Katherine Murray – Page 6

‘Super Fun Night’ Postmortem

ABC announced late last week that ‘Super Fun Night,’ Rebel Wilson’s half-hour comedy about being supremely uncool, was getting the axe. After 17 very strange episodes, it’s time to look back and figure out what went wrong (and right) with this offbeat series.

Written by Katherine Murray.

ABC announced late last week that Super Fun Night, Rebel Wilson’s half-hour comedy about being supremely uncool, was getting the axe. After 17 very strange episodes, it’s time to look back and figure out what went wrong (and right) with this offbeat series.

Super Fun Night is/was a sitcom produced by Conan O’Brien, starring the hilarious Rebel Wilson as Kimmie, an awkward, uncool lawyer who lives with her awkward, uncool friends, while pining after her handsome, unattainable co-worker, Richard. It’s significant that Kimmie lives with her high school friends, since the defining question of the series is whether or not being cool is the prerequisite to having a satisfying life.

Kimmie, who would like to think of herself as being a little bit cool, drags her friends into misadventure by taking them out of the apartment and into the city on various outings they call “super fun night.” Also, she works in an office and stuff.

The show includes a strange mishmash of singing, and jokes, and serious after-school-special moments about accepting yourself. At times, it tantalizes you with the idea that it might actually be good, only to let you down in the following episode. There were lots of things to like and dislike about it, but I enjoy finding fault with other people’s work, so let’s start with the stuff that went wrong.

The Stuff that was Wrong

● The American Accent
Rebel Wilson is Australian; her character is not. That is a mistake of huge proportions, mainly for the reason that a lot of Wilson’s comedy comes less from what she’s saying, and more from the specific way she says it. For some unknown reason, Kimmie is American, and you can hear Wilson struggling with the accent during the first few episodes. It flattens her delivery and makes it hard for her to use the right inflection to carry off a joke.

Wilson has explained that the decision sprang partly from the fact that Kimmie is supposed to have gone to school in America, but, if the character had moved from Australia as a teen, I doubt anyone would have cried foul.

● The Law Firm
Kimmie is a lawyer in the way that children imagine people are lawyers – she’s vaguely in an office setting, wearing a suit, doing legal-sounding things. Her job bears absolutely no importance to the story, and yet the show insists on following her to work, where her career and her coworkers are drawn in very broad strokes, and not nearly as entertaining as the rest of the show.

It seems from the title, and the pilot (which aired as the eighth episode), that the real meat of the story is Kimmie’s interaction with her friends, Helen-Alice and Marika, who are also the funniest and most specific characters. It would have been easy to structure the show so that each episode was focussed on whatever Kimmie and her friends achieved on “super fun night,” and it’s surprising that so much screen time is instead given to Kimmie moving papers around at an imaginary job.

The only interesting fact about the law firm is that, between two Australian actors and one Englishman, nobody who works there is American. I’m pretty sure Matt Lucas even showed up in the elevator. As a citizen of the Commonwealth, I’m pleased that our invasion is proceeding according to plan.

● The Woman With No Personality
It’s clear that the series did not know what to do with Kimmie’s arch nemesis, Kendall. She’s the shallowest character, and the role was changed and re-cast after the pilot (some of the official websites still show a photo of the original actress, because that’s the level of support this show got on the ground).

The problem with Kendall is that she isn’t a person. She’s the most archetypical character on the show – a projection of what we imagine pretty, successful career women must be like (confident, lovelorn, a little bit mean), lacking in the little quirks and details that make the other characters seem human. Even after the writers flip the script and try to make Kendall into Kimmie’s friend, we never get a sense of who she is, beyond how she makes Kimmie feel awkward and slovenly by comparison. It drags down the law firm scenes even more.

● The Tinkley Piano Music
This is not actually a complaint about the music (though the music numbers were weird). It’s a complaint about the Very Special Moments the series had where the characters Learned A Lesson or otherwise expressed their innermost emotions in an entirely serious way. Kimmie is a virgin! Marika is a lesbian! Both of them were really unpopular in school!

Super Fun Night tries really hard to be sensitive to all of these things (and more – so many more) by not laughing at the characters, or shaming them for their experiences. That’s awesome, but, given that this is a comedy, it would also have been nice if the writers had found a way of laughing with the characters instead, so that at least there could be laughter.

In spite of these issues, though, I confess that part of me was pulling for this series to succeed. And that’s because of the stuff that went right.

The Stuff that was Right

● Kimmie’s Relationship with James
After Kendall and Richard start dating, they set Kimmie up with one of Richard’s friends. Kimmie spends the week fantasizing about what kind of suave, handsome, Richard-like man they’ve selected, only to find out it’s James, a goofy fat guy, who seems kind of loud.

Kimmie’s first reaction is to feel insulted that this is who Richard and Kendall imagine her with, but, once she gets to know James, it turns out she likes him a lot. She realizes, in a fairly understated way, that even though she’s used to being dismissed because of the way she looks and the awkward first impression she makes, she made the same mistake with James. It’s a nice, self-aware moment in which the audience takes the same journey as Kimmie – James is presented in such a way that we’re encouraged to find him disappointing (and to think that the joke is going to be “look what an awful blind date this is”) before the situation reverses, and we realize that he’s really an OK guy.

The series also ends on a really strong note, in terms of the Richard-Kimmie-James love triangle. Richard and Kimmie have always been friends – they share some of the same interests, and dork-out to the same kinds of things – but, once Kimmie starts dating James, Richard suddenly decides that he’s in love with her. He makes his feelings known during the final episodes of the series, right before he gets on a plane to leave the country and start a new job. Now that Kimmie finally has the chance to be with the man she’s been dreaming about, she frantically runs to the airport to tell him… that she thinks he’ll do really well at his new job and she wishes him the best.

Kimmie makes the mature choice of staying with James, the guy she’s actually built a relationship with, rather than chasing after Richard and the idealized romance she had with him in her mind. In real life, this may be what most sensible people would do, but, in TV land, this is the sitcom equivalent of “Ned Stark dies.” It completely reverses our expectations about how the story is going to play out, and shows that the writers are doing something insightful and intelligent with the genre. If I was going to identify a single reason why Super Fun Night deserved to exist, it would be that scene at the airport.

● Actual Lesbians (Not Just Lesbian Jokes)
One of the running jokes in the series is that everyone except Marika thinks that Marika is gay. The reasons for this mostly rely on stereotypes like the way she dresses, her love of sports, and the coffee table she built out of salvaged railway ties, but Marika also shows an obvious interest in other women, and an obviously fake-sounding interest in dudes, making her denial seem absurd.

Even if it’s a little heavy-handed (or a lot heavy-handed) it’s nice that Marika’s story line actually finishes out with her finding an awesome new girlfriend and accepting herself as she is (which means that the “LOL @ your lesbian coffee table” jokes also end). If you’re going to joke about your characters being gay, you earn it a little bit more if you’re willing to follow through by actually making your characters gay.

● It’s Totally Fine to Act Like a Dork
The thing that really set the series apart and made it seem special was this: the main characters, who are supposed to be kind of uncool, are actually kind of uncool. This isn’t a thing where they’re just wearing glasses (though one of them is wearing glasses). It’s a thing where their ideal Friday night involves cookies and DVD sets, and they keep fantasy figurines on their desks, and they have anxiety attacks about riding the subway, and they congratulate themselves for daringly eating papaya.

Most of the funniest jokes on the show are about this – which is why most of the funniest parts of the show involve Kimmie’s friends rather than her coworkers – but there’s no suggestion that the characters need to fundamentally change who they are in order to be cooler people. At the end of the pilot episode, they manage to agree that they will “sometimes” leave the apartment to venture outside, and that’s about as far as the concessions go.

It isn’t a novel idea that being a geek, nerd, or dork can be fine, but most of the celebrated characters within that niche are men. Comparatively, it’s much more rare to see a story about female geeks, nerds, and dorks, where they aren’t asked to change in some way, or to start dressing better, in order to prove they have worth. It’s rare to see a geek girl who isn’t also (secretly) a hot girl, and, as annoying as the Tinkley Piano Music moments are, it’s nice to see the characters confess insecurities that many women have without being punished for it.

There were a lot of problems with Super Fun Night – including the fact that it wasn’t consistently funny – but the core idea behind it was something important. It introduced geeky, nerdy, dorky female characters that women could relate to, and it inverted the legacy of 80s and 90s movies (which taught us that only cool people can date and have fun, therefore we should learn to be cool), by telling us that uncool people can still lead full lives and have self-esteem.

I’m not surprised that the series was cancelled, but I think it brought something of value, and, even after all the singing and the touching introspection at the law firm, I’m not really sorry I watched it. I would like a magic do-over where someone strengthened the content a little bit more before this went to air, but the feeling behind it was noble.

