Max Thornton – Page 3

Recipe for Success: The Surprisingly Charming ‘Hannibal’ Fandom

The ‘Hannibal’ fanbase has taken something potentially very twisted and grotesque, and reshaped it into something charming and cuddly, focused on love and flowers and puppies.

I don’t want my role on this website to be that of some gross White Knight, the dude constantly defending (largely female) fandom as if fans are incapable of standing up for their pretty little lady selves. But I do want to talk about fandom a lot, because the broader culture denigrates fandom in a way that is not, I think, unconnected to the (perceived) female dominance of fandom (*COUGH* MOFFAT *COUGH*), and I truly believe that fandom is a really important space for carving out counterreadings.

LOOK AT THEM. Look at girl!Supernatural and tell me it's not the best thing ever. — LOOK AT THEM. Look at girl!Supernatural and tell me it’s not the best thing ever. Source

I only started watching NBC’s Hannibal because of Bryan Fuller. Fuller created Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies (and Dead Like Me, which I swear I will watch one day; please don’t let it ruin my credibility that I haven’t gotten to it yet), which are shows that seem tailor-made for me: they are charming and colorful and quirky and witty and delightsome, shows with a supernatural element and a slightly twisted edge and totally rad female characters. Much as I loved Silence of the Lambs when I was an angsty (and deeply closeted trans) teenager, I wasn’t at all sure how well the good Dr. Lecter would lend himself to the Fuller aesthetic, but it’s turned out quite interesting.

The aesthetic is definitely the most striking thing about the show. You’ll see it described in terms like sumptuous, operatic, Lynchian, bombastic. It’s a show that is deliberately dreamlike, blurring the distinction between fantasy and “reality” (where the reality is, of course, itself a fiction), exploring the beauty of horror in a febrile dream of refined grotesquery. It’s not, perhaps, traditionally “girly.”

Well, until the fans get their hands on it. Source

The cast is also noticeably more male-dominated than Fuller’s previous shows. Even though IMDb’s cast listing suggests that Beverly Katz (Hettienne Park) and Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas, or as she’ll always be to me, Jaye Tyler) are just as prominent as Hannibal and Will Graham, this is really not the case. Katz and Bloom are both pretty awesome, and the choice to genderflip the book’s Alan Bloom was a very good one, but they are definitely backgrounded in comparison to the main dudes.

I like the show fine, but to be perfectly honest I like the fandom more. The fandom is the thing that’s keeping me engaged. Fuller himself expresses it nicely in this Entertainment Tonight interview:

I was surprised at the demographic that the show was reaching. A significant portion was young, smart, well-read women; they really responded to this show and I typically relate to young, bright ladies [laughs]. It was nice to see how enthusiastic and passionate they were. And, also, happy in the face of the dark material. They found joy and hope in something that is arguably quite bleak. I found that really rewarding and as somebody who is a fan of many things myself, I appreciate and relate to being enthusiastic about a show you love. I think it’s wonderful.

Aw, he looks so much less murdery with flowers on his head! Source

One example of what Fuller’s talking about is the whole flower crown incident of 2013. Last year, for whatever reason (can you fathom the mysteries of memes?), the fandom started photoshopping flower crowns onto pictures of the Hannibal cast. The joke spilled over into real life at Comic-Con, where the show’s cast and crew wore actual flower crowns.

Then, of course, there is the inevitable shipping. Fans love their “Hannigram,” the proposed romantic pairing of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. Canonically, the relationship between Lecter and Graham is certainly intense and obsessive, but it’s fair to say that it’s not really sexual. Fuller’s reponse to the shippers is wonderful.

The correct response to, well, all of fandom.

He’s gracious and respectful, recognizing that slash is an important creative outlet for a lot of people, and opening space for it to exist as a kind of paratextual AU with canon’s blessing. Bryan Fuller is the best at having fans.

The Hannibal fanbase has taken something potentially very twisted and grotesque, and reshaped it into something charming and cuddly, focused on love and flowers and puppies. That in itself is very Bryan Fuller, and it’s also something I find very delightful and redemptive. I think the (young, female) Hannibal fans are doing a really cool counterreading that’s extremely needed by our violence- and crime-obsessed culture. Long may it last.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. You can donate to his surgery fundraiser here.

Max Goes to the Athena Film Festival

Last weekend, several ‘Bitch Flicks’ writers were lucky enough to attend the Athena Film Festival (AFF) at Barnard College in New York. The festival bills itself as “a celebration of women and leadership,” and it’s a four-day extravaganza of women-centered and women-helmed films. I already wrote about ‘Radical Grace,’ the terrific documentary about nuns fighting for social justice, and here is a whirlwind tour of some of the other highlights of my AFF weekend.

Last weekend, several Bitch Flicks writers were lucky enough to attend the Athena Film Festival (AFF) at Barnard College in New York. The festival bills itself as “a celebration of women and leadership,” and it’s a four-day extravaganza of women-centered and women-helmed films. I already wrote about Radical Grace, the terrific documentary about nuns fighting for social justice, and here is a whirlwind tour of some of the other highlights of my AFF weekend.

Maidentrip

You may recall reading a few years ago about Laura Dekker, the then 14-year-old Dutch girl who had to battle the authorities to be permitted to sail solo around the world. Dekker won, and Jillian Schlesinger’s film Maidentrip tells the story of her journey.

Laura Dekker is, as you might expect from someone who sails solo around the world at an age when most of us are primarily concerned with acne and algebra, a fascinating figure. According to Schlesinger, in the course of her two years at sea, Dekker only shot ten hours’ worth of video diary footage, and so much of the film is reconstructed around ex post facto interviews. Dekker is an extraordinarily self-possessed and contemplative young woman. If she were twenty years older and male, somebody would write a film based on her life and it would be hailed as a remarkable character study of an enigmatic figure and win all the Academy Awards. We so rarely see people like Laura Dekker in our popular culture, where teenage girls are portrayed as insecure, frivolous, or catty, that this film is a much-needed counterweight to the bulk of film and TV. Rachel and Megan wrote a detailed review recently, which you should read if you haven’t already.

(Be aware, though, that this film might make you feel terrible about yourself. At 16, Laura Dekker had circumnavigated all 24,000-some miles of this planet. I just turned 25 and I still consider it an accomplishment if I can get out of bed in the morning.)

Short Term 12

As a teenager in the UK, I watched embarrassing amounts of Tracy Beaker, so I have a soft spot for stories about kids in care. For a children’s show, I think Beaker set the bar quite high for realism and heartbreak without dissolving into schmaltz, and Short Term 12 definitely delivered on that front.

The center of the film is Brie Larson’s Grace, a young woman who works at a foster home, but the ensemble is crucial too, from starry-eyed naif Nate to sassy Luis. When difficult 15-year-old Jayden arrives at the home, Grace begins to suspect that the girl’s problems mirror her own painful past, and becomes determined to help her. Is that a cliché? Undeniably, but it’s pulled off with such deftness and sensitivity that I couldn’t help loving the film. Both the humor and the awfulness of daily life in a residential home really shine through, but it’s the crackling chemistry between Grace and Jayden that makes the film for me. Not quite sisters, not quite teacher/student, not quite friends, theirs is a mentor/mentee relationship that showcases female guidance at its best.

