Tag: Max Thornton

The Sun (Never) Sets on the British Empire: The Neocolonialism of ‘Skyfall’

Growing up, my little brother was an enormous James Bond fan. He rewatched the films repeatedly on video; he developed an encyclopedic knowledge of all the villains, plots, and gadgets from reading his glossy making-of books; and, in an anecdote our mother never tires of retelling, he wanted to be Bond “without the kissing.”

Thanks to his enthusiasm, and everyone else’s moderate enjoyment, each new Brosnan Bond film was cause for a Family Outing to the cinema (and we have never been big on Family Cinema Outings; our taste in films is too disparate). For me, this meant a couple hours’ quality nap time. I snoozed happily through Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day.
Me, watching a James Bond movie, 1997-2002.
Casino Royale, of course, famously upset some Bond fans who felt it was too serious, too Bourne-y, and unfaithful to the sense of fun that had always previously characterized the series. And maybe it is indeed a complete break with the rest of the franchise, because it’s the first Bond film that kept me awake for its entire (bladder-busting, 145-minute) runtime.
Bond is a British institution, and every new film is quite the cultural event back in Blighty. It’s a slightly different perspective from this side of the Atlantic, but in some ways the US is an appropriate place to be for the release of Skyfall: director Sam Mendes is a Brit, but he’s most famous for a film with “American” in the title. This latest offering turns out to be not only self-reflexive on the half-century-old Bond film franchise itself, but also a somewhat disturbing meditation on Britain’s role in the modern world.
Before I get into a geopolitical reading of the film, let’s talk feminism: this is NOT a good film for its women characters. The Craig Bond films have been weird about women in general. They don’t seem to be quite sure whether or not they want to get away from the traditional Bond treatment of women as interchangeable totty for 007’s shagging pleasure. On the one hand, Casino Royale won feminist plaudits for recapitulating Dr No‘s famous Ursula-Andress-rising-from-the-sea moment with a ripped Daniel Craig in the role of Anadyomeneeye-candy. On the other hand, Skyfall features Bond walking in on a former child sex slave in her shower, and that is objectively more squicktastic than most Bond seductions.
Even the one where he shags Honor Blackman straight.
Plus, without getting too far into spoiler territory, by the end of the film the role of women in the MI6 workplace is not exactly inspiring for one’s feminist sensibilities.
SPOILER: this is the final shot of MI6 at the end of Skyfall.
Having said all of which, the film does focus significantly on one female character. Dame Judi is of course a British icon, and – particularly in the wake of the Olympics opening ceremony stunt – it’s not a huge leap to see her M as representative of the queen (and, by extension, the UK as a whole): she’s talked about obsessively as a “little old woman” who holds people inexplicably in her thrall and power, and unfailing loyalty to her is presented as an irrational but ultimately very British characteristic.
I should make it clear that I am not a fan of monarchies, empires, or jingoism, and that my own British nationality is so compromised by my third-culture childhood that it doesn’t really have abstract, personal, emotional, or ontological relevance for me. As such, I don’t care much for the endless, usually racist and Islamophobic debates over what British identity IS or whether the Royal Family is relevant(IMO: this, and no).
However, I do think that there is a very good reason for the continuance of these discussions, and it is this: Britain has never really bothered to process the loss of its empire.
By this I mean both that Britain has failed to properly grapple with or repent for its imperial sins, and that it has not yet seriously reconsidered its place in the current global milieu. The former is the more difficult task, and I still don’t see anyone trying to do anything about it; on the contrary, imperialism, via western neoliberalism, looks to be reinscribed through the very public conversation on modern Britain’s role that has arisen in the past few years. Between the Royal wedding, the Jubilee, and the London Olympics, Britain has begun to gain something of a sense of itself in the 21stcentury, and I don’t know if that’s entirely a good thing.
The British brain. See, it does too exist.
21st-century Britishness is precarious and conflicted, but still deeply troublesome (and still, I think, built on a feeling of entitlement to control others). Skyfall beats you over the head with its theme of whether the Good Old Ways are useful in the modern world, but that’s because this is a question that has plagued Britain since at least WWII. Bond first meets young tech-savvy Q in front of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire, and the obsessive harping on the motif of Old vs. New doesn’t get any subtler, between the callbacks to Bond movies past and the, well, explicit conversations about whether the old ways are useful in the modern world.
And yet the film has a striking caginess about the real world. The London Underground hijinks almost entirely avoid evoking 7/7. The villain of the piece is a former British intelligence agent with a grievance about his mistreatment at British hands, but he’s played by Javier Bardem; and, while many of the world’s countries have legitimate grievances about their mistreatment at British hands, Spain is waaaaay down the list. Giving the villain a purely personal grievance against M allows for a paralleled symbolism: as M represents imperial Britain, so Bardem’s character represents any or all of the formerly colonized territories of the world.
The film chooses not to engage with the perspective of the colonized. Bardem’s desire for revenge on M is a Very Bad Thing, and Bond takes M “back in time” to defend her. Bear in mind that I’ve been reading M as a symbol of the British Empire, and you’ll realize that I do not love where this is going.
***Spoiler ho***
Bond loses M, but another M arises to take her place. The Union Jack still flies over London. MI6 still operates. The new M still has missions for Bond, offered in front of another painting, this time of an intact fleet of ships. The Good Old Way of territorial imperialism may be gone, but the same colonizing work can still be done – in newer, slicker, more insidious ways.
 
