Kirsten Dunst – Bitch Flicks

Sofia Coppola as Auteur: Historical Femininity and Agency in ‘Marie Antoinette’

Sofia Coppola’s film conveys, to me, a range of feminist concerns through history. Concerns of how much agency, even in a culture of affluence, women can wield given that so much of women’s lives are dictated by the structures of patriarchy.

This guest post written by Marlana Eck originally appeared at Awaiting Moderation and appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors. Cross-posted with permission.

When it comes to 2006’s Marie Antoinette, some reviewers have ridiculed Sofia Coppola for creating “just another costume drama.” This is simply an attempt to discredit Coppola as a masterful auteur.

In reality, Coppola spent years (starting in 2001) researching the life of Antoinette with support from historian/writer Antonia Fraser, author of Marie Antoinette: A Journey.

Antoinette’s elaborate costuming is much like an ancient grotesque painting, producing both aesthetic endearment and strange sympathetic curiosity at what kind of deficiency the costuming is compensating for. Marie Antoinette herself has become somewhat of a chimera; a piece of the architecture we use to describe decadent aristocracy.

In one of the earliest scenes, Marie Antoinette is investigated to see if her virginity is still intact before being traded from her family in Austria to the French nobility. We see Marie Antoinette as an inmate, not something we would have attributed to her otherwise. Her world is insular and stunted, punctuated by decadent “treats” and passive, objectifying adoration by the court.

What stood out to me as I looked into Marie Antoinette’s life was the politicized severity in her relationships with people who she was supposed to adopt as trusted family. What they had in riches and prestige they lacked in empathy for each other.

As Antoinette approaches Versailles, The Radio Dept. “I Don’t Like It Like This” plays.

Words fail me all the time
I don’t even feel like talking
still I go on and on
I’m dying here and you keep walking

why are you asking me this?
can’t you see I’m trying?
I don’t like it like this
no I think I’m dying

Destined to go on as, more or less, a piece of furniture, this song is a flawless companion to the scene. Coppola’s use of contemporary music to generate a better understanding of Marie Antoinette’s condition is noteworthy. Kirsten Dunst is the perfect Antoinette with her few lines and held-back-ness in affect.

Through costuming, Marie Antoinette was able to attach a feeling of specialness she did not feel otherwise. Surrendered as a bargaining prize by her family at the age of 15, Coppola portrays the intense amount of watchfulness, and little love, she was exposed to.

As much as I am hard on Hillary Clinton, how much of these parallels can be drawn in her life? Here is another woman dedicated to a system of striving which is part of structural and damaging patriarchy. For Marie Antoinette, it was her flamboyance which helped her declare agency. For other women, maybe it’s joining the “boys club” however oppressive that may be (to others and the self).

Coppola shows that Marie Antoinette was merely using the language of power she had available. To delve further, Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was attracted to anything which helped her portray the eminence she felt she lacked in personhood.

Marie Antoinette was truly a prelude to our DeBordian society of spectacle, or, even more contemporarily (and French) Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl. How different is the reluctant Queen’s high profile folly than anyone else we worship in television or magazines? I’d argue even the modern Kim Kardashian’s life is decidedly martyred and politicized while the cultural roots of her decadence are not so easily scrutinized by the public. The Young Girl is a figure that is both revered and despised.

We can learn much about nobility in this film, whether it is historical past or our nobility at present. As much as people feel dehumanized at the level of working class, we also elevate the “elite” to the level of gods, giving them both immense privilege and unreachable humanitarian expectations.

One reviewer said, “Only an American” would depict Antoinette so sympathetically. But that misses the dichotomy of the grotesque. There is culpability in the culture which creates their iconic demons, the ones which attract and repulse us.

Jason Schwartzman as the reticent ruler Louis XVI says, “Lord God, guide us and protect us, for we are too young to rule.” How true is this of our modern media aristocracy? As we scrutinize politicians and the glitterati alike, shouldn’t we be mindful that they don’t much know what they are doing either?

Coppola shows us Marie Antoinette’s range of human qualities: most movingly that giving up to decadence is easy when love or agency is absent.

In discussions with Antonia Fraser, Coppola reportedly asked her if it was alright for her to leave the political bits out. Fraser remarked that Marie Antoinette would have “loved that.” Funny though, because what I see on screen, at times, is a cleverly wrought political drama in the tradition of “the personal is political.” This phrase becomes much clearer and richer in the life of Marie Antoinette as depicted by Coppola. Here was a girl (then woman) whose entire life was used as a political bargaining chip — from birth it was destined, and her death in an unmarked grave could only be so appropriate for someone whose only told purpose was to be a fancy prop to represent aristocracy.

Coppola’s choice not to show Marie Antoinette’s brutal death instead makes us focus on how cultures worship and dehumanize icons. Coppola does a masterful job of showing how this woman (Marie Antoinette) is only praised when she shows a complete lack of agency (being traded off, marrying someone she doesn’t know, obeying the rules she finds “ridiculous”) and scorned when she does the things which allow her to have agency (buying things, having an affair, having a barn built to experience something new).

Coppola leaves me with questions: why was Marie Antoinette asked to answer to a French public who had monarchs for centuries? Only her? How would they have her respond?

Big questions loom after watching Coppola’s film that defy what we believe about nobility.

Coppola’s film conveys, to me, a range of feminist concerns through history. Concerns of how much agency, even in a culture of affluence, women can wield given that so much of women’s lives are dictated by the structures of patriarchy.

Marlana Eck is a scholar, writer, and educator from Easton, Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Raging Chicken Press,Hybrid Pedagogy, San Diego Free Press, Cultured Vultures, Lehigh Valley Vanguard, and Rag Queen Periodical. At the latter two publications she serves as director. In her free time she enjoys horticulture and overestimating the efficacy of her dance moves in the living room mirror. Follow her on Twitter at @marlanaesquire.

Lessons from Underrated Coming of Age Flicks: Part 2: Back To School Edition

Even you’re not in school, September feels like a time for beginnings. It’s when you met the people who would become your close friends, bought new school shoes, and settled into a new year. With that in mind, I decided to look at a selection of coming of age films loosely based around school and learning. As an extra bonus, all five films come from female writer-directors.

See Part 1 here: Lessons from Underrated Coming of Age Flicks

Even you’re not in school, September feels like a time for beginnings. It’s when you met the people who would become your close friends, bought new school shoes, and settled into a new year.

It’s also when you were a bundle of nerves. Will my classes be too hard? Will I wear the right thing? Will anyone want to hang out with me?

I still feel that way in September, and I don’t think it’s an accident; I still have a lot to learn about life–we all do.

With that in mind, I decided to look at a selection of coming of age films loosely based around school and learning. As an extra bonus, all five films come from female writer-directors.

The D.A.R. support each other in their career ambitions.

All I Wanna Do/Strike!/The Hairy Bird (written and directed by Sarah Kenochan, 1998 )

It’s 1963 and headstrong Odette “Odie” Sinclair (perennial 90s coming of age star Gaby Hoffman) is being sent to Miss Godard’s Preparatory School, an all-girl boarding school, against her will. Her parents have discovered she plans to have sex with her boyfriend and believe the all-girl environment will keep her safe from boys. It’s this tension between ambitious girls and their growing attraction to men that sets the films conflict in motion.

At Miss Godard’s, Odie joins the D.A.R. (Daughters of the American Ravioli), a group of girls (including Kirsten Dunst) with the shared belief that they can be more than wives and mothers. When they discover plans for the school to go co-ed, the D.A.R. girls are torn. They like boys and want them about, but at the same time are concerned that the pressure to look good and appear feminine would detract from their learning. In addition, they believe the teachers will concentrate on teaching the boys as their education is seen as more important. First, they try to sabotage the plans and make the boys at a near-by school appear as sex-crazed drunks, then they take over the school and hold a strike.

Writer/director Sarah Kenochan based the film loosely on her own school experiences in that period and it definitely feels true to life. In addition to being immensely quotable (“Up Your Ziggy With a Wa-Wa Brush!”), it’s packed with memorable, off-beat characters and great 60s fashion. Though it’s set in the 60s, the central conflict of girls fighting for the quality of their education and their ability to be successful career women is something we can all relate to.

Lesson: Though many think otherwise, feminism doesn’t mean hating men. You can have crushes and romances without giving up your self and your ambitions. It may have been harder to learn these lessons in the 60s, especially as they didn’t always appear true, but unfortunately women are still fighting for recognition of these basic truths.

Hanna finds herself attracted to her best friend

Emporte-Moi/Set Me Free (directed by Léa Pool and written by Pool, Nancy Huston, Monique H. Messier and Isabelle Raynault, 1999)

In 1963, the Canadian province of Quebec was having a crisis of identity (and many feel it still is). Much of the population felt they needed to their own country rather than a part of Canada. This identity crisis is mirrored in teenage Hanna (Karine Vanasse). Her life is marked by in-betweens: she is not a child or an adult, she is not technically Catholic or Jewish (as her mother is Catholic and her father is Jewish), and as she begins to experiment, she finds she is neither straight nor gay.
She attempts to create an identity for herself by imitating her favourite film star, French New Wave star Anna Karina in the Godard film, Vivre Sa Vie. In one scene, the film cuts between shots of her and Anna Karina doing the same dance. This imitation gets her into trouble when she experiments with prostitution, which she sees as romantic because of Karina’s role in the Godard film, and is raped. After her attack, she finds her own voice by picking up a video camera and creating her own images.
The film feels earnest, identifying its main characters as a clearly working class family, several of whom are struggling with depression and highlighting the appreciation of movies and music so crucial to teenage dreams.

Lesson: You are never going to fit into an image. Your glamourous stars may have tragic pasts, you may have uncool conflicts and interests. Our favourite characters and stars even have fictional, streamlined images meant to tell us the stories we want to hear. They’re never as awkward or as painful as real life.

