Max Thornton – Page 4

‘Birth of the Living Dead’: Women and Gender in Cult Films and B-Movies

Birth of the Living Dead is Rob Kuhns’ documentary of the making of George Romero’s 1968 cult horror genre game-changer Night of the Living Dead. Bitch Flicks writers Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez discuss both the documentary (BOTLD) and the original film itself (NOTLD).

A Conversation Between Max Thornton & Amanda Rodriguez

Birth of the Living Dead is Rob Kuhns’ documentary of the making of George Romero’s 1968 cult horror genre game-changer Night of the Living Dead.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TowiviD3xgE”]

Bitch Flicks writers Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez discuss both the documentary (BOTLD) and the original film itself (NOTLD):

MT: I spent my teens as an ardent fan of all things zombie (and I have a lot of theories about what this says about my relationship to embodiment as a trans person, but that’s another discussion). I went on a zombie walk in London for the 40th anniversary of NOTLD in 2008. I skipped a college class to go meet George Romero when he was doing a signing for the Creepshow re-release. My first academic publication is a chapter on zombies (and queerness, and Jesus, because those are my other favorite things). My cred as a Romero fan is well established, and I’m guessing yours is, too. Do you think someone who’s less of a zombie nut — or perhaps even someone who hasn’t seen NOTLD — could enjoy Birth of the Living Dead?

AR: I am a huge horror and zombie fan, but I didn’t start out life that way. I saw NOTLD when I was 4. I can empathize with Ebert’s observations of the younger children who didn’t have the resources to protect themselves from the fear and dread engendered by the film. I refused to watch NOTLD again until I’d graduated college because it was so formative and so terrifying. Perhaps in large part because of NOTLD, I have always been fascinated with what frightens us and why. The deep psychology of fear and what that fear represents within a larger cultural context have been the subjects of much of my critical analysis and fiction writing. I love the idea that horror, in particular the zombie, is a physical manifestation of our societal fears.

Karen cannibalizes her father, illustrating society's fear of the brutality of youth. — Karen cannibalizes her father, illustrating society’s fear of the brutality of youth.

That said, I’ve only properly seen NOTLD once, so I think the documentary can be interesting to people who aren’t as entrenched in zombie culture; although who isn’t these days, considering they’re such a popular horror subgenre? I found Romero’s continued enthusiasm for the film all these years later to be quite endearing. Film nerds and aspiring indie filmmakers could find value in this documentary. People interested in history, particularly the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war could benefit from seeing this documentary, as it and NOTLD deal with those huge cultural landmarks from a different angle than we’re used to seeing. I also really appreciated the way the documentary casts NOTLD as a meta-narrative of the actual making of the film: the DIY approach and guerrilla tactics the crew used despite the huge filmmaking machine that is Hollywood. The process of making the film becomes its own protest against the Hollywood status quo, the insistence on professional actors, the elitism of art and entertainment. In a way, this is exactly the function of zombies; to disrupt the normalcy and complacency of institutions.

MT: Is this documentary perhaps a little too much of a hagiography? Does it give Romero too much credit for inventing the zombie as we know it, provide too little contextualization of the Haitian origins of the zombi, and thus perhaps whitewash the racism, colonialism, and cultural appropriation inherent in our cultural enthusiasm for the zombie?

Haitian Zombi in 'I Walked with the Dead' — Haitian Zombi in ‘I Walked with the Dead’

AR: Though I thought Romero was a sweet man, and as a fan, I couldn’t help but gobble up his nostalgic reminiscences, the documentary underscored for me the importance of the concept of the death of the author and the fallacy of the notion of authorial intent. It is clear that Romero had no idea what he was making. This film is considered a cult classic and of cinematic significance in spite of him. He makes it clear that he didn’t intend to comment on race by casting a black protagonist, and I doubt he had any idea he was critiquing the Vietnam war or truly upsetting the horror genre in a profound way. I think the film does all those things in a compelling way, which is why it withstands the test of time and is infinitely imitable. Without divesting him of his agency completely, the documentary shows that film experts and filmmakers today understand the important work he created more than Romero himself does.

You’re right that the documentary seems to gloss over the true origins of the zombi, which does divorce it from its racially-charged roots. However, I always thought the movies that predate NOTLD featuring Haitian zombis were painfully racist. Romero zombies are different from the Haitian zombi and speak to our culture in a different way…probably because the Romero zombie is versatile and can morph into any of our greatest fears. It would have made sense, though, to have the documentary further explore the origins of the zombi. Since BOTLD is so racially aware, I would have enjoyed seeing it tackle the implications of colonialism and appropriation. Do you think Romero’s so-called reinvention of the zombi is ultimately racist? Does his malleable notion of zombies only address first-world fears and insecurities?

MT: I think this is something that deserves more interrogation than it tends to receive — consider the fact that he always cites I Am Legend as a huge influence, and not the Haitian voodoo roots or even the massively racist earlier zombie films like White Zombie — but then NOTLD doesn’t actually use the term “zombie.” As well as getting more credit than he deserves, perhaps Romero gets more flak than he deserves when we criticize his appropriation of the zombi, because, as you point out, he doesn’t necessarily know quite what he was doing. (I would note that some people are attempting to balance out the deification of Romero as inventor of the modern zombie: the editors of my zombie chapter, for example, were very insistent on giving Romero’s co-writer Russo equal credit.)

I really enjoyed the film’s emphasis on the social context of the late sixties and how that shaped much of the imagery and message of NOTLD: race riots, Nam, anger, disillusionment with the hippie movement’s failure to elicit major structural change. Are we currently in a comparable period of crisis and distrust in institutions, reflected in the renewed zombie boom of the past decade? And yet is the profound social consciousness of NOTLD largely missing from zombie stories today? For example, I rage-quit The Walking Dead at the end of Season One because it seemed to me so profoundly the white men’s story, with the female characters and characters of color remaining firmly secondary to the almighty White Man. I think maybe I find this particularly disappointing in zombie stories because I want more out of a genre rooted in a movie that was so far ahead of its time in its attitude toward race.

'Night of the Living Dead' hero Ben played by Duane Jones — ‘Night of the Living Dead’ hero Ben played by Duane Jones

AR: I think zombies will always appeal to us because our society is a house of cards. Zombies remind us of a life without the comforts of technology, safety, and structure. The more complicated and reliant we become on institutions and corporations, the more relevant dystopian fantasies like zombies become because we are one global crisis away from that house of cards collapsing on us, leaving us weak, reeling, and unable to fend for ourselves.

I think zombie movies are being made left and right because they’re a hot item, but a zombie movie isn’t truly great unless the zombies are a compelling metaphor. The last zombie movie I remember adoring was 28 Days Later because it explored the terrifying fear of pandemics, the brutality of the military, and the rage that exists inside us, constantly questioning whether or not human nature is really as pure and good as we’re led to believe. Though Naomie Harris’ Selena was its secondary protagonist and her characterization falters at the end, she is a majorly badass, smart Black woman who kicks some serious keister with a machete. (However, I didn’t love the sequel 28 Weeks Later because I thought that was some misogynistic bullshit.)

Selena Machete — Selena slays first and asks questions…not at all.

I, too, have been struggling with the TV show version of The Walking Dead. I even wrote a Bitch Flicks article comparing the superior graphic novel series to the show. You’re totally right; the show is reactionary, racist, and sexist. It’s not doing much new or interesting with its post-apocalyptic material, which has vast potential to make meaningful commentary about what day-to-day life looks like when you’ve stripped our society away. There are questions ripe for the asking, such as: What do morals look like? How do you raise children? Can we work together against a common enemy (as touched on in the BOTLD), or are we inherently self-motivated?

What do you think the zombie trope “means”? Why do you think it’s still got such a stranglehold on us after over four decades?

Are zombies then not really a horror subgenre but a dystopian subgenre? Maybe the words “zombie” and “apocalypse” always go together. Can you think of any zombie film examples where the threat of utter human and societal annihilation were not issues?

