Rockhopper Productions’ first feature film, ‘Drunken Butterflies,’ is a fun-to-watch experiment in filmmaking that’s focused on friendship between working-class Newcastle girls.
Rockhopper Productions’ first feature film, Drunken Butterflies, is a fun-to-watch experiment in filmmaking that’s focused on friendship between working-class Newcastle girls.
To war
“Would you rather have Tracy’s extensions or Tracy’s face?”
So begins a conversation between Tracy’s two best friends in Drunken Butterflies, the debut film from UK director Garry Sykes, now available on VOD.
Billed as a cross between “scripted reality TV” and narrative story-telling, Butterflies is a loosely plotted, largely improvised day-in-the-life movie about six fictional Newcastle teens and the shifting friendships between them. The film relied on its cast of young actors to develop and workshop the characters and story, following a 20-page outline, and portions of the footage were filmed directly by the actors, using phones and hand-held cameras.
In other words, it’s a lot like The Blair Witch Project, if The Blair Witch Project contained an extended dialogue about vajazzling and didn’t make you want to puke.
As the story begins, the film’s main character, Chloe, has just had a falling-out with the hard-as-nails Tracy, causing four of their friends to pick sides to the tune of The Pipettes’ aptly-chosen “Judy.”
The next 90 minutes track the group’s movements through the day, following them through minor acts of betrayal, sporadic outbursts of violence, and moments of genuine caring. Their lives are volatile, confusing, and uncertain, but their makeup looks really amazing.
Oh, Judy…
As an experiment in film-making, Drunken Butterflies could have been more ambitious.
The film adopts a style that’s reminiscent of reality TV and documentaries, and there’s a self-referential scene toward the end, where two of the characters talk about how reality shows are all scripted, but there doesn’t seem to be a concrete message about the line between reality and fiction. Butterflies is more of a pastiche of different modes of representation, acknowledging that, in the age of reality TV and social media, the way that we present ourselves has changed. That those things are an extension of the fronts we already put up for the world.
It would have been nice if the film had done more with that idea, or delved deeper into questions of truth and personal identity – I don’t quite buy the press packet’s claim that “the lines between fiction and reality… crumble to nothing” because of this style – but the movie, I think, still succeeds in capturing something true.
While I didn’t grow up on the “Geordie Shore,” and can’t speak to how real that is, I recognize the girls in this movie as people who could have appeared in my own life – in some cases, as people who could have been me. I remember what it’s like to start a fight with someone just because. To stand there screaming the f-word, self-righteous, because you get off on the drama. To dare someone to hit you in the parking lot.
Ah, youth.
It’s a side of girlhood – and maybe a class-specific side of girlhood – that isn’t represented that often, and often isn’t represented in such a sympathetic way.
This is, first and foremost, a movie about female “toughness” – a quality that’s maybe less required of middle-class women, or is expressed by them in a different way. This is the toughness of physical fights – of being so hard that nothing can hurt you, because there’s a world of hurt waiting outside the front door.
This is literally the same expression as my happy face
As Butterflies starts to wind down, there are some plot threads that make less sense than they could, and some conflicts that seem to get resolved too easily, but the dominant theme is that life is an ongoing struggle. Each of the characters is fighting a private battle that sometimes puts her at odds with and sometimes makes her best friends with the others.
Life is chaotic and scary, and everyone’s just trying hard to survive.
Butterflies is also the rare film that focuses intently on relationships between girls, treating their interactions with boys as an afterthought. The event that sets everything in motion is the discovery that Chloe cheated on Tracy’s brother, Liam, but this isn’t a movie about whether Chloe and Liam will get back together – it’s about whether Chloe and Tracy will get back together. Liam is – in some cases, literally – pushed to the side while they argue about it.
Although gender isn’t the primary focus of the film, the story takes place in a setting where its heroes are, for the most part, menaced by cat-calls and threats of attack, where they talk to each other in front of a wall of pornography posted by boys. It’s uncomfortable to watch them turn their anger on “soft” targets – like a mild-mannered boy named Chris, whom they corner and bully – but there’s also something about that that rings true, even if the film doesn’t examine it at any great depth.
The decision to mold the characters based on the actors’ personalities means that even those with less experience come across as fairly convincing, and the use of hand-held cameras and cell phone video add a sense of immersion and reality to the experience.
For a film that was made on a pretty tight budget, Drunken Butterflies looks and sounds great – it’s an extremely watchable film that’s visually interesting as well as interesting to think about. Rather than having the freak show vibe that reality TV can carry, it feels like a sincere attempt to understand a particular intersection of gender and class that’s often ridiculed or stigmatized.
In that sense, I think it does achieve its goal of blending reality and fiction, in order to get at the truth.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
‘Glee’ was set in Lima, and then it was set in Lima and New York, and then it was set in New York, and now, for its final, thirteen-episode season, it’s moving back to Lima. The most important thing, though, is that it’s finally going to end.
Glee was set in Lima, and then it was set in Lima and New York, and then it was set in New York, and now, for its final, 13-episode season, it’s moving back to Lima. The most important thing, though, is that it’s finally going to end.
Even their street sign’s a little bit off
Glee has been on for five seasons, and there was no point during that time when it knew when it was trying to be. Originally conceived of as a cynical indie film, the TV show version of Gleebecame a mishmash of voices, depending on who was writing each episode, and it swung from satire to saccharine, comedy to drama, genuine insight to whatever the hell “Shooting Star” was supposed to be on a regular basis.
Glee has never known what it’s trying to be, but the question really got called at the end of season three, when most of the main characters were due to graduate high school. At that point, somebody had to decide: is Glee a show about a high school glee club, or is it a show about particular characters, whom we can follow after they step outside high school?
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the answer was still “I don’t know.”
The next one and a half seasons were split between the fictional high school, stationed in Lima, and a fictional performing arts school in New York, where most of the graduating characters happened to go. The New York plot line (eventually) featured three of the characters who had anchored the show during the first three seasons – heterosexual diva Rachel Berry, martyred gay man Kurt, and razor-tongued lesbian Santana.
In a slightly aged-up version of Fame, the characters lived and worked in New York, while Rachel and Kurt attended the fictional arts school, and they dealt with young-adult problems, like how to make long-distance relationships work, how to choose between competing opportunities, and how to deal with setbacks and disappointment. Adam Lambert was also there, for some reason.
Back in Lima, the B-team was still going to high school, and high school was full of new characters… who not-so-cleverly stepped in to fill the exact same roles as the old characters who’d left. Only, they had less distinct personalities, because no one is going to own the role of “The New Rachel” the way Lea Michele owns Rachel, and no one is going to be the new Kurt.
Part of Glee’ssuccess came from its original casting decisions. The role of Rachel was written with Lea Michele in mind, and Kurt was created for Chris Colfer, after he auditioned for another part. Naya Rivera and Heather Morris (Santana and her on-again-off-again girlfriend, Brittany) were originally cast in small roles that got bigger once it became clear that their delivery was turning the characters into fan favorites. None of the characters added late in the series – except, arguably, Kurt’s boyfriend, Blaine – have made such a strong impression.
It’s understandable that the producers would want to keep Lea Michele, Chris Colfer, and some of their other rapidly aging stars. The problem is that Glee was never framed as a story about particular people; it was framed as a story about the high school experience.
Buffy: a show that survived the transition to college
Shows that start out in high school typically have a rocky transition once the characters graduate. The ones that manage it best are the ones that are focused on particular people who happen to be in high school, rather than high schools who happen to have people in them.
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, for example, followed its main character from high school to college, and then from college to normal adulthood. The series was never about Sunnydale High – it was about the girl who killed vampires there. Similarly, Veronica Mars managed a slightly less graceful, but still pretty good transition to college, since the series was more about Veronica being a private detective than it was about Neptune High.
The way that Glee was framed and presented, during its first three seasons, it was mostly a show about high school. Rachel Berry was the lead character, but the focus of the show was the high school glee club and its power to transform the lives of students (by literally making them good singers as soon as they stepped inside the choir room, without any practice or training – I digress). The point of the show was that there were multiple journeys of personal discovery, and they were all united by the glee club.
Fame 2.0, in New York, was arguably a better show than Glee, but it wasn’t Glee, and, as we cut back and forth between the two shows, for one and a half seasons, it eventually became clear that someone was going to have to make a choice about which show to pour production resources into.
Someone chose New York.
The last half (or thereabout) of season five dumped the high school story line completely and moved everyone interesting – mostly characters who were introduced during the first three seasons – to New York on a permanent basis. The only strong character who didn’t move there was Coach Sylvester, played by Jane Lynch, but she came by to visit when she wasn’t hosting Hollywood Game Night. It was the right decision in terms of making a show that was good, but it was the wrong decision in terms of making a show that was Glee.
And, now the show is moving back to Lima for its final season. And its characters are now people who keep hanging around their old high school after they’ve already graduated.
These kids are, like, 30 right now
The boldest, riskiest decision that Glee could have made two years ago would have been to dump its existing characters and try to create the same magic with an incoming cast. But that’s not the world we live in.
Instead, Glee has become a hybrid of High School Choir Show, and The Rachel Berry Show, with Rachel (who is still the series’ most recognizable character) tethered to her high school for the rest of her life, in order that the series may exist. In season six, she’ll return to McKinley High – along with lots of her friends – as the new coach of the glee club. It’s sort of like when Buffy became a “counselor” at her high school, during the last and worst season, just so the action could take place on site.
Rachel’s story – which mirrors the story of many of the characters on Glee – was that she wasn’t pretty, and she wasn’t popular, and people threw ice in her face, but she knew, deep down in her heart, that she could be somebody special. That all she had to do was believe in herself, and keep pushing, and trust that one day she’d get the brass ring. Unfortunately for her, Glee loved her so much that the show clipped her wings to stop her from flying away.
Her story is now (spoilers say) that she “failed” in chasing her dreams, and has become a music teacher, like the series’ other failed dreamer, Mr. Shue. If Rachel wanted to be a teacher because she loved it, that would be different, but her only consistent motivation, over the past five years, has been wanting to be a star – something that the show has alternately criticized and rewarded her for at different times.
The truth is that Glee has always been partly The Story of Rachel, and the stakes have always been partly about whether or not she can triumph, despite having been unpopular when she was sixteen. At heart, it’s an underdog story, where (rightly or wrongly) she is the principle underdog, and we’re led to believe that her suffering will be redeemed because she turns out to be special.
The fact that Rachel now, literally, cannot leave high schoolbehind just reinforces one of the most troubling messages Glee has produced – that the person you are at 16 is the person you have to be, always. That you’d better embrace that person and sing a song about her, because any kind of change or growth is inauthentic.
An essential part of growing up is letting go, and learning to leave the past, whether good or bad, behind. It’s a tragedy if Rachel stays trapped in high school, either because it was the best time in her life (like Mr. Shue), or because it always haunts her as the worst.
The only hope I have for season six is that it somehow involves letting Rachel go free. After hate-watching this thing for five years, though, I’m also just glad it will end.