Harper meets Connie at her sister’s wedding, where she is an overlooked bridesmaid

Guinevere (written and directed by Audrey Wells, 1999)

Harper Sloane (Sarah Polley, now an acclaimed writer-director herself) is Harvard bound and not happy about it. She’s an overlooked younger sister from a buttoned-up, patrician family concerned with status and wealth. Though she plans to attend law school in the fall, she secretly feels uncomfortable about the decision though she’s never thought about what other kind of life there could be for her.

Enter Connie Fitzpatrick (Stephen Rea), a 40-something bohemian photographer, and the only person who sees her secret discomfort. They become lovers and Connie invites her to move in with him, his latest in a long line of muses all of which he calls, “Guinevere.” As a Guinevere, she has to learn some kind of art (Connie’s practices are often referred to as a school she will eventually graduate from), and Harper decides to take up photography. She follows him as an apprentice, not out of her passion for it, but because she enjoys seeing what he does. When she begins to enjoy it and gains confidence, however he is weary about even letting her take a single picture.

Guinevere is set apart from other films with similar stories of romance between young girls and older men, by the constant assertion that Harper is 19 and the relationship is between two adults, though they are often posed as teacher and student. Great care is also taken to show the reality of the relationship, as Harper ends up having to work to support him as his alcoholism and bohemian principles won’t let him. He is not a “sugar daddy” that takes her every care away.

Despite this, it’s unclear what the film’s stance on Connie is, as it makes his program look quite attractive. It helps Harper come out of her shell and establish a fulfilling career. When she returns to him years after their break-up, she is very affectionate toward him and sees it as her responsibility to take care of him as he dies.

Lesson: There’s a fine line between discovering your passion and coming into your own. Be sure you’re really discovering who you are, not who others, your family, your friends, even your mentors and lovers, want you to be.

Bethany graduates valedictorian in a class of one and sees the graduation ceremony as a prolonged humiliation

Sassy Pants (written and directed by Coley Sohn, 2012)

To Bethany Pruitt (Ashley Rickards), pink is the colour of oppression. All her life she’s been homeschooled and forcibly sheltered by her impossibly, even cartoonishly cruel mother June (Anna Gunn). June forbids her to go out with people her own age, has as never let her have a job and steals the money she has saved to go to college. Later on, when Bethany escapes, June even tricks her into coming home by telling her her grandmother is dying. As a budding fashion designer, Bethany’s predicament comes to her clearest in the wardrobe full of baby pink clothes her mother has bought for her.

So begins Bethany’s trip to independence. She packs up whatever clothes are salvageable, moves in with her father and his boyfriend and gets a job at a cool clothing shop where she falls in with a bad crowd and finds herself manipulated by a co-worker. But Bethany doesn’t stay down for long, she works hard and enjoys some success designing clothes for a small store. It’s refreshing how the fact that it is very hard to make it in the fashion world is never on Bethany’s mind, she’s just trying to break into its periphery.

The portrayal of Bethany’s mother, June, is the most contentious aspect of the film. She appears to be a terrible mother and possible sociopath through most of the film; however, it’s possible to interpret this view of her as Bethany’s point of view. In the last act, June’s humanity is carefully revealed and she becomes a sympathetic character.

Lesson: Even the worst monsters have their human moments. You don’t have to forgive the cruelty but you can try to understand it.

Vanessa and her FUBAR friends plan their strategy for Snowstream Survivor

Dear Lemon Lima (written and directed by Suzi Yoonessi, 2009)

Dear Lemon Lima is a charming story about outcasts fighting back, not with force but with friendship. It follows 13-year-old Vanessa (Savanah Wiltfong), a half Eskimo (note: Vanessa and the other characters refer to her as Eskimo, though this is not usually seen as a politically correct term) girl attending an Alaskan prep school on an ethnic scholarship. Vanessa is uncomfortable with the Eskimo cultural identity because her mother is Caucasian and she does not have a relationship with her father and his culture. It represents otherness to her, so she clings to her whiteness, claiming “I’m from Fairbanks!” as proof of normalcy.

To complicate matters, she has recently been dumped by her boyfriend, Phillip, whom she believes is her true love. They had a very close relationship, where she called him “Strawberry” and he called her “Onion.” The fact that Vanessa sees herself an a onion, sour and not easy to like, is interesting. She yearns to fit in and be popular, choosing to use the ordinary backpack from her ex’s parents over the cool sealskin bag from her grandmother. In school, she finds herself clumped into the FUBAR (military slang meaning fucked up beyond all recognition) group. The other outsiders who aren’t worried about their status and feel they have reclaimed the word FUBAR, are ready to befriend her, but Vanessa brushes them off.

It’s this that originally makes Vanessa difficult to identify with. In addition, Philip is so ridiculously terrible its hard to believe she still wants him. Then again, she’s a teenage girl blinded by love and sure popularity is the only important goal in life, so she’s probably more like most of us than we’d care to remember. Eventually she realizes she’s too good for Philip and becomes the leader and advocate of the FUBARs so it’s clear she realizes her mistakes.

An interesting facet of the film is its examination of cultural appropriation. Each year, the school holds a competition called the Snowstorm Survivor championship where the school’s all-white student body (Vanessa is the sole native student) compete in events inspired by native games. These activities include a cringe inducing scene where white students dress up in eskimo costumes and do elaborate cultural dances. In addition, Vanessa realizes her scholarship was sponsored by a known racist who instituted the program as a PR move. By the end of the film she connects to her Eskimo heritage by forming a Snowstorm Survivor team that values the principles of the World Eskimo Olympics, a games intended to bring people together rather than tear them apart through competition.

Lesson: Cheer for everyone, have fun and don’t worry about pointless competition and popularity contests. You’ll regret the friends and the fun you didn’t have.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Women in Sports Week: Because Being Girly Doesn’t Mean Being Weak: ‘Bring It On’

Bring It On movie poster

This guest post by Deborah Pless previously appeared at her blog Kiss My Wonder Woman and is cross-posted with permission.

I first saw Bring It On when I was still deep into my rebellious phase. You know the one. Lots of punk rock, plaid bellbottoms (they came back in style just in time for my middle school years), and an intense loathing for anything that smelled of “school spirit.” I prided myself on never attending a single football game in high school, and I absolutely never ever cared about cheerleading.

I was a rebel. A grrrrl. And no cheerleader was going to get in my way or the way of feminism.

So imagine my surprise when partway into the movie I’d rented as a hatewatch I realized that I cared. A lot. I really, really wanted the Rancho Carne Toros to win that darn cheerleading competition. It made me deeply uncomfortable.

Kirsten Dunst and Eliza Dushku in Bring It On

But looking back on it, I know exactly why I love that movie. It’s not “just” a cheerleading movie; it’s a cheerleading movie. A movie about female athletes in a feminine sport doing incredibly difficult things for the sheer love of the game. And doing those difficult, athletic things as a team.

More than that, this isn’t a movie about a ragtag group of misfits who somehow rise to success. It’s not about women trying to succeed in a man’s world. It’s got more interesting, diverse female characters than you can shake a spirit stick at, and the male characters are the ones who feel ancillary. The male characters are the ones getting flack for joining the sport, and the whole story revolves around a team of women in a female-dominated sport competing against other women at the top of their game.

Cheerleading.

I just dumped a lot on you right there, so let’s back up. Bring It On, released in 2001, stars Kirsten Dunst as Torrance Shipman, a peppy high school cheerleader in her senior year. Torrance has just made team captain of the Rancho Carne Toros, a team that’s just won their fifth National Championship in a row. She’s excited. She’s ambitious, and in the first five minutes of the movie she sends a girl to the hospital.

Gabrielle Union as Isis in Bring It On

And injured player means they need a replacement, so bring on the recruits! Torrance and the team hold tryouts, eventually selecting Missy Pantone (Eliza Dushku), a transfer student from LA and a gymnast looking for an athletic outlet. While Missy is leery of joining the cheerleaders at first, she eventually gives in, because they are athletes, and it sounds like fun.

Unfortunately, Missy gets pretty pissed when she realizes, and tells Torrance, that the Toros have stolen all their cheers, plagiarizing them from an inner-city squad in LA, the East Compton Clovers. She proves it too, and Torrance is horrified to learn that all their National Championships were the result of cheating. Worse, the Clovers know about it, as their captain, Isis (Gabrielle Union), makes very clear. The Toros won’t be getting away with it this year.

Torrance is devastated and has to figure out what to do. They try to carry on as usual, but the Clovers show up at a football game and humiliate them by showing that the cheers are stolen. They try hiring a choreographer, but that ends badly when another team hires the same choreographer, and they both bring the routine to Regionals.

Kirsten Dunst as Torrance Shipman in Bring It On

Finally, they reach the end of their rope, and Torrance decides to do something drastic: make up their own entirely original routine, like they should have been doing all along.

From there to the end of the movie it’s a lot of training montages and inspirational speeches, but the ending is what really sticks the landing here. The Toros and Clovers both compete at Nationals. They’re both really good. And the Toros lose.

But they don’t care, because for once, they lost on their own merits. Besides, second place in a National Championship with a routine they made up in three weeks isn’t all that bad, and the Clovers were genuinely and indisputably better.

Torrance (Dunst) and Isis (Union) face off in Bring It On

Now, there is a romance in the movie, with two guys vying for Torrance (Missy’s brother Cliff, the punk rocker, and her college boyfriend Aaron, the cheating jerk), but the romance is never the feature. It’s a nice side dish to the entrée that is competitive cheerleading. And the entrée is fantastic.

For all that it’s ridiculously sexualized by the media, cheerleading really is a sport. Not only that, but it’s also the single most dangerous high school and college sport, resulting in the most injuries and hospital visits. Cheerleading is terrifying, and it’s hard, and it’s really hard to do well.

The story in Bring It On is about women in a sport that’s totally hardcore trying to be the best. It doesn’t gloss over the sport’s sexualized history, with the football players, who have never won a game, taunting the male cheerleaders by calling them fags, and openly objectifying the women on the squad. No one respects the cheerleaders. But they don’t care.