One interesting factoid about the film is that it began life as a short in which the Grace character was a man. Not having seen the short, I can’t directly compare the two versions, but there are some aspects that are clearly changes made for a female character. However, they seem reasonably organic, and Grace is such a developed character (and Brie Larson such a wonderful actor) that I mostly set aside my reservations about certain over-employed plot points.

Regina

It’s no secret that awesome religious women are an especial enthusiasm of mine. Since the exclusion of women from the hierarchies of the Abrahamic faiths has been so thorough for so many centuries, the women who have left their mark on the traditions have tended to be particularly strong, determined, and fierce. Kind of like Beyonce, but with God instead of pop music.

Regina Jonas was the first fully ordained female rabbi, and she was certainly a very strong Jewish woman. Regina focuses on her life, from her childhood ambition toward the rabbinate to her untimely death in Auschwitz. Diana Groó’s film is poetic to a fault, offering frustratingly little context or explanation for its monochrome images, but it’s a fascinating story of an intriguing figure. To be honest, the film is more of a starting point for learning about the rabbi than a comprehensive source of information, but luckily there is more information about Regina Jonas on the web, and I am grateful to this film for bringing her to my attention.

Rabbi Regina Jonas is taking precisely none of your shit.

As well as these films, the Athena Film Festival gave me the opportunity to see some rather more film-festival-specific events, including a wonderful program of short films and a panel discussion in which some wonderful women film writers talked about the role of the Bechdel Test today (look out for a detailed write-up from one of my Bitch Flicks colleagues soon). My Athena weekend was terrific, and I can’t wait for AFF 2015.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He got to meet NPR’s Linda Holmes at AFF, which was very exciting for him.

Nun Better: ‘Sewing Hope’ and ‘Radical Grace’

Nuns are the BEST. What’s so interesting about them is that they operate simultaneously within and against a hierarchy. Anyone who cares about social justice can relate to the frustrations of trying to change institutions from the inside, often wishing you could opt out, but never being able to. Recently I saw two documentaries about awesome nuns being awesome feminist warriors in very different circumstances.

I’m Episcopalian, which I like to tell people means I get the best parts of Catholicism and Protestantism – though it would probably be just as true to say we get the worst of both worlds. We do technically have nuns, but they don’t seem to be completely awesome the way Catholic nuns are.

Nuns are the BEST. What’s so interesting about them is that they operate simultaneously within and against a hierarchy. Anyone who cares about social justice can relate to the frustrations of trying to change institutions from the inside, often wishing you could opt out, but never being able to. Recently I saw two documentaries about awesome nuns being awesome feminist warriors in very different circumstances: Sewing Hope is about Sister Rosemary’s work to help women and girls in Uganda, while Radical Grace tells the story of three US nuns who fight for social justice.

The West does not have a very good image of Uganda. Hands up if you remember Kony 2012 and the associated controversy, not least of which was the issue of white saviorism. White people sure do love to swoop in and rescue brown people from themselves, completely eliding the history (and present) of western colonialism that is often the root of many of the problems in the Two-Thirds World. The cool thing about Sister Rosemary is that she is not a white savior. She’s a local Ugandan who runs a school for women and girls who were forced to be soldiers in Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. Many of these women were also sex-slaves, and bear the burden of social stigma on top of single parenthood and personal trauma.

Saint Monica’s, the school run by Sister Rosemary, trains the women in tailoring and baking, providing them with skills that are in demand both in the local hospitality industry and for the international sale of goods. The school not only helps them work toward economic independence, but it also provides a holistic, person-centered environment for healing.

What’s really extraordinary about Sister Rosemary’s work is that she’s not just providing skills from a brute economic bottom line – she’s helping trauma survivors recover. Early in the film, Sister Rosemary speaks about the importance of listening, and this is immediately followed by several women telling their own stories of horror and brutality. Sister Rosemary explains that her method is not to welcome girls by saying she knows what they have been through, but to provide a supportive environment. This includes both emotional support and very practical things like childcare.

Sister Rosemary is working within her context and making a difference from the ground up using the resources available to her and to women in her culture. The US context is very different, and so concomitantly are the methods and tactics of Sisters Simone, Jean, and Chris.

I saw a rough cut of Radical Grace at the Athena Film Festival. — I saw a rough cut of *Radical Grace* at the Athena Film Festival.

Being censured by the Vatican for “radical feminism” (no, not that kind of radical feminism) didn’t stop the sisters from fighting the injustices of their own society. As Nuns on the Bus, they traveled around assorted US cities and petitioned a number of politicians, campaigning for healthcare reform and now immigration reform.

The sisters are tackling issues both of wider society (poverty, the prison-industrial complex) and specific to the Catholic Church (women’s ordination). They are undeterred by the backlash they face, which ranges from the disapproval of the Church hierarchy to on-the-ground accusations of being “worse than pedophile priests” (yes, one protestor really says that).

The sisters are grounded in their commitment to the social gospel, which sees Jesus’ message as being primarily one of radical justice for the people on the margins of society. At the same time, the nuns are committed to thoughtful interrogation of their own faith, and to challenging the institution – which, as they say, is “always going to be ten years too late, if not a hundred” when it comes to social issues.

In some ways these nuns are an embarrassment to the hierarchy. They make the institutional Church look like a reactionary dinosaur; and yet it’s clear that they are working from a place of love. The Church is something they want to be better, and they’re taking matters into their own hands.

Vatican-approved picture of nun being badass

The filmmakers want us to see these stories and be moved by them to get involved. Whether it’s donating to Sister Rosemary and her women, or helping to get the final cut of Radical Grace finished so the story can get out there, they are hoping to motivate us to action. As Rebecca Parrish, director of Radical Grace, notes, there is potential for alliance between secular feminism and progressive religious movements, and we must overcome the divisions of ideology if we want to make the world a better place.

You can learn more about Sewing Hope here, or donate to the Radical Grace kickstarter here.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

American Mythology in ‘Sleepy Hollow’

I think this show demonstrates some of the very best and the very worst of quintessential Americanism: the idea of the melting-pot and a generous cultural and mythological syncretism or ecumenism, and a fine implementation of the ideals of opportunity, liberty, and justice for all; but also a pro-American revisionism that uncritically elevates the ideals of the US above all and completely ignores the genocide at the foundation of this nation. ‘Sleepy Hollow’ mythologizes the past in a way that speaks volumes about the present.

On moving back to the US as an adult, I was struck by the similarities between literalist Christian readings of the Bible and a certain attitude toward the United States Constitution. In much of the public discourse, both Bible and Constitution are the highest forms of authority on earth, revealed to humans from on high through prophet-men (let’s be real, they’re almost all men) who are the temporal agents of an eternal plan and must be revered. In certain circles, “the Bible/Constitution says it” seems to be the final word in any dispute.

My problem with this attitude arises from my understanding of textuality, wherein texts don’t have mouths, there is no reading without context, and the very concept of textual authority is an invention of a historically specific time and place. But this easy transference of (un)critical hermeneutic between religious and political spheres is a quintessentially USian phenomenon, and gloriously campy fantasy show Sleepy Hollow is a fascinating engagement of specifically American religious and political mythology for the 21^st century.

It's as American as a headless soldier eating a donut! — It’s as American as a headless soldier eating a donut!

