Tag: Max Thornton

Foreign Film Week: Growing Up Queer: ‘Water Lilies’ (2007) and ‘Tomboy’ (2011)

Written by Max Thornton, this review previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on June 26, 2012.
Céline Sciamma’s films are ever so French. Light on dialogue, they tend to rely on lingering shots of longing glances and exquisite mise-en-scène to reveal character; loosely plotted, they leave the impression less of a story than of a series of vignettes, of tiny moments freighted with great import.

These techniques are uniquely suited to the onscreen portrayal of adolescence. It almost seems churlish to complain that Water Lilies and Tomboy lack full structural coherence, because that’s arguably intentional. Growing up, after all, is not a tightly-plotted three-act hero’s journey with clear turning points, tidy linear progression through the successive stages of personal development, and a satisfying ending. It’s a messy and confusing struggle to find a place in the world, littered with incidents that may or may not ultimately be significant (with no way to tell the difference), and most of the time the morals make no sense.

Sciamma instinctively understands this, and the little stories she tells of growing up queer are given vivid life through her two greatest strengths as a filmmaker: her ability to coax marvelously deep and naturalistic performances out of her young actors, and her eye for a strikingly memorable little scene that perfectly encapsulates a moment of overpowering adolescent emotion – the normally boisterous Anne clutching at a lamppost and weeping in Water Lilies, for example, or Tomboy‘s Laure curling up on the couch, thumb in mouth, suddenly overwhelmed by an earlier humiliation.

Both films are carried on the remarkably expressive faces of their lead actresses. There are no voice-over monologues or expository conversations, but both Water Lilies and Tomboy present the inner life of their protagonists with stunning depth and rawness.

Movie poster for Water Lilies
The protagonist of Water Lilies is Pauline Acquart’s Marie, a quiet fifteen-year-old with a crush on Floriane, star of the local synchronized swimming team. Marie’s best friend Anne, meanwhile, has her eye on Floriane’s boyfriend François. So far, so Gossip Girl, but there is nothing over-dramatic or sensationalistic about the way this love quadrilateral plays out. Although the film’s primary focus is on the blossoming friendship between Marie and Floriane, there is a clear thematic through-line of what it is to grow up female in the patriarchy. Marie, Anne, and Floriane all embody different ways of being young women, and especially young women coming into their sexuality.

Anne, though less conventionally feminine than the other girls, is confidently heterosexual and determined to sleep with the boy she finds attractive. Marie is so eager to spend time with Floriane that she agrees to help her sneak out to meet François, and her yearnings for the lithe bodies slipping through the water are beautifully conveyed through moments such as the shot of Marie shifting, flustered, as Floriane unselfconsciously changes into a swimsuit right in front of her. Floriane herself, despite the reputation she cultivates (perhaps recognizing that denial would be futile – once branded a “slut,” a teenage girl is hopelessly trapped in a no-win morass of contradictory social pressures), eventually confesses to Marie that she has never actually had sex, and in fact is afraid to do so.

“If you don’t want to do it, don’t.”

“I have to.”

“Where did you read that?”

“All over my face, apparently. If he finds out I’m not a real slut, it’s over.”

Floriane recounts several instances of sexual harassment from men; when Marie has no similar stories to share, Floriane tells her, “You’re lucky… very lucky.” And perhaps to some extent she is. Perhaps, as Anne and Marie float fully-clothed in the pool at the end of the movie, while Floriane dances alone for the boys she’s not certain she even wants to be with, they are considering their good fortune: they, at least, are strong enough to defy the patriarchal dictates around female sexual behavior, to name and claim their desires (or lack thereof), to make mistakes and learn from them without being defined by them. Growing up female in this world is hard, but they know they will make it.
Movie poster Tomboy
Tomboy tells a very different story of growing up queer. Zoé Héran turns in a truly remarkable performance as androgynous ten-year-old Laure, who, on moving to a new neighborhood, is asked by the friendly Lisa, “T’es nouveau?” – “Are you new?” – in a way that genders Laure male. In that moment, Laure becomes Mikael, a boy who spends a happy summer among his new friends and his puppy-love girlfriend Lisa. For the duration of the summer, Laure is confined to home and family (well-meaning dad, heavily pregnant mom, hyper-femme little sister Jeanne), and Mikael is the face presented to the world.

Any ten-year-old lives in the present, and Mikael meets each challenge as it arises – sneaking away deep into the woods when the other boys casually take a pee break; snipping a girl’s swimsuit into a boy’s, and constructing a Play-Doh packer to fill it; swearing Jeanne to secrecy when Lisa unwittingly tells her about Mikael – even as it becomes increasingly clear to the viewer that eventually Laure’s parents must find out about Mikael. As loving as they are, they still exert some gender-policing of their oldest child: Mom’s delight at hearing that Laure has made a female friend (“You’re always hanging out with the boys”) might have been tempered if she’d remembered that “copine” can also mean girlfriend!

The relationships between the various children are superbly observed, and constitute reason enough to see Tomboy in themselves. The energetic activities of childish horseplay that give Mikael such joy in himself and in his body – dancing enthusiastically with Lisa, playing soccer shirtless, wrestling in swimsuits on the dock – are balanced by the many lovely domestic scenes demonstrating the closeness of Laure’s relationship with Jeanne. This is honestly one of the most moving and genuine cinematic portrayals of a sibling relationship in years, and after her initial shock Jeanne takes to the idea of Mikael like a duck to water, boasting to another child about her awesome big brother, and telling her parents that her favorite of Laure’s new friends is Mikael.

The parents themselves, unfortunately, are much less accepting of Mikael. The film’s ending is ambiguous, allowing for multiple readings of the exact nature of Laure’s queerness; indeed, the film has been criticized as “an appropriation of trans narratives by a cis filmmaker toward her own purposes”; but to me the ending is terribly unhappy. With deep breaths and with profound conflict on Héran’s preternaturally expressive face, the character is forced to claim “Laure,” the name and gender assigned at birth and not the ones of choice. The cissupremacy has won this round.

Though Tomboy is the better film, the two movies make excellent companion pieces. Between them they depict a range of queerness and explore a variety of strategies for growing up queer (and/or female) in a hostile world. And yet they offer no easy solutions, no cheap moralizing, no promise that it gets better. These films, and the characters they portray, simply are. And, in the end, isn’t that the one universal truth of queer people? There is no ur-narrative of queerness. There is no right or wrong way to be queer. We simply are.

———-
Max Thornton is a Bitch Flicks writer, blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Foreign Film Week: Red, Blue, and Giallo: Dario Argento’s "Suspiria"

Written by Max Thornton.
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.
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.
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.

