate choice. In fact, it wasn’t until we had our first male speaking role in Season 3 Episode 5 that we realised this was the case. The fact that there are very few men is just a reflection of the world of these characters. They are lesbians. They spend most of their time with women.

In episode 3.5, we also find out some new information about Darcy’s parents – her father cheats and her mother has a lot of unfulfilled ambition. It’s clear that she’s worried about turning into them. How much do you think Darcy’s like her parents, and how do you see that relationship influencing her decisions?

That’s spot on, Darcy is worried about turning into her parents. Some viewers are critical of Darcy and her actions but I really think she’s doing the best she can. We’re a product of our environment and Darcy came from a pretty toxic environment. At least now she’s trying to take responsibility for her actions and make choices that take into consideration those around her.

What can we expect from season 4?

Season 4 is darker than the previous seasons. We’re taking the opportunity to explore new topics and push the boundaries a bit in regards to this world and the world of online content.

All of the existing episodes of Starting From… Now! are available for free on YouTube and the series’ official website.

Also on Bitch Flicks: Moving us Forward: Carmilla the series

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

‘Clouds of Sils Maria’ Is Exactly As Mysterious As Life

Now playing in North America, ‘Clouds of Sils Maria’ is the Kristen Stewart – Juliette Binoche are-they-or-aren’t-they-lesbians movie that critics have been raving about since Cannes 2014. I wasn’t able to see it at TIFF last year because the tickets sold out fast, but this movie, from writer-director Olivier Assayas, was well worth the wait. It’s thoughtful, well-acted, and everything else you’ve been promised.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Now playing in North America, Clouds of Sils Maria is the Kristen Stewart – Juliette Binoche are-they-or-aren’t-they-lesbians movie that critics have been raving about since Cannes 2014. I wasn’t able to see it at TIFF last year because the tickets sold out fast, but this movie, from writer-director Olivier Assayas, was well worth the wait. It’s thoughtful, well-acted, and everything else you’ve been promised.

Clouds of Sils Maria is a movie about ambiguity – in art, relationships, and our understanding of ourselves. The story follows an actress, Maria (played by Juliette Binoche), who’s been asked to star in a revival of the play that made her famous 20 years ago, this time as the elder of the two main characters. She and her assistant, Val (Kristen Stewart), hole up in Sils Maria, running lines and trying to prepare for the performance. Along the way, Maria must confront her fear of aging, and try to understand the way that her perspective on the play, and on her life, has changed with time.

It sounds like a simple set-up, but the movie draws a lot of complexity from the way that the fictional play, Maloja Snake, parallels Maria’s life. Particularly, it zeroes in on how the relationship between the play’s main characters – a business woman seduced by her scheming assistant, or an assistant seduced by her scheming boss – can be used as a prism to view the relationship Maria has with Val.

It’s a story about two people who share a connection they don’t understand – a connection that could be a lot of things, that we don’t have the words to articulate properly. Are they employer and employee? Are they friends? Does one or the other want more than friendship? Do they even like each other? No one is sure, and that’s part of the point.

The relationships in Maloja Snake are similarly ambiguous. Once the characters start talking about the play, it becomes clear that everyone remembers and interprets the story differently. In some versions, the business woman, Helene, is taking advantage of a young assistant who admires her; in other versions, the assistant, Sigrid, is taking advantage of a woman who envies her youth and beauty. In one interpretation of the story, Helene is really Sigrid herself, 20 years older – the same personality at a different stage in life. Maria’s own interpretation of the play changes depending on which of the characters she’s ask to empathise with. When she played Sigrid, 20 years in the past, she saw depth an humanity in the character – a sympathetic struggle that she doesn’t see now. Asked to take on the role of Helene, she struggles with the character’s vulnerability, trying to find a way to inhabit the role without feeling humiliated.

In one scene, Maria admits that the play’s original director, Wilhelm Melchior, must have seen something in her – must have felt something for her – to cast her as Sigrid, though she can’t define what that feeling was. It seems like it must be the same thing Maria feels for Val – like it’s maybe the same thing Helene feels for Sigrid – a spark of connection that can’t be explained.

Clouds of Sils Maria takes its time exploring these relationships – between Maria and Val, Helene and Sigrid, Helene and the play, as she ages – from several different angles, and always pulls away from giving us an easy answer. It’s too simplistic to say that Maloja Snake is literally the same as what’s happening between Maria and Val. It’s also too simplistic to say that Maria’s relationship with her young co-star – Jo-Ann Ellis, played by Chloë Grace Moretz – mirrors the play, or that Jo-Ann is scheming to steal the spotlight, or that she isn’t. The characters’ motivations are largely left up to interpretation, and writer/director Olivier Assayas resists the urge to over-explain their feelings, instead pulling back to let us draw our own conclusions.