The supernatural elements of the show draw on the kind of pop Christianity that permeates US culture, even – especially? – among those who are not directly familiar with biblical texts. The characters make easy malapropisms, calling the final book of the New Testament “Revelations” and threatening to “call in the damn Calvary.” The Headless Horseman of Washington Irving’s original story has been recast as one of the horsemen of the apocalypse, following the whole Left Behind, End Times, Scofield Bible prophecy interpretation of Revelation that pervades the culture (and Supernatural, another particularly American show). There is a supernatural syncretism here, though, more melting-pot than other fantasy shows in its cheery everything-and-the-kitchen-sink fusion of pop occultism and pop religion, involving demons and witches and the Sandman and prophecies and sin-eaters and necromancy and golems (and not forgetting the whole time-travel thing, which makes for some of the silliest moments on a very silly show).

sleepy-hollow-skinny-jeans — Did you think I wasn’t going to mention the skinny jeans?

More important than the pop religion, though, is the pop Americanism saturating the show. Transporting a figure from the period of the Revolutionary War to the present day allows the writers to liberally sprinkle in people and events from the mythology of the founding of the United States. Ichabod Crane has convenient personal experience with all the big events and important names listed in the history books, from the drafting of the Constitution to Paul Revere. Franklin and Jefferson and Washington, oh my. Some humor is derived from the juxtaposition of the pop-history version of events with Crane’s personal memories thereof, which is a nice little comment on the popular mythologization of history.

However, the show steers clear of challenging American myth-making too strongly. Crane is a defector from the British to the true and noble cause of FREEDOM – a British dude with a British accent is now the quintessential American, the only one around with personal experience of the country’s founding. It’s a neat piece of reverse colonialism, I guess, to which I as a Brit can only shrug and say, “Fair do’s.” But the show has yet to say anything about, you know, the original colonialism. For all its mythological syncretism and its welcome cast of African-American, Asian-American, and Latin@ characters, Sleepy Hollow is conspicuously devoid of Native Americans. I’m not asking the show to tick off a bingo card of lip-service diversity – that would possibly be even worse – but it seems disingenuous at best and actively revisionist at worst to celebrate the founding of the United States while perpetuating the cultural erasure of the people on whose literal erasure this country began.

Of course, a silly fantasy TV show can only bear the weight of so much challenge to our culture’s foundational mythology, and the writers are probably wise to steer clear of getting too deeply into the values dissonance between the 18^th and 21^st centuries, even if it requires a little extra suspension of disbelief. Ichabod is conveniently untouched by the prejudices of his (and our) time regarding women and people of color. It’s an important part of American mythology-building that anybody can be or do anything and systemic barriers aren’t in their way. This is, of course, not true of reality, but I’m glad the writers made the choice to build a world with less systemic injustice than ours. It would take a very skilled writing team indeed to engage real-world systemic injustice meaningfully within the framework of a show that literally includes dialogue like, “The Headless Horseman is mowing people down to bring about the end of days. For further questions please call Ichabod Crane, the man who beheaded him in 1781.” Choosing to steer clear of getting too weighty left the writers two main options: fill the show with white people so you don’t have to talk about race, or implicitly create a world largely free of microaggressions. Given that the vast majority of popular culture picks the former, it’s refreshing to see the latter. Abbie Mills is awesome on so many levels, and so are the many other people of color among the cast of characters.

And it would be unfair to claim that the show completely ignores race. For example, there’s a great little scene in episode 7 where Ichabod is lauding Thomas Jefferson in front of Abbie and Frank Irving. When they challenge him on Jefferson’s slave ownership, he gets hyper-defensive and bangs on about how much Jefferson TOTALLY WORKED FOR ABOLITION YOU GUYS.

Abbie: “Maybe Sally Hemings inspired him.”

Crane: “Who is Miss Hemings?”

When they explain Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, Crane gets all pissy about how Jefferson would NEVAR do that, and he only accepts that he might be wrong about Jefferson when Abbie shows him that Jefferson stole a snappy witticism of his. It’s a nicely barbed commentary on white privilege, and how often white people – even white people who are implausibly free of overt racism – find personal injury to themselves more offensive than, say, slave-ownership.

In the end I think this show demonstrates some of the very best and the very worst of quintessential Americanism: the idea of the melting-pot and a generous cultural and mythological syncretism or ecumenism, and a fine implementation of the ideals of opportunity, liberty, and justice for all; but also a pro-American revisionism that uncritically elevates the ideals of the US above all and completely ignores the genocide at the foundation of this nation. Sleepy Hollow mythologizes the past in a way that speaks volumes about the present – and, of course, it is very, very silly.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He’s excited for tonight’s two-hour Sleepy Hollow season finale.

Fandom, Feminism, and One Direction

One Direction is, first and foremost, a product. And yet I think the consumption of 1D by fans demonstrates that young women are not completely manipulable by corporatocracy, but rather comprise a powerful grassroots movement capable of taking what they are fed and reappropriating it on their own terms, often in ways that defy the design of the corporate media producers.

As feminist critics, we get very frustrated by the constant cultural devaluing of media aimed primarily at girls. It goes farther than just a lot of people saying, “Twilight sucks,” because Twilight does suck, but it’s not always clear if people are making a legitimate critique. Are they saying, “Twilight is poorly written and full of problematic assumptions and messages,” or are they saying, “Ew, it has a female creator, a female protagonist, and a predominantly female fanbase”?

Even the former can contribute to the cultural devaluing of girl stuff. I’ve read literally dozens of feminist critiques of Twilight, some of them very detailed and very thoughtful; but I just don’t see an equivalent barrage of critique leveled at, say, Transformers (which could be considered the masculine-coded equivalent of Twilight). Of course the reason for this is that Twilight, being “for girls,” is more interesting from a feminist standpoint than Transformers and offers a richer vein of potential for feminist analysis; but the upshot is a net contribution to the vastly greater cultural scrutiny of products for girls than of products for boys.

One solution is to quit scrutinizing stuff for girls so closely, but if we do that we lose valuable feminist analysis. Another is to start scrutinizing stuff for boys with the same critical eye, but Jesus Christ, have you seen a Michael Bay Transformers movie? Nobody should be subjected to that. Perhaps the correct counterbalance to feminist critique of bad stuff for girls is the feminist championing of good stuff for girls.

Caveat: when I say “for girls” or “for boys,” I am not being prescriptive. I’m a 24-year-old man writing publicly about my love of One Direction. I do not believe that any book, movie, music, TV show, article of clothing, color, website, philosophy, job, hobby, interest, or anything else is inherently “for girls” or “for boys.” I use the terms advisedly, to refer to the demographic towards which a product is primarily marketed and the demographic that comprises the majority of its consumers (which are not always the same demographic).

Let’s get the unavoidable critiques out the way first. One Direction is the product of a cynical capitalist empire and when you buy your 1D concert tickets (assuming you can – they’re way outside the grad student price range) you are lining the pockets of Simon Cowell and perpetuating the manufacturing of lowest-common-denominator entertainment where artistic merit is firmly subjugated to the concern of profit margins. The band is designed as a hegemonic artifact servicing the production of heteropatriarchal capitalist values: five cute but non-threatening boys for barely-adolescent girls to swoon over and spend their (parents’) money on.