The final season of Glee is set to air in 2015.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
All art is political. That’s what they teach you in art school, and it’s what they teach you in criticism school. It’s apparently not what they teach you in internet troll school.
All art is political. That’s what they teach you in art school, and it’s what they teach you in criticism school. It’s apparently not what they teach you in Internet troll school. In a turn of events that is both terrifying and depressing, a feminist game critic was recently driven from her home by threats of violence after some men didn’t like a video she made. If you’ve been following the story, one of the ideas that keeps coming up is the notion that this critic was somehow imposing a political viewpoint on a space that was neutral before she arrived. She was, as the troll legends tell it, “ruining” something that was “pure entertainment” by “trying to make it political.”
Film has been treated as an art form, and been subject to the same critical analysis as art, for long enough now that it doesn’t gall people to see a review that focuses on more than the technical mechanics of how the thing was made. Even so, if you’re a critic who’s interested in gender, race, or sexuality, you still get blasted from time to time for “making things political” when they otherwise wouldn’t be.
With that in mind, may I present:
6 Types of Political Movies
Water
1. The Message Movie
The Message Movie explicitly takes a position on some political topic. Braveis about how women have the right to choose their own destinies. Born on the Fourth of Julyis an indictment of the Vietnam War. Quills at least thinks it’s about how freedom of expression is the most important good.
Message Movies don’t have to be blunt and simple – and I would argue that Brave and Born on the Fourth of July are fairly nuanced in their presentation – but the blunt, simple movies are the ones that are easiest to point to.
For example, Water, directed by Deepa Mehta, is a really nice-looking two hour lecture on how the Laws of Manu have led to women’s oppression in India. The two main story lines – about a young woman who’s forced into prostitution and then shamed into killing herself, and a child bride who becomes impoverished after the husband she’s only met once leaves her a widow – are shaped explicitly to drive this point home, and the movie ends with a third woman chasing after Gandhi’s train, begging him to help the untouchables.
Whether or not you agree with the film’s position on the issue – and I certainly don’t know enough about it to offer an opinion – Water is very straight-forward in its message and intent.It would be hard to walk away from it thinking that it wasn’t political, even if you didn’t know that Mehta’s films have sparked violent protest in India.
The Message Movie is the easiest kind of movie to discuss from a political point of view, because it frames the questions for you and draws attention to the issues it wants to debate.
Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 1 percent – even if we don’t all agree with or about the film’s message, we all understand that it’s trying to tell us something. Most people think it’s fair play to discuss that.
Children of Men
2. The Implied Message Movie
The Implied Message Movie still offers a strong point of view on political issues, and still seems to be doing it deliberately – it’s just not as explicit as the Message Movie.
One of my favorite films ever, Children of Men, mashes together everything wrong in the world, from terrorism to racism to wrongful imprisonment to war, but never didactically spells out its message for viewers. At the same time, no one would leave the theater believing that director Alfonso Cuarón is agnostic about immigration policy or the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib. The movie is full of disquieting, uncomfortable scenes and topical imagery that make the director’s position on real-life issues quite clear.
It’s the same way that no one would watch Brazil and walk away thinking, “I’m optimistic about the moral path our bureaucratic culture will be walking,” or feel like racial tension is not a pressing issue, based on watching Crash.
The Implied Message Movie has clearly dipped its oar in the river of politics, and has ideas it wants to share with us, even if they aren’t packaged and delivered quite as neatly as the message in the Message Movie.
Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 30 percent – depending on how abstract the movie’s themes are, there’s a chance someone will tell you that you’re ruining it by making it about real life.
Zero Dark Thirty
3. The “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie
The “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie also has its oar in the river of politics, but it resists pushing off in any particular direction. Biographical movies, or movies based on a true story, are especially likely to land in this category, since the filmmakers may feel that they shouldn’t “impose” a viewpoint on events.
Zero Dark Thirty, which is about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, was controversial, in part, because it didn’t come right out and say that torture was wrong. The scenes depicting torture are filmed in a cold, emotionally detached way, often taking us outside the point of view of either the victims or the perpetrators. Rather than discussing whether what happened was right or wrong, Zero Dark Thirty seems more interested in exploring the motivations behind it, from a fairly non-judgmental standpoint.
Michael Moore has a pretty persuasive argument for why the film is actually an indictment of torture as an interrogation technique, but your opinion on the events of the film will mostly depend on your opinion of torture in real life.
12 Years a Slave, though it’s not likely to be mistaken for a pro-slavery movie, is also far more interested in exploring the social and psychological dynamics of slavery than in arguing for why it’s wrong. As compassionate human beings, of course we understand that what we’re seeing is wrong, but the movie is leaving us to do the ideological work on our own.
Whereas Zero Dark Thirty and 12 Years a Slave use politically charged issues as their primary content, straight-up biographical movies like Walk the Line and The Runaways – especially when the subjects or direct descendants of the subjects are alive – often try to take a non-judgmental attitude toward the characters, simply reporting what they did, without examining the larger context.
In either case, the “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie leaves you on your own to decide how you feel about what happened and your feelings are probably based on information drawn from outside the film.
Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 30 percent – depending on how central the issue you want to discuss is to the movie’s themes, you may be accused of reading something into it that isn’t there.
The Help
4. The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie
The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie tells a benign, feel-good story that reaffirms what its target audience already believes, while steadfastly ignoring anything else that might crop up.
The Help exists to congratulate me, as a white person, for being less racist than the movie’s most villainous character. It invites the audience to identify with white people who Aren’t Racist, and completely limits the scope of its discussion to the Jim Crow era, avoiding any opportunity to draw a parallel or connection between racism as it existed in the 1960s and racism as it exists today.
Similarly, Forrest Gump takes a long tour through twentieth-century American history, reassuring us at every turn, through the simple, home-spun wisdom of its hero, that life is miraculous, love is important, and we should always have faith and feel hope. As Amy Nicholson recently pointed out in LA Weekly, the movie avoids discussing any of the difficult, contentious issues Forrest encounters, from the Vietnam War, to the AIDS crisis, to women’s rights, to civil rights – struggles that defined the national history it’s asking us to feel good about.
The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie doesn’t just leave us to make up our own minds – it actively steers us away from controversial topics by drawing our attention to the topics we’re most likely to agree about.
Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 50 percent – this is the tipping point where we start to talk about and criticize what’s not in the movie, and people don’t like that as much.
Sex and the City 2
5. The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie
The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie is aware that it should probably say something about the issues that it’s raised, but it would rather just do that quickly so it can move on.
Sex and the City 2, for example, makes the bizarre, kind-of-orientalist decision to send its characters to Abu Dhabi for most of the film. Once there, they are, of course, confronted with the very complicated and difficult issue of women’s rights within the UAE, which they address by:
Treating it like it’s none of their business, so they can have fun riding camels
Trying to make a culturally sensitive statement about how it’s probably OK to wear a veil
Deciding that the women of Abu Dhabi probably have things under control, since they meet to wear make-up in secret
Behaving in culturally inappropriate ways and then acting surprised when people get angry about it
Spilling a bunch of condoms all over the street and then screaming at people
Sex and the City 2 is in no way equipped to discuss a topic as complex and politically volatile as women’s rights in the UAE, and it doesn’t really want to do that, either. Instead, it awkwardly fluctuates through a series of attitudes wishing, like so many wayward travelers, that someone else’s political conflict didn’t have to ruin its vacation.
Similarly, 22 Jump Street, which I wrote about earlier, is aware that it should say something about gender and sexuality, given that so many of its jokes are essentially gay jokes, underneath. The best it can manage is an inconsistent pastiche of ideas, in which its characters sometimes deliver humorously-timed lectures on tolerance and equality.
The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie acknowledges that there’s something we might want to discuss about its content, but quietly begs us to just let it go.
Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 50 percent – depending on how graciously the film has requested that you not do this, and how entertaining it otherwise is, you might get told you’re a buzz-kill.
The Way Way Back
6. The Invisible Perspective Movie
The Invisible Perspective Movie realistically presents ideas and attitudes that are so normalized within our culture that we’ve forgotten that they form one particular perspective, rather than an objective view of reality.
In The Way Way Back, the film’s teenage protagonist forms an emotional bond with a surrogate father figure who helps him come of age as a man. The film, which is otherwise very thoughtful and enjoyable to watch, takes for granted that part of becoming a man involves learning to objectify women, and battling with other men to win a woman’s loyalty.
Someone watching the movie might say, “Well, that’s what boys learn to do,” and I’m sure that, for some boys, it is. But the fact that the movie doesn’t label or examine this as a political issue – the fact that it treats this as a completely unremarkable feature of gender – doesn’t mean the issue’s not there.
Edge of Tomorrow casually presents a female soldier as being competent and skilled – something that many critics did comment on, since it’s not what we usually see – and it also casually presents the fact that the male soldiers she serves with don’t like her and call her “Full-Metal Bitch” behind her back. Both of those things – the idea that a woman can be a competent soldier and the idea that that means nobody will like her – have political meanings, though you might notice only the first one – or neither – on the first pass.
Every movie that exists is made from a certain perspective, whether the movie calls attention to that perspective or not. And, since we live in a world full of constant political struggle, the perspective a movie is made with can necessarily be read as offering a political viewpoint.
That doesn’t make the movie good or bad – The Way Way Back doesn’t “lose” at politics because it didn’t spend a lot of time interrogating its perspective on gender – it just means that we frame our discussions about it differently. A movie that isn’t specifically trying to impart a political message is still a mirror to the culture that produced it and, by examining what we see in the mirror, we can learn new things about ourselves.
Critics add the most value when they talk about things that aren’t obvious, and help us to consider our assumptions from an alternate perspective. They do, indeed, “go looking for things” to talk about rather than taking films at face value, because that’s how you engage with art as something that’s culturally relevant.
Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 99 percent – people hate it when things are culturally relevant.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
Neil Jordan is best known for ‘The Crying Game’ —aka The Movie Where It Suddenly Turns Out That the Main Character is in Love with a Trans Woman – but he also made two vampire movies, and damn if those weren’t kind of interesting, too. Taken together, they show that the vampire genre can be re-invented in all kinds of ways, as long as there’s substance under the biting and blood.
Neil Jordan is best known for The Crying Game—aka The Movie Where It Suddenly Turns Out That the Main Character is in Love with a Trans Woman – but he also made two vampire movies, and damn if those weren’t kind of interesting, too. Taken together, they show that the vampire genre can be re-invented in all kinds of ways, as long as there’s substance under the biting and blood.
This family is non-traditional in more than one way
Let’s start with the obvious one. Interview with the Vampire is unusually relaxed about its LGBT content, especially given that it came out 20 years ago, in 1994 (a special anniversary blu-ray will be available soon). It’s a mainstream Hollywood movie about a bisexual man finding the self-esteem to leave an emotionally abusive relationship, and it has bankable A-list actors – one of whom famously sues people for saying he’s gay – in the lead roles.