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

When It Seems Like the Movie You’re Watching Might Hate You

Quick – you’re all settled down in front of the TV with Cheetos and soda when you start to have an uncomfortable feeling. The characters are being really hateful, and you can’t quite tell if the writer supports them. Do you: a) keep watching the movie to see how this ends; b) stop watching the movie and do something else; or c) read spoilers for the ending, to find out if you’re wasting your time? If you answered a, b, or c to that question, congratulations! You win. There’s no single Right Way to respond when it seems like a movie might hate you.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I watched Chasing Amy for the first time last weekend, and it was a pretty intense experience. I can totally see why this film was such a boost to Kevin Smith’s career – it’s a great movie with a strong voice and an unusually forthright message about how women are actually people. What’s weird is that watching it still felt like walking through a minefield, and not in an exciting way. In a way where I was kind of scared and uncomfortable, thinking I might get blown up.

Check it out.

Chasing Amy is about a real-life experience Kevin Smith had, where he judged his girlfriend for her sexual history and then realized that he was acting like a jerk. The movie takes the situation further and fictionalizes it, giving us a story about a comic book writer named Holden who falls in love with a lesbian, Alyssa, convinces her to start dating him anyway, flips out when he hears that she’s had sex with other dudes in the past, and then alienates her completely and ends up alone. His best friend, Banky, stands on the sidelines making misogynist, homophobic jokes, before it’s revealed that the real root of his anger is his unacknowledged homosexual attraction to Holden.

The movie essentially pulls a bait and switch. The first half of the story looks like it’s going to be about a straight guy who only hangs out with a lesbian because he wants to sleep with her, and then turns her straight with his dick, but then the second half of the story is about that guy learning that he’s acting like an asshole. That, instead of treating Alyssa like a person with the right to her own sexual history and choices, he’s labouring under the belief that she’s obliged to be the Perfect Woman as created by his imagination. She calls him out on it in a pretty straightforward way – first when he assumes that his being attracted to her should mean that she’s attracted to him, and later when he tries to shame her for a three-way she had back in high school – and I can’t quite express how relieved I was when that happened.

It’s a sad commentary on the culture we live in that, as much as I like and respect Kevin Smith as a writer, I honestly wasn’t sure at first if I was supposed to think Holden was cool. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to think that what he was doing was OK, or that Banky was funny when he told jokes about man-hating dykes – I wasn’t sure if this was going to end with Holden and Alyssa getting married and living happily ever after. And I actually stopped the movie halfway through and looked on Wikipedia to see how it ended, because I didn’t think I could stand to watch it if it was really about Holden and the Bankster being awesome bros together.

It surprised me to have such a strong reaction – I mean, I will seriously sit through almost anything, no matter how annoying it is; I love sitting that much – but it also put me in mind of something Kendra James said about watching Django Unchained – “I advise seeing it in the company of people you trust.”

What makes Chasing Amy an important movie is that it taps into something that’s real in our culture – it puts its metaphorical finger right on a raw, exposed nerve. The things that these guys are saying, the things that they’re doing – these are things that some guys really do and say, without recognizing that there’s anything all that wrong with it. In fact, some guys have found it appropriate to say these things to me, for real, in my life. The fear that the movie might not have my back on that was not an abstract, intellectual concern. It was a visceral reaction. I didn’t want to let my guard down just to feel betrayed.

It isn’t just me, either.

Back when Dollhouse premiered in 2009, a lot of women I knew (and knew of, through the internet) swore off watching it. If you don’t remember the show, that’s OK – I’m pretty sure only five people actually saw it. It was made by Joss Whedon and the story was about a bunch of people (mostly women) who sell their bodies to a futuristic whorehouse where scientists have the technology to wipe someone’s mind and download a new personality into her brain. Clients could request exactly what they wanted, and the Dollhouse would give it to them by programming a human being to act like a fantasy.

Because it was an action-adventure show (sort of), the client of the week usually wanted something beyond whoring – they might need a spy, or a thief, or an expert psychologist or something to go on a mission – but it was clear that sex work was the company’s bread and butter.

As the story ultimately unfolds, it becomes clear that the Dollhouse is fundamentally evil – the first step toward the total collapse of civilization, heralded by the disregard for human life that displays itself in treating people as disposable, programmable shells. The inhabitants of the Dollhouse fight to escape and regain their identities, and find themselves at ground zero of a massive civil war. The dark desire to make women into whatever one wants or needs them to be – here expressed a little more literally than in Chasing Amy – is presented as a form of misguided entitlement, feeding into other situations where the powerful take what they want at somebody else’s expense.

Unfortunately, during the first few episodes of the series, it’s unclear whether we’re supposed to be bothered by what’s going on in the Dollhouse, or to casually accept it as a sexy, cool recipe for adventure. Just like with Chasing Amy, the attitudes expressed in the first half are attitudes expressed in real life, usually by people who don’t see any problem with what they believe – and watching the characters accept these ideas as normal raised the possibility that maybe the writers were just blind to it. The power and relevance of both of these stories comes from the fact that objectifying women is a popular pastime in real life, and not everyone sees the problem with that – the discomfort and uncertainty of these stories comes from the fact that objectifying women is a popular pastime in real life, and not everyone sees the problem with that. It’s hard to know, at first, whose side the story is on.

It doesn’t help that both of these stories also seem to be aimed at dudes. They’re both structured in such a way that the skeeviness of these attitudes toward women is something that’s “revealed” rather than taken as given. I have a hard time imagining a female audience that would begin from the position that all of this stuff is okay and need to hear an explanation of why it’s not. It’s a lot of dudes telling other dudes that women are people, and that’s encouraging, but it also reminds you that you’re not considered a person right from the start.

So, what do you do when you feel uneasy, and fear that the movie might hate you?

I think it just depends on how much you trust the people telling the story, and how much you’re willing to risk. I don’t think anyone is obligated to sit still and be insulted for two hours, so, if you feel like that’s what might be happening, you’re well within your rights to bail. I also don’t think you’re obligated to avoid watching something just because it’s problematic, so, if you want to stick it out and see the whole thing, that’s a totally awesome choice, too.

Either way, I think Kendra James has it right; when the topic is your relative equality, you need the company of people you trust–in the audience, behind the camera, on a Facebook chat after the show. People who think you’re a person right from frame one.

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

Doctor Who and the Women

Remember that uncomfortable moment when ‘Doctor Who’ became a story about how women destroy themselves to rescue an emotionally volatile man from his loneliness? It’s OK if you don’t; I’m going to remind you of it now.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Remember that uncomfortable moment when Doctor Who became a story about how women destroy themselves to rescue an emotionally volatile man from his loneliness? It’s OK if you don’t; I’m going to remind you of it now.

Doctor Who runs on a pretty simple dynamic. There’s a wizard god alien called the Doctor who travels through time and space in a magic futuristic magic police box and defends humanity from other aliens while encouraging people to be better humans themselves. He is joined on his travels by a human companion who, at least in the new series, is always female (although secondary male companions sometimes tag along).

The human companion’s job is to: 1) stand in for the audience by expressing surprise / bewilderment / excitement / low-simmering sexual desire for the Doctor / etc; 2) represent that which is Good and Noble about humanity through displaying traits like bravery and compassion; and 3) throw herself on metaphorical grenades to save the world.

Part of the strength of the show, in its rebooted form, is that, while we enjoy watching the Doctor run around being clever and wacky, the real emotional heft comes from watching ordinary people perform small acts of heroism. The Doctor doesn’t save humanity just by outsmarting the aliens; he does it by inspiring human beings to become their better selves.

Because the Doctor’s companions are our primary touchstone with humanity, it isn’t entirely surprising, then, that they make a lot of sacrifices and endure a lot of suffering along the way. The Doctor’s companions die, or their brains are erased, or they get stuck in some pocket of time where he can’t reach them, or they’re visited by a thousand other miseries they have to endure in order to travel through time. One of the eleventh Doctor’s companions, Clara “I was born to save the Doctor” Oswald, is actually distinguished by dying multiple times – this is why the Doctor takes an interest in her in the first place; because she keeps getting killed as an indirect result of helping him, only to come back again.

On the one hand, it seems like this is the price of heroism – that the tally of things these women have sacrificed is the measure of what they’ve accomplished. If the price were too low, the achievement wouldn’t be as great (and, certainly, the show often reminds us of all the things the Doctor has lost as a measure of his greatness).

On the other hand, though, there’s also a sense that we’re watching mortals destroy themselves to feel close to God, or women destroy themselves to feel close to a man. We’re invited to pity the Doctor for being alone – for literally standing in the rain and feeling sad while his companions walk away from him. There’s a sense of tragedy around the fact that these women couldn’t hang – that, no matter how much they wanted to be The One who could save him, human frailty prevented them from rising to the challenge.

And you might say, “No, that’s not what the story’s about, Katherine. He’s alienated, for sure, but nobody’s proposing that these women should just follow him around and sacrifice their own interests in an ugly, codependent way so he can have a friend.” You might say that, if it weren’t for this one really horrible moment in “The Angels Take Manhattan.”