Missy (Dushku) and Torrance (Dunst) in Bring It On

Or rather, they do, but they don’t let it bring them down. Missy, the character who first disses cheerleading as “not a real sport,” comes around in a big way when she sees that it is physically challenging, and just, you know, fun. She sticks by the team, and even contributes to their ultimate routine. Her gymnastics expertise is sadly underused in the film, but it’s clear that she’s a consummate athlete, and her devotion to the team helps us as an audience get invested.

More than that, though, Missy starts to appreciate the “girliness” of the team. At first she sneers, but she slowly comes around. Because being girly doesn’t mean being weak, the movie shows us. Girly girls are just as capable of kicking butt. Doesn’t mean you have to be a pretty princess, but you can. It’s okay. You can like shoes and still be a top-notch athlete. When Missy starts to get it, we start to get it. She doesn’t lose herself in the squad; she just gets more comfortable. Like she doesn’t have to front, and whatever she’s into is fine. Because they’re a team, and teams support each other.

It’s funny too, because you don’t often think about it, but not only does the movie pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, it also passes the Race Bechdel Test, and contains a surprising lack of White Savior behavior. While Torrance does feel terrible about what her team has done to the Clovers and tries to make amends by raising the money for them to attend Nationals, the Clovers turn her down. They don’t need her help, and they manage to raise the money themselves.

The Toros perform their routine in Bring It On

The title of the movie itself is a sign of how seriously this movie takes the competition, not only wanting to win, but wanting to win because you are actually the best. When Torrance tries to use her white guilt to “make it right,” Isis tells her that all she should do is bring it.

“You want to make it right?” she says. “Then, when you go to Nationals, bring it. Don’t slack off because you feel sorry for us. That way, when we beat you, we’ll know it’s because we’re better.”

Ultimately, I’m pretty sure that’s the message of the movie. That the real pride in sports comes from doing your absolute best no matter what, and win or lose, being completely proud of what you did. The Toros don’t have a lot to be proud of for most of the movie, and you can see the damage it does to them. So their final performance, and their second place win, is a moment of triumph. They fight long and hard and they get the score they deserve.

Kirsten Dunst as Torrance Shipman in Bring It On

I’m not saying the movie is perfect, mind you. There is an alarming amount of sexual objectification even with the caveat that it’s bad, and some of the characters are total stereotypes. Jan, the male cheerleader who just does it because he can finger girls, disgusts me, and the entire bikini car wash thing is sad. But no movie is perfect.

So back to little high school me sitting on the couch, jaw dropped that a movie about cheerleaders in sexy uniforms, that doesn’t skimp on the sex-talk or avoid the sexual issues surrounding the sport, actually made me care. And it made me kind of excited. I wasn’t about to go and try out for the squad, but I was still inspired.

I saw women at the peak of their skill competing in a sport that is for women, by women. A sport where being girly doesn’t mean being weak, and where you try your absolute best because you refuse to go quietly. I fell in love.

Deborah Pless is the blogger-in-chief over at Kiss My Wonder Woman. She lives in Western Washington.

‘Elizabethtown’ After the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

DVD cover for Elizabethtown

This is a guest review by Amanda Civitello.

When she was ten, my little sister pronounced herself a “Young Feminist in Training” and authored an editorial for a school newspaper entitled, “Sarah Palin: Feminist? No!” I was surprised, then, when she said last week that she wanted to watch Elizabethtown for our girls’ movie night. “Really?” I asked. “The film that launched the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?” She shrugged, and, as she predicted, I loved it. I loved it for what it is: a fun little moralistic summer movie with a good soundtrack and an interesting – if somewhat farfetched – premise, as well as an incredibly moving final fifteen minutes. The story of a failed shoe designer whose plans for suicide in the wake of his “fiasco” are foiled by his father’s premature death, writer/director Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown stars Orlando Bloom as Drew, the brooding architect of a catastrophic business failure, and Kirsten Dunst as Claire, the woman who descends from the sky – practically literally; she’s a flight attendant – to rescue him from his melancholy with an overabundance of quirky good cheer. But rather than find it a guilty pleasure, something I liked in spite of the inadequacies and disappointments of its manic pixie of a female lead character, I found that Claire didn’t really merit the MPDG moniker at all.

From its first appearance, in a review of Elizabethtown by film critic Nathan Rabin, the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” seemed preternaturally possessed of staying power. It had two things going for it: a catchy name and truth. There are too many films in which a female lead seems to exist solely to improve the outlook of the male lead with a winning combination of pep, quirkiness, and vintage clothing. Unsurprisingly, it’s very easy to find a plethora of examples of characters fitting this trope.

Kirsten Dunst (Claire) and Orlando Bloom (Drew) in Elizabethtown. This is just before Drew tells Claire she needn’t make jokes to be likeable.

The idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was, at the beginning, a critique of those films that view women through an unabashedly male gaze, in which the viewer identifies primarily with the leading man and is therefore predisposed to regarding the leading lady as an extension of the man. (Elizabethtown makes Drew the identifiable character from the first few moments, which consist of voiceovers from Orlando Bloom. We’re definitely supposed to watch Claire, not stand in her shoes.) In many cases – as in the case of Elizabethtown, as Nathan Rabin so rightly argued – the female character does serve to remind the male of his zest for life, and that’s all she seems to do. The MPDG was meant to describe a phenomenon of the male gaze as evident in scripts written by men and films made by men, as Rabin explicitly stated: “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” At its inception, therefore, the MPDG was all about critiquing men. In recent years, however, as writers have pointed out, the MPDG label has expanded to become more broad. It’s often used to describe a kind of woman, rather than how she is written/seen by a man, and to incorporate characters and films – like Annie Hall – without good reason, and has actually been used to describe real women. It’s even become shorthand for one real woman in particular: Zooey Deschanel. It’s ridiculously simplistic and extraordinarily misogynistic to reduce a real woman to a trope.

For me, then, the MPDG label, while it started out as a catchy, if somewhat simplisti, truthism, turned problematic and even pejorative in recent years. (As a side note, because it isn’t really germane to this post: using the word “manic” is troubling as well. After all, “manic” is a weighty word, associated as it is with bipolar disorder. There are other, but less memorable, words that could better describe the kind of peppy, preternatural cheerfulness that hangs about these characters. My discomfort with the use of “manic” is compounded when the character demonstrates depressive tendencies, as does Claire in Elizabethtown. When the term is applied to real people with real conditions it’s even more troubling, as it is here to Edith Bouvier Beale, who suffered from a stress-related condition with tragic consequences.) It was, therefore, with great relief that I read the many articles this past spring/summer heralding the demise of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. You don’t need me to summarize them, so check out these posts from Jezebel and xojane, and let’s get back to Elizabethtown, because now that we have poked holes in the trope itself, and others have concurred or found other reasons to get rid of it, I think the film that launched the MPDG deserves a second look.

“Do you ever just think, ‘I’m fooling everybody?'” — Claire

Elizabethtown is an interesting little indie-esque effort from Cameron Crowe. By and large, it succumbs far too readily to mistakes that detract from the enjoyment of the film. The great moments – and there are two – manage to redeem it in my estimation. The first is a long conversation between Drew and Claire, in which Bloom and Dunst really manage to capture the joy of recognizing oneself in someone else, and in which Crowe effectively contrasts their discussion – alternately probing and amusingly shallow – with the ordinary tasks we all do while on the phone. The second sequence is Drew’s cross-country road trip with his father’s ashes, following a map that Claire has (mostly unbelievably) made for him. The stops on Claire’s map are all places of historic, national, or cultural importance. Drew scatters some of his father’s ashes in the waters of the Mississippi and along a stretch of flat American highway surrounded by farmland. He visits the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel and Earnestine and Hazel’s Bar & Grill in Tennessee. It’s a reminder of all the things worth seeing and visiting in this country (and, like lots of other reviewers, has made me totally game for a road trip). Drew’s trip is juxtaposed with memories of his childhood, and we see little Drew dancing and roadtripping with his dad, and it’s this connection – the idea that someone’s dad can be to him as great a man as Martin Luther King, Jr. – that is really compelling. But these effective and moving scenes are hampered by the many, many scenes that don’t work, most notably Drew’s mother Hollie’s (Susan Sarandon) big moment at her husband’s memorial. That, unfortunately, is the victim of poor editing: the first part of her scene is a comedy routine detailing all the things she’s tried to learn since her husband’s death, and at one point, borders on the ridiculously crass (it is a memorial service, after all). The second part, the part that should have stood mostly on its own, with only a few words of introduction, is a moving little tap dance she performs to their favorite song. Like the road trip that follows, it’s a quiet, personal moment that’s deeply rooted in the little things that give life meaning.

With regard to its female characters, Elizabethtown has far more issues. Of the three female characters – Claire, Drew’s sister Heather, and their mother, Hollie – each is the victim of poor writing. The characterization of Heather in particular is downright egregious: it seems that her only personality trait is a kind of modern-day hysteria. She’s a woman who begs her brother to “handle everything” with regard to their father’s death because he’s the only one capable of it, who watches her mother flit from activity to activity in a frantic display of unmoored grief, and occasionally widens her eyes and throws up her hands and shrieks. While deep, raw grief is to be expected, as a grown woman with a kid, Heather is the caricature of the stereotypical woman who just can’t deal with it, because she’s just too darn emotional.

Drew and Claire

Claire, on the other hand, is at least compelling in spite of her faults. She’s interesting, and she has an admittedly underdeveloped back story. She’s a self-described “helper” and a “substitute person.” She invents trips to Hawaii and waxes on about boyfriends that don’t exist. She is, at her heart, immersed in much the same pursuit of happiness as Drew. She has her own struggles which we grasp only tenuously. The problem with Elizabethtown is that it doesn’t explore that complexity nearly enough – but not that it doesn’t exist in the first place. Claire isn’t a vacuously vapid MPDG; she has beginnings of a complex characterization that the writer only hints at, but doesn’t seem to think is worth developing. There were opportunities to do so: Why doesn’t the conversation about Claire’s unnecessary jokes continue? Why don’t we get to see an answer to Drew’s confrontation about the faux-boyfriend? Why, when we know as well as Drew that she has something slightly darker lurking beneath the quirky veneer, do we not get to see it? In my book, that’s a bit worse than creating a one-note plot device of a character.