Women of Color in Film and TV: Shirley, Donna, and Lana: African-American Women in Thursday Night Sitcoms

Written by Max Thornton.
Thursday night is the best TV night for comedy fans. Even now that 30 Rock has departed this mortal coil (goodnight, sweet show; may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest), there is still a lot to enjoy about Thursday nights. For me, it’s the trifecta of Community, Parks and Recreation, and Archer.
(Remember 2009, the year all three of those shows debuted? Ugh, what happened to you, TV – you used to be awesome.)
I love Community, Parks and Recreation, and Archer. They are my three favorite shows on the air at the moment. Coincidentally, each of them has an African-American woman among the main ensemble, and it makes for an illuminating comparison to look at the respective treatment of Shirley Bennett, Donna Meagle, and Lana Kane.
Community: Shirley Bennett (Yvette Nicole Brown)
Not gonna lie, I adore that pun.
The central conceit of Community is that seven unlikely friends are drawn together as a study group at a community college. The intent to explore diversity is built into the concept. Unfortunately, the actualization is not always as laudable as the ambition.
Shirley has tended to get short shrift in terms of character development. A lot of the time it kind of feels as though the writers don’t quite know what to do with her. It’s not necessarily because she’s one of the older characters – they never seem to run out of things for Chevy Chase to do as crusty old white dude Pierce. It’s not necessarily because she’s a woman of color – Troy and Abed are the show’s most beloved characters, and neither of them is white. I think it’s an intersectional thing. Shirley is an African-American woman, a committed Christian, and a middle-aged mom, and possibly none of these are things a writers’ room for a hip young pop-culture-savvy show is entirely comfortable with.
There has been some recognition on the show’s part that Shirley was a little underdeveloped in the early episodes, and seasons two and three made a conscious effort to give her more depth. We learned that she has a history of alcoholism, that she kicks ass at foosball, that her Miss Piggy voice is actually her bedroom voice. She had a very ill-advised hookup and a paternity scare while getting back together with ex-husband Malcolm-Jamal Warner. She has toned down the evangelical fervor of her faith to accommodate the diverse religious traditions (or lack thereof) among her friends.
Shirley is still often the show’s most problematic character and the one that is left most adrift in its various plots. At this stage, though, she is well-rounded enough that she actually feels like a real character. It just took a little longer than it did for everyone else on the show.
Parks and Recreation: Donna Meagle (Retta)
My main complaint about Donna is that she is too often in the background. She was technically only a recurring character in the first two seasons of Parks and Rec, only getting promoted to a regular in the third season.
Donna rarely if ever has storylines focused on her, which is a shame because she’s kind of awesome. She’s one of Pawnee’s most competent employees, tending to just get things done when the rest of the Parks Department is goofing around, but she also has a healthy sex life (both partnered and solo: in one episode she was shown casually reading Fifty Shades of Grey at work), a friendship with Aziz Ansari’s character Tom, and a brilliant made-up holiday called Treat Yo Self.
Although Donna is more of a background player than Shirley, she feels fully developed on much less screentime. It certainly helps that Retta is not the only woman of color in the Parks and Rec cast: Rashida Jones and Aubrey Plaza are both perfecton the show, and if any character is a little undercooked it’s Jones’s Ann Perkins (and her ennui is finally being addressed in-text).
Ann and April: NOT friends.
One question I do have for the Parks and Rec writers, though: With such a fantastic, positive, nuanced portrayal of a larger woman on your show, why do you keep making so many fat jokes about the citizens of Pawnee?
Archer: Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler)
Archer is a show of an entirely different tenor than the NBC sitcoms. An animated dark comedy on FX, it’s considerably less popular and considerably edgier than either Community or Parks. As always, edginess in comedy is a double-edged sword. When it works, it’s absolutely brilliant (and perfectly attuned to my personal sense of humor); when it doesn’t, it’s just painful.
For the most part, Archer walks the line very well. If you’re unfamiliar with the conceit, creator Adam Reed’s description “James Bond meets Arrested Development” is not a bad one. Lana Kane is one of the top spies at ISIS, an espionage agency centered on the dysfunctional relationship between suave, self-centered, reckless Sterling Archer and his mother Malory, the agency’s head. At its best, the show functions largely as a workplace comedy with cool gadgets and some magnificently weird characters.
Lana is indisputably the most sane person at ISIS, in a Dave-Nelson-in-NewsRadio kind of way, and she also has to cope with being a woman of color in a pretty unforgiving milieu. Archer does a pretty good job of portraying other characters’ prejudice against her in a way that skewers the discriminators, not the discriminatee. Just look at the most recent episode, when Lana challenges Malory for refusing to send her on a mission to Turkmenistan.
Lana: “Because I’m black, or because I’m a woman?”
Malory: “Pick one! I mean, look, I don’t want to sound racist, but–”
Lana: “But you’re gonna power through it.”
Malory proceeds to explain how sexist and xenophobic Turkmenistan is, and how she just had to send only white men – who are meanwhile cocking up the mission with considerable panache. It’s a nifty but non-preachy way to demonstrate the myopia of racist thinking.
I love my Thursday night shows, and I’m glad they include rich roles for women of color. None of them is perfect, though, and it’s a sad truth that they are all created and helmed by white men. Putting women of color in your shows is great, but as long as the creators, showrunners, and executives are overwhelmingly white men, there is still a helluva lot of progress yet to be made.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

2013 Oscar Week: Cosmology, Gender, and Quvenzhané Wallis: ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’

Written by Max Thornton.
In my studies, I work with the intersection of pop culture and religion. This is a frustrating field: a lot of the discourse from the theological side is exceedingly shallow, and the explicit pop-culture engagements with religion are rarely any better.
Honestly, I often find I can have the richest theological dialogue with popular culture that is not explicitly religious, and Beasts of the Southern Wild is a superb example.
It is, of course, religious in the broad twentieth-century existential sense of “ultimate concern” and “meaning-making.” The film tackles Big Themes of loss, belonging, growing up, but it does so through a very specific story – that of six-year-old Hushpuppy, living with her difficult father in an imperiled swampland community called the Bathtub.
Quvenzhané Wallis is astonishing as Hushpuppy. I own T-shirts older than this girl, but she knocked my socks off and I hope she wins a billion Oscars. Like the film itself, she had to pull off a delicate balancing of the cosmic and the intimate. As the cinematography veers between wide sweeps of polar ice caps and close, intense shots of life in the Bathtub, so Wallis seemingly effortlessly manages both the very embodied work of near-wordless acting and the lyrical voiceovers that punctuate the film. With lines like “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the entire universe will get busted,” Beasts of the Southern Wild reminds me a little of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, but whereas that film bored me rigid, Beasts moved me to tears.
Or, to express that in Internet…

Part of that dynamic is simply that both films exist in an entertainment culture overwhelmingly dominated by white middle-class people. Before The Tree of Life ever came out, I had reached a point where if I never again in my life saw another piece of entertainment about a white suburban family, it would be too soon. A film about a poor, largely African-American community in a Louisiana bayou automatically grabs my attention to a much greater degree (and, let’s be perfectly honest, the fact that it’s 45 minutes shorter than Malick’s endless bloody movie doesn’t hurt).