That One Really Horrible Moment in “The Angels Take Manhattan”
The one really horrible moment happens like this: the Doctor and his companions and an honorary alien called River Song (who is more or less the Doctor’s girlfriend) are doing important time travel stuff in Manhattan when River gets her hand caught in a trap. The only way to get it out is to break her wrist, and the Doctor doesn’t want to do that, for important time travel reasons that would take too long to explain out of context. The point is that, instead of helping her, he leaves her there and tells her to find a way out of the trap without breaking her wrist.

In Doctor Who terms, it’s actually totally fine that he leaves River to find her own way out of the trap – she’s one of the most capable characters, and he’s respecting her as an equal by trusting that she can handle this herself. I have no problem with that.

It’s what happens after that that’s terrible.

River shows up again a few minutes later, free from the trap, and happily reports to the Doctor that she was able to escape just like he asked her to. He’s very pleased – and also, apparently, blind, because she’s holding her arm very stiffly through this – and he grabs her hand in joy only to have her scream like he’s pulling on her broken wrist, because – surprise – that’s exactly what he’s doing.

In the moments that follow, both the Doctor and his companion ask River why she didn’t just say her wrist was broken, and she explains – in this horrible, horrible moment – that the Doctor must be protected from knowing how much it hurts people to be around him; that humans must hide their weakness from him so that he will not feel upset.

In other words, a relationship is an endurance test where one person (here, a female person) has to pretend that everything’s OK when it’s not so that the other person (here, a male person) will be spared from either the inconvenience of having to deal with it, or the pain of feeling responsible, or the unwelcome reminder that the first person is not everything he hoped she would be. And, it’s his girlfriend who believes this. His girlfriend. Technically, she might even his wife. Oh, man.

The tenth Doctor’s girlfriend, Rose, never articulated the same idea, but their relationship was framed pretty clearly as one in which his magnificence rescued her from the boredom of leading a meaningless life and she, in turn, wanted to rescue him from the horror of being alone. The tragedy of their relationship, as it’s presented to us, is that, just as he allows himself to love her, and to carve out a place in his future for her to inhabit, she gets taken away. No matter how badly she wants to be the one to give him what he needs, she can’t live up to the challenge – she’s not alien enough to survive an attack from his enemies, and she’s trapped forever in a timeline he can’t enter. The icing on this tear-soaked cake is that he was never able to make himself say the words “I love you.”

So, now we have two women in romantic relationships with the same emotionally distant, volatile man, and one has to take it on faith that she’s loved, and one has to hide all her pain in order to save the relationship. Both of them are desperate that he shouldn’t feel alone.

If this sounds familiar to you, that’s because this is a pretty well-worn and disturbing trend in romance stories – the trend where women martyr themselves to win the hearts of isolated men. It isn’t a healthy dynamic in either direction, but it’s one that’s often repeated, and it’s a little bit uncomfortable to see it play out over and over again on what is otherwise a very fun, exciting, well-written show.

I don’t know what the solution is, exactly, because the premise of the series almost demands an asymmetrical relationship between the Doctor and his companions, and the attempt to balance gender by having a male and female lead means that that relationship will almost inevitably Say Something (awkward) about the dynamics between men and women.

That said, season four gave us a precedent for a female companion who at least didn’t want to sleep with the Doctor and told him when he was annoying (I miss you, Donna). It might be a nice change if more of the Doctor’s companions had a reason for travelling with him that wasn’t either total obsession with him or the belief they were born, in one way or another, to save him. I’d like to see more of that kind of thing and less of the thing where people hide their broken bones to be polite.

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

‘Shameless’: The Most Dramatic Comedy This Season

‘Shameless,’ Showtime’s irreverent story of working-class hardship, has re-categorized itself as a comedy for awards season. That’s a strange choice when you consider that series star, Emmy Rossum, has spent the whole season knocking it out of the park in what is clearly a dramatic role, and clearly the show’s most serious attempt to engage with its subject matter.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Shameless, Showtime’s irreverent story of working-class hardship, has re-categorized itself as a comedy for awards season. That’s a strange choice when you consider that series star, Emmy Rossum, has spent the whole season knocking it out of the park in what is clearly a dramatic role, and clearly the show’s most serious attempt to engage with its subject matter.

Shameless, a remake of the UK series of the same name, has never been the kind of show that could go toe to toe with the Breaking Bads of the world. It has an uneven tone that often seems to make light of the class-based difficulties its characters face, and a sense of humour that slips over the line from “borderline offensive” to “actually, for real, offensive” at times. It’s never been entirely clear whether the series is supposed to be grounded in the real world, or take place in a hyper-reality where actions have no consequences and the characters are supposed to be satirical. The show’s dramatic plot lines lean toward the former and its comedic plot lines lean toward the latter (maybe because there’s nothing particularly funny about being poor in the real world).

The series follows the adventures of the Gallagher family–six children, and their drunken, absentee father, Frank. The eldest Gallagher child (and the only one over the age of majority at the series’ inception) is Emmy Rossum’s character, Fiona, who more or less serves as the moral center of the show.

Over the first three seasons, we watch Fiona struggle to care for her siblings while working odd jobs and dating men who turn out to be bad for her. Every time Fiona tries to better her life, the family drags her back down either through sabotage or (more usually) through requiring things from her that aren’t compatible with what she wants. Through all of these setbacks–and despite the occasional outburst–Fiona, like all of the Gallagher children, displays an almost super-human resilience. Despite being abandoned by her parents and dropping out of high school to raise five children on her own, despite shuffling from low-wage job to low-wage job and scrounging for money for food, despite being repeatedly cheated out of even the smallest opportunities for happiness, Fiona stays positive, optimistic, determined, and focused on doing for everyone else, when no one is doing for her.

It’s the kind of chipper, poor-but-happy attitude the show sometimes displays, which undercuts the seriousness of the situation the characters find themselves in. Events that would scar you for life, in the real world, become funny anecdotes and colourful stories about triumphing over adversity. You might get the impression, watching this show, that being poor is a great adventure that doesn’t hurt anyone’s chances to lead a fulfilling life.

And then season four happens. Wonderful, dramatic, thoughtful season four, which we are now calling a “comedy.”

In this “comedy,” Fiona finally has a stable middle-class office job. She’s a rising star in the sales department, and she has a comprehensive benefits plan that covers all of her dependents. She’s dating her boss, which isn’t great, but he’s a stable, emotionally healthy man who treats her with respect and encourages her instead of dragging her down. With no one trying to sabotage her, Fiona decides to sabotage herself.

Over the course of this season (the last episode airs this week), Fiona torches her relationship, torches her career, and–because that’s not enough–ends up with a felony drug conviction that sends her to prison, passing all of her responsibility onto her next oldest sibling, Lip.

What makes this different from previous seasons is that the story line is played completely straight. Although there’s an element of humour in the earlier episodes, Fiona’s arrest turns this into a Big Deal, and the scenes of her arrest, trial, parole, and incarceration are treated very seriously. They’re much darker than similar scenes on, for example, Orange is the New Black (which is more legitimately classified as a comedy due to its tone), and the show engages in a fairly downbeat explanation of how things ended up this way.

Fiona is a product of the environment she grew up in, and her attempts at mobility are almost pre-destined to fail. At one point, she explains that she never felt like she deserved to have a good job or a stable relationship, and she wanted to prove she was right by destroying it. The values she holds as a working class woman also play a role–she might have been able to get a better deal with the prosecutor if she had sold out the middle-class man who gave her the drugs; she didn’t, because it was unthinkable to her to be a rat.

The penultimate episode invites us, as well, to see the connection between Frank’s poor parenting and the fate of his eldest child, essentially forced into the role of parent during her own childhood. She’s self-destructing the same way her parents did and, in a world of such limited options, when so much pressure has been applied to her, it’s hard to imagine that this wouldn’t have happened someday.

The show also takes a very serious attitude to the way these events affect Lip. The first in his family to go to college, he–like Fiona–struggles with fitting into middle-class culture, and initially tries to sabotage himself by withdrawing. Just as he seems like he’s making progress, he’s forced into Fiona’s role as head (and moral center) of the family, and he looks at her with the same hatred and sense of betrayal that they’ve both directed at Frank.

This is just one of several serious, dramatic story lines this season, but it lends the show a sense of gravity and relevance that it hasn’t always had. It’s also given Emmy Rossum a chance to demonstrate what an outstanding performer she actually is–she’s come a long way from staring into the middle distance while a guy in a mask swarms around her. In fact, I might have liked to see her compete as an actress in a drama series during awards season–I think she might have wormed her way into a nomination, this time.

Alas, this is not the world we live in. In probably the least funny season of Shameless ever, and the season that treated the characters’ situation with the greatest respect, and the season that finally gave the leading actress a meaty, dramatic role to sink her teeth into–one in which, dare I say it, she takes off her clothes to a little more purpose–it’s a comedy. OK, then.