The top-hatted octopus-man is James Bond. Okay, it’s not a perfect metaphor.


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

Trans* People On TV

I spent my weekend at a conference for transgender people, and it was a little frustrating. If there’s one place in the world you might hope to escape clueless questions, utter ignorance, and the necessity of patiently holding people’s hands through Trans* 101, it’s at a conference by, for, and largely attended by trans* people.
Alas, no such luck.
It’s well past time popular culture assumed the burden of basic education. Pop-culture overthinkers like myself enjoy citing articles that indicate the profound influence of the mass media on public attitudes. The Cosby Show changed the televisual landscape for African-American-centered shows. Will & Grace taught America about The Gays (FACT; Joe Biden says so). Isn’t it time Middle America learned, from its favorite babysitter / best friend / water-cooler-conversation facilitator, that transgender people are human too?
Stupid TV! Be more trans-friendly!
Certainly it’s much, much more likely for pop culture to get it wrong than right. I’ve read queer theory textbooks assigned for class that left much to be desired on the trans* front, and I hardly expect better from the mass media.
Of course, there are some lovely, sensitive, non-rage-inducing portrayals of trans* people to be found in books, film, and TV, but these tend to be fairly obscure. In the mainstream, things are still pretty terrible.
For example.
Apparently there are no actual trans* actors in Hollywood. Apparently a trans woman needs to be portrayed by a cis woman, and a trans man needs to be portrayed by a cis woman, and the films need to focus obsessively on these characters as explicitly trans bodies. We have to see all of the little things a trans person does in order to pass. We have to see crotch shots and/or invest all meaning in bottom surgery. We have to cast an ugly, voyeuristic eye over these bodies – bodies which, lest we forget, in real life belong to cis women: there’s a weird doubling of voyeuristic focus here, on the characters as trans and on the actresses as women, and while on one level we are being invited to leer over these bodies as trans bodies, we are certainly also being invited to leer over these bodies as women’s bodies.
For example.
I rage-quit Glee long before the introduction of its trans* character, and so did fully half the Americans who used to tune in on a weekly basis when the show was in what I (for want of a better term) will call its prime. People just aren’t talking about this show the way they used to. From what I can make out, the portrayal of the trans* character has been reasonably well-received; but, as always with Glee, things could spiral horrendously out of control at any moment. An unholy chimera of offensively over-the-top jokes and earnest After School Specials, and never remotely consistent with its tone or characterization, Glee would not have been the ideal venue for a realistic depiction of a trans* person even at the zenith of its cultural impact.
(And now I have wasted an hour of my life reading up on recent developments in this stupid show, and I have the TV equivalent of a caffeine headache.)
Help me. Friends don’t let friends relapse.
 For example.
A friend recommended the show Hit & Miss, starring Chloe Sevigny as a trans woman who is an assassin. But I’d already seen this interview, and I knew there was no way I could watch this show without spontaneously combusting from rage. I mean, really:
Whenever Mia is shown changing or in the shower, there are quick glimpses to remind viewers that a crucial part of her is still male. Hence the prosthetic, which took two hours to attach. 
 “It was horrifying,” says Sevigny. “I cried every time they put it on me. I’ve always been very comfortable being a girl, so it was hard to wrap my head around the fact that someone could feel so uncomfortable in their own skin.”