Interestingly, the film was initially a play about a father and son. Writer Lucy Alibar’s initial choice to distance herself from the young character through the gender-flip is reversed for the screen, and she is not unaware of the politics of gender:

“We made a hero story with a little girl in it, and she is fighting for her family, not her boyfriend. I never saw that growing up, I thought I had to be a little boy to be a hero.” (BlackBook interview)

“I always felt like there wasn’t a blueprint for father daughter relationships — for them or for us. Because what are they supposed to do with us, treat us like boys, or small women, or what? Father daughter relationships are so unique from family to family, and I’d love to watch it explored more onstage.” (Barnes & Noble interview)

Suddenly it makes sense that Hushpuppy’s father encourages her to be “a man”: it’s the only way of relating that he knows. He simply has no other way of expressing his feelings or his hopes for his young daughter.

Hushpuppy, being a man.

The film beautifully navigates the relationship between independence and interdependence. From the very beginning, where Hushpuppy and her father live in separate but adjacent tiny houses, the six-year-old is never babied or coddled in any way; and yet she consistently stresses her understanding of the world and her place in it. She has a remarkably holistic idea of the cosmos, completely lacking in anthropocentrism – her description of a hospital: “When an animal gets sick here, they plug it into the wall” – and astounding in its sense of perspective.

Although the film itself doesn’t directly address the concept of God, it is pervaded with a religious sense. Lucy Alibar again:

“God isn’t this distant thing. God is right here with you all the time. He’s your buddy, and you can talk about everything. And writing this play and working on the film, seeing it, I felt God’s presence. I just had more of a sense of my place in the whole scope of everything.” (Elle interview)

Alibar’s triumph is that the film perfectly walks the line of contradictory impulses, affirming the individual’s “place in the whole scope of everything” without being deterministic, stressing the need to (as Hushpuppy’s teacher puts it) “take care of those smaller and sweeter than you” without being paternalistic, portraying an aching realism through a fantastical story of long-dead beasts. Cinema’s triumph is the emergence of an amazing young talent in QuvenzhanéWallis.

“I see that I’m a little piece in a big, big universe. And that makes things right.”



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

The Religious ‘Community’

Written by Max Thornton. Originally posted at Gay Christian Geek in March 2012; reposted here in honor of Community‘s return.
Anyone who is even casually acquainted with me in meat-life will be aware of two facts: (1) Community returned this week, and (2) I was very, very, very, very happy about this.
Community is straight-up my favorite show on TV. Its midseason disappearance from NBC’s schedule was devastating to me, and the announcement of its return had me capslock keymashing all over the internet. I celebrated Thursday’s episode with friends and champagne: it was glorious and beautiful, and it’s not really an exaggeration to say that this show is a religious experience for me. Here’s why.
I just love them all *so much*
1. The community of television
I tend to be fairly generous with my definition of “the religious”. Like Tillich, I think religion is an orientation toward ultimate concern; like Barthes, I believe we are surrounded by images that signify ideologies – and if popular culture reveals and reflects a society’s most deeply held values, then it’s not a huge leap to argue that pop culture can be a locus of religious experience. (Tom Beaudoin’s Virtual Faith makes this argument very nicely.)
Although TV ownership in the US is apparently declining, television is still the most ubiquitous form of mass media in this country (of that 3.3% of TV-less households, it’s a fairly solid bet that many of them still watch shows online). As such, it is the most unifying artifact of American popular culture, and thus television as a whole could be considered a site of religious meaning. Even for a small cult show like Community,several million viewers participate in the weekly ritual of watching it – a shared experience that nonetheless resonates on a personal level for each individual, much like a religious service.
2. The community of the individual
Some people have accused the Community ensemble of being uniformly terrible human beings who evince no character growth and are unlikeable and completely unrelatable. I will not link to the people saying these things, because they are erroneous, incorrect, inaccurate, misguided, mistaken wrong-mongers who are very very wrong.
I see myself in Jeff: his walls of sarcasm and cynicism that try but fail to hide the true depths of his emotional responses.
I see myself in Britta: her enthusiasm for political causes and her morality that stems from a heart in the right place but is often ill-thought-out or hypocritical in practice.
I see myself in Abed: his profound love of pop culture, his social discomfort, his use of pop culture to understand those around him.
I see myself in Shirley: her deep Christian faith and her struggle to overcome her personal failings to live a really loving Christian life.
I see myself in Annie: her neurotic perfectionism and intense fear of failure.
I see myself in Troy: his goofy sense of humor, his deep bromance with his BFF, his quest for a place and purpose in the world.
I see myself in Pierce: his desperate desire for acceptance and inclusion, insecurities often masked by acting like an almighty asshole.
I really, really love these characters. Each one of them speaks to a different part of my own personality, often in ways that illuminate my flaws and weaknesses. They are complicated, imperfect human beings, but they love each other and I love them. They embody the complex, messy reality of being human – of being simultaneously wonderful and terrible, capable of beautiful things and horrific things, worthy of love and of hate.
Remember this?
3. The community of friends
It’s called Community because that’s what it’s ultimately about. This is a show about a group of people who are thrown together in a situation that’s for none of them ideal, and who learn to make the best of it. The interpersonal dynamics at play in this show are special because they are bold and because they speak a truth that is rarely spoken in television.
Compare the show Friends. That was also a show about a group of friends, and it was often a sweet show with a good heart, but all the friends came from the same social location: straight, white, young, of a certain socioeconomic bracket. Community dares to portray a very diverse group of people who find common ground without erasing their differences. The relationship between the Self and the Other must involve both the unity of commonality and the space of respecting difference. Friendship is the experience of navigating this Scylla-and-Charybdis – learning to find common ground in your shared humanity while celebrating and benefiting from each other’s difference – and Community portrays this wonderful, difficult process better than any other show I’ve ever seen.
Remember this??
4. The heart of Community
Community is a dizzyingly inventive show, playing with pop-culture history in endlessly fun and creative ways, but it is still a television show, and as such it follows a certain formula. The characters love each other; they learn lessons about the value of friendship; they make missteps and hurt each other, but they ultimately make the right choices and warm our hearts. Like religious truth, Community‘s heart is both inexhaustibly profound and completely obvious.
So very many religious and philosophical traditions hinge on the Golden Rule. Jesus himself said that everything else was pretty much window-dressing. Love your neighbor as yourself: it really couldn’t be simpler. And yet we have to be taught it, over and over again, in different ways and by different people, and we still don’t do it. It’s childishly simple, but it’s also really difficult.
In the same way, Community is a television show. More specifically than that, it’s a half-hour network sitcom. It plays by established rules and conveys a simple, feel-good message. At the same time, though, it takes such delight in exploring the limits of those established rules and finding new and awesome ways to express that simple message.
Community is a show about love, it’s a show written from a place of love, and I believe it’s a manifestation of God’s love in the world. I leave you with the moment I first knew this show was something really special and a nugget of pure wisdom: cabeza es nieve, cerveza es bueno.
 