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

Marshmallows and Promises: ‘Veronica Mars’ and the Hard-Boiled Heroes of Neptune

The ‘Veronica Mars’ movie delivers on many of the promises made to fans of the TV series, but less so on the promises of the hard-boiled detective story at its core.

Written by Katherine Murray

The Veronica Mars movie delivers on many of the promises made to fans of the TV series, but less so on the promises of the hard-boiled detective story at its core.

Warning: This review contains partial spoilers for both the movie and the TV show.

When Veronica Mars premiered in 2004, the conceit of the series was simple – it was a classic, hard-boiled detective story, moved to a high school setting, where the role of the cynical, world-weary gumshoe was played by a cute teenage girl. What made the series stand out is that, rather than treating the premise as a joke, the writers took it completely seriously and used the conventions of the genre to build a topical, neo-noir world in which the corruption of the justice system comes through in its treatment of women and people of colour, and class struggle comes through in bullying that begins in the schoolyard.

Veronica is introduced to us as a rape survivor whose claims were never investigated by the police, which goes a long way toward explaining her prickly demeanour and suspicion toward the authorities. Her father, Keith Mars, is a P.I. who lost his position as Sheriff after accusing the town’s most powerful man of a crime. Together, they spend most of the first season investigating the murder of Veronica’s best friend, Lily Kane – a case that reveals the ways that the wealthy have tried to conceal the truth. When Lily’s killer is eventually caught and sent to trial, he’s found Not Guilty, in part because the jury is convinced not to believe Veronica’s testimony for reasons of suspected promiscuity. It’s clear that the only kind of justice in Chinatown Neptune is the justice you make for yourself, and the show successfully mixes the tropes of the hard-boiled detective with depictions of very real social and political injustice to create a story that resonates.

In the second season, Veronica investigates a bus crash and uncovers an even deeper spread of corruption, culminating in the discovery that the mayor is a pedophile, and Veronica’s rapist is one of the boys he molested. Families that appear to be normal and wholesome are revealed as harbouring child abuse, and Veronica loses the person she loves and the scholarship that would have let her go to Stanford as the price for trying to do the right thing.

The third season drops the plot a little, but ends on a suitably downtrodden, hard-boiled note – Keith, who regained his position as Sheriff, is about to be kicked out of office again, and Veronica returns to her status as a social pariah after some rich boys make and distribute a sex tape of her. Despite trying, for three years, to help Neptune’s underclass find justice, the Mars family is back where it started, and the powerful forces against them are still gaining strength.

The movie checks in with Veronica nine years later and, while it does fans (who funded it through Kickstarter) a solid by giving them a chance to reconnect with the characters and tying up loose ends, Veronica Mars the movie is considerably less interested in all of this grimdark sociology stuff.

It turns out that Veronica walked away from the detective business after the series ended and started a new, normal life, attending law school, and moving in with her bland third season boyfriend, Piz. When she gets a call from her more exciting ex, Logan Echolls, she does what we want her to do – she throws Piz and her burgeoning career as a lawyer away and returns to the seedy underworld of Neptune to continue the doomed fight for justice as a P.I. The voiceover frames this as an addiction – to Logan (who has lost all of the personality traits that made him addictive and dangerous in the TV show) and to the adrenaline rush of living in the gray zone between light and dark. There’s a subtext, though, in which this is also a moral decision – Veronica was about to “escape” from Neptune at the price of working for the very, very rich, who’re holding everyone down; when she sees the corruption in Neptune’s police force, she realizes that this is where the battle’s being fought and, therefore, where she needs to stay.

The A-plot of the story concerns Veronica trying to solve a murder for Logan, which reconnects her both with her passion for him and her passion for solving crimes. The B-plot, though, is where the hard-boiled detective story lives, and it’s living on life support – barely hanging in there from beginning to end.

In the B-plot, the police force of Neptune has become even more blatantly (and ham-fistedly) corrupt than before. They’re conducting stop and frisk searches, planting evidence, and making wrongful arrests. One of the best and most topical scenes in the film occurs when Keith and Veronica see the police Taser a teenage boy and Keith gets out of his car to make sure they know that he’s filming it all on his phone. This is how the little people fight back in 2014, and it’s a moment that resonates both with contemporary culture and with the hard-boiled aesthetic of the series.

Veronica’s sometime-friend, Weevil, is later shot and booked for a crime on false evidence, after he stops to help someone in trouble. In the TV series, Weevil was Veronica’s primary criminal contact – a gang leader with a conscience who carried out a violent form of justice for the underclass. He left the gang when they lost the mission, but ended up in jail. When the movie checks in with him, we learn that, like Veronica, he’s been a law-abiding citizen for years, with a job, and a family – carefully building a life for himself that distances him from his origins. After the events of the film, the last we see of Weevil is that he’s gone back to the gang. Like Veronica, he puts on his old costume and gives up the idea of walking away.

That story about how Neptune is losing the war against corruption, and how its heroes are drawn back to the darkness to fight it? That story that engages with the genre concerns of the series and invigorates them by making them relevant and part of a morally complex world? That should have been the A-story.

What we get instead, for most of the film, is a throwback to Veronica’s high school days (framed by her ten-year reunion). The mystery concerns her wealthier classmates (some of whom we know and some of whom we don’t) and the discovery of a crime that may have been committed in their youth. It’s totally disconnected from the police corruption story and mostly serves as an excuse to get the band back together, leading to scenes like Veronica punching out one of the high school mean girls, and plot points concerning invitations to parties and after-parties, or who’s dating whom. In terms of fan service, this makes sense – in superficial ways, it gives us more of the show we loved: more high school; more of our favourite characters; more cute, funny moments between them. In terms of letting us visit with old friends, Veronica Mars delivers in spades.

In terms of giving our old friends something of interest to say, the movie delivers less. While the bar was admittedly set pretty high by the series, the movie doesn’t reach the same heights in terms of using the genre to say something meaningful about the world we live in. Veronica is still a great character, but the movie loses touch with her hard-boiled roots and gets lost in nostalgia rather than digging for the gritty, hard-to-stomach truth.

In the end, there’s plenty of laughter, and tense final scenes with the killer – and the movie is crammed full of in-jokes, and nods to the fans – but something’s still missing. The spark that made it relevant is gone, and now it’s just a trip down memory lane with someone who happens to be a detective.

Read Also at Bitch Flicks: A Long Time Ago, We Used to Be Friends: The Veronica Mars Movie

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

‘Rescue Me’ and Being Treated Like Everyone Else

Consider this a late addition to the Women and Work Week, if you like. This plot line aired on ‘Rescue Me’ almost ten years ago, but it was so interesting and so frustrating that I haven’t forgotten it since.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Consider this a late addition to the Women and Work Week, if you like. This plot line aired on Rescue Me almost ten years ago, but it was so interesting and so frustrating that I haven’t forgotten it since.

Rescue Me is an hour-long drama/comedy about a group of New York City firefighters that aired on FX from 2004 to 2011. I stopped watching after the third season (for scheduling reasons, rather than the content of the show) but, up until that point, it was a weird Libertarian blend of conservative and progressive ideas wrapped in a blanket of swearing.

The show stars and was created by Denis Leary, and you can hear his voice very clearly in the writing – which is to say that it’s sometimes very funny, but it’s also hostile toward anything it perceives as “political correctness.” Leary and Rescue Me are both invested in honouring the work that firefighters do (Leary has raised a great deal of money to support fire departments in real life), and the show is also invested in portraying a particular image of (predominantly white) working class masculinity. The straight men on this show call each other “fag,” use violence to solve their problems, and transmute any vulnerable emotion into an outward display of anger. The show is sympathetic to them without (usually) idealizing their behaviour.

The portrayal of women on Rescue Me is a lot less thoughtful, and usually falls under the heading of “bitches be crazy,” but there’s an absolutely fascinating story during the first two seasons where a female firefighter named Laura joins the team and the guys are really mean to her. It’s fascinating (and frustrating) in part because the show takes such an agnostic approach to the conflict – it doesn’t firmly side with either Laura or the guys who hate her guts. Instead, it acknowledges that she has good reasons for being upset, but takes the position that there’s nothing anyone can really do about it. It’s unfortunate, but she’s entered the masculine space of the firehouse, and she doesn’t fit in. Period.

The most important moment in this conflict comes early in season two, when Laura finally files a complaint because one of the senior firefighters, Lou, calls her a stupid twat while they’re responding to a call. I’m going to go into a painful level of detail describing that exchange to you now, because there are so many layers to what’s going on that it makes for one of the best and most nuanced portrayals of gender discrimination I’ve ever seen on television, and it gives us a good jumping off point to talk about what we mean when we say we want to be treated “like everyone else.”