Everything about that just makes me so incredibly furious. The fact that the show’s producers thought it was necessary to include those “quick glimpses.” The journalist’s phallocentrism and essentialism. Just the whole fact that Chloe Sevigny is appropriating and trivializing the experience of gender dysphoria for the sake of some TV show. I’m so happy that all those times I sobbed in the shower because I hate my body, all those hours spent wishing myself away into some non-physical realm, the absolutely inescapable feeling of discomfort and discontent in my own skin – I’m so happy that all of that was able to be comprehended by comfortably cisgender Chloe Sevigny when she donned her prosthetic penis to play a transsexual assassin in a TV show.
Things that are retroactively ruined because I can’t see Chloe Sevigny without ragesploding: American Psycho, Boys Don’t Cry, that one episode of Louie
Some things are getting better. Lana Wachowski is pretty high-profile at the moment; I could personally take or leave her films, but as a human being she is perfection, and Hollywood’s first mainstream trans director is a BFD. And maybe Glee is going to do a really excellent job with its trans* character, and the six million suckers who still watch it will be vindicated.
But I don’t think I’m going to run out of things to be angry about any time soon.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

A Walkthrough of the New ‘Evil Dead’ Trailer

The Evil Dead movies are some of my all-time favorites. I love them the way you can only really love something you first saw in your teens: with nostalgia, delight, and fierce ardor.
Just looking at this makes me incoherent with happiness. ;aksdjf.
So I have a lot of complicated feelings about the forthcoming remake. On the one hand, precedent suggests that any remake of a classic horror film has a high likelihood of being terrible (see: Psycho, The Wicker Man, The Omen, etc.), and what’s an Evil Dead movie without Bruce Campbell anyway? On the other hand, The Bruce is onboard as a producer, as is original director Sam Raimi; and, now that the new red band trailer is out, I am starting to get excited.
00:09 –Look at the cabin! It’s so perfectly Evil Dead, just looking at it makes me happy.
00:18 –Aah! Creepy basement of taxidermy.
00:24 –DON’T SAY IT DON’T WRITE IT DON’T HEAR IT! Oh you dumb kids. You never do what you’re told.
(Actually I’m pretty interested to see how the movie will deal with the problem of self-awareness. Will they just be dumb horror-movie kids who ignore all warnings, or will there be some nice meta Cabin in the Woods-style explanations for their behavior? Is it going to pretend the last 30 years of film never happened, or is it going to acknowledge them?)
00:27– Shakycam through the woods. Nostalgia is threatening to overwhelm me. Maybe I should just go marathon the originals.
00:31– Well that’s new! A creepy girl rising from a lake. I can get behind that.
00:39– “We’re all going to die tonight.”
00:41 –FROM THE CREATORS OF THE HORROR CLASSIC. Comforting words.
00:50– I’m not quite sure what’s happening here. A red-clad figure appears to be catching a red ball. Somehow this is the creepiest image in the trailer to me.
00:51– Although the long-haired girl crawling along the ground, The Ring-style, comes close.
00:54– Lightbulb! Nostalgia again. The bloody lightbulb is one of my favorite little moments from the first Evil Dead.
Somehow simultaneously silly and creepy, which is the Evil Dead franchise in a nutshell.
00:57– Another creepy girl standing there. There are an awful lot of creepy girls in this trailer, which seems to be the biggest influence of the past few years of horror. Someone really needs to write a Men, Women, and Chain Saws-type analysis of all these J-horror silent creepy girls in contemporary horror.
1:05 –Chainsaw! This can only end well.
1:06– Possessed arm! This is definitely going to end well.
1:07– Chainsaw, meet possessed arm.
1:08– A girl in KISS makeup appears to be getting stabby on another girl.
1:10– Lamp getting spattered with blood. An even better lightbulb moment.
1:12– Explosion!
1:14– Oh no. The tree-rape. Um. Of all the scenes in the original, is that one we really need to see again?
This sad puppy has just seen moment 1:14 in the new Evil Dead trailer, and now is very very sad.
1:20 –She just sliced her own tongue in two with a box cutter! Okay, the gorehound in me must admit that’s kind of awesome.
Honestly, overall I have mixed feelings about this trailer. It looks like a mash-up of some great horror tropes of the past few years all in a classic Evil Dead setting, and there look to be at least a couple quite inventive horror set-pieces. As a straight horror film, there’s plenty to like here.
However, I’m both intrigued and concerned as to the new film’s approach to gender. One of the most striking points about the remake is the fact that the Bruce Campbell character has been gender-flipped. Of course, as Bruce himself observes in this video, it was already a gender-flip in the original. Ash was the Final Girl, and I’m awfully worried that, in making the Ash character female this time, the film-makers are going to wind up watering down everything that made Ash a memorable character and falling back on traditional Final Girl tropes.
The trailer does little to allay my fears on this front. The female protagonist gets to do a lot of standard Final Girl screaming and hiding, and most of the talking and action is done by the nerdy guy in flannel. (When my brother watched the trailer, not knowing in advance about the gender-flipped Ash, he assumed this guy was the new Ash.)
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.
I want to see this, and I am not sure that the Evil Dead remake will give it to me. But I’ll certainly be there in 2013 to find out.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Horror Week 2012: A Brief Feministory of Zombie Cinema