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Goodbye Forever, ’30 Rock’

Written by Max Thornton.
 
If you care at all about popular culture and feminism, you may have noticed that last Thursday seven years of television history came to an end.
 
30 Rock had a complicated relationship with feminism. Linda Holmes of NPR’s Monkey See wrote an excellent article on the difference between what 30 Rock wasand what it did:
I have never considered Liz Lemon a feminist icon of any kind, nor have I ever considered 30 Rock especially strong when it comes to gender politics.
I don’t care for the obsessive joke-making about how Liz is ugly/mannish/old/awkward, and I haven’t always been comfortable with the way some of the “she’s baby-crazy!” or “she’s relationship-crazy!” comedy has played. …
And yet, I think it’s been one of the most important, helpful, meaningful, landscape-altering shows for women in the history of television.
No assessment of 30 Rock can escape the unfortunate but inevitable tendency to scrutinize every aspect of a female-led show to an unreasonable degree – most of all its creator. Exhibit A is, of course, poor Lena Dunham. The misogynists are looking for any excuse to hate a successful woman, while we feminists are dreaming of intersectional perfection that the mainstream media is never going to provide. As a result, conversations about 30 Rock are inseparable from conversations about Tina Fey. Which at least is an excuse to link to this.
Luckily, 30 Rock was (it feels so weird to be using the past tense) a show with a strong sense of the meta, and as such it pretty much demands contextualization.
A few years ago, Overthinking It pointed out that 30 Rock looked like a staunchly liberal show – “from far away, if you squint.” Once you start paying attention, though, neocon Jack Donaghy tends to be in the right, and the joke is almost always at the expense of Liz Lemon, the leftist comedy writer and (to at least some extent) Tina Fey self-insert characer.
There’s a kind of self-parody you do around friends which you might avoid more publicly, because you know your friends know you’re kidding. My friends and I tend to Godwineach other with wild abandon, because we spend so much time on the internet that we enjoy its utter absurdity. In a discussion with a stranger, though, I probably wouldn’t throw around the wanton Hitler analogies, since there’s a risk they wouldn’t get the joke.
One of the things that was simultaneously endearing and frustrating about30 Rock was its frequent usage of that friends-only self-parody material. When it worked, it made you feel like a good friend of the show and of Tina Fey, sharing in a self-critical but ultimately loving humor. When it didn’t work, it was awful. (Remember the season-five sleep-rape controversy?) A lot of the time, though, it was hard to tell which side of the line the show was on.

This A.V. Club review of a December 2012 episode asserts that “30 Rock is one of the few shows that can cleverly get way with joking about stereotypical female behaviors, such as everyone rushing to the bathroom at the same time or being unable to work the projector, without getting offensive.” I’m not entirely sure I agree with that. Andrew Ti of Yo, Is This Racist? illustrates the problem with the example he sometimes uses, of the season six episode that features Jon Hamm in blackface. In the context of the episode, the brief skit is parodying TV’s history of blackface. That might potentially be a reasonably clever joke, but, as Ti has pointed out on his site and in his podcast, we live in a media culture where things get taken out of context all the time and people have short attention spans, and what that means is that there’s just a gif floating around the internet of Jon Hamm in blackface. I’m inclined to think it’s just hopelessly irresponsible to make jokes like that when you know how widely your material is circulating.
Having said that, 30 Rock had a tough job to do: trying to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, while still maintaining its distinctive voice and viewpoint. And did it ever have a distinctive voice. If, before I saw the episode, I had come across the finale’s line “Hogcock. Which is a combination of hogwash and poppycock,” I couldn’t have mistaken it for a joke from any other show. It’s a style of humor and a general set-up that simply won’t appeal to everyone, and it never translated to particularly high ratings. To avoid alienating uncommitted viewers further, I think the show sometimes had to pull back from fully supporting specific ideals – I seem to recall a number of feminist blogs complaining that the end of the infamous Jezebel-parodying season five episode “TGS Hates Women” was a cop-out, forcing in some unlikely circumstances to avoid actually engaging with the issues it had raised.
Ultimately, I agree with Linda Holmes, that 30 Rock was willing to sacrifice pretty much anything for the sake of a joke. In the end, its effects on the TV landscape are more feminist than its content ever was; but it was a damn funny show, written by and starring a damn funny woman, and I miss it already.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

When Dumb Fun Turns Nasty: Sexual Violence in Stupid Movies

Written by Max Thornton.
[content note: explicit discussion of violence and rape]
Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Violent media poisoning nation’s soul.”
Is it, though? To his credit, LaSalle recognizes that it’s pretty fatuous to blame movie violence for real-life violent crime, but that doesn’t stop him from calling for blanket R ratings for movies with “any violence at all.” I honestly don’t see how that will help. An R rating won’t stop anyone from seeing a film they’re determined to see (hi there, internet!), and it definitely won’t encourage critical thinking (the trouble is, you can’t legislate for that).
Also, you know, Adam Lanza – the motivation for LaSalle’s piece – was 20. He could have seen the most brutal NC-17 movie he wanted.
It’s an old complaint that MPAA ratings are seriously messed up, mired in disturbing double-standards around male and female sexuality, straight and queer sexuality, sex and violence. However, if you happen to believe that violent movies contribute to a “culture of violence,” age-based restrictions don’t accomplish a thing. Except perhaps to make under-seventeens desperate to see movies just because you say they can’t.
I really don’t think the problem with movie violence is that too many superhero flicks are rated PG-13. I don’t even think the problem is the existence of movie violence. I think the problem is the context and presentation of the violence. MPAA ratings, audiences, and filmmakers themselves overwhelmingly fail to distinguish between cartoonish violence and realistic violence, or between sex and sexual violence, and this is what I find truly alarming.
I have a shameful love of really stupid gory movies. I have a dumb but almost limitless enthusiasm for the subgenre lovingly dubbed “splatstick.” Evil Dead II. Peter Jackson’s Braindead. Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd. Appendages being severed in improbable ways, fountains of dyed corn syrup gushing forth, heads and eyeballs rolling all over the place… That stuff cracks me up, and has done ever since I was an eight-year-old at home with septicemia, watching videocassettes of Tom & Jerry and bringing my mother running with every yell of sympathy that quickly dissolved into peals of laughter.
And I respond just like Bart and Lisa Simpson.
 