Yet, it’s not remembered as being especially controversial. The characters don’t have sex – in the Rice verse, vampires are pretty much impotent and only get off on biting – but it’s clear that Brad Pitt’s character, Louis, is in two separate homosexual relationships over the course of the film. Interview was marketed as a vampire movie, though, rather than a gay romance, and the fact that people are biting each other rather than kissing apparently masks all other content.
In fact, “They’re vampires!” seems to mask many of the emotional and interpersonal dynamics in the film, which is kind of a shame, since Interview with the Vampire is a very complicated, well-dramatized story about co-dependency and toxic, emotionally abusive or incestuous relationships. The fact that at least two of these relationships are homosexual is treated as No Big Deal by the movie, and could potentially sail right past you – I guess – because of the fangs.
The female vampire, Claudia (played by a 12-year-old Kirsten Dunst), is literally an adult woman trapped in a child’s body, but she’s also a representation of how her fathers’ infantilizing treatment of her has kept her from becoming independent. When Lestat (Tom Cruise) turns her into a vampire, he does it specifically to manipulate Louis, after Louis threatens to leave him – it’s not about wanting a child, or wanting Claudia, specifically; it’s about wanting another thing to control and another avenue to control what he already has. We find out later in the film that what he’s done is forbidden – that vampires generally feel it’s wrong to create something that can’t survive on its own; a creature that will be trapped with you through its dependency.
Claudia is never allowed to become an adult and, since she and Louis are both victimized by Lestat, they form an emotionally incestuous bond that’s based on his taking care of her, and her being (sort of) his wife. She’s afraid that he’s going to leave her; he feels guilty about what will happen if he tries to strike out on his own.
In the end, Louis finds a new boyfriend, who murders Claudia in order to have Louis to himself and, at that point, Louis realizes that he can’t spend the rest of eternity taking care of people – whether it’s Lestat, or Claudia, or this new guy – and he decides to go live by himself, at which point he discovers that that possibility is not as terrible as he imagined.
“They’re vampires!” certainly adds an extra layer of interest to the story, and creates lots of opportunities for gory, stylized violence, but it’s the all-too-boring, all-too-common human dynamic beneath it that makes the vampire stuff worthwhile. It’s a story that spans centuries and uses fantastical elements like, “Look, this child can never grow up!” to touch on deeper reflections about dysfunctional relationships, boundaries, and self-esteem. The fact that it snuck the idea of two gay/bisexual men raising a child together into popular culture is just an added bonus.
Jordan revisits some of the same themes in his less well-known but more political vampire movie, Byzantium (2012), written by Moira Buffini.
Some vampires are made in a cave
More in-your-face than Interview with the Vampire, Byzantium tells the story of Clara and Eleanor Webb (Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan), a vampire mother and daughter on the run from others of their kind who want to kill them.
Most of the story takes place in the present day, but flashbacks slowly reveal the tale of how Clara (who is Eleanor’s biological mother as well as her vampire!mother) was forced into a life of prostitution by a misogynist naval officer, Captain Ruthven, and later stole the map to immortality from him.
The way we get this information is really ham-fisted, and it’s lacking in any kind of subtlety or emotional weight, but the idea is important. Ruthven comes by the map in the first place because local Nice Guy, Darvell, who thinks of himself as a good person, invites Ruthven to join his Secret Special Amazing Fraternity of Super Cool Dudes, knowing that Ruthven viciously destroyed Clara’s life. He feels sorry for her, but the idea that Ruthven is responsible for doing this to her is in no way incompatible, for him, with the idea that Ruthven is the kind of guy you’d want to be blood brothers with for eternity.
When Clara steals the map to the supernatural cave that turns people into vampires (just go with it), Darvell gets pissed-off and tells her that she ruined everything by becoming the first female vampire. She’s forbidden from turning anyone else, but, when Ruthven attacks Eleanor as revenge for Clara stealing his map, Clara brings Eleanor to the cave and makes her a vampire, too. Nice Guy Darvell spends the next two hundred years trying to kill them because they wrecked his super special brotherhood.
Along the way to driving home this point about women’s equality, Byzantium also explores the uncomfortable dynamic between Clara and Eleanor, where they’re more like sisters than parent and child – partly owing to the fact that Clara was so young when she gave birth to Eleanor – and the uncomfortable way in which Clara keeps resorting to prostitution as a way of making money. (This is maybe the only vampire movie where the vampires are not somehow rich, and you can easily trace it to the lack of opportunity they’ve had as women).
In the end – spoiler, spoiler – Darvell finally figures out that he’s being an asshole, and Clara figures out that Eleanor needs to have her own life rather than being a project for Clara to work on.
Byzantium is not a subtle movie, but it’s interesting in that it uses the long life of vampires to trace the social position that women have held in Western culture, over the past 200 years. When we first meet Clara, she isn’t even treated as a person – in fact, she steals personhood from a group of men, and passes it onto her daughter, making her public enemy number one. Flash forward to the present, and it’s ridiculous to suggest that Clara and Eleanor aren’t people – so ridiculous that even Darvell comes around to the idea, in the end.
It’s a very different narrative about vampirism than the one where male aristocrats get to hang out being rich and good-looking, luring women toward them in some kind of magical thrall. It’s a narrative that takes into account that the world looks different depending on whether you’re standing on top, or getting your face stomped in, down below.
Whereas Interview with the Vampire has a more general message that isn’t specifically about being gay, and casually pulls in gay characters, Byzantium is much more overtly political, and much more about articulating an experience that is specifically female. Both approaches are interesting, and both offer something more than “They’re vampires!” to steer the story.
Interview with the Vampire and Byzantium are both movies that use their supernatural elements as a springboard for exploring social and psychological content that’s relevant to the world we live in. Rather than using real-life issues as window-dressing (True Blood), or being purely escapist (Twilight, Dracula), Neil Jordan’s vampire movies (and the source works they’re based on) show how you can re-imagine the vampire in different, less superficial ways, based on what kind of analogy you’re trying to make.
We’re living in a time of vampire saturation, but it’s a (blood) well that doesn’t actually have to run dry. As long as “vampire” is tied to something more than having fangs, I’ll keep watching these movies forever.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
‘Masters of Sex’ is not a great show. It’s awkward and safe and seems to think that we’re impressed by watching people masturbate. But it’s also this really strange, kind-of cool story all about the masculine ideal and a time traveler who tries to break the cycle of self-hatred that supports it.
Masters of Sex is not a great show. It’s awkward and safe and seems to think that we’re impressed by watching people masturbate. But it’s also this really strange, kind-of cool story all about the masculine ideal and a time traveler who tries to break the cycle of self-hatred that supports it.
Bill, Virginia, and the terror of human emotion
Masters of Sex, if you haven’t been watching or hate-watching it,is a fictionalized account of the work done by of real-life sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson in the late 1950s. Officially, the series is about the study they conducted and the breakthroughs they made in our understanding of human sexuality. Unofficially, it’s a love story, too.
We know from history that the real Masters and Johnson eventually married, and the tension in Masters of Sex isn’t about whether they’ll get together. The tension in Masters of Sex is about whether Virginia can rescue Bill from his sense of self-hatred by freeing him from 1950s gender norms. She is the hero, and that is her quest; if she succeeds – and we think she’ll succeed – her reward will be his love.
Most of what we’ve learned about Bill, so far, has been in service of explaining Virginia’s quest to save him. He’s smart and sensitive and, basically, a good, well-meaning person, but he has a tragic backstory involving an abusive father, and an internalized sense of shame around his own emotions. With his wife – he’s married when he meets Virginia – he acts out the gender roles he’s learned. That is, he treats her kindly, but like something that’s foreign to him; a creature from another planet that he can’t quite understand. He doesn’t feel that he can talk to her about his troubles; he thinks that she depends on him to be a stable presence. He would like her to admire him, and thinks that he would damage their relationship by revealing his true self.
The reality, of course – and this is dramatized well by Masters of Sex – is that Bill’s wife would like nothing more than to be emotionally intimate with him – to know what he’s thinking and feeling, to have a sense that they’re on the same team. Unfortunately, her own ideas about gender are just as antiquated as Bill’s, and she is, in fact, alarmed when he shows signs of strong emotion. She also treats him like something foreign and unintelligible, hiding her own feelings, and acting like he’s more of a guest in their house than someone who actually lives there.
Virginia, just as stereotypes would have it, is the mistress that Bill can be his true self with. It’s a little bit because he looks down on her, a little bit because he respects her, and a lot because Virginia is a time traveler from 2014.
As the character the audience is most invited to identify with, Virginia is the mouthpiece for most of our beliefs. Masters of Sex is awfully proud of itself for telling us things like “the clitoris exists,” but its target audience is people who already know all this stuff. Specifically, the target audience seems to be women like Virginia – smart, single, independent, self-supporting, sex-positive women with liberal values and a soft spot in their hearts for closed-off men. Virginia is us, wearing a dress from the 1950s, and we get to vicariously rescue the 1950s, and Bill, from the backwards social taboos of the time.
It’s a story-telling strategy that’s sometimes extremely annoying, and other times strangely effective.
Virginia, with Lillian, who overcame Being a Woman to also become A Doctor, and then get killed by being a woman, because she has cervical cancer
On the annoying front, Masters of Sex doesn’t usually challenge us. Despite the fact that it’s supposedly about two people who had radical ideas for their time, the show’s pretty safe by today’s standards. It takes the bold stance, for example, that gay people shouldn’t try to turn themselves straight with electroshock therapy. And that women can have careers outside the home. And that people can have sex for recreational purposes. And that you shouldn’t be a dick to someone just because they’re black.
None of these are radical ideas by today’s standards, and we’re invited to look backwards at the 1950s with a sense of satisfaction about how much things have changed. At least so far, there’s very little attempt to examine racism, sexism, or homophobia from an angle that would highlight ongoing problems today. It’s all done retrospectively, like, “Can you believe what people were like?!?” And we share Virginia’s bewilderment and exasperation. She’s essentially A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with a social rather than technological advantage. If we identify with her, we might enjoy the sense of feeling forward-looking and superior, but we don’t learn very much about ourselves.
Masters and Johnson’s actual research, as presented by the show, isn’t exactly a bag of surprises, either. We watch all of the characters freak out over discoveries like, “women can have multiple orgasms” and “people curl their toes during sex.” Were you aware that not everyone who has sex does so in the missionary position? Or that sometimes they think about something other than the person they’re having sex with? If so, you won’t learn anything new, here.
In some ways, this backward-looking orientation is most frustrating when the show is just barely unable to address information that’s actually useful today. There is, for example, a really topical B-plot about cervical cancer that can’t communicate the most important fact we now know about cervical cancer – that it’s caused by HPV, and that there are vaccines for that. The bitter irony of leading the audience to think about cervical cancer each week, without telling them the one thing they might need to know, is almost too much to take. Instead of learning something that might be of actual use, the audience is invited to feel good about the fact that pap smears are now a common practice.