I spent my teen years hopelessly addicted to zombie movies. No matter how poorly made, no matter how artistically worthless, no matter how nasty and exploitative, if the movie had zombies in it, I would watch. The first thing I bought with the first paycheck from my first job at seventeen was Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema.
In 2006, it was indeed more or less complete, but a LOT of zombie movies have been made since then.

I should state upfront that I hold no truck with narrow, exclusionary definitions of “zombie.” To me, the zombie is a very broad church: if somebody has ever called it a zombie, it’s a zombie. The Deadites of Evil Dead? Zombies. The Somnambulist in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari? A zombie. The Dead Men of Dunharrow? Zombies. (Don’t even try that 28 Days Later “infected” crap with me. Those are most definitely zombies, and you should trust me on this because I probably know more about zombie cinema than you.) (Unless you’re Jamie Russell, in which case thank you for stopping by, sir, and I love your book, and I wrote a paper about Zombie Jesus if you’d like to read it?)
As well as being a zombie aficionado, I spent my teen years deep in confusion and denial about sexuality and gender – and these two things are perhaps not unrelated. Vampires and werewolves are explicitly sexual and very gendered, but my movie monster of choice erases sex and gender entirely by its very nature. There are no alluring seductions, no monthly cycles, no explosions of pent-up masculine rage in the zombie: only a creeping sameness and inevitability, all social categories dissolved into nothingness, all physical difference literally consumed in the nightmarish Eucharist of undead cannibalism.
Of course, this erasure of sex and gender does not mean that sex and gender are not explored in zombie films. On the contrary, there are some very interesting things going on, as we shall see in our whirlwind tour of the Three Eras of Zombie Cinema.
Stage One: The Pre-Romero Era
The early stage of zombie cinema is the least popular (and it is also my strongest ammunition in the fight against the purists who insist that only the Romero flavor of zombie – the dead, resurrected, flesh-eating variety – counts as a true zombie). For the first 35 years of its onscreen existence, the zombie didn’t eat anybody’s flesh. Instead, a zombie – first seen in 1932 Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie – was a mindless slave resuscitated by voodoo.
The words “voodoo,” “1932,” and “slave” all in the same sentence like that has probably alerted you to the most striking fact about these early zombie films, which is that they are hella racist. In White Zombie, Bela Lugosi plays a Haitian voodoo master who conspires with a plantation owner to zombify a white woman. I Walked With A Zombie (1943) and Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966) also draw on Haitian voodoo and slave plantations. Per Russell’s thoughtful postcolonial reading of these films, they play on colonial fears of white enslavement and Afro-Caribbean magical powers. In all three movies, the great threat posed by the zombies and their voodoo master is the enslavement of a young white woman.
I Walked With A Zombie: SO MUCH horrendous racial and sexual imagery in one little screencap.