Realistic movie violence disturbs me, of course, in films like City of God or Irreversible. These are movies intended to confront you with the utter awfulness of the events they depict, with no interest in minimizing or trivializing their horror. They’re hard to watch, and they should be.
Cartoon violence, on the other hand, is outlandish, clownishly over-the-top, and nothing like real life. A scene like the possessed hand scene in Evil Dead II or the zombie baby scene in Braindeadis funny in the way that a cartoon character slipping on a banana peel is funny. It’s an outlet for Schadenfreude in a really goofy setting.
It really, really bothers me when cartoon violence turns sexual.
When a tree rapes a woman in the original Evil Dead. When a tentacled zombie-slug-man rapes a woman in Slither. When a snowman serial killer rapes a woman with his carrot nose in Jack Frost(no, not that Jack Frost). Most recently, when zombie Nazis turn rapey in Nazis at the Center of the Earth.
Goddammit, it’s called Nazis at the Center of the Earth, not Rapists at the Center of the Earth.
 
I’m watching a movie called Nazis at the Center of the Earth because I want to laugh at a lousy special effect of Zombie Josef Mengele ripping a guy’s skin off in one elegant motion. That’s funny to me, because no one in real life gets their skin ripped off by Zombie Josef Mengele, and if they did it wouldn’t look like that. The sudden inclusion of sexual violence is just grim.
We’re all feminists here, so I don’t need to repeat the stats, but here they are again: 1 in 6 women. 1 in 33 men.
Comical beheadings with fountains of unrealistic blood are funny to me in the way that Laurel & Hardy dropping the piano again is funny. Sexual assault IS NOT FUNNY. Jack Frost (again, the killer-snowman one, not the family film or the bizarre Russo-Finnish fairytale that was on MST3K) is rated R for “violence and gore, language and some brief sexuality.” For “brief sexuality.” CALL IT WHAT IT IS, MPAA.
I get that plenty of people don’t find splatstick funny. That makes sense and is valid, and I can respect that opinion. What doesn’t make sense, isn’t valid, and does not merit my respect is thinking that sexual violence belongs in splatstick humor. Contra George Carlin, Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd is not funny to me. Cartoon sexual violence isn’t funny in the way cartoon splatstick can be, because of the whole rape culture thing. The difference is crystallized in the fact that the MPAA doesn’t call a nose-breaking punch “brief face-touching,” but it does call carrot-rape “brief sexuality.”
In the end, what crosses the movie-violence line depends largely on your personal taste. A really cheesy special effect of a sharktopus eating a person makes me laugh; others won’t find that funny. But I don’t think sexual violence is a matter of personal taste. When I sign up for some cheesy splatstick movie fun, I want cheesy splatstick fun, and that does NOT include sexual assault of any kind. What’s so hard to understand about that?

 

If you’re more of a words person, this might help.

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

 

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘Ballet Shoes’

 Written by Max Thornton.
If people see a list of things I love – science fiction, fantasy, progressive rock, movies about zombies, witty and charming sitcoms that you will watch on NBC Thursday nights at 8/7c starting February 7 – they might be surprised to learn that I think ballet is awesome.
If people see a list of my favorite authors – a small selection: China Mieville, Ursula LeGuin, Alan Warner, J. G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood – they might be even more surprised to learn that some of my most dearly beloved childhood books are about ballet.
This odd and rather niche enthusiasm neither stemmed from nor translated to any interest in performing myself. Slightness of build, grace, agility, physical stamina, a right and a left foot instead of two lefts: I have never in my life possessed any of the attributes necessary for success in the field of ballet dancing. My single semester of lessons was a comedy of ineptitude for my watching family, and a crushing humiliation for me.
Me.
All of which is to say, the depth of my love for Noel Streatfeild’s 1936 children’s classic Ballet Shoes might initially seem baffling. Until you read it, and learn how very very awesome it is. Alternatively, you could watch the 2007 BBC adaptation starring Emma Watson, which is very nearly as charming as the book.
 
Ballet Shoes is the story of three sisters, Pauline, Petrova, and Posy Fossil. Adopted from assorted circumstances of orphanhood by the eccentric fossil-collector Great-Uncle Matthew, or “Gum,” they are brought up by his great-niece Sylvia and her beloved nurse Nana while Gum is off on a decade-long expedition around the world. When poverty compels Sylvia to take in boarders, the Fossils’ lives change dramatically: they are sent to a stage school to learn dancing and acting.
Much of the story’s genius lies in the characterization of the three sisters. Beautiful Pauline is a talented actress who feels the responsibility of being the eldest sibling; dreamy, waifish Posy thinks of nothing but dancing, to the point of complete otherworldliness; Petrova is the tomboy, the middle child, and the odd one out, who loathes being onstage and is happiest around engines. This set-up creates a lovely interplay of strong, distinct personalities who are united by the loyal bonds of sisterhood, which is really the heart of the story.
Petrova (Yasmin Paige), Posy (Lucy Boynton), Pauline (Emma Watson)
The adaptation is fairly faithful, notwithstanding the inevitable glossing over of details and eliding of the timeline. Two notable changes that, in my opinion, weaken the story are the character assassination of Winifred and Theo’s happy ending. Winifred is an enormously gifted actor and dancer, who is consistently overshadowed by the classically beautiful Pauline. In the book, she is also a genuinely sweet person and a stalwart friend to the Fossils; in the film, she’s rather bratty and unkind. Theo, one of Sylvia’s boarders, has no personal life to speak of in the book, but gets an unlikely reunion with a long-lost lover at the end of the film. I understand the motivation for these changes – they heighten the story’s fairy-tale feel: every character, good and bad, gets what she deserves – but they’re unfortunate from a feminist standpoint. Female friendship is undermined in order to perpetuate the tired trope of the jealous, spiteful girl; while the cleaning up of romantic loose ends reinforces the old chestnut that a single woman couldn’t possibly be happy.
Probably the biggest alteration made from the book to the film is the Sylvia and Mr. Simpson subplot. The book Simpsons are a happy couple, both boarders who act as friends and parental figures to the Fossils; movie-Simpson is a widower who lost his wife (and child, for added Tragic Backstory) to typhoid. Seeing that Mr. Simpson is the only male character of any presence in the story, he and Sylvia somewhat inevitably get a little romance.
This subplot has overtones of a lot of tedious cultural tropes, from the above-mentioned Unhappy Single Woman thing to the Wounded Man Who Can Only Be Healed By The Love Of A Good Woman, but on balance I think it’s a good thing. Sylvia gets very little characterization in the novel outside of her noble devotion to her girls; the love story is only one of several ways in which she is fleshed out for the film – she also gets an ongoing health problem and a rather charming unlikely friendship with Theo.
Theo (Lucy Cohu) and Sylvia (Emilia Fox)
What I really love about this story (apart from the “lady doctors,” who are certainly a couple) is that it’s ultimately a story about sisterhood and chosen family. Three orphans, a young woman, an older nurse, two retired professors, a dancing teacher, and a widower – none of them related by blood – come together, mostly by chance, and constitute a family. That’s pretty progressive for 1930s Britain. The three sisters love each other dearly, but they also have dreams and big ambitions. Their familial devotion and their wild ambitions are never presented as being in conflict; in fact, it’s those very ambitions that bind them together, as they vow on every Christmas and birthday: “We three Fossils vow to put our name in the history books, because it is uniquely ours, and ours alone, and nobody can say it’s because of our grandfathers.”
At the end of the story, Gum – the patriarchal male figure who has been totally useless and absent from the entire thing – returns after a decade abroad. He asks in surprise, “Who are all these women? … I brought entrancements! I brought babies!” To him, the girls were souvenirs, fossils, which he brought back as presents from his globe-trotting exploits. In his absence, they have grown into a close family of faithful sisters and strong, ambitious women, and it’s because of their guardian and their wealth of female role models, and certainly not because of their grandfathers. 