That Time Lou Called Laura a Twat
The conflict between Lou and Laura begins in the episode “Balls” (for real; that’s what it’s called), when the crew responds to a call at a burning building. Lou goes into the basement of the building with Laura and a male firefighter named Garrity. They find someone passed out on the floor, and Lou tells Garrity to carry that person outside. Laura misunderstands that thinks that she’s supposed to help Garrity, so she stays behind while Lou goes into the basement alone, thinking that Laura’s behind him. He doesn’t realize what’s happened until he asks Laura for help and finds out that she’s not there. He’s understandably freaked out by this – being in the middle of a fire by himself – and, when he gets back outside, he finds Laura and reams her out for abandoning him. In the process of doing that, he yells that she obviously never learned to do her job, and calls her a stupid twat.

Laura approaches Lou later and tells him in a reasonable tone of voice that, while she understands that she made a mistake, the way he spoke to her wasn’t acceptable. Lou initially pretends that he doesn’t remember what he said, but then he calls her a stupid twat again, and condescendingly refuses to apologize, saying, “I don’t think so, honey.” Laura tells him not to call her “honey,” either, and says that she doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it, and will consider the issue closed if he just says he’s sorry. Lou refuses to say he’s sorry.

Laura makes a formal complaint against Lou, and what follows is two episodes in which the other guys try to convince her that she has no right to feel upset, before they all get sent to mandatory sensitivity training (which is a joke). The guys take the position that Laura’s choosing to work in a male-dominated field, and that this is how men talk to each other – like it or lump it. They don’t see any difference between what Lou said to her and the kind of trash talk they exchange on a daily basis, and they clearly think that she’s being too sensitive and asking for special treatment by making a big issue out of it.

The male characters remain completely oblivious to the context in which the comment was made. It’s different to tease someone or to use rough language in the spirit of camaraderie when your relationship is fundamentally based on respect. In Laura’s case, she’s well aware that the guys don’t want her there – the very first thing they do (at Lou’s suggestion, it bears mentioning) is freeze her out by refusing to speak to her when she arrives. She has to fight to get a private bathroom (so that she can shower separately) and, once she does, they take turns leaving the foulest things they can in her toilet. Laura tries various strategies to break the ice and make herself part of the group – ranging from an ill-advised decision to bring in baked goods to taking on assignments that no one else wants to do – but she’s frustrated to discover that they treat her with contempt no matter what. Within that context – the context of having been specifically rejected, excluded, and bullied because of her gender – having someone scream a gendered insult at her lands a little differently. It lands differently than the insult would land in the context of an otherwise respectful relationship, and it lands differently than a non-gendered insult, like “asshole,” would land.

The men also ignore the attitude with which the comment was made. In the episode “&#!&,” Franco, who’s Puerto Rican, tells Laura that it’s totally fine for the other guys to call him a “spic,” and therefore she shouldn’t be mad about specifically gendered insults. What we see in practice, though (in season two and, later, in season three), is that, while Franco seems okay with people saying “spic” in casual conversation, he’s definitely not okay with it when Lou (again) uses that word in anger. In fact, Lou ends up apologizing when he does that, because he understands it wasn’t cool. If Lou were using derogatory terms to refer to women in casual conversation, it still wouldn’t be a great thing to do, but it would come across differently than when he uses those words deliberately as a weapon to hurt Laura.

The men on this show don’t display any awareness of those contextual differences, though, and they instead do an awful thing that men sometimes do in real life where they make themselves the arbiters of what’s offensive to women. These characters, with their limited imaginative powers, don’t feel like they would be offended if they were Laura, so she can’t be offended, either.

To the show’s credit, Laura’s reaction to these well-meaning lectures on How Guys Talk to Each Other and Why It’s Totally Not a Big Deal is to look angry, hurt, and frustrated at being ganged-up on again. She points out, at various moments, that she would be doing a disservice to the women who come after her if she just ignored this kind of thing, and that she didn’t create the problem by reporting it – Lou created the problem by saying something inappropriate in the first place. She never changes her mind about whether she’s right to be offended, but she comes to see that she’s not going to get the result she wants. It’s a lose-lose situation where nothing she says or does is going to make any difference.

Lou, in the meantime, never apologizes. After Laura files her complaint, he’s called into a meeting with his superiors where they tell him that, because it’s his word against Laura’s, he should just deny that he said anything and get the other guys to make her miserable enough to transfer out. That suggestion seems to sober him a little bit, and he chooses to go on record saying that he did call her a name, which leads to the sensitivity training. He talks to Laura again after and tells her that the (chauvinist) world inside the firehouse is the only thing in his life that’s stayed constant and that, if she forces that to change, he won’t even know who he is anymore. Laura says that she’ll accept that as an apology, even though Lou doesn’t want her to.

I’m not going to say that the show succeeds in dramatizing both sides of this particular argument because, while I feel sorry for Lou, I also think his “side” – the side where he wants his workplace to be a safe space for him to say whatever awful thing he wants without having to hear a complaint about it – is just wrong. That’s not how we share society with other people. What the show does do successfully, though, is portray the clash of worldviews taking place in the struggle for gender equality.

On the one hand, there’s the worldview that says, “All people have equal worth as human beings and are entitled to the same base level of respect,” and, on the other hand, there’s a worldview that says, “All people are arranged into a single hierarchy, and your position on the hierarchy is determined by how well you measure up to the standards of the dominant group.” That means that, depending on your worldview, “I want to be treated like everyone else” can either mean, “I want to be treated respectfully, as all people deserve to be treated,” or “I want to be measured against the same standard as everyone else, never mind if the standard is biased.”

The way that the men on this show reject Laura is more complicated than saying, “No girls allowed,” because the second worldview – the one they appear to subscribe to – allows that women can enter the dick-measuring contest; it just guarantees that they’ll lose.

The male characters in Rescue Me completely believe that they’re treating Laura “like everyone else” by being meaner to her than they are to men in the same position (we see this, for example, when male firefighters transfer into the house and are welcomed with open arms, or when a male firefighter makes a mistake on the job and is instantly forgiven). They’re treating her according to where they think she falls on the hierarchy and they’re annoyed by what they perceive as her demanding respect that’s unearned.

These are men who’ve worked hard to measure up to the masculine ideal – to earn respect that they don’t feel was afforded to them just for being people. They’re not suddenly going to change their minds and decide that that was all for nothing. Instead, they defend what they perceive as their territory, by telling Laura that she’s wrong for upsetting the balance.

It’s awful, and it’s frustrating both for Laura and for the audience, but it plays out in a very realistic way. It’s scene after scene of Laura by herself against everyone else in a battle that’s years away from being won. It’s painful, but it’s really good television.

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

Jeannie Van Der Hooven: Unlikable Woman Done Right

So far, this is Kristen Bell’s season to shine as the hard-hearted Jeannie Van Der Hooven on Showtime’s ‘House of Lies.’

So far, this is Kristen Bell’s season to shine as the hard-hearted Jeannie Van Der Hooven on Showtime’s House of Lies.

Whether we’re talking about the characters on Girls or (confusingly) the adorable lead on The Mindy Project, it seems like being “unlikable,” at least when we’re talking about women, has come to mean “having a personality that not everyone likes.” Far from being the sociopaths that carried Breaking Bad and Dexter, “unlikable” female characters are often women who basically mean well, but come off as being disagreeable, self-centered, or rude.

That’s unfortunate, and it raises a whole slew of questions about the way we watch television – like, “Why are we, as viewers, less prepared to love a woman who says ugly things than a man who cuts people up with a chainsaw?” – but it also distracts from the really unlikable women on TV – the ones who don’t really mean well, who hurt other people on purpose – and the challenges of telling a story about them.

House of Lies, which is now midway through a surprisingly strong third season, has lately devoted a lot of time to the really unlikable woman in the form of Jeannie Van Der Hooven (Kristen Bell), a calculating, manipulative business management consultant who’s not only willing, but happy to destroy whoever she has to as part of her climb to the top.

House of Lies has always traded in unlikable characters – in fact, one of the problems with the first season was that there was no one to cheer for. The heroes are a team of management consultants who bullshit their clients (equally unlikable representatives of corporate America) into paying them outrageous sums of money for absolutely nothing. They sometimes crush the companies they work with, order massive layoffs, and knowingly promote products and services that are dangerous, fraudulent, or exploitative. Advertising for the third season has tried harder to frame the show as a contest between evil and evil, where we cheer for Jeannie and her one-time boss, Marty (Don Cheadle), because they’re smart and the people they’re screwing over are often equally bad. Since the start of season two, the show has worked to clarify that it isn’t a big ode to capitalism and that it’s aware of its characters’ failings.

That’s been a successful strategy overall, but things really clicked this season when Jeannie, who was never that soft to begin with, hardened up into a white-collar sociopath. It’s a move that takes all of Kristen Bell’s unflappable, charismatic charm, and transforms it into the calculated veneer of a cold-hearted snake, and it’s the most thrilling thing I’ve ever witnessed on this show.