MT: I wonder — and this is highly speculative, and clearly born out of my perspective as a theologian with seminarian friends who worry a lot about the decline of mainline Christianity in the US — if the zombie’s place as a monster of the 20th and 21st century is intertwined with secularism. Is it a manifestation of a certain cultural anxiety related to the “rise of the nones” — that is, a cathartic expression of a fear of being swallowed up by materialism (in both the philosophical and the economic senses of the term)? As mindless masses of rotting flesh whose only drives are the basest physical urges, zombies represent the logical extreme of pure materialism, and I suspect it’s not a coincidence that our cultural psyche is obsessed with them in a time when global capitalism is engulfing everything while traditional channels for religious/spiritual sensibilities are on the decline — among the young westerners who are the primary audience for zombie culture, at least.

Zombies gravitate to the mall in 'Dawn of the Dead', consumers even in death. — Zombies gravitate to the mall in ‘Dawn of the Dead’, capitalist consumers even in death.

It’s an odd and frustrating paradox that zombie stories are always these grand-scale, global apocalypses, and yet they always focus on your straight-white-male protagonists. This piece does a grand job of addressing this issue. I’d take World War Z as an example of the paradox: the book actually does take on the geopolitics of the zombie apocalypse on a truly global scale, whereas the film is a by-the-numbers Hollywood disaster flick where the global disaster is mere backdrop to the story of whiterocis dude hero and his perfect(ly passive) white family. I think that’s perhaps symptomatic of the increasing polarization of mainstream and independent content in our age of digital distribution, and I suspect that mainstream pop culture zombie tales are only going to get more anodyne and more unthinkingly supportive of the heteropatriarchal status quo, while we’ll have to look to non-traditional channels of production and distribution for interesting stories. I haven’t yet watched Ze, Zombie, a queer zombie film, but I’m deeply intrigued — not least, I admit, because the top update on the website is currently an apology for the film’s excessive whiteness…we’ve a long way still to go, it seems.

For all its social consciousness, though, does NOTLD (and BOTLD – only one of the talking heads is a woman; African-American men are interviewed, but African-American women are not) fall into the trap of so many progressive social movements, both in the sixties (e.g. black power) and still today (e.g. movement atheism): failure to properly include, address, and account for women? Do you know of any actually feminist zombie films (I can’t think of any)? Why is this such a cultural lacuna? Other movie monsters have been reinterpreted in explicitly feminist ways: vampires (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), werewolves (Ginger Snaps) — doesn’t the zombie have feminist potential as a movie monster?

In 'Ginger Snaps', werewolf Ginger revels in her new power. — In ‘Ginger Snaps’, werewolf Ginger revels in her new power.

AR: I’m totally with you on your critique of World War Z the film vs. the book. We’re like E.T. and Elliott here because I wrote a Bitch Flicks review critiquing the film: its narrative choices that narrowed the scope of the book until it was unrecognizable, the way it cast Gerry as a messianic figure, and its under-development of its potentially fierce female characters, rendering them as nothing more than symbols to reflect back upon Gerry’s manly manliness.

I’ve always thought that NOTLD wasn’t feminist when I consider all the female characters in the movie. I wish someone would have commented on the flat female NOTLD depictions in the documentary, but I guess the movie wouldn’t come out looking so well…the documentary does kind of lionize NOTLD.

They were coming to get you, and they got you, Barbara.

I think Jennifer’s Body could maybe be categorized as a female zombie flick, but it’s debatable whether or not its feminist. Return of the Living Dead 3 was kind of a big deal because the protagonist was a woman and a zombie, and she became a sexual icon for teenage boys everywhere. I think part of the problem with associating zombies and women is that zombies aren’t usually sexy, and it seems like a requirement that women and sexuality are linked in cinema whether it’s in a feminist or a non-feminist way. So, I’d say that the lack of feminist zombie films speaks to a larger issue, in which our culture insists on associating women and sexuality.

Mindy Clarke stars as a sexay zombie in 'Return of the Living Dead 3' — Sexay zombie in ‘Return of the Living Dead 3’

There’s no real reason, however, why a woman can’t be the zombie killing heroine, though it happens so infrequently. We’ve got shitty examples like the Resident Evil series, but I think there’s a lot of potential to critique the patriarchy in a film that sets up a lone woman (or a small group of women) working against the never-ending onslaught, the plague of patriarchy. Wow, now I’m stoked to see that movie! Think it’ll ever get made?

Romero identifies as “Spanish” as per his Sharks vs. Jets anecdote in BOTLD, but he’s of Cuban & Lithuanian descent. He’s never represented as a director of color (I bet his last name, as he mentions, is often mistaken for Italian), and I wonder if that has an effect on the distribution and reception of his films? Would horror films directed by a POC known to have an underlying social and political commentary be shunned by the mainstream or turned into an even more exclusive niche (i.e. something like “politically-charged cult horror films by people of color”…ugh)? I also wonder if that’s why he’s well-known for casting characters of color in his films without sort of thinking about it: because he views race differently than, say, his white director counterparts?

Romero contextualizes his sense of race using 'West Side Story' — Romero contextualizes his sense of his race using ‘West Side Story’

MT: Your point about Romero and race is really interesting, and I hadn’t considered that before. The idea that he’s a POC who’s never read that way does go a long way to explain the use of race in his films. The history and theory of the “passing” POC is too often elided or overlooked in a lot of critical race discussions, and perhaps this element nuances the question of misappropriation of zombi above? It definitely merits more analysis!

And I think Romero’s engagement with both race and gender does get more explicit in his later films, notably Day of the Dead (clearly a heavy influence on 28 Days Later) and the very underrated Land of the Dead. It’s not an accident that Land‘s Big Daddy, the first zombie to develop a sense of consciousness, is African-American, and Land‘s whole narrative of class warfare is extremely relevant. (Now I kind of want to have future discussions about each of Dawn, Day, and Land of the Dead, looking at the evolution of Romero’s social consciousness over the years and films!)

AR: I’m in complete agreement about Romero’s evolution as a socially and politically conscious director in his later films. Dawn of the Dead‘s critique of consumerism is probably the reason that I insist upon socially relevant zombie interpretations. I also find it fascinating and a bit depressing that the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake was lazy in that it eschewed the critical commentary inherent in a mall-based zombie flick, proving once again that we’re not necessarily getting better or more self-aware as a people. Romero’s Diary of the Dead I also thought was an interesting engagement on the notions of the viral connection of online media and the viral nature of information, despite its ultimate disappointment as a film. Although Land of the Dead wasn’t as commercially successful nor as engaging as some of Romero’s other films, I, too, was impressed by its class critique and some of its underlying racial commentary. However, I think the Black man emerging from the water with his new sense of self-awareness is a problematic depiction, putting Africans and African Americans on a slower time line for evolution than white people, claiming (perhaps unintentionally) that their consciousness is nascent, which is a disturbing paternalistic attitude.

Zombie leader, Big Daddy, emerging from the water.

This is one of my long-held issues with the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres. In order to tell these socially and politically charged stories, they embody the Other in monster flesh: think the apartheid conversation in District 9 with the grotesque alien bug people or Oz, the werewolf, along with Angel, the vampire, in Buffy and even more so in the Angel series or the way all the Star Trek series are rife with the creation of Othered alien species to elucidate the plight of an oppressed people (not to mention the racism inherent in the vicious warrior Klingons as stand-ins for Black people or the antisemitism of the greedy, urbane Ferengi as stand-ins for Jewish people). While the metaphor comes across, it often dehumanizes and further Others those it is attempting to bolster.

I could talk about this stuff for days and days! Count me in for future convos on the rest of the Romero zombie films! I’m planning to watch his Survival of the Dead, the last of Romero’s zombie series, for a Halloween-y treat since I’ve shockingly never seen it before.

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Thanks for joining us for this conversation between Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez on ‘Birth of the Living Dead’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead’. Keep an eye out for Max’s upcoming interview with Esther Cassidy, producer of ‘Birth of the Living Dead’.