In these early films, white women exist primarily to be threatened by a monster with a subtext of sexual violence, suggesting the racist narrative of predatory, animalistic black men preying on lily-white women. It’s pretty stomach-churning to watch, even if it’s fascinating fodder for students of gender, race, colonialism, and the cinema. Luckily, in 1968 zombies were revitalized, and their race and gender aspects completely transformed, by one remarkable movie.
Stage Two: The Golden Age
In Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s most obvious innovation was actually cribbed from the Richard Matheson novella I Am Legend (in which the undead bloodsuckers are actually identified as vampires, though often read as zombies). Like their literary predecessors, Romero’s shuffling reanimated corpses fed on the living. The association of zombies with Haitian voodoo, slavery, and colonialism was jettisoned, and pop culture hasn’t looked back.
Calling this period the golden age is almost entirely a matter of personal preference, but good lord are there some terrific zombie films from the 1970s. Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead is the undisputed masterpiece of the era, but there are some wonderful movies from all across Europe: the Spanish Blind Dead series, Lucio Fulci‘s giallo gorefests in Italy (especially the splendid The Beyond), French film The Grapes of Death, the underrated and transnational The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue…
But it was Night of the Living Dead that set the tone for these movies, both in terms of the unremitting bleakness and in the heightened consciousness of social issues. Romero has always claimed that his choice of African-American actor Duane Jones for protagonist Ben was color-blind casting, but his own subsequent filmography displays a clear concern for class and race issues. The role of gender in golden-age zombie films is subtler, but no less present. One of the more shocking moments in NotLD is the reveal of the little zombie girl chomping on her dead father and murdering her own mother. The message is clear: the zombie apocalypse breaks down all social categories. The mother-child bond, so often inviolable in Hollywood, is broken in the most violent way imaginable. A little girl, the archetype of innocence, enacts the violence. Social roles cannot possibly hold in the face of the undead threat; in the end, the zombie makes equals of us all.
No wonder I am terrified of preteens.
Stage Three: The Great Comeback
The eighties and nineties saw a proliferation of slasher flicks, while the zombie fell out of favor. Russell ascribes the zombie resurgence of the past decade to the 2002 double-whammy of 28 Days Later and the video game Resident Evil. Before long, Dawn of the Dead was remade, while Shaun of the Dead gave the genre a simultaneous shot in the arm as the first self-styled “RomZomCom.” By the middle of the decade, zombies were well and truly mainstream.
It’s a curious fact, explored by Carol J. Clover in Men, Women, and Chain Saws, that lowbrow genre fare can sometimes push the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable by mainstream Hollywood standards. Arguably, the mainstreaming of zombies has actually defanged some of their ability to make interesting commentary on gender.
For example, the largely entertaining and in some ways surprisingly innovative 2009 zom-com Zombielandends with its previously strong, capable female characters screaming on an amusement park ride, needing to be rescued by the male protagonist. While 1970s zombie films didn’t exactly lack delicate fainting ladies, there was an overall thematic sense that the rising of the dead renders categories such as gender roles ontologically insignificant. A film like Zombieland manages to use the zombie apocalypse to actually enforce gender stereotypes. Similarly, I rage-quit AMC’s The Walking Dead after one season, in part based on a scene where the female characters had a discussion along the lines of, “Well, the apocalypse has hit; better revert to traditional gender roles, ’cause cavemen!!”
I still love zombies deeply. I love the wish-fulfillment aspect of imagining yourself as the last brave outpost of survival against the onslaught, creating your own beleaguered little society when this one collapses. I love the multiplicity of symbolic potential in the zombie, the seemingly endless variety of fears for which it can stand: the inevitability of death; infiltration of human-seeming replicants or pod people; fear of brainwashing or enslavement; loss of all particularity or individuality; uprising of the faceless proletariat; the revenge of Gaia; communism; enforced conformity; being overwhelmed by whatever force it is that you fear most (feminism or kyriarchy or theocracy or secularism or or or…). 
 