Val and Maria have a professional relationship that’s complicated by something that seems like a friendship, which, in turn, is complicated by resentment, jealousy, impatience, neediness, dependency, and passive-aggression. In some ways, they represent two people, confused about how they feel – in other ways, they represent two different generations butting heads. Maria is dismissive toward Val’s opinions, and proud of herself for not recognizing young celebrities or liking mainstream movies. Val doesn’t seem to think Maria’s a very good actor, and teases her – with varying levels of hostility – for being out of touch. Like Maria at twenty and Maria at forty, they see the world differently, and they’re both convinced that what they see is right.

The really admirable thing about the movie is that it peels back all of those layers without ever telling us who we should side with, or what the story should mean. The message is that we don’t know – that life isn’t a multiple choice test, where you just pick the right answer. Sometimes it’s unclear – sometimes you don’t understand what somebody else is feeling, and sometimes you don’t understand yourself. Sometimes we’re doing the best we can with things that none of us know for certain.

Just in case existential dilemmas about the ambiguity of life aren’t enough to sell you on the movie, here’s the other stuff you need to know:

Is Kristen Stewart actually good in this? Yes. A lot of the time, when we talk about whether an actor’s good in a movie, we’re partially talking about casting – whether or not this role is the right fit for the actor, whether the actor fits in with the rest of the cast, etc, etc. Kristen Stewart isn’t doing anything all that different here from what she usually does, but it works well in this role. Val is supposed to be a bit of a cipher – she plays things close to the chest and masks most of her emotions when she’s around Maria. In the scenes where the characters are running lines, especially, Stewart’s bored, deadpan delivery also works as a perfect counterpoint to Binoche’s take on Maria – an actress who keeps her emotions very close to the surface and seems to be a bit volatile. Stewart also seems much more confident and relaxed in front of the camera than she has in other roles – this is my favourite thing I’ve seen her in.

How pretentious is it really? Not very. It’s more pretentious than a mainstream movie, but less pretentious than a lot of Serious Movies. For the most part, the film’s exploration of ambiguity actually stops it from being pretentious, because the characters aren’t presented as authorities on what’s happening. They can tell you what they think life is about, but part of the point is that you don’t know if you should believe them. There are a couple of moments that remind you you’re watching a Serious Movie but, mostly, you’ll be so caught up in the characters and in trying to solve the puzzle of their relationships, that you won’t mind a little pretention along the way.

Is there anything in it that’s going to offend me? Probably not. Clouds of Sils Maria doesn’t challenge the ideas we have about gender in any significant way, but it does give us a really thoughtful, interesting story about three women – which, in turn, gives three female actors a chance to shine. If you want to dig for something troubling, I offer you this: the movie takes for granted that aging is bad, and that it’s natural for older women to feel threatened by younger ones. We live in a youth-focused culture where a lot of people are afraid to get old, and where a lot of women – especially women in the entertainment industry – have good reasons to feel like their perceived value drops with age. Clouds doesn’t really do anything with that besides acknowledging that it’s so, and that seems like a missed opportunity but, for me, it didn’t detract much from the overall experience.

Was it worth $14 and having to eat concessions snacks for dinner? Yes. It’s a densely packed movie that doesn’t feel tedious to watch, and the scenery in Switzerland is beautiful. Because of the complexity involved in mirroring Maloja Snake to the movie’s plot, it’s also the kind of story you can think about and discuss after watching.

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

‘Waterworld’: Where We Were with Gender 20 Years Ago

Written by Katherine Murray.

In 1995, Waterworld was known for being stupid, stupidly expensive, and the first in a series of bad decisions that hurt Kevin Costner’s career — its reputation hasn’t changed a lot since then. Still, if I’m honest with you, the movie didn’t bother me that much when I was 11. Watching it again this past weekend, I wasn’t exactly shocked to find my perceptions had changed, but I was interested to see where Waterworld falls in the history of popular culture – including popular notions of gender. The movie isn’t as good as you’d hope – in fact, in many ways, it’s really, really bad – but it represents an important phase in how we understood ourselves as men and women.

For those of you who’ve blocked it out, Waterworld is a post-apocalyptic action-adventure movie about a future where the polar icecaps have melted, and humanity lives aboard boats, rafts, and makeshift floating cities. Dirt has become a form of currency, and people preserve fresh, drinkable water at all costs. In the midst of this open sea nightmare, Kevin Costner (whose character doesn’t have a name) is a mutant drifter who lives on the margins, salvaging, trading, and doing battle with pirates, all while looking bad-ass on his boat. Jeanne Tripplehorn is Helen, a shopkeeper on one of the floating cities, who’s adopted a girl named Enola – played by a 10-year-old Tina Majorino.