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

 

2013 Pop-Culture Resolutions

Written by Max Thornton.
I have a confession to make:
Last year, I only went to the movies a dozen times, and only 7 of those were 2012 releases.
That is the least time I have spent at the movies in any year since I started going to the movies. There are a few reasons for this tragic failure of mine:
  • I’m a grad student, so I don’t have much free time.
  • I’m a grad student, so I don’t have much spare money.
  • After a blissful six-month stint working in a cinema in 2011 and taking full advantage of my comps, I am still a little resistant to the prospect of having to pay to go to the movies.
  • I no longer live in London, where there is a glorious wealth of theaters screening any and every movie you could want to see. All of four movie theaters exist within walking distance of me now, and most of them have a pretty unexciting selection of films most of the time.
The biggest reason, though, is my general sense of disillusionment with Hollywood as a whole. I’m not sure if this is because the past year or two offered genuinely fewer interesting movies than previous years, or because inevitably a sense of ennui sets in after a while. For example, I thought The Master was okay, but it didn’t blow me away like There Will Be Blood did in 2007. Is this because The Master is an inferior film, or because, with five more years of film-watching behind me, I am just bored to death of movies about white dudes talking about stuff?
To be honest, 2013 doesn’t look much better than 2012 when it comes to movies that grab my attention. A cursory glance over the list of forthcoming releases fills me with despondence. I want to see Zero Dark Thirty, but I’m disturbed by reports that it’s naked CIA propaganda. I’ll see the Evil Dead remake, though my expectations are lowered with every advance word that trickle out. There won’t be any escape from seeing Star Trek: Into Skegness (British joke!). Just about the only 2013 movie I have unmitigated, childlike excitement for is Pacific Rim. Giant robots, giant sea monsters, Guillermo del Toro, and Idris Elba are four of my favorite things, and I can only hope and pray that the combination will be as marvelous as I’m anticipating.
I can’t be the only one who would switch teams for this dude in a heartbeat, right?
 
The thing about being a grouchy griping curmudgeon, though, is that it gets old fast. I want to like things. I want to get excited about upcoming movies. Salivating over a giant-robots-versus-sea-beasties movie is way more fun than shitting all over the latest crop of derivative, kyriarchal tedium. I’m not going to quit fighting the good fight, but I am going to change my focus a little. Here are my pop-culture resolutions for 2013:
I will see more movies alone.
Last week, I went to the movies alone for the first time in eighteen months. It was FANTASTIC. I used to go to the cinema alone all the time, back when I was a fresher in university trying to escape roommate troubles, and I’d forgotten just how brilliant it is. Something about sitting in a darkened auditorium with a group of strangers, never speaking to each other but sharing the cognitive experience onscreen, is just delightful to me.

I’m certain I get this exact expression when I see a good movie alone.

 

I will seek out more foreign and independent films.
It was so easy when I lived in London. I had maybe half a dozen favorite cinemas, scattered all around central London; anything that got any kind of UK release was guaranteed to be screening somewhere nearby. In 2012, shamefully enough, I didn’t see a single foreign-language film. Not one. I haven’t even seen Les Misérables yet, and I’m pretty sure the title and character names are the only French things about that movie. I pledge to make more of an effort this year. Hollywood might be boring me silly, but there must be interesting things going on elsewhere in the world.
I will not be ungrateful about Community, no matter what happens.
When showrunner Dan Harmon was unceremoniously fired from his brainchild, it seemed like yet another death-knell in the long, slow, painful process of NBC’s gradual euthanizing of my favorite show. I had spent so much energy hoping for Community‘s unlikely season-four renewal that, when it actually happened, it seemed churlish to carp about Harmon’s absence. Some fans are predicting that season four can only be a vortex of suck without his guidance. For now I reserve judgment – though, after being so vocal about my hope for a fourth season, I won’t really feel I can legitimately complain even if I do wind up hating it.
This picture does a lot to assuage my fears.
 
Anyone else have any pop-culture resolutions? What are you planning to do or not do in 2013?
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

The Great ‘Freaks and Geeks’ Rewatch of 2012

Written by Max Thornton. There is a delightful Freaks and Geeks special in Vanity Fair this month, with set photos, a cast reunion, and an interview in which creator Paul Feig discusses what would have happened had the show not been canceled. I recommend savoring all of it, but be warned – you may find yourself compelled, as I was, to hasten to Netflix and marathon the whole series once more.