But I’m experiencing burnout. I don’t enjoy seeing such a rich, challenging, bleak, existential symbol stripped of all its nuance to cater to the same old reductive Hollywood tropes and narratives. I’m sick of the mainstream cultural attitude toward gender and social roles, and I am very sick of seeing things I love harnessed to serve this attitude.
It makes me want to eat somebody’s brains! Which is a thing invented in Return of the Living Dead in 1985.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Counterreading ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’

Reality television has never held much appeal for me. I get plenty of reality in reality, thanks – I like my TV fictional. Besides, hasn’t the last decade or more of respectable journalism assured me, in the shrillest possible tones, that reality TV is the very lowest form of entertainment, positively reveling in the filth of humanity’s worst, most voyeuristic excesses: a Coliseum for the digital age?
SATIRE!!!1111!1
Even without watching it myself, I’ve become less and less comfortable with the traditional critiques of reality TV as I’ve sharpened my critical apparatus. For a start, it seems predicated on the notion of a hierarchy of art, the assumption that some forms of entertainment are somehow innately higher or better than others. It’s a terribly condescending form of knee-jerk moralizing.And if you don’t ever watch it, it’s a bit presumptuous to be judgmental about the whole genre.
I’ve tried to stay in the moral middle ground, having no real opinion on reality TV other than that it’s not for me. I’d likely have continued my reality-TV-free existence, had it not been for this excellent piece at the incomparable Womanist Musings.
Renee and Sparky watched TLC’s infamous Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, the reality show about six-year-old beauty pageant contestant Alana and her working-class Georgia family, and their reaction was not necessarily what you’d expect. They make many terrific points about how repugnant the show is as a piece of television, how it “other[s the family] at every turn,” but they also offer an invaluable counterreading. They like this family – the four daughters aged between six and seventeen, the quiet father figure, and heroic matriarch June – and they’ll continue to like them, no matter what the show’s structure seems to want us to think.
I love them all, but “Pumpkin” is my favorite.
If you consume entertainment and have any conscience at all, you are a practiced counterreader. You have to be, if you’re going to stand up to the hateful kyriarchal bullshit with which 21st-century westerners are bombarded every minute of the day. All responsible entertainment consumption requires a risk assessment, weighing the potential value to be gained against the potential harm to be done, and everybody’s evaluation is slightly different. For one person, well-rounded white female characters but no characters of color is worth the trade-off; for another, it simply isn’t. And sometimes performing an adequate counterreading requires you to marshal all your critical resources.
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is not a text that welcomes counterreadings with open arms. Operating well within the established format of reality television, it utilizes an arsenal of techniques – both subtle and not so much – to impel voyeurism. TLC makes it very, very easy to sneer at and judge Honey Boo Boo and her family. You have to work quite hard to counteract this compulsion. You really have to be on the critical ball the whole time. And is that okay?
All summer the debate has raged as to whether, or to what extent, the show is exploitative. Having watched all of it inside of a week, I’m still undecided. There are moments when June and the girls express a self-awareness and a confidence that has me cheering them to the skies, sure that their assertions of not caring what people think of them are sincere. At times, though – especially when outsiders arebrought in to interact with the family, an etiquette teacher or a pedicurist, and get all flustered and shocked by them – the whole thing seems enormously exploitative and gross.
It’s this indeterminacy, this openness to a multiplicity of different interpretations, that has the national conversation about Honey Boo Boo going so fiercely. As Time’s James Poniewozik observes:
…overall, she has a kind of sassy sweetness to her. In the second episode, she gets a pet teacup pig as consolation for losing a pageant and decides to dress him as a girl, which she says will make him gay. The ensuing argument with her older sister is both ridiculous and oddly wise in a 6-year-old way: “It’s not gonna be gay.” “Yes it is, because we’re making it a girl pig! And it’s actually a boy pig!” “O.K., but it’s not gonna be gay.” “It can if it wants to. You can’t tell that pig what to do.”
You can’t tell that pig what to do. See, you can look at that scene, like you can most of Honey Boo Boo, several ways. You can laugh at the intensity of Alana’s conviction that she’s right. You can tut-tut at the gender-role signals this pageant girl must be getting to conclude that you can “make” someone or something gay by dressing it in girl clothes. But you can also see something kind of remarkable in it: a little country girl, whatever confusion and misinformation she has in her mind, fervently arguing a teacup pig’s right to determine its own sexual identity.
AWWW
There are plenty of other interesting aspects of this show (Salon considers the race angle; Slate tackles the class issue), but the two that can’t be ignored are the gender dynamic and the class factor. The gender dynamic is pretty glorious: five strong, opinionated women who love each other deeply and don’t take anyone’s shit. They do what they want to do, they look how they want to look, and they are happy. Dare I suggest that one of the reasons the country’s spent its summer in thrall to these people is that we just don’t see women like this in our scripted entertainment?
Of course, it’s rare to see poor white people portrayed sympathetically on US TV at all. My understanding of class in the US is much less nuanced than my understanding of the British class system, but I’m aware of this country’s distaste for its own working poor. “Rednecks” appear in the media as rapists, as racists, as the butt of jokes and the object of revulsion. Voyeurism and disgust motivate hate-watching in our culture to an obscene degree, and that is why I think it’s important to perform a counterreading, to celebrate this family and refuse to let your responses be dictated by classism and hatred. If you want to be truly horrified by your fellow humans, check outthe comments on this Gawker article (I hope you have a strong stomach). To me, this is the aspect of Honey Boo Boo that’s truly awful – not a happy family letting a camera crew into their lives in exchange for some money they surely need, but the legions of haters who judge Honey Boo Boo and her family to be less human, less worthy of dignity and respect for their life choices, than themselves.
The family certainly does not reciprocate that sentiment. Even in the throes of labor agony, when asked, “Do you recommend to anybody else to get pregnant at 17?”, oldest daughter Anna replies, “Do whatever you want to do.” She just refuses to tell anyone else what to do with their body or their life. The rest of America – from legislators to judgmental internet commenters – could learn something from her.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Quote of the Day: Nico Lang On Gaycism