A Girl Worth Fighting For: ‘Ava Snow Battles Death’

For all my cynicism, fall TV season secretly fills me with (false, inevitably dashed) hope every year. I may not always admit it, but I do give a fair chance to any new show that strikes my attention even a little. (Grad school has robbed me of many things – NaNoWriMo, the concept of disposable income, alcohol, the ability to stay awake for more than eight hours at a stretch, my last slender grasp on mental health – but it has not yet made a significant dent in the truly irresponsible amounts of TV I watch.) On some level, I think I’m still searching for something to fill the Buffy-shaped hole in my heart.

(DO NOT mention the comic books. Just don’t.)

What I want isn’t complicated: good, women-centered specfic.

Primetime just isn’t giving me what I want. Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is watchable, but big-screen success has amplified many of the most problematic tendencies in Joss Whedon’s work. Supernatural is my latest mini-obsession (no spoilers please; still in season 5), but it has a MAJOR women problem which even its own stars recognize, and where is my equivalent show about two demon-hunting sisters? Sleepy Hollow is gloriously, magnificently awful and I love every minute of that nonsense, but lord have mercy it’s terribad. The best women-centered specfic of 2013 was indisputably Orphan Black, but it’s disappointingly low-profile compared to those other big-hitters.

TV’s failure to deliver on this front is especially irritating because women-centered specfic is in a general cultural boom. The current crop of post-Twilight YA specfic with female protagonists – Hunger Games, Mortal Instruments, Divergent – proves that there’s an audience hungry for this stuff in both our books and our films, and yet television is still largely determined to prove that it is SRS BSNS, which in our culture always equates to telling stories about white cishet dudes.

And so we turn, as always when life disappoints, to the internet. The Kickstarter campaign for Ava Snow Battles Death was recently brought to Bitch Flick’s attention, and it looks like a series with the potential to deliver the women-centered specfic goods.

Misfits. Knife-fights. Government cover-ups. Ancient curses. Good versus evil. Overlords from another dimension.

That’s right. This web series is going to punch the internet in the face.

Sure, it’s a little cutesy, but it also sounds really cool. Judging from the teasers, this embryonic webseries offers us specfic adventures with thrills and horror and a romance subplot, female friendship between complex characters who easily pass the Bechdel test, and a kickass woman protagonist with amazing hair and a memorably distinctive style.

UGH just look at her. I'm already in love. — UGH just look at her. I’m already in love.

I’m optimistic about Ava Snow for a few reasons.

First, the creative team. The names of the Kickstarter backing levels tell us something about their specfic influences, which are impeccable: from Buffy to Star Wars, from Battlestar Galactica to Game of Thrones, from The X-Files to H.P. Lovecraft, they span the gamut of geek cred.

Second, the backstory of creators Zack Drisko and Arielle Davidsohn.

Zack and Arielle met in Los Angeles in 2009, fell in love, and moved in together. They have always been happy with each other but found themselves struggling with the other parts of their lives. Both creative types, they were frustrated by the obstacles involved with breaking into the Hollywood entertainment industry and doing all the menial odd jobs to get by in the meantime.

So they created Ava Snow as their own personal hero to inspire them. They channeled their hopes and frustrations into Ava Snow, and she became a hybrid of the traits they needed and wanted: someone who never took crap, who never stopped fighting, who refused to conform to what others wanted. She became a hero forged by the real life struggles of her writers.

That is both super adorable and pretty cool, not to mention a mouth-watering possibility for Supernatural-style fourth-wall-destruction somewhere down the line. (As one of my undergrad professors used to say, <British accent>meta is better</British accent>.)

Third and not least, the characters and premise. Unless I’m gravely misunderstanding, Ava Snow’s strength is not of supernatural provenance. She has internal strength built up by facing adversity, and it’s this inner strength that is coveted by evil underlords who are trying to steal her soul. And she has a best friend who’s a shy, awkward nerd girl. Any show with the potential for an odd-couple bromance a la Buffy/Willow gets my seal of approval. You can visit the official Ava Snow Battles Death website here.

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

Speaking with a Woman’s Voice: ‘The Future Starts Here’

Bitch Flicks was lucky enough to receive an invitation to the premiere of Tiffany Shlain’s new webseries The Future Starts Here in New York City last week, and your humble correspondent was lucky enough to be the one to attend it. Shlain is, as her series’ voiceover states, a mother, filmmaker, and founder of the Webby Awards, and The Future Starts Here is an AOL-produced miniseries about being human in the digital age.

Our history books have been telling the stories of just a small handful for centuries. When we look back at this time in history, the story’s going to be about the power of creative breakthroughs that include all of us.

Episode 5, “Participatory Revolution”

Bitch Flicks was lucky enough to receive an invitation to the premiere of Tiffany Shlain’s new webseries The Future Starts Here in New York City last week, and your humble correspondent was lucky enough to be the one to attend it. Shlain is, as her series’ voiceover states, a mother, filmmaker, and founder of the Webby Awards, and The Future Starts Here is an AOL-produced miniseries about being human in the digital age.

Eight bite-sized videos, The Future Starts Here will only cost you forty minutes of your life total, and it’s well worth the time. It’s a remarkable distillation of complex ideas into accessible, snappy soundbites that are thought-provoking rather than reductive, and I think it makes a fantastic general introduction to some of the complicated questions I happen to be grappling with in my own doctoral research.

Though the series is all about technology and how it is changing our lives, the first episode, “Technology Shabbat,” is about switching off. When I spoke with Shlain, she explained that this was a quite deliberate move: it serves to ground what follows in caution and self-awareness, steering the series clear of the naïve, starry-eyed techno-optimism it sometimes skirts. When I asked her if she thought technology was a force for good, she said yes, provided that we use it right. (And this assessment is clearly borne out by any brief glance at, say, internet feminist activism and the backlash thereto.)

The second episode, “Motherhood Remixed,” is the one that Shlain pinpointed as most explicitly engaging with feminist concerns. It’s an intriguing and important look at Shlain’s efforts to balance her busy workload with her family life, and it features some delightful infographics that reconfigure parental roles in admirable ways; but its concluding piece of advice is perhaps the weakest of the bunch, because “Create your own schedule or present a plan to someone who can make it happen” is simply not a workable option for many parents outside of Shlain’s socioeconomic bracket. The episode raises some excellent points about how technology can change the work-life balance, but it’s simply narrower in scope and context than some of the other pieces, and a direct acknowledgment of that fact wouldn’t have gone amiss.

A thread of feminism runs through the whole series, in a way that Shlain emphasized is intended to be accessible to the widest possible audience. Shlain told me with a sigh that she had had no end of questions about being a woman in a male-dominated arena, and she stressed that she feels her feminism is most powerfully enacted simply through being a woman and speaking with a woman’s voice. When you come down to it, this is the very heart of feminism: the most abstruse feminist theory is ultimately rooted in the many disparate experiences that we collect under the heading “being a woman.” Throughout the series, Shlain does a skillful job of integrating the fact of her womanhood, mentioning it explicitly at key moments when the non-feminist-identified viewer might be struck by it and brought to new understandings.

One of the delights of the series, and something that is perhaps at least partly attributable to a familiarity with the phrase “the personal is political,” is the seamless integration of aspects of Shlain’s personal and family life. Even outside of the episode directly concerning motherhood, Shlain grounds her musings and illustrates her ideas by using material from her own life: anecdotes about her children, examples of her family’s actions, even an episode co-helmed by her robotics professor husband (episode four, “Why We Love Robots”). This fluid movement from the micro to the macro, exemplifying the inextricable relation of the personal and the theoretical, is what good feminism does best, and in this sense The Future Starts Here is a triumph of feminism in action.