The Vanity Fair reunion.
Not that a Freaks and Geeks marathon takes very long. For the uninitiated, F&G is one of the great unjustly-canned, widely-mourned, single-season shows, right up there with Firefly in terms of squandered brilliance. Set in a Michigan high school in 1980, it focuses on sister and brother Lindsay and Sam Weir and their respective groups of friends, the freaks and the geeks.
To some extent, F&G feels like an improved version of My So-Called Life – not that My So-Called Life couldn’t be charming, or speak the truth of the adolescent condition, but it undeniably succumbed to schmaltz and caricature in a number of ways. Freaks and Geeks nails absolutely everything it tries.
I do wish there were more female characters. Of the eight core characters – five freaks, three geeks – only two are women. The more general lack of diversity, particularly in terms of the overwhelming whiteness and straightness of the characters, can be attributed to the fact that the show is based on Feig’s personal experience of an overwhelmingly straight, white Michigan suburb in the late seventies and early eighties. This, of course, feeds into a larger and still ongoing conversation about whose experiences get put on television; but, assuming we can accept the show’s premise and the whiteness and (ostensible) straightness inherent therein, I still think there could be more female characters.
Kim isn’t even in this picture, dammit.
The female characters that are included are fantastic. Lindsay Weir is one of my all-time favorite TV protagonists: blisteringly intelligent and world-weary, yet still a vulnerable and confused teenager searching for an identity and a place, Lindsay kicks off the series with a paradigm shift brought on by her grandmother’s death. Losing her religious faith and quitting the mathletes, Lindsay ditches long-time best friend and inveterate goody-two-shoes Millie in order to befriend the “freaks,” the “burnouts,” a laid-back group of stoners who cut class to hang out and passionately discuss their favorite bands (something that resonates with me personally: I may have attended high school 20-25 years later than these characters, but I was just as enthusiastic about the Who, Pink Floyd, and Rush!). Lindsay doesn’t truly fit in with the freaks, but the more her parents and her guidance counselor and Millie press her on this, the more determined she is to make a place for herself among them.
Lindsay’s place among the freaks becomes secure once she makes a true friend out of Kim, the only other girl among them. The episode in which their friendship solidifies, “Kim Kelly Is My Friend,” was supposed to be the fourth, but was shelved from airing because of its intense subject matter. Lindsay rolls her eyes at her parents’ narrow suburban existence and hopeless squareness, but witnessing Kim’s violent and abusive relationship with her mother causes her to reassess her own life. Most of the freaks have difficult home lives, and they expand Lindsay’s horizons even as she expands theirs. Kim – fierce-tempered and hotheaded, unashamedly sexual, a total spitfire – shows Lindsay that a person’s worth is not dependent on the school system’s assessment of them, but Kim also gains from Lindsay a sense of ambition and motivation.
“You’re like my only friend, Lindsay, and you’re a total loser!”
The relationship between Lindsay and Millie is one of the most beautifully observed and painful aspects of the show. Millie, who initially seems like a caricature of the strait-laced goody-two-shoes, proves to be an unfailingly loyal friend who loves Lindsay enough to let her go. In my favorite episode, number 13, “Chokin’ and Tokin’,” Lindsay smokes pot just before a babysitting job, and Millie steps up to care for both the child and an increasingly paranoid Lindsay. During the comedown, the following conversation ensues:
“I love you, Millie. Why aren’t we friends anymore?”
“I thought we were friends.”
“We are. But just, you know, not really. But we’re still the same people we were when we were five. It’s just different now.”
“You’re different now.”
“Yeah, you’re right. But I’m not gonna be different anymore. I’m gonna be the same. And we’re gonna be best friends.”
“You know what, Lindsay? I feel sorry for you.”
“Why?”
“Because tomorrow, when you’re not loaded anymore, you’re not going to believe in God, and you’re not going to want to be my friend anymore.”
It’s heartbreaking.
Awww, Millie.
I don’t think Freaks and Geeks has a hidden feminist agenda, but it has a core of real decency and generosity toward its characters. It tries to walk the line of portraying kids honestly, warts and all, without necessarily condoning their behavior. They’re high-school kids; they can be misogynistic, essentialist, bigoted, and the show portrays this honestly, sympathizing for them in their ignorance while gently revealing the flaws in their thinking.
 
Nowhere is this clearer than in two storylines that dovetail neatly in the penultimate episode, “The Little Things”: geeky Sam’s courtship of his dream girl Cindy, and sarcastic freak Ken’s relationship with Amy. Sam has long been the Nice Guy™, worshiping all-American cheerleader Cindy from afar and slowly becoming the friend she can talk to “like a sister.” When Cindy tires of her jock boyfriend and decides to give Sam a shot, it seems like every little geek’s (and every Nice Guy™’s) dream come true – except that they turn out to have nothing in common, to bore each other, and to have no fun at all. It’s a nifty subversion of what initially seems to be a straightforward idealized Nice Guy™ trajectory from friendship to dating: without any kind of heavy-handed moralizing, the show suggests that the Nice Guy™ routine is not the way to a happy relationship.
It could never have lasted. Look at the terror on his face.
Ken, on the other hand, doesn’t spend too much time mooning after Amy before asking her out. They click immediately, and seem very happy together. In pursuit of full disclosure, Amy tells Ken that, although assigned female and comfortable in her gender identity, she was born intersex. Ken reacts the way you might expect a teenage boy ignorant of all things intersex to react: by freaking the fuck out. He worries that this makes him gay (and experiments, hilariously, with disco and a dirty mag) and figures he will have to break up with Amy. It’s only on hearing Sam list the reasons he has to break up with Cindy (“we don’t have anything in common… she thought The Jerk was stupid… we don’t have anything to talk about… she doesn’t like anything that I like… we never have any fun together”) that Ken realizes that he’s being ridiculous.
 
The handling of the whole intersex storyline is wonderfully sensitive (this episode actually got nominated for a GLAAD award). Ken’s initial insistence that “It’s over, move on” is not how Amy views her intersex status. He has to go through the stages of denying it completely and then letting it take over completely before he can come to acceptance: “I’m sorry, and I don’t care, and I’m sorry.” Had the show lasted, I don’t doubt that there would have been other queer or queer-adjacent storylines, and that they would have been handled with a similar tact and delicacy.
 
Freaks and Geeks is long dead, but with each rewatch I find new things to appreciate about one of the best television shows ever aired. Long live Freaks and Geeks.
 
 
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Six Essential Christmas Specials