We’re generally invited, through the benefit of hindsight, to see 1950s America as misguided and conservative, and to see Virginia as a hero who’s fighting a noble battle to achieve the future. We know that, in most cases, history is on her side, and we see that she faithfully represents our values. Somehow, she hasn’t internalized any of the bullshit in her culture. That makes her annoying, sometimes, but it’s also what makes her the perfect champion for Bill – she stands outside of everything that makes him hate himself, and offers the perspective that only a (highly improbable) outsider can give.
Bill and Virginia engage in a little after-sex metaphor-making
The root of Bill’s self-hatred is the masculine ideal. The cornerstone of any really excellent/terrible patriarchy, the masculine ideal is the notion that there is only one really desirable Way for a person to Be. Women are automatically excluded from being that Way, but so are most men. In the USA, and cultures like it, the masculine ideal of the 1950s required things like: heterosexuality; skill in physical combat;
avoiding the outward display of any emotion except, perhaps, anger; and courage in the face of physical danger. Trying to meet the requirements of that ideal – trying to be a “real man” and win approval from one’s peers – could lead to aggression, misogyny, homophobia, and the construction of a private emotional prison where normal feelings like sadness, embarrassment, grief, loneliness, uncertainty, and fear could fester until they got twisted.
The 1950s – the era that present-day conservatives harken back to when they talk about the good old days – is really a peak in the backlash against equal rights for people who weren’t straight, white men. It was a doubling down on rigid ideas that we now understand can hurt everyone – even the straight, white men who supposedly benefit from them.
Virginia, as a time traveler with values from the future, can give Bill something that nobody else – including his well-meaning wife – can deliver. She can give him a space where it’s safe to let go of all of the things he’s been taught about who he should be, and find out who he is underneath. It’s like Idina Menzel on that mountain.
“Fight,” the series’ best and most critically lauded episode so far, is nothing but a really heavy-handed treatise on this point. Bill and Virginia meet to have sex in a hotel, and a hugely symbolic boxing match on television leads Bill to confess, for the first time out loud, that his father used to beat him as a child and that his only form of protest was to take it “like a man” by not allowing himself to reveal how much it hurt him.
Virginia, who is horrified by this, tells Bill that she won’t raise her son to think that that’s the way to be a man.
The episode uses boxing as a metaphor for several other things, but the point it eventually drives at is that the ability to be vulnerable in front of other people is a strength. This is an idea that’s decidedly 2014, where we’re starting to understand the cost that comes from raising people to suppress their feelings, and shifting to a greater emphasis on mental and emotional health.
The idea that a woman can “save” a man by teaching him to talk about his feelings has become a cliché in the genre, but it’s one that makes sense in this setting. Virginia is the spokesperson for a future where feminists have already largely succeeded in challenging the masculine ideal – where everyone has benefited from discovering that there is more than one right Way to Be. Bill’s anguish and emotional isolation are a reminder of why no one should want to go back to the so-called golden era where men were “real men.”
The informative part of the series – “this is how anatomy works!” – isn’t telling us anything new, and the social values it promotes aren’t very challenging, but, if there’s something relevant buried deep within Masters of Sex, it’s the pointed view it takes of masculinity. It shows us how rigid notions of gender hurt everyone, not just specifically women, and highlights not just the distance we’ve traveled, but why it’s important to go there.
The series’ discussion of gender is the rare instance where its visionary characters have a vision that extends into our future. One where we stop feeling nostalgic for the 50s, and look forward to what we’ll become when we’ve let that all go.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
’22 Jump Street’ alternately endorses and makes fun of the idea that we should be sensitive, tolerant people, but it isn’t mean-spirited or offensive – it’s just sort of harmlessly dumb.
22 Jump Street alternately endorses and makes fun of the idea that we should be sensitive, tolerant people, but it isn’t mean-spirited or offensive – it’s just sort of harmlessly dumb.
The Whole Movie in One Screenshot
The premise of 22 Jump Street is that the characters from 21 Jump Street — two undercover cops played by Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill – have to do the exact same thing they did in the first movie, but with a bigger budget, and in a slightly different setting. I’m not being sarcastic – that’s actually the brief they get from their Captain at the start of the movie, because 22 Jump Street is one long, self-referential joke about making a half-assed sequel.
In this particular case, the cops, who went undercover as high school students in 21 Jump Street, are now undercover as college students. There are jokes about college, jokes about movies, and jokes about how the characters look really old, but the dominant theme in the movie is that it, and its characters, try really hard to be not homophobic, not sexist, not racist… and don’t always figure out how.
The most obvious example of this, and the one that’s been discussed the most often in reviews, is that the friendship between Tatum and Hill’s characters – Jenko and Schmidt – plays out as if it’s a romance. Jenko becomes friends with a football player, making Schmidt jealous, and leading them to fight about whether they should split up and “investigate different people.” There’s a sad musical montage while they think about how much they miss each other, before they agree to team up again as “a one-time thing.” When they reconcile, in the end, Jenko’s football player friend looks on with a mixture of joy and regret, declaring, “That’s who he should be with!”
Despite their cover story being that they’re brothers, and the fact that Schmidt starts dating a woman, other people mistake them for a couple, too. A school counselor makes them hold hands and attend couple’s therapy; some drug dealers think they’re having oral sex during a bust.
The movie is trying hard to be not homophobic – there’s even a part where Jenko, who’s forced to take a seminar on human sexuality, explains why you can’t use gay slurs – but, when you boil it down, the joke is still, “They seem gay, but they’re not!”
After a long period of time where movies couldn’t allude to homosexuality at all, and a shorter period of time where they could only do it in a derogatory or pejorative way, we’re now in a place where mainstream movies are totally cool with joking that their leading men are gay… as long as it’s clear that they don’t have gay sex. It’s a step forward, for sure, and you can argue that 22 Jump Street is just making fun of the homoerotic subtext that’s already present in buddy cop movies, but the joke is still based on the idea that actually being gay is a bridge that can never be crossed.
This kind of humor has gotten more and more prevalent as public acceptance toward the LGBT community has increased. Homosexuality is no longer something so taboo that we can’t even talk about it – and it’s no longer a career killer for heterosexual actors to play a gay character, or to joke about their masculinity. “They seem gay, but they’re not!” has shown up in R-rated comedies, and most of the recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations – including the Robert Downey Jr. movies, House, and, most notably, BBC’s Sherlock – and the punch line is always the same: “Ha ha ha. This looks gay, and we’re fine with looking gay – and doesn’t it reflect well on us, that we’re not afraid to look gay – but, just so you know, we’re not gay.”
If you were watching a movie or TV show about a man and woman who really, really acted like a couple, and people mistook them for a couple, and there were constantly jokes introducing the idea that they should be a couple, chances are they’d end up as a couple. Usually, the point of making those sorts of observations in the early part of a movie or series is to plant the idea in the audience’s mind that the characters should get together, and introduce tension about whether or not they will. It’s the same principle as We’re the Millers, where Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis pretend to be married as part of con, but end up falling in love. Or the second season of Orange is the New Black, where Larry and Polly are mistaken for a couple, and it makes them realize that they should be one. Or even the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Buffy and her mortal enemy, Spike, fall under a spell that makes them act like they’re in love, which leads to them actually falling in love.
With 22 Jump Street and its contemporaries, we’re under no illusion that the story will resolve itself that way. In fact, part of the point of the joke is that we take for granted that it won’t. That’s what makes it a “safe” joke to tell. That doesn’t offend me, and I understand that joking about things in a non-judgemental way can be a step toward acceptance. The movie just isn’t as progressive as it seems to want to be.
Most Awkward Fistfight Ever
Speaking of things that aren’t as progressive as they seem to want to be, 22 Jump Street, intentionally or not, dramatizes the same type of struggle in Schmidt. While the movie is awkwardly trying to avoid homophobia without being sure what to do, Schmidt awkwardly tries to avoid being sexist or racist, with mixed and confusing results.
There’s a running joke in the film where he tries to suck up to the Captain (played by Ice Cube) by saying what he clearly thinks are appropriately sensitive things about race. When the Captain flips out and starts yelling for the waiter in a restaurant, Schmidt defends him by saying, “He’s black! He’s been through a lot!” When the case is initially explained to him – that a black woman died after taking drugs sold to her by a white man – Schmidt comments that’s it’s refreshing to have a black victim, and that the fact that she’s black makes him care so much more. Jenko corrects him that he means to say he cares equally, but Schmidt’s adamant that he cares more.
In both cases, everyone else in the scene is confused or annoyed by his comments, and the joke seems to be that he’s trying too hard to seem sensitive without knowing how to go about it. (In the second case, the joke might also be that people who criticize casting decisions in movies are similarly misguided about it).
Schmidt’s also confused about how to relate to women. One of the antagonists in the movie is his girlfriend’s roommate, Mercedes (played by Jillian Bell). Her idea of conversation is to crack deadpan jokes about his age, even when they’re in life or death situations (which is funny), and, at one point, they get into a fistfight, where he’s not sure if it’s okay to hit her. She yells at him that, if he saw her as a person, he’d punch her in the face, and he does it, but he feels really awkward and uncomfortable. (There’s also an improvised moment where they become confused about whether they’re going to kiss during the fight.)
The fistfight scene stands out as one that captures Schmidt and 22 Jump Street’s dilemma pretty clearly – as a reasonably progressive straight, white guy, he wants to do the right thing and not be racist, sexist, or homophobic, but he has no idea what he is and isn’t supposed to do and say. The absurdity of a situation where, in order to be feminist, you have to punch a woman in the face sums up the conflict pretty clearly – in this brave new world we live in, well-meaning people still get confused about how they’re supposed to behave.
The film also has less thoughtful sequences. Schmidt hooks up with a woman named Maya, and we’re supposed to laugh at the idea that he wants to have a relationship while she’s looking for a one night stand (because women are supposed to want relationships, and men are supposed to want one night stands, get it?). He does the walk of shame in the morning, where it appears that he’s the only man among a group of women, and a later scene in the movie follows this up by showing us that Schmidt is now on a first name basis with the same women (implicitly because he’s done this so often that they’ve all gotten to know each other).
The joke “Schmidt makes friends with the other people doing the walk of shame, because he does it all the time” is funny in itself, but Jonah Hill, for some reason, adopts a more effeminate posture and delivery during those scenes, making the joke more like, “Schmidt’s become one of the girls!” Which is funny because… it’s emasculating? Like being gay?
I honestly don’t know.
22 Jump Street exists in a sort of no-man’s-land where we don’t want to be bigoted or hateful, but where even the least homophobic person in the world can reach for a gay slur in anger, and where, even a movie that’s trying to be progressive can reach for jokes that tacitly confirm the same stereotypes it’s opposing. It’s a snapshot of where mainstream culture is, now, where we want to be better, and thoughtful, and kind, but we haven’t dismantled the language that came before. We’re in a transitional stage between the generations that would find this movie offensively tolerant, and those that will find it offensively backward.
You’re Welcome
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
Pitchy, breathy, raspy, screamy – all the notes are there as A-list Hollywood actors hurl themselves at the camera, relishing the chance to look and sound as ugly as their quasi-operatic characters feel. The soundtrack is probably not going to go on your iPod.