Examining aspects of technology from the simple rules of tech etiquette to the effect of participatory culture on the creative process, Shlain strikes an excellent midpoint of optimism and skepticism – what she dubs “opticism.” She expertly weaves together big ideas (referencing such luminaries as Heschel and Teilhard) and an approachable style. She ends each episode with a suggestion for action or a question for consideration. And, as noted above, she does it all in about the length of your average TV drama, if you DVR it and fast-forward through the commercials.

The Future Starts Here. What are you waiting for?

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He’s intrigued that a secular Jew like Tiffany Shlain and a leftist Christian like himself have such similar ideas about the philosophy of the digital revolution.

We Need A Different Game: ‘Tiger Lily Road’

From Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to contemporary men-are-from-Mars neurobabble, there has been a Western cultural tendency to view male-female relations in military terms, as a “battle of the sexes.” As a veteran of both teams, and even more so as a feminist who disputes gender essentialism, binarism, and cissexism, I find this framing deeply tiresome and hopelessly passé, and it’s hard to know what to with cultural products that revisit it.

“You can’t force him, Louise.”

“Why not? If it was you or me tied up in there, they wouldn’t hesitate. It’s why they join the army, so they can rape and pillage and–”

“He’s not in the army!”

“He’s in the army of men. And he’s a prisoner of war.”

From Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to contemporary men-are-from-Mars neurobabble, there has been a Western cultural tendency to view male-female relations in military terms, as a “battle of the sexes.” As a veteran of both teams, and even more so as a feminist who disputes gender essentialism, binarism, and cissexism, I find this framing deeply tiresome and hopelessly passé, and it’s hard to know what to with cultural products that revisit it.

If this is true, what am I? Benedict Arnold?

This is why I absolutely cannot make up my mind about Michael Medeiros’ film Tiger Lily Road, which is so oddly pitched that I can’t decide how to read it. Medeiros has averred that “Dark comedy can illuminate aspects of the soul usually left in shadow in lighter treatments,” but I’m not entirely sure what aspects of the soul are being illuminated here, unless they’re ones that are hugely more cynical about human nature and gender relations than I am.

The IMDb plot outline runs thus: “Two small-town women accidentally capture a handsome young fugitive.” Blonde, gentle veterinarian Annie and vampish brunette Louise are both middle-aged, single, and disillusioned with romance. When douchey young criminal Ricky stumbles into their lives, they find themselves acting in unprecedented ways.

Both within the film and in the director’s statements, the allusion to Thelma and Louise is made explicit. From Tiger Lily Road‘s Facebook page:

This film, which could not exist without Callie Khouri’s ground-breaking screenplay, Thelma and Louise, asks the question: where are we now? Are we still frozen in mid-air as in Ridley Scott’s boldly edited ending? Or have we crash-landed in some new and twisted territory…

Thelma and Louise is certainly still depressingly relevant some twenty-odd years later: rape survivors still get scrutinized, mainstream films that pass the Bechdel test are still vanishingly rare, men are still inundated with violent power fantasies and women are not. The awesome thing about Thelma and Louise is its portrayal of the titular women’s friendship – as Sophie Standing wrote last year, “nothing is more important than their loyalty to each other, and they are empowered by their freedom and refusal of male domination.” I’m not fully convinced that the women of Tiger Lily Road even like each other. Certainly there’s far more onscreen evidence of bonding between Annie and Ricky than between Annie and Louise.

Not that Annie and Ricky’s relationship is healthy (the Misery allusion might have tipped you off). If this film is meant to be an empowerment fantasy, it’s a creepy and depressing one where women’s relationships with men are cast as either the mother, with blonde Annie’s 50 Shades of Grey emotional fixer-upper thing (“He’s damaged!”), or the whore, with dark-haired Louise raping Ricky using the physical means of Viagra. If it’s a cautionary tale exploring the perils of a “battle of the sexes” worldview, it’s certainly stylishly made, particularly one standout sequence near the end, but it’s very strange tonally.

But then, maybe the point is to unsettle us. Pop culture is full of male empowerment fantasies that are objectively creepy and depressing, but we’re so inured that we don’t take them seriously. Maybe the reason this one discomfits me is because I’m just not used to it. Or maybe because I know the writer-director is a man, and I’m not certain that his portrayal of gender relations is a helpful one.

In the end, even though he’s a nasty piece of work who manipulates Annie’s trust and naivety with film quotes, Ricky perhaps makes the film’s best point. Annie shows him a picture of a co-ed soccer team from their childhood and laments growing up and separating along gender lines: “We couldn’t be on the same team anymore.” Ricky replies, “Maybe you just need a different game.”

Amen to that.

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

The Most Important Film of 2013: ‘After Tiller’

Though our adversaries might be impermeable to facts and logic, this thing isn’t unwinnable. We just have to use the right strategies to get through to people. If After Tiller can’t change the minds of anti-choice die-hards (and maybe it can! I haven’t asked any!), then it might at least be a mobilization tool for our side to recruit activists from among the undecided.

Written by Max Thornton.

One of the first classes of my master’s degree was called “Religion and Politics in the US,” and one of the assigned texts was Ziad W. Munson’s The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works. Rather to my surprise, I learned that anti-choice activism does not on the whole result from strong anti-choice convictions: in fact, movement involvement often precedes the formation of convictions. People come into contact with the movement at times of major life transition – through new friends at college, say – and begin their activism for primarily social reasons. Beliefs come later. This is not only a good poststructuralist account of subjectivity (holla at Foucault and my homegirl Judith Butler), but it’s also a useful lesson to those of us on the other side. Though our adversaries might be impermeable to facts and logic, this thing isn’t unwinnable. We just have to use the right strategies to get through to people. If After Tiller can’t change the minds of anti-choice die-hards (and maybe it can! I haven’t asked any!), then it might at least be a mobilization tool for our side to recruit activists from among the undecided.

I’m not kidding. I genuinely think After Tiller is the most important film that will be released this year.

Reproductive Justice League!

Directors Martha Shane and Lana Wilson portray the daily lives of four late-term abortion providers, LeRoy Carhart, Warren Hern, Susan Robinson, and Shelley Sella. They chose these doctors because they are the only providers of third-trimester abortions left in the United States. All four were friends and colleagues of Dr. Tiller, and all four clearly derive at least some of their professional motivation from the desire to pay appropriate tribute to the memory of his sacrifice. This is not a film about the anti-choice movement. As the directors state in their press notes:

We decided to represent the anti-abortion movement as it is experienced by the doctors themselves – as a constant presence in the background, whether standing outside their clinics in protest, or lurking in the air as a potential threat – but not as the main story.

This is a film about the individual human beings, the everyday heroes, who provide this essential service, and the daily workings of their clinics. It is their story, a project in which they chose to participate in order to be humanized in the eyes of those who would vilify them as “baby-killers.” I hope some anti-choice hardliners will see the film, because they surely couldn’t ignore the truth about these four doctors:

How good they are, providing a desperately needed service, and treating their patients with oceans of compassion.
How human they are, getting up daily and keeping at their work despite the dangers and psychological toll of the constant threat from anti-choice terrorists, and relying on the love and support of their families to keep them going.
How moral they are, clearly thinking about the issue deeply every day of their lives, and fully aware of the moral burden of being the last resort for pregnant people who don’t want to be pregnant. Even an unyielding anti-choicer would have to admit that these doctors are far from cheery baby-murderers. They all have backgrounds in midwifery or obstetrics. They like babies! They want babies to live and be loved and have wonderful lives! That’s why they provide this service, to spare the babies who wouldn’t live and be loved and have wonderful lives.
How feminist they are, living out their commitment to women’s rights, and trusting pregnant people’s personal moral reasoning. One doctor speaks very movingly of her absolute refusal to morally infantilize pregnant people, of her unwavering faith that anyone seeking a third-trimester abortion will have been through all the ethical legwork necessary to make such a heart-aching decision.