Having split off from Marty at the end of season two, Jeannie begins season three on a high. She’s been given a big promotion at the management firm and heads her own team of consultants. She’s got the boss in her pocket, and one of the first things we see her do is steal a major account from one of her peers.

In what’s probably a nice bit of foreshadowing, Marty has a trippy dream right around the same time in which Jeannie, who’s come to kill him, is so consumed with getting revenge, and so certain of her impending triumph, that she doesn’t see danger sneak up from behind.

The next thing we know, Jeannie walks into work to discover that the firm has re-hired an old enemy of hers, a misogynist jerk called The Rainmaker. Jeannie got him fired in the first season by confessing that she slept with him to further her career (the confession itself was a calculated attempt to save her own job), and now he’s replacing pocket boss, and starting a boys club for boys with the guy she stole an account from.

The writers help us to cheer for Jeannie by reframing The Rainmaker’s actions as sexual harassment (something that wasn’t made clear in the first season) and by showing us that, regardless of what might do, she’s always going to be on the outs as a woman. They used a similar strategy with Marty in season two, highlighting the racism he faced as a Black man, and, in both cases, it’s an effective way of bringing us around to the characters’ sides. Although they’re both very greedy, conniving people, they’re also at an unfair disadvantage. It doesn’t erase our disapproval of their methods, but it helps us to celebrate their wins.

With only a few hours to process The Rainmaker’s threatening return, Jeannie completely changes her strategy, screws over Marty, steals a major client from the firm, and uses it as leverage to get equity in Marty’s private consulting company. As a parting “fuck you” to the firm, she convinces one of her subordinates – the naïve, gentle-hearted Benita, who sees Jeannie as a mentor – to torch her own career by reporting details the firm’s shady dealings to the press. To underscore what a cynical, self-serving move this is, Jeannie gives what initially appears to be a sincere speech about how she admires Benita’s principles – how they remind her of the girl she used to be – that gradually starts to turn sour as we realize she’s setting Benita up.

We can practically hear the music from Game of Thrones start to play as Jeannie climbs into the elevator, so ruthless is her victory. The following episode finds her reunited with Marty, at Kaan and Associates, where she wastes no time in alienating one of her new subordinates, Caitlin. When a client makes inappropriate sexual comments to Caitlin during a meeting, Jeannie appears to stand up for her, only to reveal, later, when Caitlin tries to thank her, that her only motive was to align herself with the client’s more decorous business partner. This is followed by an impatient, condescending lecture about how much Caitlin sucks at her job, to which she can only say “wow.”

What’s interesting about the scene – other than the fact that it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colours – is that the show allows Jeannie to be correct in the substance of what she’s saying at the same time as being bankrupt of any human warmth or compassion. It’s not an “awkward moment” kind of unlikeableness, where maybe she meant to say something nice but was hampered by some minor personality flaws – she’s being harsh on purpose. And, in back to back episodes, we see this come out specifically in situations where we might normally expect her to nurture, encourage, or support other women who look up to her. It’s a dynamic we don’t often see on TV (especially not from this side), and it’s fascinating to watch.

Jeannie finishes the episode off by going home early, and making sure that Marty sees that she’s going home early, in order to remind him that he’s not in charge. Marty, who’s been trying to make peace with Jeannie, and sees her as being somewhat of a friend, explains in a fairly heartfelt way (while still trying to re-establish control) that he worked very hard all his life to have something that was his, and that she should appreciate what it means that he gave her half of it. Jeannie rejects him and says, “You didn’t give me anything. I took it.”

The moment she says it, we know that it’s true. Everything she’s done makes sense from a practical point of view, but there’s a meanness, and an anger underneath. This is a woman who knew she was taking half of his dream and did it, in part, just to hurt him.

Jeannie’s story line this season isn’t just interesting because of the way it characterizes women, but because it represents House of Lies becoming what I think it wants to be — evil versus evil; the smart and the mean outfoxing each other; what Marty and Jeannie have made themselves into, to take things from people they hate.

I’m loving this season more than I thought I could love House of Lies, and it’s all down to one of the worst people I’ve ever seen. A woman I would never want to be in the same room with, who’s vindictive, and greedy, and mean, at the heart of a story about power and people who scrape themselves raw just to get it.

I’m excited to see how this ends.

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

‘Battlestar Galactica’: The Show Where All of the Women Die

Taken in the larger scope of what’s available, it’s so rare to find a TV show with so many great parts for women – so many characters who are interesting and smart and competent and vital to the stories they live in – that it’s kind of a bummer when all of them die. That said, I do think there’s a case to be made for why this may not be a horrible choice.

Um… spoilers for Battlestar Galactica.

What Battlestar Galactica is
To recap for anyone who isn’t familiar with the show but still wants to hear about death, Battlestar Galactica (2004) is a remake of the original series, in which humanity lives on a ragtag group of spaceships because robots are trying to kill everyone. The robots are called Cylons, and they look like human people, and it’s a metaphor for how the Other is really the same as we are, and that’s a lesson we need to learn to make peace.

In practical terms, there are twelve models of humanoid Cylon and multiple copies of each. So, whenever a Cylon dies (with a few specific exceptions) he or she downloads into a new, identical body and gets to come back again.

The main story line is about how the ragtag band of humans tries to find a mythical planet called Earth with the Cylons acting (mostly) as antagonists along the way. There’s also a supernatural/religious element in which there are prophecies and angels, and God has a special plan to save both the humans and Cylons by making the most vile man in their number his prophet.

Laura Roslin is the president, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace is the hotshot viper pilot, and there are videos on YouTube that recap the first three seasons if you want to know what happens.

As other Bitch Flicks writers have previously discussed, there are a lot of really good, well-written, interesting female characters, human and Cylon alike. And almost every single one of them gets killed.

Teach the Controversy: What We Mean When We Say “All of the Women Die”
As the show was winding down in its final season, Slate ran an article by Juliet Lapidos called “Chauvinist Pigs in Space” that criticized several aspects of the way women are filmed and portrayed on BSG. Among other points, Lapidos argued that, “The main female characters are all dying, dead, or not human” and that this trend sent the unintentional message that “women…just can’t hack it when the going gets rough.” The piece prompted several responses, including this one from Slant, but Lapidos wasn’t the only one saying it; similar comments were popping up on message boards and blogs (by which I mean Live Journal, because that’s where we all hung out in 2009, amirite?), especially after the series finale aired, and both Starbuck and Roslin were down for the count.

One common response to Lapidos’ article, and to the more general complaint that so many women die on this show, is to either start listing all of the male characters who died – and, since the overall death toll on this series was high, it’s a very long list, or to argue that, hey, there are still cylon women alive at the end of the show, and they’re women, too, goddammit. The problem is that comparing the number of dead characters, or human versus Cylon characters, doesn’t get at the real issue. A better way to ask the question is, “Who, of all the characters on the show, was able to survive four whole seasons without getting killed?”

On the men’s side, we’ve got all three of the leads (William Adama, Apollo, and Gaius Baltar), several important secondary characters (including Chief Tyrol, Colonel Tigh, and Helo), and a few other randoms who we never got to know that well. On the women’s side, we’ve got more randoms and (probably) a minor character named Seelix who does not appear in the final episode.

That’s all.

All of the non-Seelix women we know, including all of the lead female characters, have died. The human women are gone, and every Cylon woman left standing at the end died on screen earlier in the series. Tyrol and Tigh are also Cylons, and they didn’t have to die ever.

While I don’t like her phrasing that much, I have to agree with Lapidos that there’s a sense in which this doesn’t sit well. A sense in which it seems like, intentionally or not, the show is telling us that capable women need to die, either as a warning to the rest of us (“the price for being good at things is that you won’t survive”), or as a way of making the audience feel safe around them. Sort of like how you feel safe at the end of a monster movie when the monster gets swallowed by lava – like, don’t be afraid! These women are not roaming the Earth, continuing to be really awesome. They’re dead, like Xena, and the threat is contained.

Um… spoilers for Xena: Warrior Princess.

On a personal note, as a woman who’s watching TV, it’s also just kind of a downer. Taken in the larger scope of what’s available, it’s so rare to find a TV show with so many great parts for women, so many characters who are interesting and smart and competent and vital to the stories they live in – that it’s kind of a bummer when all of them die.

That said, I do think there’s a case to be made for why this may not be a horrible choice, so…

Why This May Not Be a Horrible Choice
Like almost every TV show, Battlestar Galactica is a mixed bag when it comes to storytelling. Some of the women die stupid deaths, but some of them die pretty good ones that follow from actively participating in the world in which this story takes place.

Starting on the Bad Death side, the main example that Lapidos focuses on is Chief Tyrol’s wife, Cally, and how she gets murdered by Tyrol’s Cylon mistress on her way to commit suicide. That’s a fair death to focus on, because it’s probably the worst, especially when paired with the mistress’ murder (by Tyrol!) in the series finale, which was just a WTF moment that got buried in all of the other explosions and stories that came to a close.