That said, there’s something amazing about the pitchiness / raspiness / screaminess / ugliness that serves to draw us in.
This repost by Katherine Murray appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.
Ugly singing; ugly make-up. Les Misérables is deservedly known as the film that tried too hard to bum us out, and Anne Hathaway is known as the actress who tries too hard to be liked. But isn’t it nice, sometimes, when somebody makes an effort?
Anne Hathaway screams a dream in Les Mis
Tom Hooper’s 2012 film adaptation of Les Misérables is either an exercise in profoundly committed, sincere expressions of raw emotion, or a hammy, emotionally manipulative attempt to win Oscars. In fact, it’s probably both of those things at different times, but it stands out due to Hooper’s unusual choice to record the actors singing live.
Pitchy, breathy, raspy, screamy – all the notes are there as A-list Hollywood actors hurl themselves at the camera, relishing the chance to look and sound as ugly as their quasi-operatic characters feel. The soundtrack is probably not going to go on your iPod.
That said, there’s something amazing about the pitchiness / raspiness / screaminess / ugliness that serves to draw us in. When the cast list was announced, it seemed strange, because many of the actors were not really known as great singers, but the movie isn’t about singing an ear-pleasing song. It’s about letting the actors emote in the moment, having their voices sync up with the other acting choices they make in the scene – the result is something that seems so authentic and raw that it starts to go the other way and seem manipulative again.
The standout number in the film, and the one you would cite, were you trying to convince someone it’s awesome, is, of course, Anne Hathaway sobbing her way through “I Dreamed a Dream.” She won an armful of awards for it, including an Oscar, and deservedly so. There’s something beautiful and unselfconscious about the way she just lets herself go in that scene – a kind of emotional nakedness, where we believe the despair that she’s feeling. We can see that she’s let herself disappear inside the character, and invited us to see her in this dark, vulnerable moment, without any fear that she’s going to look stupid. That’s rare, and it displays a type of courage and skill as a performer that should be rewarded.
It’s also reminiscent of Jennifer Hudson’s standout performance of “And I am Telling You I’m Not Going” in Dreamgirls. That performance similarly made the whole movie, and led to an Oscar win for the woman screaming her pain to the camera.
Jennifer Hudson brings down the house in Dreamgirls
Hudson doesn’t go to the ugly place in Dreamgirls. The studio-recorded track sounds beautiful, and the makeup department isn’t trying to make her look diseased. What makes the scene stand out, though, is still the amount of raw emotion she pours into it. A more gifted vocalist than Hathaway, she uses her voice to convey a torrent of rage, despair, and desperation, which she then telegraphs through her body language and facial expressions on screen.
We’re drawn into her performance, and it conveys the most important emotional truth of the scene – that, even though her character’s words sound powerful, they’re being shouted from a place of total loss. She says, “I am telling you,” but there’s no one to tell. She’s lost her partner and her friends — she stands alone on a darkened stage without even the audience she hungered for. And, into the darkness, she orders, “You’re gonna love me, yes you are!”
It’s a powerful moment, and Hathaway’s performance in Les Misérables is like that, with the additional layer that Les Mis is so proud of her suffering.
Whereas Dreamgirls is a pretty standard and standardly-shot movie musical – enlivened by outstanding vocals from Hudson and co-star Beyoncé — Les Misérables is really reaching for the brass ring. It has a take-no-prisoner’s approach to engaging with the story’s pathos, and an awkward kind of delight in making everyone seem plague-ridden and miserable.
Her bed is a coffin — get it?
Don’t get me wrong – I love Les Misérables. I had low expectations, but I was less than ten minutes in before I felt that special shiver of delight that tells you you’re watching a kick-ass movie. I would much rather watch a film where everyone really goes for it, even if their reach sometimes exceeds their grasp.
At the same time, I completely understand why some people found it annoying.
The annoyance comes in part because you’re watching people who do not live in poverty pat themselves on the back for how poor they’re willing to make themselves look, and how deeply they’re willing to crawl inside the suffering of others. The ugly singing and the ugly makeup can be read as self-congratulatory – “Look how much I’m willing to debase myself for art! I don’t care if I look pretty; I just care if I’m authentic.” After a certain point, it comes across as trying too hard – of actually being inauthentic, since the attempt at authenticity feels so calculated.
It’s the same criticism that’s followed Anne Hathaway, herself. Whereas Jennifer Hudson came across to us as a spirited American Idol reject, who made good on her big dreams of stardom by signing her heart out in Dreamgirls, Anne Hathaway has been criticized for coming across as fake during public appearances. In fact, the backlash against Hathaway reached a fever pitch just as she was accepting her slew of awards for Les Mis.
No doubt, there’s a sharp contrast between the vulnerability she shows in “I Dreamed a Dream,” and the polished, eager-to-please persona she throws on in public. (Though I hasten to add that a lot of celebrities seem self-conscious in managing their public personas; for people who want to be liked, there’s nothing better or worse than having millions of people stare at you).
The general reaction to Les Misérables seems to fall along similar lines. The raw, ugly, emotionally intense performance is either touching because it seems authentic, or it’s disgusting because it seems crass and manipulative. We all agree that the emotions, like the vocals, weren’t cooked and seasoned before they were served, but we don’t agree about whether that’s fresh and exciting, or lazy and self-involved.
Like Anne Hathaway, the movie is trying hard. Like Jennifer Hudson, it’s screaming, “You’re gonna love me,” into the darkness. One cannot dare to be loved without risking rejection, and Les Misérables invites both love and rejection from its audience – but, isn’t it beautiful to see – and to hear – someone try?
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
Ugly singing; ugly make-up. ‘Les Misérables’ is deservedly known as the film that tried too hard to bum us out, and Anne Hathaway is known as the actress who tries too hard to be liked. But, isn’t it nice, sometimes, when somebody makes an effort?
Ugly singing; ugly make-up. Les Misérables is deservedly known as the film that tried too hard to bum us out, and Anne Hathaway is known as the actress who tries too hard to be liked. But isn’t it nice, sometimes, when somebody makes an effort?
Anne Hathaway screams a dream in Les Mis
Tom Hooper’s 2012 film adaptation of Les Misérables is either an exercise in profoundly committed, sincere expressions of raw emotion, or a hammy, emotionally manipulative attempt to win Oscars. In fact, it’s probably both of those things at different times, but it stands out due to Hooper’s unusual choice to record the actors singing live.
Pitchy, breathy, raspy, screamy – all the notes are there as A-list Hollywood actors hurl themselves at the camera, relishing the chance to look and sound as ugly as their quasi-operatic characters feel. The soundtrack is probably not going to go on your iPod.
That said, there’s something amazing about the pitchiness / raspiness / screaminess / ugliness that serves to draw us in. When the cast list was announced, it seemed strange, because many of the actors were not really known as great singers, but the movie isn’t about singing an ear-pleasing song. It’s about letting the actors emote in the moment, having their voices sync up with the other acting choices they make in the scene – the result is something that seems so authentic and raw that it starts to go the other way and seem manipulative again.
The standout number in the film, and the one you would cite, were you trying to convince someone it’s awesome, is, of course, Anne Hathaway sobbing her way through “I Dreamed a Dream.” She won an armful of awards for it, including an Oscar, and deservedly so. There’s something beautiful and unselfconscious about the way she just lets herself go in that scene – a kind of emotional nakedness, where we believe the despair that she’s feeling. We can see that she’s let herself disappear inside the character, and invited us to see her in this dark, vulnerable moment, without any fear that she’s going to look stupid. That’s rare, and it displays a type of courage and skill as a performer that should be rewarded.
It’s also reminiscent of Jennifer Hudson’s standout performance of “And I am Telling You I’m Not Going” in Dreamgirls. That performance similarly made the whole movie, and led to an Oscar win for the woman screaming her pain to the camera.
Jennifer Hudson brings down the house in Dreamgirls
Hudson doesn’t go to the ugly place in Dreamgirls. The studio-recorded track sounds beautiful, and the makeup department isn’t trying to make her look diseased. What makes the scene stand out, though, is still the amount of raw emotion she pours into it. A more gifted vocalist than Hathaway, she uses her voice to convey a torrent of rage, despair, and desperation, which she then telegraphs through her body language and facial expressions on screen.
We’re drawn into her performance, and it conveys the most important emotional truth of the scene – that, even though her character’s words sound powerful, they’re being shouted from a place of total loss. She says, “I am telling you,” but there’s no one to tell. She’s lost her partner and her friends — she stands alone on a darkened stage without even the audience she hungered for. And, into the darkness, she orders, “You’re gonna love me, yes you are!”
It’s a powerful moment, and Hathaway’s performance in Les Misérables is like that, with the additional layer that Les Mis is so proud of her suffering.
Whereas Dreamgirls is a pretty standard and standardly-shot movie musical – enlivened by outstanding vocals from Hudson and co-star Beyoncé — Les Misérables is really reaching for the brass ring. It has a take-no-prisoner’s approach to engaging with the story’s pathos, and an awkward kind of delight in making everyone seem plague-ridden and miserable.
Her bed is a coffin — get it?
Don’t get me wrong – I love Les Misérables. I had low expectations, but I was less than ten minutes in before I felt that special shiver of delight that tells you you’re watching a kick-ass movie. I would much rather watch a film where everyone really goes for it, even if their reach sometimes exceeds their grasp.
At the same time, I completely understand why some people found it annoying.
The annoyance comes in part because you’re watching people who do not live in poverty pat themselves on the back for how poor they’re willing to make themselves look, and how deeply they’re willing to crawl inside the suffering of others. The ugly singing and the ugly makeup can be read as self-congratulatory – “Look how much I’m willing to debase myself for art! I don’t care if I look pretty; I just care if I’m authentic.” After a certain point, it comes across as trying too hard – of actually being inauthentic, since the attempt at authenticity feels so calculated.
It’s the same criticism that’s followed Anne Hathaway, herself. Whereas Jennifer Hudson came across to us as a spirited American Idol reject, who made good on her big dreams of stardom by signing her heart out in Dreamgirls, Anne Hathaway has been criticized for coming across as fake during public appearances. In fact, the backlash against Hathaway reached a fever pitch just as she was accepting her slew of awards for Les Mis.
No doubt, there’s a sharp contrast between the vulnerability she shows in “I Dreamed a Dream,” and the polished, eager-to-please persona she throws on in public. (Though I hasten to add that a lot of celebrities seem self-conscious in managing their public personas; for people who want to be liked, there’s nothing better or worse than having millions of people stare at you).
The general reaction to Les Misérables seems to fall along similar lines. The raw, ugly, emotionally intense performance is either touching because it seems authentic, or it’s disgusting because it seems crass and manipulative. We all agree that the emotions, like the vocals, weren’t cooked and seasoned before they were served, but we don’t agree about whether that’s fresh and exciting, or lazy and self-involved.