And make no mistake, this film is also the story of the patients. It’s gut-wrenching to hear the testimony of the parents-to-be whose desperately wanted baby is so ridden with fetal abnormalities as to be unviable; of the rape survivor who spent the early months of the pregnancy in traumatized denial; of the sixteen-year-old Catholic who doesn’t think she will ever forgive herself, but feels abortion is the least worst option for her at this time. All the patients have given this decision immense amounts of thought, and they all urgently need this service.

Worryingly, it’s not clear how much longer late-term abortions will be available in the US (and the filmmakers do not omit the fact that medical costs alone are far beyond the means of most people, let alone the price of traveling to either Albuquerque, Boulder, or Germantown, MD). None of these doctors are getting any younger, and there isn’t exactly a clamor to replace them. This is by far the most troubling aspect of the film. All of the doctors speak of formative experiences seeing the terrible impacts of criminalized abortion on both women (who suffer tremendously from DIY abortion attempts) and children (who, unwanted, are sometimes horrendously neglected and abused). Those of us who have only lived in a post-Roe world have not seen this firsthand; we don’t know that world and we don’t have that drive.

This film is a remarkable spur to much-needed action. I feel compelled to speak out to from my own context of mainline Christianity, which is too often evasively silent on the topic of reproductive justice. George Tiller, murdered on a Sunday as he served at his beloved Lutheran church, did not worship the forced-birther God of the anti-choicers, and neither do I.

Go Team Leftist Christians for reproductive justice!

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. In case you couldn’t tell, he’s strongly pro-choice.

The Ones We Forget: ‘Men At Lunch’

Written by Max Thornton.

“At the height of the Great Depression, eleven ironworkers sit side by side on a steel beam, eating lunch. Central Park stretches out behind them as they rest, boots dangling eight hundred feet over the sidewalk of Fiftieth Street. Just a bunch of regular guys. Just another working day.”

What makes a good photograph?

What is the essence of New York City?

What role do iconic images play in the public consciousness?

What stories can they tell?

These are some of the questions raised by Seán Ó Cualáin’s thoughtful documentary Men At Lunch, which investigates one of the most recognizable American photographs of the twentieth century. At an economical 67 minutes, the film is lean, but far from weightless: this single image is the center from which multiple lines of fascinating inquiry spiral outward. The movie explores each aspect of and in the photo – the metadata of the photograph’s origins, the context of 1930s New York City, the industry of skyscraper building, the economic and social situation of the time, the tragic contemporary resonances in a post-9/11 world, immigrant lives – but takes care to center the people at the heart of it, anonymous though they are.

The practicalities of the photo’s history are dispensed with fairly quickly. The probable identity of the photographer, the current whereabouts of the original negative, and the fact that it was a staged publicity still rather than a naturalistic shot are all mildly interesting, but it’s much more engaging to turn to the question of what the picture means to people in all walks of life.

Source

Ó Cualáin interviews historians who have investigated the photo, street vendors who sell prints of it to tourists, a sculptor who built a large model of it, present-day ironworkers who are inspired by it, and some of the far-flung individuals who are firmly convinced that among the eleven sit one or more of their own relatives. The kaleidoscope of meanings read into this one image could be seen as a microcosm of the United States as a whole, and indeed the world portrayed by the photo exemplifies the best and the worst faces of US society simultaneously.

Lunch atop a Skyscraper first appeared in the New York Herald Tribuneon October 2 1932, when unemployment was at an eye-watering 24%. Nor were the ironworkers, in paid employment far above the city streets, immune to the high cost of a capitalist society: apparently skyscraper developers of the time budgeted for one dead worker per ten floors of building. On the other hand, the picture is almost propaganda in its idealized portrayal of the American dream of the city as melting pot, the aspirational immigrants hard at work to build something lasting and to contribute something tangible to the diverse society of which they have voluntarily become a part.

If the film has a weakness, it would be its elision of the true complexities of the melting pot myth. An honest narrative of immigration to the United States really should make mention of this nation’s foundational genocide of native peoples, as well as the ongoing tensions of anti-immigrant prejudice and the marginalization of hybrid identities.

Am I a man, or am I a muppet?

Aside from this oversight, however, Ó Cualáin has put together a charming, thought-provoking film which finds remarkable depth and power in an over-familiar image, exploring wide-reaching ramifications but never losing sight of its titular men at lunch.

Most striking, perhaps, are the connections made by this photograph and the people it portrays. Contemporary workers see their own faces there. Others are absolutely convinced they see their relatives there, and clearly in some sense they do. The fact that these men are famous – iconic, reproduced, parodied the world over – and yet their identities are unknown exemplifies not only “the great American immigrant story” of a nation at once reverent and forgetful of its roots, but also their particular role as the architects of a skyline. As one interviewee puts it: “They put their lives and their bodies into the buildings, and how strange that they’re the ones we forget.”

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.He lives near New York now. It’s awesome.

A (Bad) Teacher

Written by Max Thornton.

Movie poster for A Teacher

People sure like to make movies about teacher-student relationships. It’s always incredibly skeevy, of course, to watch someone in a position of authority abuse their power, but cinematic representations are rarely as nakedly awful as the reality.

A Teacher consciously downplays the really appalling aspects of intergenerational classroom romance without ever intimating that it’s anything other than a very bad idea. As suggested by the title, the film focuses entirely on young English teacher Diana Watts (played by Lindsay Burdge), for whom the relationship is at least as destructive as it is for Eric, the pupil (who is, if it makes a difference, a high-school senior and significantly bigger physically than she is).

The total focus on Diana is signaled from the opening classroom scene, where the camera stays fixed on her, regardless of who is speaking. This directorial choice recurs throughout the film, and it serves to highlight her naïve solipsism. It’s tricky to maintain audience empathy for a viewpoint character while also drawing attention to her self-centered immaturity, so props to director Hannah Fidell for finding a deft way to put us inside Diana’s head (hearing other characters’ dialogue from her perspective) while still maintaining an outsider’s gaze (looking at her face).

Lindsay Burdge as Diana.

Overall, both style and acting contribute to an odd sense that Diana is not the one doing the victimizing in this circumstance. Factor out her job, and this movie would just be the story of dumb puppy love, a young woman so hopelessly smitten with the very idea of romance that she’s heedless of the realities of the situation. But, of course, her job is the point – the movie’s called A Teacher – and the experience, knowledge, and wisdom implied by that position are dramatically at odds with her incredibly adolescent attitude toward the whole relationship.

Early in the film, while hooking up with Eric in his car, Diana reminisces about similar trysts from her own high-school days. It’s a tellingly sad and uncomfortable little moment that kicks off a spiral of nonstop sadness and discomfort: Watching a grown-ass woman sext and Facebook-stalk a teenage boy is both tragic and kind of disturbing. There’s something Carey Mulligan-esque about Burdge’s face when she’s in bed with Eric, evoking (as does the title) another film in which the questionable sexual relationship is the other way around, age- and power-wise.

Perhaps the echo is deliberate. Diana never seems to have any power in this relationship, never acts like the teacher or the one giving the education. Even in the bedroom, Eric calls the shots (“Take your clothes off.” “Come here.”), and, while driving his car, he describes feeling as though his penis is getting bigger, coming into its own, “powering up.” For him, sex with an attractive young teacher is a power fantasy come true. The lovelorn look of the infatuated is notably absent from his face throughout the film, even as Diana is distracted from grading papers by soft-focus fantasies of him.

Oh girl.

Diana doesn’t have to be alone in these delusions of romance. The hand of friendship is consistently extended by her coworker and her roommate – both of whom are women, the latter of whom is even named Sophia– but she ignores this potential salvation in order to continue down the self-destructive path of reliving her high-school sexuality and daydreaming of underage man-meat.

That’s not really an unfair assessment of Eric, who is little more than a cipher. He’s just there to be strong and silent and sexy, a backdrop for Diana’s nostalgic projections, whose actual personality she never seems to take into account. Almost everything he says to her is to do with sex. By contrast, Sophia tells Diana she cares about her. In a heartbreaking pre-Thanksgiving scene, Sophia monologues anxiously about the upcoming holiday with her family, and Diana completely ignores her in order to text topless selfies to her teenage boyfriend.