So: did Claire deserve to be the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl? I don’t think so. I think it was perhaps a fair assessment upon a single viewing. But tucking her neatly into the MPDG box denies vital aspects of Claire’s character. True, we don’t know much about her ambition or life apart from Drew. That’s absolutely a failing on Cameron Crowe’s part as screenwriter. And for part of the film, Claire certainly does fill that role for Drew. She’s there to answer the phone when he wants someone – anyone – to talk to, happy to sit on hold waiting for him while he bounces between his fuming ex-girlfriend and crying sister, neither of whom – credit where it’s due – particularly like being kept on hold. Claire is the placid one, patiently waiting her turn to work her magic, as Drew expects. What saves Elizabethtown is that Drew comes to recognize that his sort-of girlfriend is not an MPDG.

“I’m impossible to forget, but I’m hard to remember.” — Claire

When Drew says, “You don’t have to make a joke. I like you without the jokes,” he pinpoints Claire for what she is: a complex character hiding behind a cheerful façade. Midway through the movie, he realizes that he doesn’t need Claire to be anything but who she is. He calls her out for the jokes he previously found engaging and attractive and confronts her about her imaginary boyfriend Ben. It’s a shame that Elizabethtown doesn’t show us this new Claire. We’re presented with a glimpse of the real woman, and then she slips away. This most interesting shift, when Drew realizes that he doesn’t want an MPDG for a girlfriend anyway, is given the least amount of exploration, because the film almost immediately switches to the long closing sequence of Drew’s cross-country road trip, back to the overarching theme of grief.

Drew isn’t the only one to think this way. Claire’s theory of “substitute people” actively refutes the MPDG pigeonhole. In describing this theory – which basically sounds a whole lot like Manic Pixie(-ish) Dream People – Claire is asserting that she knows perfectly well the image she projects. The implication, of course, is that it’s nothing but an image. She knows just as well as Drew that what she’s saying is a convenient label, nothing more. She’s aware of it in much the same way as is Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, although Clementine is far more direct in her refutation of the MPDG label: “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s lookin’ for my own peace of mind; don’t assign me yours.”

“You shouldn’t be a substitute for anybody.” — Drew

Elizabethtown’s major problem is that it makes a halfhearted attempt to be a love story, when really, it’d have done far better to focus on grief. It would have been a much more compelling movie, because the moments that shine are the ones which have Drew – sometimes with Claire – facing the full implications of what happened. Would we have read the film differently from the start if there’d been no sex scene, no agonizing introspection over whether or not they’re dating? I think so. And it would have been refreshing to see a movie featuring a male/female friendship that wasn’t aching to become more.

In the end, from the oversaturated colors to the overwhelming (but expectedly awesome) soundtrack and the entirely implausible narrative, Elizabethtown is a kind of fairy tale: the kind of story that sticks with you in spite of its tenuous grip on reality, the kind of confection that you enjoy even though it falls apart when you look too closely. Cameron Crowe would have been better to structure Elizabethtown like 500 Days of Summer. 500 Days of Summer works because of its nonlinear narrative and impressionistic array of short scenes. Where Elizabethtown explicates far too much, spelling out each character’s thought process and motivation, 500 Days of Summer allows for the audience to draw conclusions and make connections between scenes. When the story is written in such a way, when there’s no need to explain everything, the characters can be more spontaneous. They can have moments in which they do not conform to our expectations of them. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind works, in part, for the same reason. ESotSM and 500 Days of Summer are not passive films. They require far more thought from the audience than does a film like Elizabethtown, where all plotlines seem to find a neat little happy ending. They work precisely because they’re impressionistic, which is, at least in my opinion, the most effective way to treat a modern fairytale.

Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern grad with an interest in arts and literary criticism. She has contributed reviews of Rebecca, Sleepy Hollow, and Downton Abbey to Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Hellraisers in Hoop Skirts: Gillian Armstrong’s Proudly Feminist ‘Little Women’

This is a guest post by Jessica Freeman-Slade.

When I think of the inspiring women in the books I read as a kid, I don’t think of the girls my age like Ramona Quimby or Harriet Welsh. No, when I was 10 years old, I wanted, more than anything, to be Josephine “Jo” March, the central character in Louisa May Alcott’s extraordinary 1868 novel, Little Women. While some little girls would bristle at the hoop skirts and Civil War hardship and use of such offensive curses as “Christopher Columbus!” I adored it…in part because I saw the March girls as out of their time, rambunctious, admirable, and most clearly modern. There have been many film adaptations of Alcott’s story, but in Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version, you feel the modernity first and foremost, as the brilliant screenplay and even more brilliant performances of Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon, and the other girls show you what you’ve always suspected: that Little Women is a full-on feminist narrative.

March girls in bed

True, sometimes Little Women looks like “chick lit”—and certainly if it were published today, its cover would telegraph it as such, in curlicue text, pink background, and lacy border. But it was a truly subversive thing to have a female-centric novel in the late 1800s: a book in which the first half is without a wedding, where women talk to each other without needing a man to talk about, and where women rail against the limitations set upon them. Little Women was an extraordinary achievement and a commercial success, and it made Louisa May Alcott a literary icon equal to Jane Austen (who wrote about the rocky road to successful marriages) and the Bronte sisters (who wrote about the tragic consequences of failed romance). If you really want to hate on the “chick lit” classification of Little Women, just remember: before you could be a Hannah/Marnie/Jessa/Shoshanna, or even a Carrie/Miranda/Samantha/Charlotte, you had the much richer pantheon of Jo, Amy, Meg, and Beth to choose from.

Winona Ryder as Jo

These young women talk openly about money, politics, education, love, and above all, the expectations set upon them. Jo (Ryder) drives the movie, narrates and controls its pace, and she gives the perfect period performance by a contemporary actress—in part because she doesn’t hide just how modern and unnatural she is in the heavy skirts she’s obligated to wear. She seems genuinely uncomfortable, just as Jo would be, slouching, hunching, galumphing about, talking with her mouth full, stomping her feet in the snow. Jo has bigger ambitions than to be pretty or charming: she has a bright mind, a passion for writing, and a dream of sharing her stories with the world. Ryder’s passion, the gusto with which she delivers every line, sings out, and makes this one of her best performances.

Laurie (Christian Bale) and Jo

Jo’s impulse, in every situation, is to express her true opinions, which makes it difficult for her to imagine conventional love with any kind of traditional man. Her friendship with Theodore “Laurie” Laurence (a smoking hot Christian Bale), the rich boy next door, is grounded in an appreciation of each other’s good humor, intelligence, and kindness. When Laurie and Jo first meet, sparks fly not from physical attraction, but a heady, hilarious exchange of wits. Their relationship is rooted in mutual respect, and a mutual desire to cast off societal expectations for proper behavior. (No coincidence that they both go by nicknames.) Neither of them fit a mold, and so they fit perfectly together. “If only I were the swooning type,” jokes Jo after a night at the theater. “If only I were the catching type,” Laurie retorts playfully. When Jo insists the girls include Laurie in their theatrical enterprises, he’s only allowed to do so by volunteering a means of communication—a mailbox stationed between their two houses, to encourage “the baring of our souls, and the telling of our most appalling secrets.” Because the girls hold the power, they are the ones who decide whether Laurie can be trusted. They are the rulers of their own government, and so, Jo narrates, “And so Laurie was admitted as an equal into our society, and we March girls could enjoy the daily novelty of having a brother of our very own.”

But Laurie, however sibling-like, never gets a relationship as intense as that between the sisters: the girls are fiercely loyal to each other and collaborative in bringing life, culture, and comforts to their home. They write plays and newspapers, sing songs, and rally in times of great poverty and conflict. The first half of the film, focused on their childhood years during the War, brings each girl’s dreams and frustrations into focus, and establishes the characteristics that will follow them into adulthood.

Claire Danes as Beth

A 14-year-old Claire Danes, perfectly suited to her role as a less moody Angela Chase dressed up in gingham, plays Beth. During a recent viewing, I found myself muttering, “Ugh, Beth sucks,” a reaction provoked by her demure, stick-in-the-mud, Mary Bennett-like status. But Beth is daunted by the prospect of having to grow up—and so, she never truly does, remaining housebound by a childhood illness. “I never saw myself as anything much,” Beth says, soft-spoken and sweet even on her deathbed. “Why does everyone want to go away? I love being home.” (Beth’s death scene, a tearjerker by any standard, is especially poignant when you realize that, though Beth’s adventures had a smaller sphere, they were no less wonderful to her.)

Kirsten Dunst as Amy

The youngest March sister, Amy (played, in the first half, by a wonderfully petulant 12-year-old Kirsten Dunst) is constantly looking ahead, making proud declarations about how she plans to reshape her nose and marry someone “disgustingly rich.” “We’ll all grow up someday,” Amy says, “We might as well know what we want.” Amy’s vanity and flightiness are often, but Dunst brings a tender longing to her growing pains, giving real weight to the scene where she reveals that her schoolteacher beat her for trading limes at recess. When Amy tells her family “Mr. Davis said it was as useful to educate a woman as to educate a female cat,” they unite against him. Amy may be frivolous at times, but she has the same sense of outrage as her sisters.

But these girls are not always lovely in dealing with their problems: they get to have real conflicts, fully violent confrontations, and true arguments. No moment is more frightening than that of Amy’s revenge on Jo after a night out, an attack so specifically crafted that it could only result in a dramatic fight. “Your young ladies are unusually active,” says Mr. Brooke to Marmee (Sarandon), and she smiles coyly in response. These girls are unconventionally free, far from the “gentling influence” that others expect them to be—for better or for worse.

What drives the film, and what shows its strengths as a female-directed, written-, and produced endeavor, is addressing the complexities of female life even as the film pivots into the March girls’ adult lives. The oldest March sister, Meg (Trini Alvarado) chooses love over fortune when she marries Laurie’s former tutor, John Brooke (Eric Stoltz). Amy (now played by Samantha Mathis, far less feisty in adulthood) travels with Aunt March (Mary Wickes) to France, where she develops her talents as an artist and reassesses her ideas of romantic love. And Jo, when confronted with an unexpected proposal from Laurie, surprises even herself when she declines his offer—not because she doesn’t love him, but because she cannot envision herself as a wife.