After she’s married to Tyrol, Cally is almost completely defined by her relationship with him and, even before they get married, it sometimes feels like her only role in the story is be jealous because he’s with someone else. Her death happens firstly as a surprise switcheroo for the audience, and secondly as a way to complicate Tyrol’s relationship with his boring, boring mistress who was never that great of a character, either. The show does this last minute thing where it tries to take us inside Cally’s experience when she finds out her husband’s a Cylon, but it’s really too little, too late.

Also in the not-such-a-great-death category are popular secondary characters Dualla (who shoots herself in the head out of nowhere during the final season) and Kat, who gets a very special, very manipulative episode all about her, so that we can learn about her backstory and feel bad when she gets radiation poisoning, which she gets by addressing a problem that also only exists in that one episode.

In fairness to the show, though, there are plenty of pointless, annoying, cannon fodder, and/or emotionally manipulative deaths to go around for both men and women. Starbuck has a dead boyfriend who exists only to create tension between her and Apollo, and she’s lost some male pilots just so she’ll feel bad about what a crap teacher she was. Roslin’s sidekick Billy gets offed pretty randomly when he no longer serves the story, and the whole point of his death is to show us that Dualla and Apollo were mean to him on the last day that he was alive (and he was too gentle to live in this world, or something).

That said, because all of the women die, it makes sense that viewers would take a more critical attitude to examining how they die and to what purpose in the story.

And that’s where it starts to seem like it might not be a horrible choice because, while some of the women die stupidly, a lot of them die because women are the do-ers of Battlestar Galactica. They’re making things happen; they’re driving the story, and, when the supernatural element rears its head, they’re the prophesized saviors of the human and Cylon race.

Like a lot of militaristic stories, Battlestar Galactica measures its characters’ heroism partly through their capacity to suffer, both physically and emotionally. And unlike a lot of stories, BSG splits its heroic suffering pretty evenly between its male and female characters.

Starbuck is the action hero of the story – she goes on the dangerous missions, she gets the crap kicked out of her by robots, she has a tragic backstory with a dead boyfriend and an abusive mother, and she has a special destiny that requires her to sacrifice herself to save the people she loves. Roslin finds out that she has terminal cancer on the same day that she becomes President, and in order to lead, she has to overcome the fear that she feels for herself. During the last season, her body is falling apart just like the Galactica is falling apart, like tenuous hopes for the future are falling apart, and the question is whether any of those things will hold together long enough to find Earth. She and the beat-up old spaceship are both trying to complete their final missions by bringing the people to Earth.

Starbuck and Roslin are two of the most important characters on the show, and one could make the argument that, along with Gaius Baltar, they make up a trinity of the most important characters on the show, in terms of moving the primary story line forward. They die in the process, but it’s part the heroic journey.

Even some of the other, more perfunctory deaths come from a pretty strong place. Admiral Cain is there for three episodes before she bites it, but her character is right at the center of everything and killed as a direct result of the choices she makes as a leader (to place revenge above everything else). Athena, a Cylon, has her husband kill her so that she can download into another body on a Cylon ship and rescue her kidnapped baby – it’s pretty badass. Ellen Tigh gets murdered for betraying the humans to the Cylons. D’Anna Biers dies multiple times while investigating the identities of the final five Cylons (who are unknown to the remaining seven). The list goes on. In a universe where lots of people die as the product of doing, many female characters die because they do something that affects the story.

This is one of those instances where everyone’s a little bit right. It’s legitimately kind of annoying that, in a story full of strong, well-written women, none of them but (probably) Seelix can manage to survive. The television landscape being what it is, it makes you wonder what’s going on there. At the same time, and without this cancelling out the annoyance, a lot of the women died because they were such good characters and because the show was fairly egalitarian in determining who would drive the story.

Personally, I wish that in those last, sweeping shots of the surviving characters standing on Earth, we had seen Cally, or Dualla, or Kat, or someone we cared about who was female and lived for four years. I wish that it seemed possible, in the BSG universe, to be female and live for four years. And that feeling exists side-by-side with my joy at having such great characters to begin with.

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

When I Say Go We Go: Popular Feminism and ‘Spice World’

Some people see the Spice Girls as champions of female empowerment, and others as mindless actors in a consumerist pantomime of feminism. Like most artifacts of pop culture feminism, the Spice Girls presented an image that was neither perfectly laudable nor perfectly awful and shaming – they gave us a sincere attempt at female empowerment that wasn’t entirely free from the culture they lived in.

Some people really hate the Spice Girls. I’m not one of them.

We can’t really talk about Spice World without talking about the Spice Girls, in general, and why everybody seems to love and hate them.

Since “Wannabe” first topped the charts in 1996, the public attitude toward the Spice Girls has whipped back and forth between love and rejection faster than Willow Smith’s hair (because remember when that was a thing? This is a timely pop music joke). Some people see the Spice Girls as champions of female empowerment, and others as mindless actors in a consumerist pantomime of feminism. Like most artifacts of pop culture feminism, the Spice Girls presented an image that was neither perfectly laudable nor perfectly awful and shaming – they gave us a sincere attempt at female empowerment that wasn’t entirely free from the culture they lived in.

It’s hard to remember, because they looked so old when we were twelve, but the Spice Girls were a group of very young women (aged 18-22, when the band first formed) who wanted to be professional entertainers and answered a casting call beginning with the words, “R. U. 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance?” This is not an auspicious beginning for ground-shaking social and political work.

If you’re curious, or hungry to hear all the details of how terrible the pressure-cooker of fame really feels when the whole world is calling you fat, the one-hour documentary, Spice Girls: Giving You Everything, includes footage of the shockingly young, shockingly ordinary-looking Spices auditioning and rehearsing their first songs. It also includes some fairly well-spoken and introspective reflections on what it was like to live in the whirlwind of temporary Spice fame, and stories that should put to rest the idea that these women were mindlessly doing whatever a man said to do.

It isn’t hard to attack them; if I were a baby feminist scholar in undergrad, still getting used to my claws, the Spice Girls would make for some easy, delicious prey. They dress really sexy; they’ve each been reduced to a single personality trait; one of them is supposed to be childlike and that’s kind of creepy; the Black one is “scary” and that feels weird; the band was forged in the fires of consumerism, and that seems pretty evil to me – I’m licking my chops just thinking about it, but wait!

To paraphrase Camille Hayes, let’s remember that not everyone has a degree in Sociology and Gender Studies. Some people are just doing their best on their own, and, rather than demonizing them for not doing well enough, let’s at least acknowledge that we’re on the same team.

Considering that they were a bunch of 20-year-olds in a manufactured pop band, the Spice Girls did a pretty good job of carrying the feminist flag. They didn’t say or do anything radical and challenging; they didn’t provide stunning new insights into gender equality. The explicit message they preached (to their core audience of tween-aged girls) was that friendship is important, and so is self-expression, and girls are just as good as boys. That’s not earth-shattering stuff, but they also modelled through their behaviour that women can be confident and ambitious – outspoken, funny, loud, accomplished – and still receive mainstream acceptance.

The Spice Girls were competent performers who made decisions that they believed would further their careers. Were they perfect? No. Is it important to discuss the ways that Spice feminism falls short, in order to shed light on larger cultural and societal problems? Yes. But they were rowing in the same direction as the rest of us, even if their strokes weren’t especially powerful, so let’s all just ease up a bit, yeah?

The Part Where I Actually Talk About The Movie
Okay, right. So, there was a movie. Spice World was filmed at the height of the band’s popularity in 1997, and released five months before Geri Halliwell announced she was leaving the group. As of this writing, it enjoys as 29 percent Fresh Rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The film follows the Spice Girls’ fictionalized Spice adventures as they tour in a massive, double-decker Spice bus and learn lessons about the importance of friendship, etc, etc. The adventures range from the commonplace (going to a fancy party) to the outlandish (making first contact with aliens), and the whole thing is wrapped in a framing story about movie executives pitching the worst, most random, half-assed tie-in movie ever (i.e., the movie we’re watching). Add to that roughly a million cameos from other celebrities, a whole bunch of singing, and a villain who makes cryptic pronouncements under the soft cloak of darkness, and you have not yet begun to imagine all of the nonsense packed into this film.

I don’t know why so many people hate it.

It’s bad, but it’s purposely bad – it’s a campy, ironic comedy that makes fun of the idea of the Spice Girls as a manufactured, highly commercialized product. It sells the central Spice Girl fantasy – that being a pop star means hanging out with your very best friends and occasionally rehearsing in between wacky adventures – and it includes a fake Spice Girl origin story – that they began as best friends who spontaneously formed a band one day – but it also addresses many of the criticisms people had of the band in a tongue-in-cheek way. It’s actually kind of smart.