Ultimately, the film’s lesson is of the value of companionship and empathy, and the danger of total self-absorption. Someone who only chases empty nostalgia for her former self (check her name, Diana, and in case you didn’t get it her brother’s called Hunter), and never bothers with the richness of female friendship that is right there in her life, is not going to end happily. A shallow focus on finding hunkitude in all the wrong places, instead of paying attention to your friends, is not the pathway to a fulfilling life.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He can never format this bio line correctly.

‘The Quiet Girl’s Guide to Violence’: The Manic Pixie’s Perspective

Written by MaxThornton.

“I have made a resolution. … People should not be allowed to get away with things.”

The Quiet Girls’ Guide to Violence poster

Actually creating matter by naming it might be the prerogative of the gods, but there’s a certain generative power in naming even the most mundane things. When something is named, it gets a categorization, a way for us to conceptualize and talk about it as we couldn’t before.

This happened memorably in early 2007, when then-A.V. Club reviewer Nathan Rabin coined the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” for a pop-culture phenomenon we didn’t know we needed a name for. Since, then the MPDG has been discussed extensively (not least on this very site), parodied extensively, and – as Amanda noted a couple of weeks ago – pronounced dead. All of this discourse proves, if nothing else, that (1) the MPDG is definitely a trope, and (2) we sure do like to talk about her, even though she irritates the heck out of us.

If the protagonist of Rafael Antonio Ruiz’s short film The Quiet Girl’s Guide to Violence can be considered a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, then she’s certainly my favorite example of the trope.

Holly (Jennymarie Jemison) wears a hideous Christmas turtleneck, a cardigan, a bow-shaped barrette, and thick-rimmed glasses. She’s a librarian and a barista, two quintessentially MPDG occupations. She speaks without using contractions and expresses an awkward naivety in her interactions. In a different movie, she would be a perfect storm of quirk, but both the superb acting and the stylish direction make it quite clear from the get-go that we should not expect cloying indie-pop adorkableness.

Jemison plays Holly with a chilly, staring intensity whereby every frame of her face can be frozen to show only a soulful, sorrowful thoughtfulness, but in motion her seething desperation is palpable. Holly’s flashbacks to an incident of harassment are heralded by a rhythmic pounding noise, signaling that her titular quietness is certainly only surface-deep.

Jennymarie Jemison as Holly.

The plot follows Holly’s revenge on two men who were responsible for a deeply scarring incident of harassment in her youth. Chance encounters with the men at her two places of employment spur flashbacks to the boys’ misogyny and sexual harassment, compelling her to take violent action.

Arguably, the film functions as a powerful feminist response to the MPDG trope. It is, of course, characteristic of the MPDG that she have neither agency nor personality of her own, existing solely as a corollary to the male main character. Holly upends that completely: She is a woman whose quiet, unthreatening quirkiness has been molded by misogynistic male dominance of her world, but she explodes that dominance and the identity it is has forced upon her. In a nifty stylistic touch, Holly’s glasses have lenses only in the scenes where she perpetrates violence. She can only see clearly when meting out her brand of vigilante justice; in the daily grind of her life, she is trapped in a role as false as any hipster’s empty frames. “I am seeing the world again, for the first time in a long time,” she declares to her coworker, a performance artist heavily influenced by Karen Finley.

In fact, this same coworker offers a rather blistering commentary on MPDG/boy relations: “No, I don’t think he likes you. I think he has a morbid fascination with you because he’s a fucking idiot.” It’s harsh, and motivated by her jealousy of the guy’s interest in Holly, but it’s not an unfair assessment of the usual trajectory of such films (heck, Joseph Gordon-Levitt said as much about his character in 500 Days of Summer). Holly herself seems to realize this, stepping back from harming the other woman too much. In a patriarchal society, other women are not the enemy.

Holly with a bat

My sympathizing with Holly is not a matter of condoning her violence, but of understanding its roots. A frightened Jeff can hardly believe that Holly is still so profoundly affected by one incident from years before, but he is overlooking the context. What seems to him an isolated instance of an awkward kid lashing out at a girl because he doesn’t know how to tell her he likes her is, to anyone with experience of being read as female in our society, the beginning of a lifetime of harassment and threats and abuse, a collective welter of misogyny that tries to force women to exist only in relation to male subjectivity. Beating men’s heads in is probably not a helpful real-world response, but it’s a cathartic fiction, and it is certainly not an unfathomable reaction to the pressures of being a woman in a sexist world.

The Quiet Girl’s Guide to Violence presents female rage with a nuance and sympathy rarely if ever seen in mainstream media. Holly’s actions are unsettling precisely because they are so understandable. It’s a brutal lesson, but one we men really need to learn: Women – even cute quirky MPDG-type women – do not exist for us.

The Quiet Girl’s Guide to Violence premieres online tomorrow at Fangoria.com as part of their “Screamers” program. More info at http://www.quietgirlsguide.com/.

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

Summer Movie Preview

Written by Max Thornton.

Time’s relentless onward march has brought us to the end of April. In just a few days it will be the first weekend in May, which is – in the strange, terrifying minds of Hollywood executives – the first weekend of summer.

Summer movies are an odd and frustrating bunch. I have taken a cursory glance at some of 2013’s biggest, emptiest spectacles and pre-judged them with extreme censure, so you don’t have to.

Iron Man 3 (May 3)

The deal: The first Iron Man was a pleasing diversion for a world with low expectations of a second-tier-superhero film. The second Iron Man was much like the first, but bigger, louder, and overlong. If other superhero trilogies are anything to go by, the third Iron Man will be even bigger, even louder, and – 130 minutes, are you freakin’ kidding me? Why does no one heed Hitchcockian wisdom re: film lengths and bladders?

Likelihood of passing the Bechdel test: 25%. Rebecca Hall has third billing after Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow, but I’ve seen a superhero movie before, and I don’t really expect anyone to talk about anything other than Iron Man.

Likelihood of general intersection!fail: The inestimable Andrew Ti of Yo, Is This Racist? says 100%. Who am I to dissent?

Will I see it?: Eventually, probably on DVD. I don’t care very much about Iron Man, but I am a little stoked to learn it’s directed by Shane Black, writer-director of my beloved Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

The Great Gatsby (May 10)

The deal: You went to high school. You don’t need me to tell you what The Great Gatsby is about. (But, if you need a refresher, it’s boring and the plot is basically the same as R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet.)

Likelihood of passing the Bechdel test: Like no percent, unless they change stuff from the book I guess.

Likelihood of general intersection!fail: 100%. It’s about straight white rich people, like fully all of big Hollywood movies.

Will I see it?: No. I don’t like Gatsby and I don’t like Baz Luhrmann. If you have a different opinion on either or both of these things, you will feel differently.

Star Trek Into Darkness (May 17)

The deal: Much like the first Iron Man, the 2009 Star Trek reboot was a slight popcorn delight for those of us with low expectations; much like Iron Man 2, this latest Trek will probably sink under the weight of current heightened expectations. If nothing else, it’ll be jolly to once again witness Karl Urban channel DeForest Kelley (and cringe at Simon Pegg’s Scottish accent, oy).

Likelihood of passing the Bechdel test: 25% if I’m generous. There are fully two lady-type humans in this movie, and as much as I’d like the writers to overcome the failures of the original series, that’s a lot of failure to overcome.

Likelihood of general intersection!fail: High. See above re: failures of TOS.

Will I see it?: I don’t see how I can possibly avoid it.

Spaceship! *starts salivating*

The Hangover Part III (May 24)

The deal: No.

Likelihood of passing the Bechdel test: 0%.

Likelihood of general intersection!fail: 1000%.

Will I see it?: Oh fuck no.

Man of Steel (June 14)

The deal: Superman is boring and zzzzzzzzz.

Likelihood of passing the Bechdel test: Low.

Likelihood of general intersection!fail: High.