Fan participation is key to how 1D is consumed by its fans. Fanfiction platforms are abuzz with works about 1D, some of it even officially endorsed, and there’s even an iPhone app specifically for 1D fanfiction. Even the lead animator for Archer has gotten in on the action. Of course, it would be remiss of me to talk about 1D fandom without mentioning the Larry shippers – the people who want Louis and Harry to be in a relationship. Obsessive shipping of real people is damn creepy, and when the shippers try to bend reality to their will it gets a little horrifying. But I think for the most part, barring the tinhat fringe, it’s not the “real people” that many shippers are interested in. It’s “Harry” and “Louis,” the public personae, who are by design not real people. The artifice is part of the point. The fantasy of fan participation is the way in which fans, mostly young women, can reclaim agency by writing themselves and their desire into the corporate product they are fed.

The movie One Direction: This Is Us is just one part of the 1D package. It’s a bit of fluff comprising ninety minutes of concert footage and squeaky-clean depictions of the 1D lads being Nice Boys. As an official production, it naturally doesn’t address fan reappropriations, but there’s the kernel of something interesting there. The boys repeatedly thank their fans, claim to have the best fans in the world, say they would be nowhere without the fans. On the one hand this is kind of true, but on the other hand they are a manufactured group who started on a reality TV show and are in the pocket of the most powerful mogul in pop music. The fans may have made the band, but the media empire made the fans.

This is why I think it’s so important to see the fans reacting in ways the media empire couldn’t predict or endorse. These fans are an extremely powerful force, sometimes for ill, sometimes for good, and that cannot be ignored.

Of course, all the focus on the behavior of the fandom can obscure the basic fact that 1D are feelgood and fluffy. Even taking them at face value, they don’t on the whole have a bad message. In a pop milieu that elevates Robin Thicke, 1D are noticeable for their deference to female agency. Every song on their first album, and most of the songs on the subsequent two, are addressed to a non-specific (but usually female) “you.” They are all expressions of blisteringly sincere emotion within the completely artificial framework of the manufactured boy band talking to the generic listener, but the emotions are always gentle. There are the Sad Songs, where the singer (who is, it must be noted, never singular: the five lads divide up lines in all the songs) laments his deep, sincere, unrequited feelings for You; and there are the Happy Songs, where he/they rejoices in deep, sincere, requited love. The subtext of many of these Happy Songs is pretty explicitly sexual, but it’s always entirely reliant on Your – the implied young female listener’s – consent. Take one of my favorites, “Kiss You”:

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/T4cdfRohhcg” title=”One%20Direction,%20%22Kiss%20You%22″]

Tell me girl if every time we touch
You get this kind of rush
Baby say yeah, yeah, yeah

If you don’t wanna take it slow
And you just wanna take me home
Baby say yeah, yeah, yeah

And let me kiss you

You’ll never convince me that this song is actually about kissing. Not only do the opening lines talk about “turn[ing] your love on,” that stuff about not taking it slow and taking the singer(s) home is language more usually associated with sex. Even if you accept the naivety of “kiss” at face value, though, rather than reading it as coy metonymy for sex, the song is explicitly about consent and communication. From the opening verse’s “Tell me how to turn your love on” to the chorus’ exhortation to “say yeah, yeah, yeah,” this whole song is about talking about what you want and making sure your partner is enthusiastically consenting before anything happens. Almost all of the songs, Happy or Sad, grant the (female) listener agency. The narrator lays his feelings bare, and You can prolong or end his misery or joy by reciprocating or not; but the decision is always Yours, and You are never coerced or ill-treated. “Blurred Lines” this is absolutely not.

Let’s get back to the gay shipping though. This Is Us doesn’t address it directly, but it takes care to show the lads’ uniquely close relationship with one another, in a way that’s surely grist to the shippers’ mill. There’s a certain queerness inherent to the homosocial structure of the boy band, noticeably in the collectivity: 1D don’t harmonize all the time, nor do they take turns on songs, but they share lines within the songs. Their songs seem to have a clear, singular narrator, but the five boys take turns being that narrator. The 1D collective addresses the (collectively-singular) listener. In some ways you’re being invited into a relationship with all five of these fellas, even though it is the done thing to have a favorite.

I’m not saying that One Direction is a feminist triumph. It’s still a manufactured boy band, and as such it’s not reinventing the wheel, and the fandom can be absolutely vicious. But I think it’s about time we started giving young girls a little more credit for the way they consume the things they like.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He’s not afraid of all the attention, he’s not afraid of running wild.

Love is an Open Closet Door in ‘Frozen’

Amanda did a brilliant queer reading of Elsa’s powers as a symbol of queer sexuality. While our fantastic commenters proposed additional, equally plausible readings, relating the treatment of Elsa’s powers to society’s fear and suppression of mental illness, disability, and even women as a whole, I think the queer reading deserves a little further exploration. Specifically, I want to look at the recurring motif of doors in Frozen.

Warning: Here be (mild-to-moderate) spoilers.

This weekend, I finally saw Frozen, and I loved every minute of it. I loved it for all the reasons everyone has been talking about, from its female-centered narrative to the subversion of Disney’s own tropes about love and romance. I especially loved that it was primarily a story about sisters. I adore stories about siblings, but it seems to me that I rarely see relationships between sisters taken as seriously in pop culture as brothers.

(Though maybe that’s because, as the middle of three very close-knit brothers, I have SO MANY FEELINGS about Sam and Dean Winchester.)

Our own Amanda did a brilliant queer reading of Elsa’s powers as a symbol of queer sexuality. While our fantastic commenters proposed additional, equally plausible readings, relating the treatment of Elsa’s powers to society’s fear and suppression of mental illness, disability, and even women as a whole, I think the queer reading deserves a little further exploration. Specifically, I want to look at the recurring motif of doors in Frozen.

The symbolism of doors is multifarious: entrances, beginnings, thresholds, transition (though after what happened last time I read as a Disney princess as trans* I’ll step back from explicitly reading Elsa as trans*) (even though I think it totally works) (and actually I really want to read her as a trans girl) (but I’ll leave it to my trans sisters to tease out the details).

Doors have a religious and supernatural element too. Think of the safety of home from the vampire, who can’t cross the doorway uninvited; the placing of the mezuzah on the doorway in Jewish tradition; Catholic ideas of Mary as a holy door.

Queer theory has found its doorways in its affinity with Victor Turner’s notion of liminality, though there’s a risk of theorizing queerness away into nothing if you take this too far. I am particularly taken by the idea of the doors in Frozen as closet doors. So, what happens if we read the film with this in mind?

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YwXff-i1fY”]

The song “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” is a heartbreaking portrait of three of Anna’s attempts to reach out to her sister over the years. As a five-year-old, as a pre-teen, and as an adolescent, Anna knocks on Elsa’s door but gets no response. In the very first verse, she sings, “Come out the door,” whereas by the final verse her urging has changed to “Just let me in.” If this door is indeed a closet door, Elsa is unable to do anything as simple as come out, because her parents’ fear of her queer sexuality has taught her that she must suppress it. Elsa internalizes her parents’ lesson that coming out is not an option, but she is equally unable to “let in” the sister who has never been inside the closet and indeed does not yet know of Elsa’s queerness.

And again, when the castle must be opened up for Elsa’s coronation, the opening lines of Anna’s joyful song “For The First Time in Forever” mention doors specifically:

The window is open, so’s that door
I didn’t know they did that anymore

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Elsa, however, refers to opening “the gate” rather than any doors, and she tells herself:

Don’t let them in, don’t let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don’t feel, put on a show
Make one wrong move and everyone will know

Her refusal of a man’s invitation to dance that night, while Anna accepts it, could be taken as indicative of a lack of interest in men at all. (Am I taking it too far if I find evidence of a straight woman’s puzzlement at her closeted sister’s lack of interest in men in Anna’s line, “Why have a ballroom with no balls?”!)