Enola has a map on her back that no one can interpret, which might show the way to dry land. When a group of pirates hears about it, they attack the floating city to kidnap her, and Helen makes a deal with Kevin Costner to save all their lives. The three of them travel together for most of the movie, facing random dangers on the sea, before they finally have a big showdown with the pirates.

From a critical perspective, Waterworld is both not as bad as we remember it, and worse than we remember it – suffering most from an inconsistent tone. The pirates are like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon, and everything that’s not the pirates is much more serious and grim than the movie seems to think it is. Judging Waterworld by the standards of ‘90s action-adventure movies, where were pretty broad in terms of character and plot, the first act is really promising. The plot points fall like dominoes to get Kevin Costner, Helen, and Enola on the ship together – there’s genuine tension, and all three characters are interesting.

From the vantage point of 2015, it would be easy to criticize the movie for its lack of subtlety and formulaic plot, but that’s partly because cinema has changed a lot in 20 years. Waterworld was created at a time when mainstream audiences didn’t expect a lot of self-referential humour or genre-subverting plot twists. Part of the reason we have so much of that now is because we first had a long stretch of films that were simple and earnest, and collectively established the genre conventions in the first place. It’s not that Waterworld’s doing anything so great and interesting – it’s just that, in terms of plot development, it’s more in the middle of the pack for 1995.

It’s also in the middle of the pack in terms of how gender’s portrayed, and that makes it an interesting snapshot of where were just 20 years ago – both in terms of how far Waterworld is from the movies that came out before, and how far it is from the movies coming out now. From the perspective of gender analysis, the most important part of the movie is the slow-moving part in the middle, where the story’s just about three people on a boat, and how they relate to each other.

Like many female leads of the ’90s, Helen is required to be capable, but not so capable that the man in her life can’t outdo her. She’s also required to be outspoken, as long as no one has to listen when she talks. In the movie’s first act, Helen breaks Kevin Costner out of a cage when the elders in her village try to murder him for being a mutant outsider. She and Enola see that he’s their opportunity to leave the city, and the three of them work together to open the gates and escape in his boat.

As soon as they’re on the boat, though, the story takes an ugly and confusing turn. Kevin Costner first wants to pitch Enola overboard because she’ll use up his resources and, although he lets both of them stay in the end, he’s completely fucking horrible for over half the movie, and it’s not clear how aware the movie is that that’s the case. The movie doesn’t seem to think it’s right for him to act like such an asshole, but it seems to think that this is understandable behaviour, and, sometimes, that it kind of makes him cool. Among the violent, hateful things Kevin Costner does:

He actually does throw Enola overboard, though we’re supposed to forgive him because he changes his mind and goes back for her
He cracks Helen in the head with a paddle, nearly knocking her unconscious, but her body is under a sail so we don’t have to see how brutal it is
He pimps Helen out to an obviously unbalanced creepball they meet on the sea, over her repeated objections – again, we’re supposed to forgive him because he changes his mind

In one of the most disturbing scenes, Helen damages the ship’s harpoon by using it to fight off pirates (and she manages to screw up fighting pirates so that Kevin Costner can look like the hero). Kevin Costner decides – and the film seems to agree with him – that he has the right to punish her for this by swinging a machete at her head and cutting off her hair. Enola speaks up to tell him he’s being an asshole, at which point he notices that she’s been using his crayons after he told her not to. We cut to shot where we see that Helen and Enola have now both lost their hair, and they sheepishly move out of Kevin Costner’s way when he walks by, and stop talking so they don’t annoy him. The movie doesn’t show us Kevin Costner swinging a machete at a terrified 10-year-old girl, and it seems to want us to think it’s funny that he’s restored order on the boat by getting the women to shut the hell up and stay out of his way.

Helen represents a new kind of fantasy woman, popular in the late ’80s and ’90s – one who’s ballsy and opinionated, but can absolutely, 100 percent, still be controlled. In fact, the only reason Helen’s “safe” for mainstream audiences in 1995 is that Kevin Costner’s total dominance over her is constantly reinforced. First, they butt heads in a series of conflicts he always easily wins, and then, once she starts to fall in love with him, they stop butting heads about anything, and she drops back to follow his lead. The message is basically that, if he can learn to be nicer to her, she can acknowledge that he’s her superior.