Like Anne Hathaway, the movie is trying hard. Like Jennifer Hudson, it’s screaming, “You’re gonna love me,” into the darkness. One cannot dare to be loved without risking rejection, and Les Misérables invites both love and rejection from its audience – but, isn’t it beautiful to see – and to hear – someone try?
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
‘Softcore Porn Roulette with Vampires’ is entering its final season and, while it’s never been good, it embraced being bad with such glee that I’m a little bit sorry to see it go. With that in mind, let’s take a moment to reflect on the awkward, sometimes hilarious, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, sometimes kind of offensive journey we’ve taken with the show that was nothing but humping and gore.
Softcore Porn Roulette with Vampires is entering its final season and, while it’s never been good, it embraced being bad with such glee that I’m a little bit sorry to see it go. With that in mind, let’s take a moment to reflect on the awkward, sometimes hilarious, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, sometimes kind of offensive journey we’ve taken with the show that was nothing but humping and gore.
Trigger Warning: Discussion of rape/assault.
Jason and Eric Get it On Because True Blood is About Who You Want to Have Sex With
The Gay Stuff True Blood’s original show-runner, Alan Ball, is an openly gay man who has done very good things for the representation of LGBT people in popular culture. His previous HBO series – and maybe his greatest work – Six Feet Under, still stands tall as being one of the only shows – and one of the earliest shows – to depict a nuanced, complicated relationship between two gay men, who were multifaceted characters, on par with their heterosexual counterparts. On the whole, the gay and bisexual characters on True Blood, be they ever so shallow and underdeveloped, are on the same playing field as the shallow, underdeveloped heterosexual characters (though there’s sometimes some weirdness about physical intimacy). For the most part, nobody on the show really notices or minds if anyone else is lesbian, gay, or bisexual, which, in itself, can be seen as a positive thing. The range of male sexuality is better represented than the range of female sexuality, but, compared to its contemporaries, the show is still unusually open to the idea of depicting something other than heterosexuality on screen.
Where things get weird is when vampirism is used as an awkward metaphor for homosexuality. Vampires “come out of the coffin” by announcing themselves to humanity. They’re persecuted by religious zealots holding signs that say “God hates fangs.” Two of the series most memorable (and intentionally hilarious) villains are/were leaders of a Christian hate group called The Fellowship of the Sun that targets vampires just a real-life hate groups have sometimes targeted homosexuals – one of the villains later decides to be true to his own identity and proudly comes out as “gay vampire-American.”
Going into the final season, the vampire population is dying from a disease called Hep-V, which, despite its name, has been presented in ways that are much more analogous to HIV and to the AIDS crisis in North America (where gay and bisexual men are disproportionately likely to contract the virus). The speech that Pam gives Eric in episode three, about how there are treatments that can help him lead a normal life, and how people are working to find a cure, could be ripped from any drama about HIV.
In this context, the hatred and prejudice that some of the characters exhibit toward vampires comes across as analogous to the bigotry that’s sometimes directed at the LGBT community… except that vampires, unlike homosexuals, want kill your whole family and feast on your blood. So maybe there’s a good reason to be wary of them.
The fact that vampirism doesn’t map very neatly onto the LGBT rights movement has already been discussed in great depth, and Ball, himself, has described the vampire/LGBT analogy as “window-dressing that makes [the story] contemporary.” For the most part, vampires and other Sups on True Blood seem to be a general representation of the Other, with the (awkwardly delivered) message being that we should judge people as individuals, based on the decisions they make, personally, rather than what group we think they belong to. We’re all just people in the end, etcetera.
In principle, though, it’s really True Blood’’s shallowness, rather than any concerted attempt to argue for tolerance, that’s brought so much lesbian and gay content to the fore. The show employs a less ambitious version of Torchwood’s “everybody’s bi” philosophy where, if there’s a possibility that two actors will look hot together, nothing else – including gender – is even a concern.
Which leads me nicely to the Tara stuff.
Tara (right) Becomes a Lesbian Cage Fighter Because True Blood is About Who You Want to Have Sex With
The Tara Stuff
If there’s one character the writers don’t find hot enough, it’s Tara. I mean, yeah, she was funny in the first season, and she seemed smart, and she had all this complicated stuff going on with her alcoholic mother, but that’s not enough to earn a real plotline on this show. Ever since season two, Tara’s been shoved into one troubling situation after another, with the final insult being her off-screen death in the first five minutes of season seven.
In season two, Tara and one of the only other Black characters on the show, Eggs, are held captive and forced to serve a magical white woman while they wait for another magical white woman to free them. All season long, they’re under a spell that makes them subservient and, in one scene, they punch each other in the face for their captor’s entertainment. They never manage to turn the tables or get their own back. Once they’re free – once they are freed by someone else – a deputy wrongfully shoots and kills Eggs, and the crime is covered up by the Sheriff. Nothing ever comes of that except that the deputy feels kind of bad.
In season three, Tara’s taken prisoner by a rapist vampire in a storyline that’s alternately played as serious and comedic (WTF). At one point, she’s held captive in an old plantation house, and it appears that she kills her kidnapper and escapes. We later discover that the kidnapper survived, and ultimately has to be dispatched by the same deputy who shot Eggs. Which, I guess, is supposed to make up for shooting Eggs? Somehow?
Other awful things happen, too – one of the worst is Tara taking a bullet for her awful, often absent bestie, Sookie, and dying on the kitchen floor during the last few moments of season four – but what’s even more telling are the two attempts the writers make to reboot the character and make her more interesting.
In the first reboot, Tara (who, up until this point has been exclusively heterosexual), becomes a lesbian cage fighter with super straight hair and more fashionable clothes. We see her girlfriend (maybe) twice, cage fighting never becomes important to the story, and all she does all season (before dying) is stand around awkwardly as the hostage of another magical white woman while waiting for magical white Sookie to come save her again.
In the second reboot, the recently dispatched Tara is turned into a vampire by fan favourite Pam. She uses her new abilities to become a pole dancer, wears corsets and belly-baring tops, and starts a lesbian relationship with Pam. Then she goes back to wearing her normal clothes and meets the true death in season seven.
Both attempts to reboot the character, and make her more relevant to the show, are pretty transparent in their intentions of making Tara seem sexy. It’s also clear that being sexy is your key to having something to do on True Blood. I mean, the werewolf plotlines are probably the most unnecessary ones in the series, but they persisted for a long time, because werewolf Alcide looked good with his shirt off. It really seems like production didn’t like Tara with any of the guys they paired her with, so they started pairing her with other women. Then, they didn’t like her as a human, so they tried making her a vampire. When all of that failed, she died.
I would actually be a little bit happy for Tara at this point, if it seemed like she was going to rest in peace, but the first three episodes have suggested that she’s in some kind of tortured, ghostly state, calling for help, waiting for someone to save her, powerless to save herself – that seems more like True Blood. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the last five minutes of the series, they find a way to send her from purgatory to hell.
Eric and Sookie Defile Narnia Because True Blood is About Who You Want to Have Sex With
The “Let’s Just Give Up On Plot All Together, Now” Stuff
Every storyline on True Blood is treated as an opportunity for sex to happen. A witch comes to town and starts an orgy. Fairies show up because they want to mate with us. Scientists prepare for genocide by watching vampires get it on through one-way mirrors. Eric has amnesia so he and Sookie have sex in Narnia.
Ball – who half-jokingly names “the terrors of intimacy” as the theme of True Blood – is correct in reminding us that vampirism has often been tied up with sex. Most vampire stories involve some element of hunger, desire, and/or seduction that’s reminiscent of sex, and the act of biting someone and ingesting their blood can easily be seen as a sexual one. That doesn’t entirely explain why so many of the plotlines on True Blood sound like they could be awkward summaries for x-rated fanfic. Like:
Sookie learns that a magic, unbreakable contract promises her to the evil fairy, Warlow, for marriage. When Warlow comes to town, looking for his bride, Sookie is surprised by her attraction to him, and no one can believe what happens next.
(They experiment with bondage while they have sex in a graveyard).
Let’s be real, you guys. True Blood is not telling us something deep and meaningful about the nature of desire. It’s not exploring human sexuality in a way that teaches us something about ourselves – this is straight-up entertainment where every situation is a sexual situation, and every problem is a problem involving sex, and every plot point becomes an opportunity for the characters to have sex in a place, or a configuration, or a way that we haven’t seen yet.
Sometimes it’s uncomfortably voyeuristic – as when we have to watch real-life couple Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer go at it. Sometimes it’s WTF – as when vampire Bill has sex with vampire Lorena and twists her head 180 degrees. Sometimes it’s actually a little bit sexy, and sometimes it’s just like, “So what?”
The only time it’s really a problem – if we accept for the moment that having gratuitous sex on your show is not necessarily a problem, sex being neither dirty nor bad – the only time it’s really a problem is when the show does something like mistaking rape for sex, mistaking rape for comedy, and mistaking rape as an acceptable way to shock us as viewers before brushing it off completely. I think it’s totally fine for True Blood to fill up its time with sexual situations that mean nothing and go nowhere – the show will not go down in history as a brilliant work of art, but not everything has to. Unfortunately, I also think that throwing sexual violence in, either as an accident, or a joke, or a cheap surprise, has been more of a problem.
One of the most offensive storylines on the show takes place in season four, where Jason Stackhouse, a human character, is kidnapped by a group of hillbilly werepanthers (they’re like werewolves but they stupidly change into panthers) and then tied to a bed and raped by several of the werepanther women. It isn’t clear whether the show understands that this is a problem, and Ball and the director made some unfortunate comments at the time, to the effect that it was funny or ironic for Jason, a fairly promiscuous character, to be placed in a situation where he didn’t like having sex.
As already mentioned, there’s a lengthy plot about Tara being kidnapped by a rapist that’s alternately played for laughs and drama. Sometimes this is a traumatic experience, sometimes they’re the odd couple on vacation. The actors don’t seem to agree about which level they’re playing it on, but the tone seems muddled over all, with the writers turning the rapist into a comedy villain. After he’s dead, the show briefly acknowledges that something significant happened, by sending Tara to a support group meeting, but then the story gets shoved down the memory hole with everything else.
As a final example, in season two, there’s this horrible moment right at the end of “Release Me” where one of the Fellowship of the Sun guys tries to rape Sookie to punish her for sleeping with vampires. There is an absolutely sickening shot of her screaming into the camera while he pulls her backward, and then a new character, vampire Godric, shows up to save her. Obviously, somebody at HBO (correctly) decided that it would be too disturbing to end the episode without reassuring us that Sookie escapes, but there are better ways to convince us that Godric’s a good guy than setting up a gratuitous rape scene.
In all of these examples, the show isn’t trying to say anything about sexual violence any more than it’s trying to say something the rest of the time. However, unlike with consensual sex, or vampires turning into puddles of goo, I’m not sure it’s appropriate to treat rape as something frivolous, or as an easy way to shock the audience, leading into a cliff-hanger. That’s the flipside of telling such a shallow story – the show isn’t equipped to broach topics requiring more serious treatment, and it ruins the fun when one of those topics crops up.