For example, one of the (valid) criticisms people have made of the Spice Girls is that, by reducing each member to a single personality trait or caricature, the band is participating in an ugly interaction of consumerism and patriarchy in which women are a commodity that comes in five types. Spice World is full of scenes that make fun of these simplified personas and highlight the fact that these women are actually whole human beings. They talk about things that have nothing to do with their Spice personalities, like chess, and manta rays; they do unflattering impressions of each other performing their Spice personalities; and they complain that everyone stereotypes them while (deliberately and obviously) acting out the stereotypes in question.

They also drive a bus over a model bridge and sleep in a haunted mansion. It’s not The Color Purple. But the movie is self-aware enough, and self-reflexive enough, that it ends up being a fun, playful story that ultimately resists the idea that there are Five Types of Women defined by specific traits.

It’s also a mainstream movie aimed at young girls where the heroes are all women who make their own decisions and who are way more concerned with their careers, their friendships, and chasing their dreams than they are with meeting some boys. In fact, the topic of boys comes up very rarely in Spice World, as though it’s possible for a woman to get through the day without raising the subject at all.

There’s this scene early on in the film, where the Spice Girls are meeting with fans, and they decide to ditch the planned trip on the Spice bus and run off to make their own fun. Mel B. says, “When I say go, we go,” and then they sprint away from the bus, dragging ten-year-old girls behind them, into adventure and freedom and Doing Your Own Thing and other big movie clichés – and maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I can think of worse heroes for those girls to have.

Spice World isn’t going on my imaginary shelf of Greatest Movies, but it captures a really interesting moment in pop culture history, and an interesting look at feminist ideals, as filtered through and expressed by mainstream entertainers.

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

Ja’mie: Mean-Spirited Impression of a Private School Girl

Power dynamics mean something in comedy. Making fun of someone less powerful than you is sort of like beating up someone who’s small, or taking advantage of someone naive. It’s not very sporting, and it makes you look mean. The problem is that the same person can be powerful in some contexts and not in others. A rich, white 17-year-old girl, for example, might be very powerful in contexts where she’s bullying her classmates at school, but less powerful in contexts where she’s trying to meet the demands of a sexist culture. If you’re an adult man nearing 40, it’s hard to make fun of the way a teenage girl dresses, flirts, and moons over boys without starting to look kind of petty.

This guest post by Katherine Murray appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

Ja’mie: Private School Girl features a drag performance from Australian comedian Chris Lilley that’s sometimes funny and sometimes uncomfortable to watch. Join me as I do the least funny thing in the world, and try to explain how a joke works.

Currently airing on HBO, Ja’mie: Private School Girl has plenty of funny moments as well as plenty that seem more mean-spirited, and the combination creates an uncomfortable viewing experience. Ja’mie, portrayed by Lilley, is a narcissistic and socially tone-deaf villain who was previously featured in We Can Be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year and Summer Heights High. Like The Office’s David Brent before her, Ja’mie craves admiration from others, but rarely does anything commendable. Instead, she inadvertently reveals herself to be racist, snobbish, bullying, and homophobic, while trying to sing her own praises. Private School Girl is the first series to focus exclusively on Ja’mie, following her through her day-to-day life as she prepares to graduate from the exclusive Hillford Girls Grammar School, and attempts to win the coveted Hillford Medal.

Ja’mie is one of Lilley’s most popular characters, and it isn’t hard to see why. A quick YouTube search returns some really funny clips from Heroes and Summer Heights High, where most of the comedy comes from Ja’mie’s hypocrisy. In Heroes, Ja’mie tries to gain recognition for her charity work—sponsoring African children through a World Vision analog—but reveals herself to be shallow and racist as soon as she tries to explain the project. She admits that she doesn’t know the names of any of the children she sponsors, because their names are “weird,” but she sings to their pictures “in their language” by making up words and clicking her tongue. When she learns that most of the children she sponsors were killed in a horrible flood, she’s devastated by the idea that this might hurt her chances at winning Australian of the Year, and calls the charity to make a customer complaint.

In Summer Heights High, Ja’mie is an exchange student at the titular public school, and she continually insults her classmates for being poor and ugly under the guise of finding common ground. She introduces herself by giving a prepared speech about how private school students are more likely to go to university and earn more money, whereas wife-beaters and rapists are statistically more likely to come from public schools. “People always go, ‘Private schools create better citizens,’”she says, “But I would say they create better quality citizens.” Later, when she campaigns for an end-of-year dance, she begins by telling everyone that dances give poor people (or “povos”), like them, something to live for. Under her leadership, the dance then becomes so expensive that no one can afford to buy tickets.

As of this writing, four of Private School Girl’s six episodes have aired, and the funniest moments rely on the same type of humour—scenes where Ja’mie congratulates herself for being nice to everyone, juxtaposed with documentary-style footage of her bullying other students. Fittingly, her nemesis at Hillford is an unpretentious girl named Erin who seems genuinely nice, and cares about helping others. Ja’mie recoils in disgust whenever Erin says or does anything heartfelt, and hypocritically accuses her of faking kindness in order to be admired. Though one might wish there were more characters for Ja’mie to play against, those scenes work really well, as do most of the scenes where we see Ja’mie whiplash between the falsely humble face she wears around people she wants to impress, and the vicious, Eric Cartman-like monster within.

Unfortunately, there are other scenes in Private School Girl where it seems like the joke is just “Ha! She’s a girl!” which makes things a little uncomfortable. Chris Lilley also gave this cringey interview where he said that straight guys love the show, because “The show is sort of like making fun of girls. It’s doing all the annoying things that our girlfriends do.” Unless the annoying things their girlfriends do include grossly misusing charity outreach programs and tyrannizing strangers at school, I’m not sure that “annoying things girls do” is an awesome target for a grown man’s comedy—especially when the annoying things aren’t otherwise hurting anyone else.

For example, there are lot of scenes where Ja’mie and her friends talk over each other excitedly, dissolving into a wall of noise and screeching for seemingly endless minutes. In the first episode, there’s a scene where they goof around, taking a long time to say goodbye to each other, yelling back and forth about how they’ll miss each other SO MUCH, and how they’re best friends, before running back for hugs. There are scenes that are just about Ja’mie being excited because a cute boy accepted her friend request on Facebook, or because she gets to throw a party. In most of these instances, the events aren’t exaggerated to the point that they become absurd and therefore funny — instead, they feel like a fairly true-to-life impression of a certain type of teenage girlhood, and it feels like the show takes for granted that it’s OK to just make fun of that.

From a practical standpoint, the scenes aren’t particularly funny — they feel too much like watching a real reality show, where people you don’t particularly like have conversations that aren’t particularly important. At the same time, there’s an uncomfortable undercurrent, since the inclusion of most of these scenes tells us that they were supposed to be funny—that there’s supposed to be something inherently laughable in the way that (some) teenage girls talk to each other, or the way they express their emotions—so laughable that you don’t even need to make up a joke for the scene; you just have to show it. As satire, it’s a far cry from the wicked hypocrisy of Ja’mie’s charity mission in Africa.

There are other jokes, though, that cut a little closer to the bone, and most of them involve Ja’mie’s brazen but awkward sexuality. Mistakenly believing herself to be a good dancer, she repeatedly tries to gain attention by performing sexually charged (or “slutty”) choreography and undoing the top buttons on her uniform to show her bra. She flirts with her school principal and, when a boy stays over at her house, she makes sure to casually pass by his room wearing only a towel. She constantly seeks reassurance that she’s not fat, while obsessing over the idea that her breasts are too small, and there’s an ongoing plot about the etiquette of sexting. Internet spoilers assure me that the ongoing discussion of Ja’mie’s breasts, and whether or not she should flash them, is building toward conflict in the final episodes, but, as others have pointed out, it isn’t always clear whether the show is making fun of Ja’mie or of the culture that’s placed her in this position.

When it comes to sex, teenage girls are at a disadvantage. They’re subject to conflicting demands, telling them both that the need to be sexually available and that sexual availability is not OK—they inhabit a world where developing a sexual identity is a Choose Your Own Adventure that always ends in scorn. Although I’ll withhold judgement about the finale until I’ve seen it, there’s an uncomfortable sense that Private School Girl has so far treated Ja’mie’s conflicted sexuality as another instance of her personal hypocrisy—that she’s pretending to be modest when really she’s the kind of girl who wants to flash her tits, or she’s pretending to be sexually experienced when really she’s too frigid to get it on—rather than a relic of a culture that would shame her both for wanting and not wanting sex.

Altogether, Private School Girl works really well when its satire is aimed at racists, bullies, and snobs, but significantly less well when it’s aimed at the more diffuse target of “girls.” Watching it, you come away with the sense that Chris Lilley has gotten a little bit too good at playing this character; that he’s revelling in his ability to imitate a certain set of mannerisms, while the point of the joke has been lost.

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