Laurie’s proposal is full of admiration for Jo’s specific virtues (“I swear I’ll be a saint,” he pleads. “I’ll let you win every argument”), but Jo cannot see her dearest friend as any kind of conventional beau. Frustrated with herself, with her inability to change and become a traditional woman, Jo breaks down in tears, but soon charges forward on a challenge from Marmee: “Go and embrace your liberty, and see what wonderful things come of it.” The movie shifts to focus squarely on Jo on her own in New York, pursuing any chance to set her writing free, and to find someone who will love her as she is.

Jo and Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne)

While shopping her writing to disdainful publishers, she meets Friedrich Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne), a professor who bonds with her first by intellect (they exchange lines of Goethe and Walt Whitman) and then by love. Bhaer encourages her to speak her mind, to take and defend her political stances, and to be bold in her writing and in her life. Jo is pushed to go far beyond her fantastical thrillers and to uncover something she truly wants to talk about, to deepen and shape her childhood fancies into real art. Jo finds herself able to love only when she can be loved for herself as she is. “Jo…” Bhaer says, tenderly embracing her at the film’s close. “Such a little name for such a person.”

Meg played by Trini Alvarado

You can see Jo’s journey as the heart of Little Women, and that’s fine. But my admiration for Armstrong’s film truly crystallized when you look at how the movie treats Meg March. Though she possesses great compassion and intelligence, Meg is constantly appraised as a beautiful, eligible young woman ready for a proper beau. Her conflicts with Jo primarily arise over how much she should follow other girls’ examples in proper behavior at parties and balls, and the constant refrain from her Aunt March is that the “one hope for [the] family is for [Meg] to marry well.” However, Meg constantly questions how she’ll negotiate the world when she will always be seen as a pretty girl, whether she must play the part at every turn or strike out on her own. But there is a reason that you have Marmee played by the actress formerly known as Louise Sawyer: in her response to Meg’s questions, Marmee’s message about a woman’s place becomes not just bold, but revolutionary.

Marmee: Nothing provokes speculation more than the sight of a woman enjoying herself.

Meg: Why is it Laurie may do as he likes, and flirt and tipple champagne…

Marmee: … And no one thinks the less of him? Well, I suppose, for one practical reason: Laurie is a man. And as such, he may vote and hold property and pursue any profession he pleases. And so he is not so easily demeaned.

Meg: […] it’s nice to be praised and admired; I couldn’t help but like it.

Marmee: Of course not. I only care what you think of yourself. If you feel your value lies in being merely decorative, I fear that someday you might find yourself believing that that’s all you really are. Time erodes all such beauty—but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful workings of your mind. Your humor, your kindness, and your moral courage—these are the things I cherish so in you…. I so wish I could give my girls a more just world.

In this brief scene, Little Women’s focus shifts from being a story about a cozy band of sisters to an examination of where women have been, and where they might take themselves. Marmee says the world is unjust, but that the girls will strive to set it right, and in pursuing love and art in each of their lives, the March sisters manage to redefine, on every level, what kind of stories women might tell.

———-

Jessica Freeman-Slade is a cookbook editor at Random House, and has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She lives in Morningside Heights, NY.

‘Bachelorette’ Proves Bad People Can Make Great Characters

Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher, and Lizzy Caplan in Bachelorette

Written by Robin Hitchcock.

[Warning: spoilers ahead!]

When I saw The Hangover, around the time its sequel came out, I was disappointed they didn’t make the sequel the story of “meanwhile, the bride and her girlfriends had an even MORE wild adventure.” Some of us hoped we’d get something along those lines with Bridesmaids, which certainly was an enjoyable movie and huge step forward for female-focused comedies in mainstream Hollywood, but sometimes felt forced when it veered into the “shocking” territory of ladies pooping.

So three cheers for Bachelorette, which certainly stands on the shoulders of Bridesmaids, but makes it look tame in comparison. Bachelorette doesn’t just have its female characters do shocking things, it has the shocking characterizations. For once, we have a movie full of female characters allowed to be the horrifically selfish jerks that routinely populate dude comedies like The Hangover. It’s delightfully bracing.

For some, the ladies of Bachelorette will be too bitchy, or too similar to sexist stereotypes, to bear. Maid of Honor Regan (Kirsten Dunst) is a Type-A ice queen, joined by bridesmaids Gena (Lizzy Caplan), a self-centered fuck-up, and airhead Katie (Isla Fisher). All three enjoy drugs and casual sex, and all three can be jaw-droppingly mean. All are horrified that the bride Becky (Rebel Wilson) is getting married first among them, because, well, she’s fatter than they are. They still use the cruel nickname (“Pig Face”) they gave her in high school, and spend the first act showing shocking disregard for the her well-being and the success of her wedding. [Fortunately for the bride, there are other women in her bridal party lurking on the sidelines of the story, theoretically taking care of most of the wedding business while these three cause trouble].

Rebel Wilson is unfortunately not given much to do as Becky, but I really enjoyed how the movie didn’t just victimize her as the “fat friend”, subverting that dynamic by making it clear that Becky’s size is much more of an issue for her skinnier friends than it is for Becky herself. Although Gena awkwardly jokes in her rehearsal dinner speech about meeting Becky when she was making herself vomit in the high school bathroom, it’s later revealed that Regan is actually the one with a history of bulimia. It’s made clear that Becky doesn’t tolerate strangers being cruel to her: she puts a stop to her bachelorette festivities the moment the male stripper Katie brought in calls her “Pig Face.” Becky retains her dignity, while Gena, Katie, and Regan pathetically retreat to have their own private coke-fueled hotel room bender without the bride or the other members of the bridal party.

Rebel Wilson as the bride, a well-adjusted foil for the main characters

During this party, the girls cruelly mock the size of Becky’s wedding gown, and Regan and Katie both try to climb into it. But Becky is only twice their size in their demented imaginations, so the gown rips. The rest of the plot follows their misadventures as they attempt to fix the gown before the next morning.

Gena, Katie, and Regan never stop being selfish bitches in their quest to undo this huge wrong. A potential solution is reached when they are able to get into a bridal shop after hours and there’s another dress available in nearly Becky’s size, but it’s rejected because that dress is Regan’s favorite, and she can’t let her friend wear it instead of her. They’re also all distracted by their own romantic subplots, particularly Gena (who is paired against her former Party Down co-star Adam Scott, to the same irresistibly watchable effect).

But through all of this shocking meanness, there’s a true-to-life thread of the genuine friendship between these women. It may be hard to imagine how these characters became friends in the first place, but who didn’t build some unlikely friendships through the happenstance of high school classroom seating charts and locker assignments? And despite all their nasty behavior, it’s not hard to understand why they are still friends after all these years: Bachelorette masterfully illustrates the bond we feel with the people we’ve known the longest, even if they aren’t the closest people in our present lives. Becky and Regan will always have a bond because Becky covered up for her high school bulimia; Regan and Gena will always have a bond because Regan took Gena to get an abortion when her high school boyfriend (Scott) chickened out. In the final scenes, Regan bounces between finally putting her bitchiness to good use by chewing out Becky’s floundering florist, and saving Katie’s life after she overdoses on Xanax. Gena assures Katie’s bewildered suitor that even though he’s right that Regan is a “head case” it’s also true that “she’s a good friend.” It rings true. Regan is the kind of friend you’d never want, but you would nevertheless be grateful for if you did have her in your life.

Bachelorette has a happy ending without absolving the characters

Still, Regan, Gena, and Katie sit out Becky’s wedding ceremony, beat-down and vomit-covered on a bench, unneeded by Becky the beaming Bride. The film ends with a wedding reception coda that’s appropriately joyful, but there’s no clear-cut redemption for our troubled trio. Bachelorette strikes a delicate balance, getting us to like and root for these flawed characters without denying their shortcomings (as The Hangover and its ilk are wont to do). It’s a rare feat for any film, and almost unheard of with a female-centric comedy.

Women in Science Fiction Week: Mary Svevo: ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s Other Strong Female Character

Kirsten Dunst as Mary Svevo in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Guest post written by Amanda Civitello.

Warning: spoilers ahead!!

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is precisely the kind of science fiction movie I like: a film in which the futuristic, scientific aspects are so well integrated into the plot that there is never a moment when the premise is implausible, a moment in which the audience is compelled to step outside the world of the film and remark, “I don’t believe it.” The viewer’s willingness to accept that world, and even to recognize it as her own, is part of what makes the very best films of the genre so disquieting. I realize that this isn’t everyone’s opinion of the genre, but mine was formed young. I was ten when my dad first let me watch Jurassic Park, even though it was released some three years prior. I wasn’t the type of child to watch potentially frightening movies, and he only let me watch it because he wanted me to see a movie with a lead female scientist. Curiously enough –and much to my dad’s surprise – what terrified me wasn’t the CGI dinosaurs, or the deadly snakes and the electric fences, but rather the concept of the film. The fact that it wasn’t so difficult for me to imagine a world in which a place like Jurassic Park could exist. I’d been to zoos and theme parks; Dolly the sheep had just been cloned. I could believe that sometime, in the not-so-distant future, a similar theme park might not be so far-fetched. Consequently, I was petrified. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind lacks the outright scare value of a film like Jurassic Park or Alien, but still delivers an unsettling punch.

When Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind made its debut, critics and audiences alike were charmed by Charlie Kaufman’s intelligent,engaging screenplay, which marries an enjoyable love story with the kind of philosophical introspection that viewers have come to expect from a Kaufman film. The “spotless mind” of the title, a reference to Alexander Pope’s poem Eloisa to Abelard, refers to the premise of the film: people choosing to alter their memories through Lacuna, a medical company which performs “targeted memory erasure” designed to erase only specific people or events from the patient’s memory. Performed through a mixture of science and art, the procedure relies on “mapping” the subject’s brain when the specific memories are triggered, and then selectively erasing those memories while the patient is sedated. Patients bring any objects associated with the undesired memories to the company, which then disposes of them, so that potential triggers, which could compromise the efficacy of the erasure, are minimized. Similarly, patients’ friends who might inadvertently mention the undesired memories are made aware of the situation and requested not to mention them in the subject’s presence.