Will I see it?: Yawn.

World War Z (June 21)

The deal: World War Z is probably the greatest zombie novel ever written and you should go out and read it, like, yesterday. I am so over how enormously boring this film adaptation looks, and I mourn for the TV miniseries that was once talked about and would have been a much better way of adapting the sprawling complexities of the book.

Likelihood of passing the Bechdel test: 10%. If Brad Pitt is the core linking the story together, I can’t see much happening without him. Also, I’m very afraid that this movie will do the horrible Walking Dead/ Stephen King / every apocalypse story ever thing of taking the apocalypse as an excuse to revert all of humanity to gross reductive caveman gender roles.

Likelihood of general intersection!fail: 90%. A summer Hollywood blockbuster in which a white dude travels all around the world trying to save it? Racism, xenophobia, and neocolonialist paternalism pretty much guaranteed.

Will I see it?: I expect so, and I expect I’ll hate it.

Seriously, read the book.

Monsters University (June 21)

The deal: While I hear the argument that Pixar needs to take a step back from the sequel-ing and prequel-ing, they had me as soon as this website rocked up months and months ago. And tell me that any TV enthusiast could look at the list of voice talent involved without squeeing: Nathan Fillion! Aubrey Plaza! John Krasinski! Charlie Day! Dave Foley! And that’s just the people who are on TV shows I like!

Likelihood of passing the Bechdel test: 5%. Pixar is awesome at so many things, but representing the non-male demographic is not one of them. I will continue to dream of a scene in which Aubrey Plaza’s character and Helen Mirren’s character hang out and shoot the shit, but I don’t hold out hope.

Likelihood of general intersection!fail: I mean, it’s a movie about monsters? I don’t know to what extent I can really hold it accountable for, say, race!fail.

Will I see it?: HELL YES.

Pacific Rim (July 12)

The deal: I may have mentioned this before, but I am losing my mind over how impossibly amazeballs this movie looks. ROBOTS VS. ALIENS. GUILLERMO DEL TORO. IDRIS ELBA. My fingertips are tingling just typing about it.

Likelihood of passing the Bechdel test: 5%. Women are not so much with the being in this movie.

Likelihood of general intersection!fail: 70%. Rinko Kikuchi is in this movie, and if God loves me she will share scenes with Idris Elba and my eyeballs will burst into flames from so much hotness onscreen at once; but I know better than to expect, say, queers or PwD to be represented meaningfully in mainstream SF.

Will I see it?: HELL EVEN YES-ER.

Hee hee

This summer in sum: Not every forthcoming blockbuster looks to be entirely egregious in every respect – some of them I might even enjoy quite a bit – but women are conspicuously, depressingly, appallingly underrepresented in the big popcorn flicks. As usual, Hollywood utterly fails to notice or care that women comprise half the human race, and we’ll have to look to smaller and independent cinema for acknowledgment of that basic, yet still somehow controversial, fact.

———-

Max Thornton blogs at GayChristian Geek, tumbles as transsubstantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Where Is My Girl Ash?: On "Evil Dead" 2013

Written by MaxThornton.

Warning: spoilers are invoked herein, and they’ll swallow your soul!

I try not to look forward to things; I’ve been hurt too many timesbefore. But I couldn’t help feeling just alittle excitement for the Evil Deadremake, tempered though it was with trepidation.

Almost certainly not true, if you’re the kind of person who wants to see an Evil Dead remake.

The movie turned out to be a lot of fun: not mindbending by any means, but certainly a good time for a gorehound on a Saturday night. (And be sure to stay right through the end credits!) Its attitude toward gender, though, is an oddity I am still trying to process.

We had been told that Jane Levy as Mia was the Girl Ash. This is, of course, a genderflip of a genderflip (Ash in the original Evil Dead having been a male Final Girl) – or rather, it would have been if we’d gotten it. The equating of Mia with Ash seems to have been based entirely on the climactic sequence, the use of a certain implement, and a rather magnificent reiteration of Evil Dead II‘s “I’ll swallowyour soul!”/”Swallow this” exchange. Apart from this, though, the story is really far more centered on Mia’s not-terribly-interesting brother David (played by Shiloh Fernandez). Mia might be the focus of the plot, such as it is, and she might be the Final Girl, but – unlike Ash – she spends most of the movie possessed by the titular malevolence.

In fact, the whole possession business is handled in a bizarrely and really problematically gendered way. For one thing, the word “bitch” is employed a HELL of a lot. Both male and female characters refer to the possessed as being a “bitch” or “Satan’s bitch.” This version of the Book of the Dead is peppered with color commentary describing what the possessed will do and how to defeat them, and it consistently describes them as “bitches.” I mean, I realize that as a queer feminist among queer feminists I am not living in mainstream society, and I realize that I am writing this for a website with “bitch” in the title, but I honestly haven’t heard that word used with such wild abandon since this.

And the reason it matters is that, for almost the entire movie, it is female characters and only female characters who get possessed. There’s even a scene that cuts between the female characters being possessed and the male characters discussing plans of action. I don’t understand why the filmmakers thought it necessary to treat possession by the Evil Dead in this way, and it’s a decision that came close to ruining the entire experience for me.

This guy? 100% as douchey as he looks.

I do think that a lot of the differences between the original and the remake simply reflect the changes in horror conventions over the past 30 years: the pretty unnecessary pre-credits flashback sequence; the recovering-junkie plotline, which gives the characters an actual reason both to stay in the woods and to disbelieve an increasingly freaked-out Mia; the general fleshing out of characterization and backstory (which makes it all the more noticeable that one of the five characters has almost none); the post-Cronenbergian relish with which the movie utilizes bodily fluids, wallowing in spit and vomit and piss as well as more traditional gore; the hardcore blood and grossness – including one instance of an RN misusing a hypo in a way that makes this trans guy very nervous about his next testosterone shot – which makes it seem even more adorably quaint that the original was once a “VideoNasty” in the UK; and the much more visual nature of the horror overall. Obviously this is partly a budget thing, but in the original, the Evil is never actually seen when it’s not possessing someone – it’s simply evoked through POV shots using sound effects and Shakicam. Whereas in this one there is an inexplicable Evil Mia lurking in the woods, because, thanks to the influence of J- and K-horror, you gotta have your pale creepy dark-haired possibly-dead girl.

It’s perhaps more interesting, though, to compare the character relationships and the reallocation of memorable scenes between the original and the remake. I very much enjoyed the replacement of Ash and Linda’s romantic relationship with David and Mia’s siblinghood, because I generally find it more interesting to see people interact in ways other than romantically. When David gives Mia a necklace very similar to the one Ash gives Linda in the original, it’s a direct signal to fans that this is going to be the primary relationship in the movie.

I very much did not enjoy the tree-rape. First of all, it’s kept in (which, fuck); second of all, it’s made even more visceral and gruesome and drawn-out (which, double-fuck); third of all, it happens to Mia, the supposed focus and alleged Girl Ash. Thought experiment: try to imagine a world containing a version of Evil Dead in which a male Ash got raped by a tree. I’m guessing it’s not our world.

I’m so sorry about the tree-rape. I hope this puppy makes you feel better.

I was also deeply disappointed by the possessed-handsequence. As I wrote back in October:

I want to see a female Ash. I want to see a woman in a movie who is as goofy and prone to slapstick as Bruce Campbell in the original Evil Dead films. I want to see a woman in a movie who follows Ash’s character arc, from cowardly dweeb to loudmouthed braggart with a chainsaw for an arm.

Spoiler: I did not get this. I am still waiting for this. Filmmakers, if you’re out there and you care at all about the narrow slice of audience that loves really gory horror movies and also feminism, please make this movie. Evil Dead 2013 is a pretty decent horror film, but it leaves an awful lot to be desired on the feminism front.

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Max Thornton blogs at GayChristian Geek, tumbles as transsubstantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

It’s Our 5-Year Blogiversary!