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The symbol of the door is made most explicit in the delightful number “Love is an Open Door” – the third song in a row to open with a lyric about doors:

All my life has been a series of doors in my face

The brilliant thing about this song is how differently it plays on first watch versus how it plays when you know how the story will turn out. Like the proverbial length of a minute in the bathroom, it depends which side of the door you’re on. Played straight (forgive the pun), this is a song about the exciting opportunity of embarking on a new relationship. But there are also resonances of the importance of honest communication in the success of a relationship and the freedom of leaving the metaphorical closet – both of which become tinged with irony once you have seen the whole film.

Indeed, Elsa’s refusal to bless Anna and Hans’s marriage seems to Anna like the sour grapes of a closeted sister who resents the straightforwardness of hetero romance, but in truth it’s a piece of real wisdom that Anna will come to appreciate. And yet it also leads to Elsa’s unintentional, very public coming-out. She flees in shame, and succumbs to her sexuality in an almighty ballad that is (deliberately?) reminiscent of “Defying Gravity” from that Broadway show most susceptible to queer readings, Wicked.

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Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back anymore
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door

– of the (now empty) closet, yes, but also of the open door that is love. Being out isn’t much good if you don’t have love in your life: ultimately, Elsa learns that love is the way to control her powers. It would be possible to do a fairly conservative reading of this – female queer sexuality is acceptable as long as it’s within the confines of a long-term monogamous relationship – but I think there’s a better reading available. Based on the fact that the love between sisters is at the heart of this film, the love that controls Elsa’s powers isn’t romantic love, but familial love: the kind of love that loves you for who you are, not in spite of it.

Frozen isn’t saying that queerness is only acceptable in certain kinds of relationship. On the contrary, its message is that love comes in many different forms, and we all of us – including women, and queer people, and people with mental illnesses, and people with disabilities, and everybody else – need to be loved for who we are, with the kind of love that opens closet doors.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. Excuse him while he gets back to writing polyamorous Anna/Kristoff/Hans slashfic.

‘Bob’s Burgers’: The Uniquely Lovable Tina Belcher

Delightful Tina. Shy, painfully weird, butt-obsessed, quietly dorky, intensely daydreamy Tina. Tina is a little bit like all of us (and–cough–a lot like some of us) at that most graceless, transitional, intrinsically unhappy stage of life that is early adolescence. She is also a wonderfully rich and well-developed character, both in her interactions with her family and in her own right, and she’s arguably the emotional core of the whole show.

Written by Max Thornton as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

It might seem odd to be writing about Bob’s Burgers for Bitch Flicks‘ Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists week, but I can justify it. For the uninitiated, Bob’s Burgers is an animated comedy centered on the Belcher family,who run the titular restaurant: long-suffering paterfamilias Bob (Archer/Coach McGuirk!), his irrepressibly cheery wife Linda, and their three children–awkward 13-year-old Tina, genial 11-year-old Gene, and borderline-sociopathic 9-year-old Louise. The show is charming, warm, and very funny, and it’s no great leap to declare it the spiritual and comedic successor to The Simpsons. It’s also eminently possible, as A.V. Club’s Sonia Saraiya explains in a recent article, to read Tina as the show’s protagonist.

Delightful Tina. Shy, painfully weird, butt-obsessed, quietly dorky, intensely daydreamy Tina. Tina is a little bit like all of us (and–cough–a lot like some of us) at that most graceless, transitional, intrinsically unhappy stage of life that is early adolescence. She is also a wonderfully rich and well-developed character, both in her interactions with her family and in her own right, and she’s arguably the emotional core of the whole show.

The typical oldest child on TV doesn’t look like Tina. Oldest children are smart and accomplished or bratty and rebellious, but always outspoken and confident: Becky from Roseanne, Sondra from The Cosby Show, Bart from The Simpsons, Haley from Modern Family… The oldest child is almost never the clear point of identification for the TV viewer, but Tina’s gentleness makes her the most relatable and in some ways the realest Belcher.In Saraiya’s words, “She’s sensitive and working-class and even possibly neuroatypical.” This might not seem like a recipe for a popular television character, but it gives Tina a depth, nuance, and a potential for growth in comparison to which her family seems a little, well, cartoonish.

Wait... you mean to say... they ARE cartoons?? — Wait… you mean to say… they ARE cartoons??

Tina’s very existence is arguably an explicitly feminist triumph. To quote Saraiya once more:

In the original pilot for Bob’s Burgers, [Tina] was a teenage boy. That fundamental difference aside, Daniel Belcher and Tina Belcher are the same character—but looking back, that choice had enormous implications for the show, because a TV audience has never seen a girl growing up like this. She’s nothing like an archetypal teen, but she’s also unmistakably one. She daydreams about kissing her crushes—and also about touching the butts of all the cute boys in her class. She fantasizes about being a prettier, bolder version of herself, who talks politics with adults and is an object of affection among the guys at Wagstaff School. … Puberty and dating have a typical arc on shows about teenage girls, but Tina’s arc on Bob’s Burgers is something else entirely. It’s gross. It’s messy. It occasionally encourages threesomes. And it’s hilarious, but the show is careful to never make Tina the butt of any jokes. (Tina touching butts, however, is okay.) If the viewer is laughing, it’s most likely with Tina—or at the very least, with the people who love her.

Amen to that.

An oddity of Bob’s Burgers is the fact that Kristen Schaal, the voice of the wonderfully evil Louise, is the only woman among the cast for the Belcher family. John Roberts voices Linda, and Dan Mintz voices Tina. Metatextually, I’m troubled by yet another instance of women not getting work in the vastly male-dominated industry of film and TV; but within the world of the show, it’s simply one instance among many of gender norms being subverted, tossed aside, or merely ignored by the marvelous Belchers. Whether it’s Tina regretting waxing her legs because she mowed down her “furry little friends,” Bob delighting in the fact that he also waxed his, Linda and Louise bailing on a creepily womb-centric mother-daughter seminar to bond over laser tag, or Gene casually declaring which outfits in a fashion catalog would suit him–all examples from a single superb season 3 episode, “Mother Daughter Laser Razor”–the Belchers are not bound by the anxieties of conforming to strict gender roles, and it’s glorious to behold.

The whole Belcher family dynamic is the real reason to watch this show. As Saraiya notes (and I swear this is the last time I will quote her), “everybody watches out for Tina, because Tina couldn’t hurt a fly.” As someone whose siblings are my best friends, I love the Belcher kids more than any other set of TV siblings. They pester and needle and tease other, as siblings do, but they also scheme together, protect each other’s greatest vulnerabilities, and have huge amounts of fun together. Tina isn’t bossy or a bully, like so many TV oldest kids. She’s weird, she’s wonderful, she’s a 13-year-old girl voiced by a 32-year-old man, and she’s one of the best young female characters on TV.

Also, she's basically Tumblr in human form. — Also, she’s basically Tumblr in human form.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

“A Bit Of An Evolution”: On Louis C.K.

It’s exhausting to consume any media as a trans* person. It’s not really a matter of if I will become a punchline, but when. This goes triple or quadruple for comedy, and Louis C.K., for all his good qualities, is no exception.