Helen is a step up from the days when the ideal woman was silent, empty-headed, and dependent, but she still exists mostly as an artefact of male fantasy. She’s fiery at first, because the man of 1995 could find that sexy. And, even though she stands up to the pirates, she’s ultimately submissive for the right kind of guy, because the man of 1995 found that non-threatening. What we see in Waterworld is a snapshot of American culture’s evolving idea of women, at a stage when we were trying to convince ourselves that feminism was compatible with all of the existing power structures patriarchy built, if we could just find the right way to look at it. We no longer believed that men had the right to control women, ipso facto, no matter what – but we still seemed to believe that men could earn the right to control certain women, by meeting vaguely defined obligations toward them. Because Kevin Costner ultimately protects Helen and Enola from other men, and overcomes his natural urge to murder them himself, he earns the right to be the boss in their relationship. It’s maybe half a step back from where we are now, and one step forward from when we were chattel.

Aside from the predictably horrible stuff about women, Waterworld is also interesting because of the snapshot it gives us of maleness. Kevin Costner’s character is antiquated by today’s standards – a type of hyper-competent manly man we don’t believe exists anymore, outside of adolescent fantasy. He’s good at everything he does, he kills people, he has a cool boat, he’s stoic, he’s wise, he gets the best of anyone who tries to screw him over – he’s such a badass that, when he goes fishing, he lets a sea monster swallow him whole so he can kill it from the inside.

He’s basically a cowboy who drinks his own piss.

At the same time, there’s a sense of vulnerability to character, because he hasn’t chosen to be an outsider. He’s an outcast because he’s a mutant, ashamed of his gills and webbed feet, forced to hide them for fear of being discovered. The movie strongly implies that the reason he’s mean isn’t just because it’s neat to be an asshole, or because he’s privy to some deep truth about the harsh realities of life – it’s partly because he’s lonely and he needs to learn how to connect with other people. In fact, the entire arc of his character development – such as it is – is that he learns to be less selfish, and becomes attached enough to Helen and Enola that he’ll risk his life and lose his boat to save them.

In the narrative of 1995, male leads still need to prove they’re capable of doing all the bad-ass things that men are supposed to be able to do. They still have to show that they don’t want to be all sissified, and caring, and interested in having conversations – they don’t want to hang around with women all the time, they don’t want to talk about their feelings, they don’t want to be all lame and interested in things like friendship when they could just swing machetes at your face – but then, somehow, somewhat against their will, they gradually start to have some vulnerable emotions and, as long as they keep blowing up the pirate ships, it’s still OK.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal by today’s standards, where male leads are often awkward, average, bumbling guys who get by with the help of their friends, but, in terms of action-adventure movie standards, having a hero who expressed self-doubt, loneliness, or insecurity was a step toward acknowledging that men have feelings, too.

The scene in Waterworld that’s maybe most instructive about how the movie sees both men and women, and the dynamics of relationships between them, is the scene just as we enter act two. Kevin Costner says he wants to toss Enola overboard, and Helen offers to have sex with him if she and Enola can stay. There’s a wide shot of the deck as she takes off her dress, and then there’s a long, silent moment where the actors communicate a lot of information through their expressions. It’s clear that Helen doesn’t want to sleep with Kevin Costner – that this is a horrible sacrifice she’s making to keep Enola safe, and it’s basically the worst day of her life. Kevin Costner is, at first, tempted by her offer, because he’s lonely, but, when he reads the disgust in her face, he backs off – maybe because he thinks she’s disgusted by his being a mutant, maybe because he doesn’t want to have sex with someone who isn’t into it, no matter what the reason – we don’t know. When she asks him later why he didn’t do it, his answer is the equally unreadable, “Because you didn’t want me.”

Waterworld is a movie that understands that women don’t actually want to have sex random dudes just because they are the heroes of the movie. It understands that, when women offer to trade sex for something, it’s usually not because they feel great about the deal. It understands that it would be wrong for Kevin Costner to accept the trade. At the same time, it’s a movie that wants to show us Jeanne Tripplehorn’s butt when she takes off her dress, and make sure we know that Kevin Costner totally could have done it with her if he wasn’t such a stand-up guy. Just like to totally could have murdered that kid, and totally could have pimped out his lady friend, also if he wasn’t such a stand-up, awesome guy.

It’s a vision of a world where men can still have the power to do whatever they want to to women, but where they sometimes shouldn’t – where, in fact, they are princely, amazing, good guys if they don’t. It’s a world where you should try to be nice to the people in a one-down position from you, as long as they aren’t climbing up.

Also, it’s a world where any random rope can be a bungee cord, and I don’t understand that part quite as well.

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