This Christmas will be my second in a row spent 5000 miles away from my family and the happy, traditional celebrations that characterized the first 21 Christmases of my life. I am feeling pretty okay about this, though, because I’ve discovered the essential ingredients for Christmas to be Christmas. They’re not family or presents or a big meal or the baby Jesus. As it turns out, all I really need to get into the holiday mood is my little list of essential Christmas viewing.
This is an exact depiction of the Lukan birth narrative, right? Look, I’m a theologian, not a biblical scholar.
For your viewing pleasure – particularly if you are far distant from family traditions – I share with you my Six Things To Watch Otherwise It’s Not Christmas.
(Sorry, Die Hard not included.)
Mystery Science Theater 3000 season 5 episode 21: “Santa Claus”
This is a deeply, profoundly, horrendously painful movie to watch. If you ever wanted to watch Saint Nick best Old Nick, where Saint Nick is the creepiest non-serial-killer Santa in cinematic history while the devil is just flat-out incompetent, then there’s something very very wrong with you, but there’s also a movie that caters directly to your reprehensible tastes. For everyone else, enjoy that endless beginning sequence of Santa’s sweatshop flagrantly flouting child labor laws – a timely reminder that the gifts you give and receive this holiday season were probably made by actual child laborers in actual sweatshops. Merry Christmas!
 Also, the best holiday song ever.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 season 3 episode 21: “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”
This one, on the other hand? Is just so stupid, I can’t even. Yes, it is literally a movie about Martians kidnapping Santa Claus. Yes, it’s terrible on every conceivable level. And yet, to my shame, I find it immensely watchable. Honestly, if this movie had never appeared on MST3K, I would probably watch it every year anyway. Luckily, it was not only featured on MST3K, it was re-riffed by the same team with all-new jokes a couple years ago, which means I get to watch it twice without looking like a person who enjoys watching this movie.
 Also, the second-best holiday song ever.
The Muppet Christmas Carol
I don’t need to say anything about this. It’s The Muppet Christmas Carol. Who ever heard of a Christmas without The Muppet Christmas Carol?
Pictured: Christmas.
A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!
I’ll be honest, the rewatch value on Stephen Colbert’s 2008 Christmas special is not that high, and your patience for the songs is likely to vary wildly depending on your ability to stomach the assorted musical guests. (Goddamn, the Toby Keith bit is painful.) But the opening number is pretty great, and I sometimes have these cynical moments when “There Are Much Worse Things To Believe In” is my favorite Christmas song ever.
Community season 2 episode 11: “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”
So what if it’s only two years old? It’s super amazing forever! Songs! Feelings! Stop-motion, of which it is legally mandated that every list of favorite Christmas specials must include at least one! The Christmas pterodactyl! Also, it’s freaking Community!!
Did you know it’s coming back on February 7???

 

The Snowman
A very British entry to round out the list. If you’re unfamiliar with The Snowman, it’s a short, wordless, entirely lovely animated film about a boy whose snowman comes to life. You should watch it this Christmas and have a good cry.
Happy hols, everyone!
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Why I Love ‘Wonderfalls’

If you want to be taken seriously as a television fan (and who doesn’t hold that as their highest life goal?), you have to know how to talk the talk. You have to have an opinion on when exactly The Office jumped the shark.You have to be able to namedrop characters from The Wire, even if you’ve never seen it (cough). You have to loudly lament, at the slightest provocation, the untimely cancellation of some of your most beloved shows: Firefly, Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks.
And, if you really want to prove your credentials, you should have a little list of rather less well-known shows whose early demise you can bewail with even greater fervor. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Terriers. Wonderfalls.
I have lots of squishy feelings about Wonderfalls. Hailing from the mind of Bryan Fuller, which also graced us with the late, longed-for Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls aired all of four episodes prior to its ignominious termination. (It can’t have helped that one of its executive producers was Tim “Touch of Death” Minear.) The remaining nine episodes saw the light of day in a nifty little DVD set which you should own.
In this gif, the part of Wonderfalls is played by Daria. Wait, that’s kind of confusing.
With every passing show of his that is born into this world, shimmers momently like a beautiful dragonfly, and is mercilessly slaughtered by evil network execs, I become more convinced that Bryan Fuller is a cruelly underrated genius whose mind is a gorgeous happyland full of puppies and rainbows and sparkly cupcakes of loveliness. If I can whip the nerds up into a Whedonesque frenzy over the name of Bryan Fuller, then maybe we can keep his next project on the air longer than five minutes. To that end, I offer five reasons why Wonderfalls is supergreat and awesome and should be watched and loved by all television-minded lifeforms.
Inside Bryan Fuller’s brain. Artist‘s rendition.
1. Jaye Tyler
Jaye is one of the best female characters I’ve ever seen on a TV show, and one of my favorite TV characters full stop. She’s a disaffected twenty-something philosophy grad living in a trailer park and working in a Niagara Falls gift shop, where the souvenirs start talking to her and guiding her to help others – which, as a curmudgeonly cynic to the bone, is the last thing Jaye wants.
Not that Jaye knows what she wants: “There is no ‘like me.’ I’m not ‘like’ anything, and if I were it certainly wouldn’t be me.” In the episode “Karma Chameleon,” Jaye is taken as an exemplar of Gen Y: directionless, shrouded in a facade of ennui and many protective layers of irony, feeling suffocated by the weight of her successful family’s expectations.Considering in how many fields of life women are still considered a special interest group who can be represented by men but can’t represent them, I find it very awesome that this show’s schlubby everyperson character, who undergoes a slow but sure transformation from acerbic jerk to somewhat caring human being, is a young woman.
2. Female Friendship
Jaye and Mahandra

I love Mahandra. I love her so, so much. (I love everything about this show to a superlative degree; it’s possible you’ve noticed.) Mahandra is Jaye’s best friend, her witty, sometimes scathing voice of reason, and the lone character of color in the main cast. Although much of the series’ overarching plot concerns the budding relationship between Jaye and heartbroken hottie bartender Eric, it’s the friendship between Jaye and Mahandra that I find most memorable and delightful.
It would be remiss of me not to mention Jaye’s relationship with big sister Sharon, which is very strained at the beginning of the series but develops into an appropriately sisterly bond of mutual irritation but rock-solid support – largely thanks to Jaye’s inadvertently facilitating the meet-cute between Sharon and her girlfriend.
3. Feminist Sensibilities
Watching disturbing rom-com cliches get subverted is something I very much enjoy, and Wonderfalls has a great example in the episode “Pink Flamingos,” where Jay and Mahandra attend their high-school reunion and encounter mean girl Gretchen. Of course, Gretchen turns out to be a sad sack trapped in a loveless marriage; of course, she winds up in the bathroom trying to scrub a drink stain out of her dress; of course, the boy who had always admired her from afar takes this chance to tell her about the feelings he still has for her, which massages her ego – and then she tells him he’s creepy and threatens him with mace. It’s brilliant.
(The evil-cheating-manipulative-wife trope employed elsewhere in the show leaves a little something to be desired, but I’m trying to accentuate the positive here.)
And I’m supposed to believe Jewel Staite is evil and manipulative??
4. Metaphysics and Philosophy
It’s a show about a woman who follows the cryptic directives of talking figurines, to the betterment of her life and those of the people around her. That premise was always going to raise interesting philosophical and theological questions, and it’s enriched by Jaye’s philosophy degree and her older brother’s studies in comparative religion. I mourn the fact that Wonderfallsnever got a chance to explore all the fascinating possibilities raised here. It’s a cruel world.
5. That Awesome Theme Song
Okay, this one is nothing more than a personal bias. XTC is one of my all-time favorite bands, and the last place I expect to hear a song from their main man Andy Partridge is on an American TV show in 2004. I love this theme song A LOT. It’s catchy, quirky, and – to me at least – irresistibly loveable. Like XTC, and like Wonderfalls itself.
 
  
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.