The various story arcs concern patients and employees at Lacuna: Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (KateWinslet), lovers who independently seek out Lacuna’s services to forget one another, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), who “diagnoses” patients, Stan (Marc Ruffalo) and his assistant Patrick (Elijah Wood), the memory erasure technicians, and Mary (Kirsten Dunst), the company’s receptionist. The ensemble cast rises to the occasion with compelling performances, particularly, as many critics noted, from Kate Winslet, whose portrayal of Clementine, something of an eccentric extrovert, garnered much critical attention. Clementine is praised as a much-needed strong female lead in a love story, because she pursues Joel, is firmly in charge of her own affairs, and takes great pleasure in telling brooding, artistic Joel that she has no intention of becoming his muse. As she puts it, “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s lookin’ for my own peace of mind.” In a time when many female leads are typecast as the hero’s romantic ideal, Clementine’s insistence on being taken for the woman she is, not the woman her lover wants her to be, is refreshing. Far from a quirky, plucky, childlike heroine who serves to inspire her moody boyfriend (the so-called “ManicPixie Dream Girl”), she’s unafraid to assert her individuality, speak her mind, and do as she pleases, dressing as she likes and dying her hair a rainbow of colors when the mood takes her. She can be uncompromising, brusque and matter-of-fact, but she makes her thoughts known. It’s Clementine who first seeks out Lacuna to erase her memories of Joel when she grows bored with him, feeling that his more quiet nature is trapping her. It’s easy to see why she’s easily the film’s “strong female character” and Winslet received an Oscar nod for her work.

Kate Winslet as Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

But the film stars another woman, albeit in a more supporting role within the cast: Kirsten Dunst, who gives a sensitive portrayal of Mary, a character who is in many ways the polar opposite of Clementine. Mary is quiet, almost mousy. She wears rather plain, unobtrusive clothes. At work, she wears a smart white lab coat, as if to reinforce the medical nature of the proceedings, and answers the phone in the same measured tone of voice, responding to all queries with variations on the same stock phrases. Her inner extrovert manifests only after a combination of alcohol and pot, which lead her (and Stan) to have a wild dance party, including jumping half-dressed on the bed while Joel’s memory is being erased. Mary is, however, a woman who knows her own mind as the film progresses. She exchanges her seemingly blind devotion to Lacuna and Dr. Mierzwiak for her own brand of individual agency. By the end, it’s clear why: Mary has had her memory altered by Dr. Mierzwiak, after what appears to be some convincing on his part, when the affair they’d been having was discovered by his wife. The knowledge, if not the memory, of this seems to jolt Mary into coming into her own. Unfortunately, all this occurs in the last ten minutes of the film. For whatever reason, Mary is most definitely a sidelined supporting character, whose potential is never fully realized in the cinematic release, as director’s commentary and the trivia about the shooting script attest.

Clementine, to be sure, isn’t always a paragon of girl power: as any realistic, well-developed character would, she has her moments of insecurity and uncertainty. In several scenes, for example,she begs, “don’t ever leave me, Joely.” Mary’s insecurities seem to run deeper; where Clementine’s appear to be exceptions to her normal behavior, lack of self-confidence seems to be Mary’s norm. The film, as one would expect something so thoughtfully crafted and well-edited, makes effective arguments about the two characters, by making use of visual imagery and the wonderful soundtrack. We are meant to read Clementine as strong-willed and Mary as rather pathetic.

Smart directorial and script decisions carry the argument against Mary further. There’s a vibrancy of color to Clementine’s scenes – even the ones that take place outside of Joel’s memory – that’s wholly absent in Mary’s. Clementine’s clothes, particularly a favorite orange sweatshirt and ever-changing hair color, are more visually arresting than are Mary’s sedate, professional daywear. Clementine’s scenes are marked by a sense of urgency and excitement. Mary’s dancing scene, the only one in which she could be described as“energetic,” has more of a frenzy about it. Clementine is exuberant and effervescent; even Mary’s exuberant moment is tempered by a degree of desperation. She’s only having fun because she’s stoned.

Like Clementine, Mary is the pursuer, not necessarily the pursued, though both have eager men interested in them. In Clementine’s case, Patrick quite obviously pursues her, using questionable techniques involving objects and memories filched from Joel while his memory is being replaced. Mary is the object of Stan’s affection, and it’s even implied that they live together; she only has eyes for Dr. Mierzwiak, whom she attempts to woo with poetry. The film presents Mary’s attempts to charm Dr. Mierzwiak as the counterpoint to Clementine’s successful pursuit of Joel. Where we see an image of empowerment in Clementine’s efforts, the kind of go-get that is frequently attached to male roles, Mary’s are sadly pathetic and desperate. We pity Mary as she recites her quotes to Dr. Mierzwiak and wince along with him when she refers to “Pope Alexander.” He reacts indulgently, as if she’s a child in need of congratulations and encouragement for telling him things he already knows,and so do we. The set up of the shot helps in this regard: Mary is seen from a distance, curled up in an arm chair, while Dr. Mierzwiak is seen in close profile, typing away at the computer to fix errors in Joel’s erasure. She’s superfluous; he’s integral. We are as unimpressed as he is with her quotation-book poetry (and in the end, it’s clear that he might have heard these same quotes during their previous relationship). Given what happens next, Mary’s quote choices are eerily prescient. She’s the one who comments on the beauty of the work, about art and science, in her dreamy voice, and considers what the targeted memory erasure means for their clients, and who ultimately makes the difficult ethical choice to release the company’s files when she discovers the coercion in her own erasure. Why can’t Mary be a thinker, too?

The viewer takes for granted that Clementine will have something of a philosophy, even if that philosophy happens to be, “I’m not a concept,” a phrase which reminds us outright that while it’s tempting, she’s not about to be boxed in to a label denoting her as, for want of better shorthand, an archetypal “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” She is capable of making that statement about her identity. One never imagines that Mary would to do anything like that, and indeed, the film actively argues against that expectation for her. What’s interesting, however, is that the film originally provided for more of Mary’s back story.

In the cinematic release, Mary never confronts Dr. Mierzwiak about her discovery, so we never have the opportunity to see her speak up for herself, thus denying her character the kind of assertiveness that so characterizes Clementine. With the traumatic discovery of her abortion (at the urging of Dr. Mierzwiak) excised from the film, Mary’s decision to release the documents becomes more of a convenient deus ex machina than a manifestation of her agony: she mails out the files in a fit of pique, motivated by anger, so that there’s a plausible narrative reason for Joel and Clementine to make another attempt at their relationship. It makes for a better, more polished and satisfying ending for the film, but I’m glad that the director’s commentary mentions Mary’s sad tale.

Earlier in Pope’s long poem, he writes: “Though cold like you, unmov’d and silent grown/ I have not yet forgot myself to stone.” If Clementine knows her own mind and her own worth from the outset, Mary figures it out as the film progresses. Despite everything, including the Lacuna intervention-by-brain-damage, Mary manages not to forget herself entirely. The only disappointment with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is that the film ends just as we’re starting to find out who she is.

Amanda Civitello is a freelance writer based in Chicago and Northwesternalum. She contributed a review of Daphne for the Bitch Flicks LGBTQI themeweek. You can find her on Twitter at @amcivitello and at amandacivitello.squarespace.com.

Biopic and Documentary Week: Sofia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ Surprisingly Feminist

Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette

Many chastised Sofia Coppola’s re-imagining of Marie Antoinette. Some critics complained about the addition of modern music while others thought it looked too slick, like an MTV music video (remember those??). But I think most people missed the point. Beyond the confectionary colors, gorgeous shots of lavish costumes and a teen queen munching on decadent treats and sipping champagne is a compelling and heartbreaking film that transcends eye candy. Underneath the exquisite atmosphere exists a very powerful and feminist commentary on gender and women.

Marie Antoinette chronicles the life of Austrian-born Maria Antonia Josephina Joanna (Kirsten Dunst) as she becomes the Dauphine and then Queen of France leading up to the French Revolution. Writer and director Sofia Coppola loosely based the film on Antonia Fraser’s sympathetic biography of the French queen. Coppola injected the dialogue with actual quotes from the queen’s life. Dunst skillfully exhibits the queen’s naïveté, loneliness and charisma. In an outstanding and underrated performance, she adeptly captures the jubilance of a young woman who desperately desires freedom as well as a woman burdened with the knowledge that her only value lies in her ability to bear children.

In the beginning of the film, we see Marie Antoinette travel from her homeland of Austria to France as her mother has arranged for her to be married to the Dauphin, Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) in order to unite the two antagonistic kingdoms of Austria and France. In a heartbreaking scene, Judy Dench tells Marie Antoinette she must leave everything she knows behind to make room for her new French identity, including abandoning her adorbs dog Mops. No, not her dog! That scene seriously broke my heart reducing me to tears. Marie Antoinette is upset yet she swallows her pain and obeys. She enters a tent placed on the two countries’ borders, entering on Austrian soil and exiting on French land. In the tent, she must strip off all of her clothes in order to don her new French garb – a symbol of her having to strip away her identity.

Once Marie Antoinette marries Louis XVI, we see Versailles’ ridiculous and over the top traditions again and again. Every morning, an entourage of servants and royalty awakens Marie Antoinette, dressing her in garments with outlandish pomp and ceremony.

As she navigates royal society’s mores, we witness Marie Antoinette’s close friendships with the free spirited Duchesse de Polignac (Rose Byrne) and the reserved Princesse de Lamballe (Mary Nighy). When she is told she should choose more appropriate friends, particularly ditching Duchesse de Polignac, Marie Antoinette defends her friend saying she enjoys her fun spirit. Yes, there are moments when Marie Antoinette indulges in vapid, decadent luxuries. But people forget she’s a teenager. Um, that’s what they do! To take her mind off the constant societal pressure, she distracts herself by gambling, singing in plays and shopping. She’s so confined by societal expectations; she’s exploring her identity and experimenting as much as she can.