Written by Max Thornton as part of our theme week on Male Feminists and Allies.

It’s exhausting to consume any media as a trans* person. It’s not really a matter of if I will become a punchline, but when. This goes triple or quadruple for comedy, and Louis C.K., for all his good qualities, is no exception.

Louis C.K. is a very funny guy, and for a white straight cis man he is often a great ally. The webpage www.arewhitepeopleraciallyoppressed.com uses one of his bits as its only explanation for its giant, bolded, all-caps “NO!” He’s pretty excellent at using his tragicomic sensibility to draw attention to inequalities in a way that might make other white straight cis men think as well as laugh. But he still has a ways to go, and I hope that he will learn and improve.

Louis CK on a rare happy day — Louis C.K. on a rare happy day

What’s interesting about being a fan of Louis C.K. is that he does learn and change, and we have watched him evolve his understanding of some things. His 2008 album Chewed Up opens with a tiresome bit about “Offensive Words,” which surely must have seemed as embarrassing five years ago as it does now:

Faggot. I miss that word… Faggot didn’t mean gay when I was a kid. You called someone faggot because they were being a faggot, you know? Someone was just being a faggot. … But if one of them took the dick out of his mouth and was being all faggy and saying annoying faggy things like, ‘People from Phoenix are called Phoenicians,’ I’d be like, ‘Hey, shut up, faggot! FAGGOT! Quit being a faggot and suck that dick.’

As we used to say when I was a kid, it’s so funny I forgot to laugh.

I’m pretty sure this bit is still being used by douchebros to justify their bigotry, but hopefully at least some of those douchebros have seen the poker scene from a 2010 episode of C.K.’s semi-autobiographical FX sitcom Louie. In this scene, the Louis C.K. character and a group of his comedian friends discuss homosexuality with their one gay friend, who winds up steering the conversation in quite a serious direction. C.K. has explained that this scene was intentional redress for his casual excusing of slurs in the past. “What does it do to a gay man when I say the word ‘faggot’?” was not merely a rhetorical exercise, but a question he raised with a gay friend and thought about deeply in the writing of the poker scene. C.K. says, “I think that the discussion of the word faggot that I did in the poker scene was a bit of an evolution. I pretty much never say faggot on stage anymore.”

His mea culpa over last year’s Rapeocalypse debacle – an incident (don’t they seem to be almost weekly these days?) where an unfunny comedian’s rape “joke” sparked a raging internet debate about comedy and offensiveness – also proves that he can learn from his mistakes, to the point that he now actively tweets against offensive jokes.

louis-ck-tweet — Has anyone tried this? Does it work?

Louis C.K. makes me laugh a lot, and he says some really on-the-ball things about a lot of subjects (“two guys are in love and they can’t get married because you don’t want to talk to your ugly child for five fucking minutes??”), but watching his sets or his show still makes me clench in the pit of my stomach.

It’s not that his material on gender relations is uniformly bad. Some of it is excellent, and some of it is downright feminist. The trouble is, he does it in a really essentialist way. Men and women are defined as poles of a biologically determined binary. And he talks about men as though we’re utterly captive to our hormones. Sometimes it almost sounds as if he’s saying, “Men have treated women really poorly for millennia, because biology.” Testosterone, contra certain trans men who will tell you otherwise, is not a misogyny potion. Neither (although I don’t have personal experience with this) is a Y chromosome.

Obviously I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t talk about relationships between men and women. It’s hugely important to recognize and challenge the ways in which gendered oppression and violence are performed specifically by men against women; but we need to do this in a way that acknowledges that these categories are imperfect and fluid and not immutably predestined or tied to biology.

C.K. is pretty solid on that first part, but he’s still not mastered the second. And it’s frustrating because he’s so clearly someone who’s spent time engaging with other intersections of oppression, especially race and sexuality, and it’s made him a better person, a better comedian, and a better artiste; so I wish he’d bother to do the same with trans* concerns.

I do worry that Louis C.K. is too much the leftist darling who can get away with anything. On the one hand, it’s not unreasonable to laud people when they learn and change for the better; on the other, fawning over straight white cis dudes for showing the slightest modicum of basic human decency is pretty gross. It’s hard to balance the discourse in response to allies, but at least we know this one is thoughtful and self-aware. If we hold Louis C.K. accountable for his failings, we can generally expect that he’ll listen and learn, and that’s perhaps the most important quality in an ally.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Straight White Cis Girls: Babystep in the Right Direction, or Sop to Shut Us Up?

I love that we are having a cultural moment where bestselling books with hotly anticipated film adaptations center on tough, three-dimensional female protagonists, who have kickass, high-stakes fantasy adventures in worlds where gender equality is largely unremarkable. But one can’t help noticing a pattern.

Written by Max Thornton.

Last week the trailer for the film adaptation of Veronica Roth’s bestseller Divergent dropped. A charitable observer might describe this story as “post Hunger Games.” Dystopian future US? Check. Implausibly advanced technology combined with a sometimes oddly primitivist lifestyle? Check. Tribalism at the service of a sinister ruling elite? Check. Teens in mortal peril? Check. Love story firmly taking a backseat to violence, survival, politics, and intrigue? Check.

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Divergent is an enjoyable enough book, if strongly derivative and prone to some of the notable weaknesses of its genre (is anyone else more than sick of first-person present tense?), and I’m sure the movie will be more or less competent. What really strikes me, though, is that it seems to be part of a mini boom of female-specfic heroines in young adult fiction. Bella Swan notwithstanding, YA seems to be the place to go for the quality woman-centered specfic I so long to see in mainstream media: Divergent, The Hunger Games, Graceling…

I love these heroines. I love Katniss and Katsa and Fire and Bitterblue and Tris. I love that we are having a cultural moment where bestselling books with hotly anticipated film adaptations center on tough, three-dimensional female protagonists, who have kickass, high-stakes fantasy adventures in worlds where gender equality is largely unremarkable.

But one can’t help noticing a pattern: All of these heroines (as well as those of less highly acclaimed fantasy series) are straight. All cis. All white (regardless of book Katniss’ skin color, the whitewashing controversy has ensured that the primary public image of her is chalkwhite). All able-bodied. All young. All thin. Really, the only way in which they differ from the Harry-Frodo-Luke generic specfic hero is in being female.

And that’s great! I don’t want to minimize the importance of female protagonists in a cultural climate where the economic exploitation of women is directly mirrored in the entertainment industry’s erasure of women. As frustrating as it is in 2013, specfic heroines are still noteworthy.

I have to wonder, though, whether this is really a step in the right direction, or if it’s simply a tiny concession on the part of the kyriarchy to try to placate those of us who are demanding better representation of marginalized groups in our entertainment without making any real change.

This is, after all, how hegemony works. It’s a constant negotiation between dominant and resistant forces in society, and the dominant forces are never going to concede any ground if they can find any way to avoid it. Kyriarchy gives with one hand while taking away with the other — we may have some kickass female heroines in our YA specfic, but female speaking roles in blockbuster movies declined last year.

The upside of this negotiation process is that the kyriarchy never gets the last word. People whose voices are suppressed and silenced are always talking back, always reappropriating what the kyriarchy provides them with and remaking it for themselves, whether through queer headcanons or racebending recasting.