I find myself in the strange position of wishing that True Blood had been less realistic, less engaged with contemporary social issues, and more of the pure escapism it was intended to be. I’m down with a show about who we want to have sex with, and True Blood is best when it doesn’t aspire to (or accidentally stumble upon) anything deeper than that.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
The second season of ‘Orange is the New Black’ is all about respect: how you get it, how you keep it, whether it’s something that someone can give you, or something you hold for yourself. Anchored by a standout performance by Lorraine Toussaint, this season is darker and richer than its predecessor, but still extremely fun to watch.
The second season of Orange is the New Black is all about respect: how you get it, how you keep it, whether it’s something that someone can give you, or something you hold for yourself. Anchored by a standout performance by Lorraine Toussaint, this season is darker and richer than its predecessor, but still extremely fun to watch.
Vee and Red are old friends (that means one of them has to die)
To recap: Orange is the New Black is that insanely popular Netflix series about a minimum security women’s prison. The second season went online earlier this month, and it ranks about the same as the first season, in terms of being very entertaining and slightly uneven. If there’s one reason to watch it, though, it’s for the pleasure of seeing Lorraine Toussaint knock it out of the park as this season’s new villain, Vee.
Toussaint, whom you may remember from a very long list of acting credits (I remember her from Ugly Betty), brings so much presence, intensity, and commitment to this role that she steals every scene she’s in. You can’t take your eyes off her – and that’s part of the point.
Vee, who’s introduced to us as Taystee’s foster mother, is an actual sociopath who somehow slipped into minimum security. She’s supposed to be magnetic, charismatic, and charming in a way that draws people to her despite the fact that she’s obviously going to murder them. The performance succeeds not only because it creates a memorable character, but because it allows the audience to experience the same draw — it’s clear from the start that Vee’s an awful human being, but we want more of her, all the same.
Maybe in response to criticism of the first season, or maybe just because this is a natural evolution, the second season of Orange is the New Black is less focussed on Piper (who served as the first season’s protagonist), and more focussed on the other inmates of the prison. The A-story, this time, concerns Vee’s arrival at Litchfield, and the way she lures some of the other characters into her web so that she can use them to smuggle in drugs. This puts her in conflict with Red (who normally corners the market on contraband), and creates a rift between Taystee and Poussey, who’ve been BFF this whole time.
While flashbacks have never been this show’s strong suit – they’re heavy handed, and they over-simplify complex situations by boiling them down into ten-minute narratives – this season throws roughly eight-hundred million our way, as a means of explaining the motivations of the major players in the season finale. In general, the flashbacks are not very good, but one thing they do nicely is lay the groundwork for the dynamics we see play out between Vee and the group. The flashbacks involving Taystee explain why she’s loyal to Vee – Vee may have been a lousy foster mother, but she’s the only real family Taystee has. There’s one really good scene that shows Taystee, her foster brother, R.J., and Vee, sitting down to a normal family dinner; you can tell from the expression on her face – and a nice bit of acting from Danielle Brooks – that this is one of Taystee’s best memories – a moment of real happiness in an otherwise difficult life.
The flashbacks also impress upon us that Suzanne (a.k.a. “Crazy Eyes”) feels rejected and like an outsider – something Vee immediately exploits by love bombing her in an obvious way – and that Cindy needs to prove herself as an adult. (Janae already got a flashback in season one, and we know she’s pissed off because she keeps going to solitary for no real reason.) More importantly, though, the flashbacks show us that Poussey, who seems like she was pretty rad on the outside, is an independent thinker who’s willing to fight for her relationships. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of conflict between Poussey and Vee, and the strongest emotional story line of the season is about Taystee being caught between them.
Poussey and Taystee, hanging out in the library (as cool people do)
There are several other story lines this season – Dayanara and the idiot guard who impregnated her are still trying to figure things out; Rosa, the cancer patient, is quickly getting worse; a new inmate named Soso goes on a hunger strike; Pennsatucky has new teeth – but, like the A-story, most of them revolve around respect.
Daya wants the idiot guard to come clean and take his lumps so that they don’t have to lie for the rest of their lives (so that they can respect themselves by living truthfully). The idiot guard experiments with being a hard-ass in order to win some respect from his boss and the inmates – which leads Daya to explain, in a heavy-handed way, that he doesn’t need to bully anyone; the fact that he has a choice about what he does already gives him more power than any of the inmates have.
Soso, a college-aged inmate, initially refuses to shower for unspecified reasons, though it eventually becomes clear that she feels ashamed to be naked in front of everyone else. After the guards force her to do it anyway – in a scene that’s excruciatingly uncomfortable to watch – she starts a hunger strike as a way to reclaim some of her dignity by fighting back against the system. While she attracts some followers who aren’t very serious about prison reform, she also attracts a few people with legitimate grievances. We’re invited to laugh at the protest, but it’s a way for several characters, with different motivations, to try to gain respect.
The A-story, which is about the fight for control of the contraband line – between three opposing, racially segregated camps, represented by Vee, Red, and Gloria Mendoza – is really about individual women trying to hold onto positions that give them a positive sense of self. Controlling the kitchen gives Mendoza higher status in the prison, and it lets her give cushier jobs to the other Latina women; controlling the contraband line gives Red special status, and allows her to buy herself friends; controlling other people feeds Vee’s sociopathic drive to power.
There’s a moment, late in the season, where Vee jokes that it’s stupid to kill and die over who can sell mascara in prison – but that’s not what the fight is about. It’s about holding onto a sliver of self-respect in a place where you have to lie down on the ground when you hear an alarm; it’s about having something that’s yours in a place where you are a number, and issued the same clothes as everyone else.
It’s easy to understand how it would be detrimental to someone to be on a chain gang, to be assaulted, or tied up like an animal while she gives birth – but it’s also detrimental to be treated like you’re not a person, no matter how nice the cellblock is. What Orange is the New Black shows us effectively is women trying to hold onto personhood, even in difficult times.
Vee’s playing the long game (with Suzanne and Cindy)
The first season ended with Piper beating the shit out of Pennsatucky – a meth addict who’d harassed her all season, and pushed her so far that she snapped. The second season dives farther into that same well of darkness, striking an awkward (and sometimes confusing) balance between acknowledging Litchfield as kind of a candy-ass prison, and stirring things up by releasing a predator into the mix.
There are moments that are disappointing, there are moments that are cop-outs, there are moments that are sickeningly sweet, there are moments that don’t make sense, there are moments that seem kind of creepy and slightly misogynist (see: Caputo’s ill-gotten blowjob from Assistant Warden Fig) – but, one of the things that’s always been worthwhile about this show is that most of its characters – good, bad, dull, interesting, funny, sexy, cruel, cunning, average – are played by women, and that means that we get to see something we don’t normally get to see on TV. We get to see complex stories about human nature where “human” doesn’t default out to “male.” That’s the first thing everyone says when they write about Orange is the New Black – I know – but it’s worth saying again, because it’s such an unusual thing.
Season two, if anything, is stronger than season one, since it widens its focus, and gives more of its characters a chance in the spotlight. It’s also stronger because it’s gone beyond the story of season one (being in prison is hard, and it’s not like being out of prison at all), to explore something deeper. It’s pounding the same drum of “prisoners are people,” and, for those of us who already know that, that drum can get old, but this season at least drums with style.
Orange is the New Black is not on my list of “World’s Greatest Television Shows,” but Lorraine Toussaint may be on my list of “Greatest Performers in a Television Show,” and the series is doing something important by modelling how you can have a diverse cast of characters made up of women, and how you can tell stories about our universal humanity, when the humans in question are female.
So, if you didn’t binge watch it opening weekend, it’s worth a look, just to see something different. If you did binge watch it, you already know.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
The acting is poor, the dialogue is terrible, and the production values are low, but the first season of ‘The 100’ has its moments, and most of them are pretty effing dark.
The acting is poor, the dialogue is terrible, and the production values are low, but the first season of The 100 has its moments, and most of them are pretty effing dark.
Clarke, in the Rubble of a Plot Point
With the finale airing tonight, the CW is set to wrap up the first season of its post-apocalyptic YA series, The 100. Based on a novel of the same name, the show takes place in the future, where humanity has been forced to live on space stations after destroying the Earth. Almost a century after the exodus, the crew of the last remaining station, The Ark, discovers that life support is failing and decides to send a team of one hundred twenty-something models teenage prisoners back to the planet, to determine whether it’s fit for colonization. Unfortunately, the prisoners immediately lose contact with the space station, leading each group to believe that it is alone, facing difficult choices about its survival.
The main character on the ground is Clarke, a political prisoner who’s basically the same serious, hyper-competent seventeen-year-old girl who stars in all post-apocalyptic YA fiction. Clarke knows a little bit about medicine, which makes her valuable to the group, but her main job is being right all the time and lecturing the others about why they are wrong. The group’s de-facto leader is an older boy named Bellamy, who snuck onto the transport ship because his sister was on board, and a lot of the tension early on comes from Clarke thinking the group should do one thing, and Bellamy thinking they should do something else.
The story on the space station is anchored by Clarke’s mother, Abby, who’s a doctor and sits on the governing council (mirroring Clarke almost exactly, but in a world of adults, rather than teenagers). Abby believes that Earth is habitable and keeps pushing for a wait-and-see approach, while other councillors want to start culling the population in order to extend life support. Her main adversary is the Vice Chancellor, Marcus, who argues (pretty persuasively) that, if Abby is wrong, then, the longer they wait, the more people will have to die.
There are thirteen episodes in the season, including tonight’s finale, and the premiere episode is rough. Rough, like it’s kind of painful to watch, and you think, “This is the worst show that I’ve ever seen.” The tone is all over the place, the actors look and sound like they feel really awkward, everything looks cheap, and the story is silly. The second episode, in all honesty, isn’t much better.
But, then the third episode happens and, it’s not that the show becomes good, but it becomes about a million percent better than it was, and it keeps it keeps improving from there.
The third episode of The 100, “Earth Kills,” does two important things. The first is that it displays honest emotion. Clarke’s backstory is that her father was the engineer who discovered the life support system was failing, and he was executed for trying to warn the population (Clarke was in solitary because she knew the secret). Her best friend, and the Chancellor’s son, Wells, is also on Earth with her, but they’re not really friends anymore because he’s the one who ratted her father out after she told him the plan. We know this already, but most of “Earth Kills” is taken up with flashbacks that dramatize these events in a much more visceral way. We see Clarke watching as her father gets sucked into space (the preferred method of execution on The Ark), and it’s horrible. It completely explains why she’s so mad at Wells and why everyone else who’s had a loved-one sucked out the airlock hates Wells’ father for pushing the button.
Raven and Abby have the Best Relationship on the Show
The second important thing “Earth Kills” does is end with a shocking, gruesome, grimdark twist that makes sense, given the emotional journey we’ve been on, but also establishes the tone of the show much more clearly. Because, despite the wacky hijinks in the first couple of episodes, The 100, once it gets going, is surprisingly dark for a network TV show.