Marie Antoinette’s mother, the Austrian duchess Maria Theresa warns her, “All eyes will be on you.” After their wedding night, it’s clear that Louis XVI has no sexual interest in his bride. Through her constant letters, Maria Theresa perpetually reminds her daughter that “nothing is certain” about her place until she gives birth to a son. Even after Louis XVI is crowned king and Marie Antoinette becomes queen, her place is still not entirely secure until she has a son. After her sister-in-law gives birth to a son, Marie-Antoinette feels even more pressure to have a child. Her mother condemns her for not being charming enough or patient enough to entice her husband. As Marie Antoinette reads her mother’s letter, the stinging words wound her, we see and feel her solitary pain.

Women were reduced to their vaginas, only valued if they got pregnant so they could produce an heir. No one bothers Louis XVI about this, even though he’s the one who doesn’t want to have sex. Nope, just the woman; of course she’s to blame. Eventually after 7 years with no children, Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor, talks to him. But Marie Antoinette is repeatedly blamed for not becoming pregnant. Clearly her body and reproduction are her only salient attributes in the eyes of society.

Throughout the film, we’re reminded that women aren’t desirable, lesser than men. When her first child a daughter is born, Marie Antoinette says to her:

“Oh, you were not what was desired, but that makes you no less dear to me. A boy would have been the Son of France, but you, Marie Thérèse, shall be mine.”

In a world where nothing, not even her own body truly belongs to her, it’s touching to see Marie Antoinette, a devoted mother, take such joy in her relationship with her daughter.

Throughout history, people erroneously vilified Marie Antoinette, attributing her with more political influence than she actually possessed. And of course she was demonized after she supposedly told starving peasants, “Let them eat cake.” As civil unrest grows inching ever closer to revolution, the film’s Marie Antoinette says she would never say such a thing. Because of her Austrian heritage and I would also argue her gender, Marie Antoinette was repeatedly used as a scapegoat for France’s financial woes and the public’s strife.

The film divided audiences. At the Cannes Film Festival, critics notoriously booed yet it also received a standing ovation. Some critics dismissed it, saying it was nothing more than a pop video or that “all we learn about Marie Antoinette is her love for Laduree macaroons and Manolo Blahnik shoes.” Sofia Coppola, who consciously chose to omit politics from the film, fully acknowledged Marie Antoinette was not a typical historical biopic:

“It is not a lesson of history, it’s an interpretation carried by my desire for covering the subject differently.

Would people still complain and moan if a dude was at the center of the film or a dude had directed this?? Nope, I think not. Does anyone else remember that Mozart acts like an immature douchebag in the critically acclaimed Amadeus??

But some delved deeper, understanding its rare beauty. Critic Roger Ebert praised Marie Antoinette astutely pointing out:

“This is Sofia Coppola’s third film centering on the loneliness of being female and surrounded by a world that knows how to use you but not how to value and understand you.”

Told almost entirely from the Queen’s perspective, we see the world through Marie Antoinette’s eyes. Her loneliness and the pressure she faces to be everything to everyone is palpable.

With its commentaries on gender, women’s agency, reproduction and female friendships, Marie Antoinette is surprisingly deeper and more feminist than many realize. Sofia Coppola created a lush and sumptuous indulgence for the eyes. More importantly, by humanizing the doomed queen and adding modern touches, Coppola reminds us of the gender constraints women throughout history and today continually endure.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Melancholia, Take 2

Justine as Ophelia? from Melancholia (2011)

This is a guest post from Hannah Reck.

“All say, ‘How hard it is that we have to die’—a strange complaint to come from people who have had to live.” –Mark Twain

As a mother of a 3-year-old, I don’t get out much, and, on my evenings off, I’d rather lie on the couch and watch something mindless. Sad, but true. A friend asked me to meet her at the town’s indie film theater and I knew nothing about the film I was going to see, not even the name…or director. I am not well-versed in Lars Von Trier’s work; though, I did try to watch Dancer in the Dark and couldn’t make it through. The film we saw is obviously Melancholia. I’d never even seen a trailer for this film and I left the theater thinking, “how could you ever make a trailer for THAT?!?” Afterward, I watched the official trailer and thought it simplified what was so moving about this film. Yes, it’s about the end of the world, but it’s so much more than that.

Ultimately, Melancholia is about the human condition and how we handle the deep emotion we feel and our personal definition of crisis. The film centers on the relationship between two sisters, who react differently to life’s challenges, and in this case they deal with life’s biggest challenge: death. Not only a single death, but death of everything, which is, I don’t know, kind of heavy. Justine, played brilliantly by Kirsten Dunst, is a near-debilitated depressive who forms a strange relationship to the approaching planet Melancholia. Claire, (Charlotte Gainbourg) is the other sister, very much the antithesis of Justine. For one, she’s sane and copes with life according to the rules of society; employing the niceties by which we all try to abide. Justine doesn’t. Even at her wedding, she rejects the ritual and falls into a deep depression after her mother’s toast. Their mother Gaby, a cutting and steely woman, is played by Charlotte Rampling (always brilliant), and their father Dexter, a bumbling, well-meaning drunk, by John Hurt (sometimes brilliant). Claire, it seems, has helped her sister cope with her depression throughout her entire life. Despite Justine’s episodes, Claire plans an extremely lavish wedding for her sister in the home she shares with her husband (Kiefer Sutherland) and her son, Leo (Cameron Spurr). Their home screams Gothic Romanticism, and could easily be the set of a British period drama with a brooding Byronic hero gazing down from the window. Justine is that hero…Byron-esque heroine?

Justine, Leo, and Claire

Melancholia possesses qualities of romanticism, which Merriam-Webster defines as: a predilection for melancholy, and Wiki describes as “strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience [with] emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities.” Where Melancholia is concerned, this is an exact description. Though I didn’t grab this Romantic connection immediately, the painting by Casper David Friedrich (most famously associated with Romanticism), Wonderer above the Sea and Fog, reminds me of the film in so many ways. The cinematography possesses the same overcast and pallid blueness that creates the moodiness in Friedrich’s painting. Justine, the main character, is seen looking out onto the vastness of the sea, the glorious grounds and into the infinity that is the sky: the sublime.

Casper David Friedrich’s Wonderer above the Sea and Fog

Melancholia, the planet, is surely sublime. No has before, or will again, experience the super-planet’s awesomeness and the inhabitants of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia have days to wonder about the vastness of our galaxy and how small we actually are in relation.

Von Trier admits he did not set out to make a Romantic film, but it became one over time. He uses Robert Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde as the haunting theme for the film. When I’ve re-viewed parts of the film the music triggers a physical emotion, because I felt a real connection to the melancholic aspects. Everyone suffers from some degree of depression and I felt an almost-sigh of relief that depression of this magnitude was shown so intimately in a motion picture. I was able to sympathize with Justine’s condition, despite her selfishness. That’s not to say that she isn’t a strange character that could be called crazy. Melancholia takes an almost supernatural turn as Justine becomes Melancholia’s advocate and justifies its course toward earth. “I know things,” she says, “the earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it.” Claire is baffled, “How do you know?” “Because, I know things,” Justine says, “And when I say we’re alone, we’re alone. Life is only on earth, and not for long.” It’s a creepy scene, but somehow you believe it without knowing why. Also, she moon-bathes nude (Melancholia-bathes) in a spot just off the property, which is Dunst’s second nude scene. Some people moon-bathe because it’s supposed to revitalize you and give you energy, and Justine’s visit to this spot is the one time she looks truly happy, excited even—I would go as far as sexually excited. Gazing up at the new sight of Melancholia, she softly caresses her skin as though she’s looking into her lover’s eyes and she smiles. Perhaps, she wants to die so badly, that this is the answer to her prayers…?

Claire, distraught, as any person with something to lose, grieves for her son who will never grow up. Though this is the main motivation behind her upset, I found her mothering abilities lacking in their final days. As Melancholia enters their atmosphere on their last day, her son falls asleep because they are losing oxygen. She lays him down in his bed and leaves the room to talk with Justine. As a mother, I found this strange. What if he died? What if he was breathlessly calling for her? It disturbed me. Also, when she finally realizes that Melancholia will indeed hit, she goes to find John, who has taken all the pills she has prepared to softly lull her family into death’s arms. She finds him dead, in their stable, and her reaction is strange. She feels sad (okay) and dwells next to him, almost forgiving what he’s done, and remains there for what seems like an eternity. Yes, it would be upsetting to find your husband dead, but come on—he’s left you (and your child) to meet the end alone. He’s a coward, like most of the men in the film, and this illustrates that Von Trier seems to empathize much more with the women in the film. They are written as the source of power when it really counts.

Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow

Melancholia is divided into three parts: the introduction, “Justine,” and “Claire.” The intro is a sequence of slow-motion scenes and still images that lasts for 8 (long) minutes, the gist of which is a strange synopsis of the film’s action; however, some of the images never actually play out. The audience sees a dirty, dead-eyed, close-up of Justine in the yard looking into the abyss, while birds fall silently (dead) from the sky. We see her teaching Leo how to sharpen stick with a knife, for the magic cave she’s promised to build. The stills look a bit like she’s teaching him to hunt, which seems connected to Bruegel’s painting, Hunters in the Snow. Not only does this work illustrate the vastness of nature, it shows (like the Romantics) the micro and macro of the landscape (and the hunter’s sticks like the ones they prepare). This image repeats in the film and is the third frame in the opening; first the still painting and then it begins to slowly burn. Pretty sad really, to think of–All. Art. Gone. Every masterpiece, gone in an instant— this, oddly, made me saddest of all. Also in the intro, (never actually seen) Claire in utter panic, running with Leo as her legs sink into the ground. Half of the images are of Justine, Leo and Claire in wedding attire, at the ready, with a grand, gothic estate behind them. Oh, and Melancholia crashing (slowly) into the earth—and it’s truly beautiful.