The downside is that we can never rest easy. Just because straight white pretty cis girls are beginning to be represented in specfic (or rather, in one specfic niche that is still derided in male-dominated geek culture), we can’t assume that this means the trend will continue in the right direction without some very real, tireless, and vocal work on the part of us consumers.

We have to keep demanding more and better representation. Yes, celebrate Katniss and Tris and Clary and Katsa; but never seem to be saying that this is enough. Cheer for our kickass young heroines, and in the same breath demand queer heroines, heroines of color, heroines with disabilities, trans* heroines, fat heroines, older heroines…

Good question.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to Twitter @RainicornMax.

Black Girls Rock The World

BET’s Black Girls Rock! Awards ceremony last week was a magnificent and much-needed celebration of the social and cultural achievements of Black women: in politics and sport, music and local activism. It’s absolutely disgusting that such an important and wonderful event was marred by white racism.

BET’s Black Girls Rock! Awards ceremony last week was a magnificent and much-needed celebration of the social and cultural achievements of Black women: in politics and sport, music and local activism. The ceremony is a 90-minute showcase of monumental talent, guts, and determination among women of color, and it’s absolutely disgusting that such an important and wonderful event was marred by white racism.

As a white person watching this event, what struck me most was this: These women were not addressing me. Although I’m trans and queer, I otherwise fall into the coveted “white males aged 18-35” demographic, and all mainstream media content is aimed squarely at me. Our society demonstrably:

And then turns around, smiling sweetly, and claims to be “post-racial.” In this environment, only the most assimilationist and unthreatening of Black voices are given a platform. Will Smith stars in bootrstrappy neocon fairytales. Crash passes for nuanced discourse around race in Hollywood. Kanye West is ridiculed for publicly speaking truths about racism in the US.

There’s an ugly mass silencing of Black voices in white America. That’s what makes Black Girls Rock! so necessary and so compelling.

I’m a white guy, surrounded by white privilege the way I’m surrounded by air, so I didn’t start watching the show for its political content, but out of sheer narcissism: I was at the taping of the opening performance by my beloved Janelle Monáe, and I just wanted to see my own face on TV (you get a split-second glimpse of me at the end of Monáe’s song). I kept watching because it is so unusual for me to witness people of color talking in this way – to, from, and for their community. The women onstage were talking about the intersectional web of systemic and individual oppressions faced by Black women in America, and they were doing this in the context of an awards show. As an avid Academy hate-watcher, I’m accustomed to treating awards shows as the smarmy, self-congratulatory industry circle-jerks that most of them are. This, though! This was a genuinely uplifting celebration of legitimately inspiring work by truly awesome individuals.

Here was the incredible Marian Wright Edelman, Mississippi’s first African-American woman lawyer and a tireless activist for underserved children even well into her seventies.

Here was anti-violence activist Ameena Matthews, speaking so powerfully about being a Black Muslim woman that she gave me chills.

Here was TV writer Mara Brock Akil, declaring, “Black women, even if nobody else sees you, I SEE YOU.”

Here was Misty Copeland, a Black woman dancing classical ballet with otherworldly beauty.

Here were three astonishing young women who have made astounding contributions to local activism in their communities, including one little girl who created her own (female, Black) superhero to combat pollution.

As Awesomely Luvvie put it, “Every moment felt like a highlight.” Amber Riley, Queen Latifah, Venus Williams, and Jennifer Hudson were among the stars present, and pretty nearly everything about the show was wonderful. Talented, tireless African-American women were lifting one another up instead of being forced to cater to white supremacy, and it was beautiful.

So, of course, white people had to throw a hissy fit.

This is the ugly reality of racism’s MO in US society. Staggering forces operate socially, economically, politically, and culturally to maintain white supremacy in every arena, and if everpeople of color do something that is not directly and primarily aimed at perpetuating this, white people start accusing them of racism. It would be funny if it wasn’t borderline-genocidal.

Fellow white people, I am begging you: don’t make this about you. Go watch the Black Girls Rock! show. Give BET your eyeballs, your time, and your attention. When I sat down to watch the show, I was only in it for myself, but I got a humbling and eye-opening exposure to some phenomenal women who are powerful forces for good in our society. May Black girls continue to rock the boat, the house, and the world.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. Laverne Cox is his queen.

Zombies and Revolution: An Interview with Esther Cassidy, Producer of ‘Birth of the Living Dead’

Zombie fans among our readers will have read my conversation with Amanda last week about Birth of the Living Dead, the new documentary about game-changing horror classic Night of the Living Dead. On Halloween, I got a chance to sit down with producer Esther Cassidy and learn more about the film, the gender politics of George Romero’s work, and the broader symbolism of zombies.

Zombie fans among our readers will have read my conversation with Amanda last week about Birth of the Living Dead, the new documentary about game-changing horror classic Night of the Living Dead. On Halloween, I got a chance to sit down with producer Esther Cassidy and learn more about the film, the gender politics of George Romero’s work, and the broader symbolism of zombies.

Birth of the Living Dead, a passion project for zombie-loving director Rob Kuhns and his (life and work) partner Cassidy, was initially intended to be a “making of” documentary featuring interviews with the cast and crew of Night, but 2008’s One for the Fire stole that thunder. So Cassidy and Kuhns changed tack. They already had experience with socially conscious journalism from their 2001 PBS documentary Enemies of War, about the El Salvadoran civil war, and Kuhns’ work for Bill Moyers got him access to archival footage from Moyers’ tenure as Lyndon B. Johnson’s Press Secretary, from 1965-67 – a.k.a. the years immediately preceding the release of Night of the Living Dead. The upshot is a documentary that superbly locates Night in the context of the US in the late sixties and skilfully analyzes the relationship between horror and sociopolitical climate, both then and now.

“A lot of people don’t realize that horror can make a political statement,” Cassidy observed. She’s a horror fan, powerfully affected by a viewing of Night in college, but, unlike Kuhns, she says she didn’t realize how much she appreciated the film until she came to make this documentary about it. This is a transferable result: Birth is likely to give viewers a renewed appreciation for Night and a deepened understanding of the social forces that influenced the making of modern zombies.

The two major cultural events to which Birth returns again and again are the Vietnam War and the race riots. In a late-sixties milieu, their specific impact lay in their relation to two major factors: the failure of sixties counterculture and the rise of mass media. Cassidy was quick to name the latter as an important component of today’s zombie obsession. Citing the devastation wrought on New York by Hurricane Sandy last year, she proposed that the renewed cultural interest in zombies this century can be linked to an awareness of both how connected we are and how fragile those connections are. “Everyone born since 1945 wakes up every day surprised we haven’t blown ourselves up yet,” she said of our generations’ apocalyptic mentality. Zombie films are a space where we can ask what resources we can muster to survive in a world where everything can change in a heartbeat, where the only certainty is death, and now even this is undone.

Gary Pullin's gorgeous graphics. — Gary Pullin’s gorgeous graphics.

The failure of institutions is a major theme of Night, and no commentator fails to note the “suspicion of authority and unmitigated bleakness” (to quote the narration of Birth). There’s a revolutionary impulse here, a desire to overthrow the forces of war and racism and capitalism and consumerism through a dramatic world-altering event, but there’s also a hopelessness, a fear that perhaps we can never really change anything. The two warring impulses are surely familiar to everyone who has ever felt dissatisfaction with the status quo. I see the current popularity of zombies as reflecting a powerful sense of collective guilt and frustration. Zombies are the systemic forces to which we are subject and which we cannot control, but these same systemic forces are us – they are the result of human actions and human institutions.