I mean, William Golding understood in 1954 that, if a bunch of kids built a society, it wouldn’t be all bonfires and sparkly butterflies — I have no grounds to be surprised. Still, after the ridiculousness that was a Jaws-attack by a giant, invisible water snake in episode one (a scene that ends with everyone having a chuckle about it), I was not prepared for episode three, or episode five, or any episode where the series actually followed through on a threat and had something terrible happen.
It’s not that I think being shocking, and making your show a big downer automatically means that it’s good – in fact, I would still hesitate to say that The 100 ever actually gets good – but, The Hunger Games, and second-wave sci-fi, and the generally dark as hell turn that TV has taken in the last few years, have taught us that moral complexity requires a certain engagement with unpleasant content. I think we also may have reached the tipping point where it’s now a “safe” decision to include that in your show – where even a drama for the CW, staring insanely good-looking people who want to hook up, needs some violence, death, and torture, just to stay relevant.
I’m not being judgemental – I enjoyed this show a lot more, once it turned serious and dark. I’m just saying, I notice that a lot of pop culture is tilting that way, and I wonder what it means.
Setting aside the tone for a second, some other good things happen once the series gets going. To start with, the actors relax more into their roles. They forget to be embarrassed and, as they take themselves more seriously as penal colonists on a strange planet, it’s easier to suspend your disbelief. It’s also easier because the costuming and makeup departments are so good at making everyone look dirty.
You can tell that the series is based on a book, because there seems to be a plan as the action moves forward. The 100 throws a lot of twists and cliff-hangers our way – just as one problem is solved, it turns out there’s another – but, unlike other shows, where it feels like the writers are just trying things out, the plot in The 100 progresses more organically. One thing leads to another, and the stakes raise each time, building to the climax.
The characters are also allowed to disagree and still be likable. At the outset, it looks like Marcus is evil, but, once we get to know him, we see that, like everyone else, he’s trying to make good decisions in a bad situation. Similarly, we’re invited to like both Bellamy and Clarke, even though they often disagree with each other, and sometimes make the wrong move.
And, while this isn’t the first show I would point to for awesome portrayals of women, it does better than you’d expect.
Octavia and the Sparkly Butterfly of False Hope
Even though Clarke is ripped straight from the pages of every YA novel ever, she’s a pretty decent heroine, and it’s nice that she and Abby serve as our entry points into this world. Whether or not we identify with Clarke, most of the major events on the ground are filtered through her point of view – she’s involved in all the major missions, she has a really loud opinion about everything, and we learn about this world and its characters at roughly the same pace she does. While she’s initially presented to us as an idealist (and a kind of a self-righteous one, at that), it’s interesting to see how she reacts as she’s forced to solve problems with no good solution.
There’s also a secondary character named Raven who’s introduced to us first as a mechanic, and only secondly as somebody’s girlfriend. Even though there’s some triangle drama happening with the character, the most important thing about Raven is that she’s smart and she knows how to build stuff. There’s even a nice scene where one of the boys tells her that they need her around for that reason. One of the most interesting relationships on the show is also between Raven and Abby, as they scheme together aboard The Ark.
On the flipside, there’s another character who’s more problematic.
Bellamy’s sister, Octavia, is initially presented as The Sexy One – an angry, outspoken, promiscuous girl who’s competing with Clarke for the affections of a boring boy named Finn. The first episode has this eye-rollingly bad scene where she gets undressed in front of everyone while they stare at her; in the second episode, she’s macking on three different dudes, partly just to rebel against Bellamy.
After the first couple of episodes, though, her personality does a 180, and she becomes Saint Octavia, a gentle and innocent soul, who’s annoying in a wholly different way. Saint Octavia literally trips over her own feet, at one point, and knocks herself out, necessitating a daring rescue. She also falls in love with a man who kidnaps her and chains her up in a cave. (Then she apologizes to him for freaking out when he chained her up in a cave – I’m not making this up).
Whereas the other characters are more active, the main point of Octavia is how other people feel about her – whether or not they’re attracted to her, how Bellamy structures his life to protect her, etc. In fact, the whole reason she’s named Octavia in the first place is because of how Bellamy relates to her – when she was born, he named her Octavia because Octavia was the Emperor’s sister, just as she is his.
Either version of Octavia is hard to take, but she’s an anomaly on a show that’s otherwise pretty balanced when it comes to gender. The characters who drive the action are just as likely to be male or female, and the show passes the Bechdel test pretty often, considering that it’s pre-occupied with heterosexual dating relationships.
If I had an award for “most improved show,” I think The 100 would win it. Most sci-fi series take a while to figure out what they’re trying to be, but the contrast between the first two episodes of The 100 and the rest of the season is pretty extreme. I’m actually excited to see the finale, and, since it’s already been picked up for a second season, I’m planning to tune in again.
Programming note to my fellow Canadians: Netflix Canada streams The 100 the day after it airs in the States.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
That’s right, you guys. I’m gonna try to analyze ‘Mulholland Drive’ for sexual desire week. I do this partly out of love for you, and partly out of hate for me. Let’s get this party started.
Written by Katherine Murray as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.
That’s right, you guys. I’m gonna try to analyze Mulholland Drive for sexual desire week. I do this partly out of love for you, and partly out of hate for me. Let’s get this party started.
Laura Harring as Rita/Camilla and Naomi Watts as Betty/Diane
Mulholland Drive (2001), more colloquially known as “Mulholland WTF Did I Just Watch?” is a story told in two parts, both of which were written and directed by David Lynch.
In the first part, Laura Harring plays Rita, a woman who escapes attempted murder but ends up with amnesia and doesn’t remember who she is or what’s going on. She stumbles across Betty (Naomi Watts), a plucky go-getter and brilliant actress who’s come to LA to launch her career, and Betty decides to Nancy Drew this thing by helping Rita piece together her identity. Along the way, they discover the body of a woman named Diane, who killed herself, and briefly run across an actress named Camilla who’s cast in a leading role as result of mob-related conspiracies.
Betty and Rita start a sexual relationship and go to a creepy post-modern theatre where everything is a facade. Then, Rita finds a magic blue box, and stuffs a key inside, at which point all of the characters and plot points go through a blender and the story starts again.
This time Naomi Watts is playing Diane, a failed actress who’s in love with her much more successful best friend, Camilla (Laura Harring). Camilla’s dating a man, which makes Diane insanely jealous, and, when she finally can’t take it anymore, she hires a hitman to murder Camilla and then feels guilty and shoots herself.
The most straightforward interpretation of the movie – and therefore, the one I will steadfastly cling to – is that the second story, about Diane and Camilla, is “true,” whereas the first story is a fantasy created by crazy Diane as a way to escape from her pain.
The first story shows Diane’s alter-ego, Betty, as being capable, likable, talented, and charming. She totally kills her first audition (even after being placed in an awkward position by her co-star), she lives in a beautiful apartment (owned by her aunt, who isn’t present), and she has a timeless, youthful appearance that invokes the sense of an earlier era.
Diane’s idealized version of Camilla is Rita, who takes her name from Rita Hayworth, also invoking the sense of an era gone by. In contrast to Betty, Rita is vacant and dependent, constantly deferring to Betty’s judgement and praising Betty’s abilities without offering any ideas of her own. She’s also the one who initiates their sexual relationship, which frees Betty/Diane from having to feel responsible for it.
The first two thirds of the movie, then, is a story about the way things should have been, from Diane’s perspective – the way, perhaps, that she imagined they would be, before her youthful optimism was crushed by the film industry. So, what do we make of the fact that Diane’s such a creepball?
The box of confusion
Because, make no mistake, now – Diane is a creepball. She behaves in a way that makes Camilla uncomfortable; she pretends to be Camilla’s friend while simmering with hatred, envy, and jealousy from the sidelines; she has Camilla killed (which is creepball enough); and her ultimate fantasy is one in which Camilla’s not even a person, but rather a prop in a story about how great Diane is. To drive it all home, the second story treats us to a long, ugly scene where Diane angrily cries while she masturbates, because that’s what her life has become. She is president of the Friend Zone, but the lesbian aspect adds an extra layer of discomfort.
The first part of the film, with Betty and Rita, feels uncanny and bizarre, like you’d expect from a David Lynch movie. You’re not going to sit there and think, “My, what a beautiful love story that isn’t unnerving at all,” but there’s a sense in which the lesbian romance is not a big deal. You’re just watching two attractive, basically likable people, with no secret, evil agendas, who decide to get it on. It’s a nice change from the way lesbianism was portrayed as sinister and corrupting in Ye Olde Hollywood – and that change lasts exactly as long as it takes for Rita to stick a key in a box and uncover the truth.
I haven’t checked to see, but I bet there’s a paper out there about what it means that one of the lesbian characters discovers her true identity as a straight woman after sticking that key in the box. I’m just saying. I won’t subject you to that kind of symbol analysis, but I do think it’s significant that, after we’re shown such a nice, cuddly picture of lesbian intimacy – like, almost right after – it turns out that Diane is a creeper who’s destined to wind up alone.
The trope of the lesbian friend who weasels her way into your life while secretly creeping on you is something that’s on the way out, but it still exists. You can see it, for example, in Notes on a Scandal, where Judi Dench pretends to be friends with Cate Blanchett while secretly stealing her hair. Somehow, she ends up looking like more of a creep than the woman who’s having sex with a 15-year-old boy.
The question for Mulholland Drive – and I confess that I don’t know the answer – is whether we’re supposed to see Diane’s situation as being universal to the human condition, or as being specifically wrought by her sexual preference. In other words, is this a story about envy and disappointment – the illusions we hold about ourselves, our regret when we don’t live up to our own expectations, our sense of being duped by the images we grew up watching on TV – or is it a story about how lesbians creep on their straight friends? Is Diane’s desire supposed to be creepy because she objectifies Camilla and wants to strip her of agency – because she feels entitled to have Camilla belong to her in a way that is creepy, regardless of gender – or is her desire creepy because she’s a girl?
I think it’s possible that the answer to all of those questions is, “Yes.” Mulholland Drive is a movie that, in many ways, could be about anyone but that, in being about a lesbian, connotes something different than if Diane were, instead, a straight man (or a woman in love with a man – or any other combination there might be). Notwithstanding recent events, as a culture, we’re much more relaxed about men who want to possess women than we are about women who want to possess. The experience of wanting something that doesn’t want you back is filtered very differently, depending on how much privilege we have, and Diane is rejected in a specifically woebegone, Hollywood lesbian way – a way that is, sadly, in keeping with the golden age of cinema she thinks she wants to resurrect.
That said, Mulholland Drive doesn’t feel like its trying to say something really self-reflexive and insightful about the way lesbians have historically been portrayed in film – it feels more like Diane is just creepy. But her creepiness is only one layer in a multi-faceted approach to character that touches on Big Themes of longing, regret, and self-hatred – so, it’s both. It is both a story about our universal humanity, and how lesbian friends are the worst. Complete with phallic keys and ugly masturbation.