BF co-founders Steph and Amber at the 2010 Athena Film Festival

We can’t believe it, but today marks five years since we started Bitch Flicks.

In March 2008, we started a blog with the wink-and-a-nudge name, Bitch Flicks. In that first year, we wrote a whopping seventeen posts, eight of which were actual film reviews.

In 2012 we published 557 posts–and “we” consisted of a dozen people, not to mention numerous guest writers.

We want to thank our Editor and Staff Writer Megan Kearns.

We want to thank our staff writers: Erin Fenner, Robin Hitchcock, Leigh Kolb, Carrie Nelson, Rachel Redfern, Amanda Rodriguez, Lady T, Max Thornton, and Myrna Waldron.

We want to thank everyone who has ever contributed to Bitch Flicks, whether by writing a post, designing a logo, donating, commenting, or sharing a piece you read with someone else.

Everyone mentioned here has been a part of what has made this project continue.

Finally, we want to thank every one of you reading this–and we hope you’ll stay with us in years to come.

–Steph and Amber

The League of Gentlemen: Drag and Transmisogyny in British Comedy

Written by Max Thornton.

Do you remember Work It? If you’ve spent the last year and a bit trying to scrub all memory of it from your brain, I don’t blame you and I’m sorry for reminding you of those ten excruciating days in January 2012 when ABC was airing a sitcom “about” (to quote its Wikipedia entry) “two men who must dress as women in order to keep a job in a bad economy.”

ABC president Paul Lee justified this terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad show by saying: “I’m a Brit, it is in my contract that I have to do one cross-dressing show a year; I was brought up on Monty Python. What can I do?” His epic wrongosity on many levels notwithstanding, the man is right about one thing, and that is Britain’s bizarre, confusing obsession with drag. I am never quite sure if the cross-dressing that permeates British culture, from Python to Christmas panto, is a Rocky Horror-style celebration of diversity and queerness, or the basest form of “LOLOLOL A MAN IN A DRESS!!” transphobic humor. TV show The League of Gentlemen exactly straddles this line.

This is a local shop for local people. There’s nothing for you here.

The League of Gentlemen aired three short seasons and a Christmas special on the BBC between 1999 and 2002. I first encountered the show in late-night reruns and the 2005 feature film, which between them fueled an obsession strong enough for me to keep the theme music as my ringtone for a couple of years. It’s been a while, though, since I gave this show any thought (other than appreciating the creators’ nightmare-inducing follow-up project, Psychoville) – until last week, when I stumbled upon the happy knowledge that BBC Worldwide has made all of season one available on YouTube. LoG, though an influential powerhouse of modern comedy back in Blighty,is unfairly little-known outside of its country of origin, and I’ve had no luck hunting down seasons two or three (curse you, DVD box set that I for some reason left at my parents’ house!). However, the three hours that constitute season one provide quite enough fodder for reflection on their own.

The show centers on the strange, sinister, often very sad inhabitants of fictional Middle England town Royston Vasey. The unifying master plot of season one is the “New Road,” a highway being built to connect Royston Vasey with the wider world, and the range of responses from the locals; but really the focus is on the locals themselves, with their bizarre quirks and quiet desperation.

Nearly every character in Royston Vasey is played by the three performing members of the League (a fourth, Jeremy Dyson, stays off-camera): Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss, and Reece Shearsmith. Each adopts an impressive variety of personae, from creepy butcher to embittered vicar to obnoxious teen horror buffs to the iconic shopkeepers Tubbs and Edward. Almost all of the characters are grotesque (except for one or two of those played by Shearsmith, aka the good-looking one) – it’s not something that’s confined to the female characters for nasty transmisogynistic laughs, and frankly Shearsmith makes almost as attractive a woman as he does a man.

Reece Shearsmith: yep and also yep.

In a fascinating decision for a show whose entire female cast is played by men, one of the characters is a trans woman. Going into my rewatch, I was concerned about the handling of Royston Vasey’s local taxi driver Barbara (voiced by Pemberton): in 2013, the mainstream British media is still rifewith transmisogyny, and how much worse would it have been in a sitcom in 1999?

And at first it does seem like the only joke is going to be “HAHA A TRANS WOMAN, ISN’T THAT HILARIOUS??!!!” In Barbara’s first appearance, we see her cab’s exterior and hear a gruff voice speak. In the course of chatting with her passenger, she casually reveals that she buys dresses (laugh track!) and that she takes hormones and they have intimate effects (laugh track!). These early jokes are pretty grossly offensive: the camera pans over Barbara’s high heels, jewelry, and extremely hairy chest (for fuck’s sake), and we don’t even catch a glimpse of her face until the final episode of the season. Meanwhile Barbara cheerfully overshares details of her forthcoming bottom surgery to whoever happens to be in the cab. The cumulative effect is dehumanizing, othering, and pathologizing, reinforcing both the laziest transmisogynistic humor – she has a deep voice and a hairy chest (because trans women always just hang onto unwanted secondary sex characteristics), but she also wears dresses and heels! Hahahahahaha! – and the transphobic notion that trans people are somehow obscene, through being particularly inappropriate and overly obsessed with surgery and genitalia.

Lots of shots like this, but heaven forfend we see her face. We might think she was an actual human being.

But. If half the characters on your show are actually men in dresses, and if you’re making them funny by actually writing jokes for them, the hypocrisy and comedic paucity of relying on ugly “man in a dress” mockery of your trans character quickly become apparent. Although the transmisogyny never fully leaves (I suppose each week you want to catch new viewers up on the HIGH-larious conceit of a trans woman existing), the jokes definitely take on a kinder spirit as the season goes on. Witness this exchange, when Barbara tells snooty Mrs. Levinson about the “beast of Royston Vasey”:

Barbara: “They dug something up working on the new road.”

Mrs. Levinson: “Oh, Barbara, stop it. You’re giving me the willies!”

Barbara: “Well, you’re very welcome to mine – it’s coming off in a fortnight anyway.”

That’s a genuinely funny, non-hateful trans joke. What a shame the League didn’t write more like that.

On the upside, as much as Barbara’s propensity to graphic oversharing is played for transphobic laughs at her expense, the residents of Royston Vasey never seem that fazed by it. They are shown to be thoroughly accepting of Barbara, much more so than you might expect from a Middle England village on TV in 1999. When petty-minded Geoff, having been the butt of a homophobic joke he didn’t quite get, asks Barbara for clarification, he sighs, “I don’t know why I’m asking you – you’re a woman.” (Of course, that little moment of acceptance is promptly ruined by Barbara’s reply, “Not quite, Geoff. They’ve got to open me up first, along the base of the scrotum…”)

And the inevitable scene of awkward sexual encounter between Barbara and out-of-towner Ben is written with surprisingly little transphobia. I mean, it still relies on some pretty disgusting tropes of trans women’s supposed excessive sexual aggression and obsession with genital configuration, but Ben’s dialogue in the scene is remarkably free of trans panic. In fact, every line he speaks could be recontextualized without change to a scene with a cis woman to whom he wasn’t attracted.

These are minuscule successes, but then I have very, very low expectations for mainstream media depictions of trans women – especially in a comedy, especially in the last century (the last 14 years constitute a long time in the advance of trans rights). The thing is, The League of Gentlemen is at its core not a hateful show (unlike certain of its imitators). There’s a sketch portraying the relationship between a pampered rich woman and her maid, which skewers British class relations at the expense of the privileged. There’s a character whose specialty is finding people with disabilities and talking well-meaning but appallingly ignorant drivel at them until he’s dug himself deep into a chasm of offensiveness. There’s an acting troupe whose educational play on acceptance of gay people is a masterclass in cluelessly paternalistic fauxgressive claptrap. In general, LoG excels at zeroing in on Middle England’s most small-minded, unexamined fear and hatred of difference, particularly when it’s coated with a misguided and sanctimonious belief in one’s own tolerance. The case of Barbara is striking because it’s a rare failure to ridicule the right target.

But I sill love the show, and you should still watch it.

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