Without the rule of law, mass media, and other social and cultural institutions to perpetuate them, racism and other systemic oppressions need no longer be cynically viewed as inevitable aspects of human existence. (The fact that they are still uncritically included in most of the popular zombie stories today bespeaks both a cynicism so deep it borders on nihilism and a profound artistic laziness.) What’s so brilliant about Night is that the conflicts within the farmhouse are to do with survival, not tribalism, and that the racially-coded violence is perpetrated by the forces of social institutions. Neither war nor racism is over, despite decades of activism and protest, so it’s no wonder Night‘s dark ending still speaks so powerfully to audiences. The fact that mainstream zombie fare today does not engage with critical social theory the way Night does instantiates this collective disillusionment on a metatextual level too. What comfort is there? Romero offers, “There’s always the refreshment stand.”

Night of the Living Dead is far from an actively misogynistic movie, but it does fail to address the vector of gender oppression, which makes its social engagement, otherwise so sophisticated, seem thoroughly incomplete. Cassidy can provide a feminist counterreading for most of the female characters in the movie, from the teenage girl whose desire to help her boyfriend leads to the downfall of the escape plan, to the strong mother whose love for her daughter is her weakness, but she’s under no illusion that Night is an explicitly feminist text. As she points out, you have to look to Romero’s series of sequels – Dawn, Day, Land, Diary, and Survival of the Dead – for some genuinely well-rounded and interesting female characters. The man has learned, and his work has developed accordingly.

Perhaps, then, there is ultimately a message of hope for redemption, for a new radically reconstructed world, but it requires a lot of work and self-critique and undeniable pain and horror and times of bleakness and despair. And that seems to be missing from a lot of present zombie stuff, wherever engagement with social issues is missing. Without that engagement, zombie stories are cynical voids of human feeling, all style and no substance, pure money-grabbing consumerist culture. They are zombies, in the most Baudrillardian way, and our only comfort is the refreshment stand.

Hope rests in the people who don’t succumb to nihilism. One of the most interesting strands in Birth is the portrayal of an after-school program to promote literacy through film, where Night is a teaching tool for Brooklyn kids – mostly kids of color whose families aren’t exactly high on the socioeconomic ladder – and it’s fascinating to see how much the film engages them. Cassidy herself works with Downtown Community Television Center to “provide outstanding media arts education to underserved populations.” There are ways in which people are attempting to engage horror with a social conscience. And hopefully Esther Cassidy and Rob Kuhns are going to do more of it with their proposed forthcoming work, on the influence of the Holocaust and the atom bomb on horror, SF, and monster movies from 1945 to the present. I eagerly await it.

Birth of the Living Dead opens at New York’s IFC Center on Wednesday.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He thinks way too much about zombies.

Red, Blue, and Giallo: Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’

I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.

As my initiation into the worlds of sex and violence, many European horror films of the 1970s no doubt occupy a Freudian subspace of my psyche. Probably the Ur-example of this genre and its strange, ambivalent attitude toward women and sexuality is Dario Argento’s 1977 meisterwerk, Suspiria.

This post by Staff Writer Max Thornton appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies. It was previously published as part of our theme week on Women and Gender in Foreign Films.

I started getting into film when I was a teenager. Growing up with daily power cuts, both scheduled and unscheduled, is not conducive to childhood as a cinephile, and anyway my parents did not consider film a “real” art like literature or music – I can vividly remember being forced, at age seven, to quit Video Club and join Chess Club instead, because my mother did not think that sitting around watching videos constituted a worthwhile extracurricular.

(I am still breathtakingly terrible at chess.)

So, partly as the cultivation of an indoor hobby in response to the unpleasant British climate, and partly as the world’s meagerest teenage rebellion, I started watching films. In particular, I sought out horror films, thanks to the friendly proprietor of our local video rental store (now sadly gone the way of all such places in the Netflix age), who would happily rent the bloodiest, goriest, most revolting 18-ratedmovies to an obviously-14-year-old me, always with a cheery, “Enjoy!”

Most of these.

I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.

From its kickass score by prog-rockers Goblin to its borderline incomprehensible plot, I love damn near everything about Suspiria. For starters, it’s set in a ballet school, which is a direct line to my heart; and it features Udo Kier (UDO! KIER!); plus, it’s a strikingly female-dominated story. Argento says of the film: “there are only three men in it: one is blind, one can’t speak and the other is gay. It’s the women who have the power.” Which is such a problematic statement on so many levels, but let’s just focus on the undeniable fact that the film is mostly about women.

The film opens with American dancer Suzy Banyon (played by a young Jessica Harper – did you know she writes children’s books and has a cookery blog now??) arriving at a German airport on a rainy night. Pretty much the first thing we see is her repeated attempts to hail a taxi; her young face, rain- and wind-swept above the virginal whites of her clothes, expresses a vulnerability that will recur throughout the movie. Her big, frightened eyes peer out of the taxi at the gushing storm-drains, the phallic tree-trunks in the spooky woods, the bright red facade of the ballet school (on the subtly named Escher Strasse). Untoward goings-on, shockingly enough, are underfoot at the school, and Suzy soon finds herself completely out of her depth as things get steadily creepier.

Suzy and Sara, swimming.

What’s particularly interesting about Suspiria, especially in relation to the giallo genre as a whole, is its lack of nudity or overt sexuality. There’s a pretty good reason for this, as Argento explains:

To begin with, I imagined the story set in a children’s school, not of teens. I thought that it could be interesting that the school was for very young girls, eight, ten years old. This was the first version. The distributor strongly opposed this choice, and the film was made also with American money, from Fox, and they were against that too. So I changed the script and raised the girl’s age, but I kept a sort of childish attitude, so the characters behaved like children. The decor too… I used little tricks, for example the doors have the handles not at a normal height, but at face level, the height at which a child of 8 years old would find the handle. It gives the impression of dealing with children, even though they have adult bodies.

I don’t think it’s reading too much into the film to find some Freudian undertones in the whites and reds, in the repeated motif of water, in the pivotal role of irises. There is a strong fairy-tale quality to the film’s artifices, its primary colors, scenes awash in blue or red; the story of the young girl entering a world of danger and threat carries echoes of Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White – Bruno Bettelheim would surely have something to say about that.

Make no mistake, this is a pretty violent movie. There are some quite fantastically grotesque murders. Within the first fifteen minutes, we see a still-beating heart stabbed and a woman’s face split in two by plate glass. Throughout, the lily-white garments of the murdered women are streaked and splattered with bright red blood. We also get a revolting maggot infestation, some magnificently scary chase scenes, and a truly bonkers climactic sequence.

Red, the color of a very murdered woman.

And yet Suzy retains a sense of childlike innocence and vulnerability throughout, relating to her friends and teachers like the little girl she was originally written to be. It’s a very weird juxtaposition, and I think it crystallizes the strange combination of female empowerment and ingrained misogyny that characterizes classic European horror. What, in the end, are we to make of stories where women are both the brutally murdered corpses and the proactive investigators of the mystery; both the pure childlike heroine and the monstrous villain; both desexed and penetrated by sharp objects; both agents and victims?

It speaks volumes to the general lack of such female-dominated stories in our broader culture that I even find myself asking this question.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.