Claire running with Leo

Justine and Claire could be viewed as one person, because their roles completely reverse by the end of the film, illustrating that we all possess the same characteristics but utilize them at different times. Hate to say it, but (some) depressives are quite good in a crisis. They can put their immediate problems aside and deal with much larger themes (yes, I’m saying me). Justine is a wreck in “Justine,” and Claire appears stable (while John is still alive), but in “Claire,” she falls completely apart and Justine is very strong. Leo calls Justine “Auntie Dealbreaker” in “Justine,” when she keeps wandering off from her wedding reception and breaks her deal with John to smile, be happy, and go through with the wedding she’s promised will make her happy (at the wedding that he’s paying for). Leo calls her “Auntie Steelbreaker” in “Claire” because she’s so tough she could break steel? I think “Justine” demonstrates Justine’s deterioration (possible pre-grieving her death) that is brought on by Melancholia’s relationship to the earth. Though this is (oddly) never discussed in the film, she falls apart as Melancholia begins its “death dance,” and reenergizes when it lines up to hit us directly. Much to John’s chagrin, Claire finds a diagram, on the internet, illustrating the orbital “death dance” Melancholia will take (it comes close, moves away and then comes back and hits).

Melancholia approaches

The men of Melancholia run away and are dismissive of women’s emotion. Justine’s father leaves on her wedding night (even though she begs him to stay); he seemingly cannot deal with her melt-down (and is also self-centered). Her new husband, Michael (played by Alexander Skarsgard), leaves when she won’t consummate their marriage (seemed hasty). Her boss (Stellan Skarsgard, Alexander’s dad, by the way) throws a royal fit when she won’t deliver the tagline he’s forced his nephew, Tim (Brady Corbet), to hound her about all night. She quits her job, as a high-powered ad exec, and (our only moment of true clarity about Justine’s past) pinpoints, with cutting accuracy, why she despises his vapid character and profession. He throws a raucous tantrum (plate-throwing) and leaves. John is completely dismissive of Justine’s feelings/depression (somewhat founded, she is pretty self-absorbed) and his wife’s relentless support; but moreover, he completely trivializes her fear of Melancholia. Instead of facing death with her and admitting he is wrong, he kills himself and leaves his wife and son to suffer a horrible, fiery death. Von Trier wrote these characters, and while he may not have intended for the men to come off as cowardly weaklings, they do.

Finally, here’s my big issue with the film: clarity. Did Von Trier purposefully remain ambiguous? Yeah, probably. Okay, what was Justine like before? She has bridesmaids, but never talks to them. She has a fiancé, who was really excited about marrying her—and they seem really in love, so she can’t have always been this bad. She has a career, as a high-powered ad executive that her boss says, “is the best in the business.” Wouldn’t that require a certain degree of responsibility? I needed more here. How are we to believe that she could hold a job and have friends if she’s a fucking unapologetic wreck all the time? AND—no one remarks that she’s behaving differently—is she worse than normal? Is old Justine at it again…? Yes, on her wedding night her sister says, “we talked about this, no episodes tonight,” but people seem to believe in her. Michael gives the sweetest speech about his love and devotion to making her happy. I’m not being sappy here; his toast to her is a really fine piece of acting.

Overall, a provoking film that forces you to think about the character’s point-of-view. Von Trier is a controversial character himself; he is eccentric and admittedly made this film about his own depression. Possibly fueled by the whole 2012 phenomenon, I’d say he’s made (so far) the most beautiful and compelling film about the end of the world.

Melancholia approaches Earth

Hannah Reck is a professional undergrad who has gained a lot of knowledge in a variety fields: Acting, Musical Theater, Women’s Studies, English, and Secondary education from Ithaca College, CCM and the University of Cincinnati. She’s taken time off to marry, have a baby and a kidney transplant.

Indie Spirit Best International Film Nominee: Melancholia

Melancholia (2011)

This is a guest post from Olivia Bernal.

As I’m leaving the theatre, the booming volume of two planets crashing still causing a hollow echo in my ears, the gentlemen who sat behind me remarks to his wife, “Well, that was…odd.”

“What did you say?” his wife replies, apparently as temporarily deaf as I.

This was the same guy who asked his wife during the beginning collage of the movie – a symphony of images, slow-paced and gorgeously rendered, whose disparate tones fit together like an orchestra – whether the whole movie would be like this and could they leave if it was.

Odd is probably one of the more tame opinions ever bestowed on a Lars von Trier movie. After Antichrist, which gave me nightmares solely from the descriptions, I was hesitant to see Melancholia. I had never seen a Lars von Trier movie and his reputation was one of Nazism, misogyny, and violence.

So I was surprised at this beautiful, thoughtful, and often funny movie. Told in two acts, it begins at Justine’s (Kirsten Dunst) wedding reception, which is held at Justine’s sister Claire’s (Charlotte Gainsbourg) mansion. It is clear early on that Justine suffers from a potentially debilitating depression, one that is being held carefully in check. Claire and her husband care for Justine as a Mother would, constantly fortifying her, usually through guilt, to return to the crowd of people there to celebrate her wedding. As the evening wanes, she escapes time and again to take a bath, have sex with a random guest on the golf course, and cuddle with her nephew, all to the ruination of her new marriage. Her husband, at first patient and understanding, abandons her to her demons by dawn.

Later, as the second act begins, Justine is delivered back to the mansion sometime after her failed wedding. This time, her depression has fully consumed her. She can barely stand, much less eat or walk or bathe. She recuperates as news comes that a rogue planet called Melancholia may collide with Earth – a potential destruction that would cease all life on the planet. In the wake of this potential tragedy, Justine becomes calm – even coherent – at the inevitability of the collision. She comforts her nephew, as her sister and brother-in-law lose themselves in terror. At one point, in the best scene of the movie, Claire stuffs her son into a golf cart and drives madly away from the mansion, as if escaping their isolation could somehow save them. And of course, it can’t. Melancholia looms over their heads, its inevitability a sordid reminder of their impending mortality.

It’s no secret that Lars von Trier manages to produce an excessively offensive quote every time he’s interviewed. Reports that he hired a “Misogyny Consultant” abounded after the release of Antichrist. While being interviewed during the Cannes film festival to promote Melancholia, von Trier announced, “What can I say? I understand Hitler.” I have never seen another Lars von Trier movies and it is difficult to assess someone’s philosophy based on only one of his works or based only on publicity-inducing quotes. But I would argue that von Trier is full of shit. Melancholia is one of the most stunning, understated, and complex depictions of women I have seen in ages.

This is not to say it does not have its flaws. Though the images are unbelievably beautiful, some of the dialogue is terrible. The ideas presented are challenging, but the way in which they are presented is awkward. Towards the end, Justine and Claire confront each other about their varying degrees of concern at the future tragedy.

Justine: All I know is, life on earth is evil.

Claire: Then maybe life somewhere else.

Justine: But there isn’t.

Claire: How do you know?

Justine: Because I know things.

Claire: Oh yes, you always imagined you did.

Justine: I know we’re alone.

Claire: I don’t think you know that at all.

Justine: 678. The bean lottery. Nobody guessed the amount of beans in the bottle.

Claire: No, that’s right.

Justine: But I know. 678.

Claire: Well, perhaps. But what does that prove?

Justine: That I know things. And when I say we’re alone, we’re alone. Life is only on earth and not for long.

The bean lottery, a game at Justine’s wedding, is a silly and ultimately ridiculous way of proving that Justine knows anything. This revelation is supposed to reveal a level of prescience in Justine’s character, a fact that had never been established before. It is the only inconsistency in her character and weakened an otherwise excellent movie. It is then the images, and those big ideas that von Trier is not afraid to take on, that raise this movie to such an exciting level.

If Melancholia is a meditation on the nature of depression, the first act, I believe, is meant to exhibit the self-destruction and eventual depletion of those who suffer from it. Justine’s ruin seemed imminent, even as she smiled and laughed in her white dress and perfectly-coiffed hair. Her father, drunk and addled, remarks upon her happiness, only to have Justine later admit to her new husband that she is not happy at all. Von Trier is so skillful at making his audience despise and empathize with Justine at the same time. You can see the strain on her face as she once again escapes the confines of the crowd and realize the intense effort of her façade, yet you want her to suck it up and be normal. It is the intricacy of this first act, the turmoil within Justine at having to conform that makes her a refreshingly three-dimensional character.

Her mental illness is born in sharp relief to her sister, who is practical and efficient in the first act. The genius of the movie is in the second-act reversal by non-reversal. As Melancholia threatens our planet, Justine loses none of her pessimism, yet now, with death looming, this seems lucid, even logical. What once was absurd about Justine now becomes rational. As Claire becomes desperate to regain control over her world, her competence is now insanity. It is the context that changes – their characters remain frustratingly consistent. Justine’s depression is rational; Claire’s control is fanatical. As an audience member, I almost wanted Justine to admit what she will lose by this tragedy or Claire to stop trying to fix the situation and give in to her destiny.

I believe that in any creation of a character, the portrayal of a character as simple is a worse crime than the portrayal of that character as negative. Honoring the intricacy and spirit and individuality is a greater boon to women than depicting us as good or positive or non-offensive. Justine and Claire are excessively flawed and in many ways are tremendously unlikeable. But, von Trier, ever skillful, will not give in to convention and never gives his audience easy solutions. What he gives us instead, is an intimate view of civilization – of two responses to terror, tragedy, and mental illness. That he does so within the framework of these women, exhibits a level of concern for humanity that his sound bytes from interviews don’t express.

At the end, the earth does end in a deafening explosion of sound as Justine, Claire, and Claire’s son hold hands under a tent of sticks, built by Justine to calm Claire’s son. Justine is placid, almost trance-like; Claire is despondent. This is indeed an odd movie, just as the gentleman said. It is odd because it defies type. Von Trier, for all his bullshit ballyhoo, might have proven himself, perhaps unwittingly, a feminist.

Melancholia trailer:

Olivia Bernal is a public school teacher from Kansas. She writes for The Independent Book Review.