A month ago, Lauren Bans coined the term gaycism, defined as “the wrongheaded idea that having gay characters gives you carte blanche to cut PC corners elsewhere.” Bans fingered the sitcoms Modern Family, The New Normal, Partners, and Two Broke Girls as major offenders.
The case of Two Broke Girls is especially frustrating. I want to see a show centering on two women who have ambitions beyond the romantic. I want to see an awesome show about female friendship which tackles class and economic issues and has characters of color. I want to watch and like that show; Two Broke Girls is not that show.
Two Broke Girls is like your white gay friend who thinks he’s entitled to say whatever he pleases because he’s been oppressed, so he’s allowed to oppress other people and call it being an “equal opportunity offender.”  He’s earned the right to be a racist, insensitive asshole, because I guess he asked Audre Lorde and she said it was okay?

Lang also criticizes The New Normal, which comes to us from the mind of Glee‘s Ryan Murphy:

Remember hipster racism?  This is that turned up to 11, like Murphy throwing a big blackface party on TV.  However, the biggest issue with pointing it out is that people often don’t realize that such “ironic racism” is still just racism.  And what actually makes the show’s gaycism so doubly troubling is that the act of being systemically oppressed should make people more aware of the ways in which they have the ability to marginalize others, because they have experienced the same thing themselves.

Read the whole piece; it’s great, and full of links to other great pieces.
Television right now is a bitter disappointment. It gives with one hand while taking away with the other. You can have a show about female friendship, but only if it’s full of racist stereotypes. You can have a show about gay parents, but only if it’s crammed with racist jokes. You can have one nice thing, but only if it’s garnished with horribleness.
My television will be intersectional or it will be bullshit. This year, the networks seem to have picked bullshit.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

E.T. – Queer Space Jesus

People love writing stories about Space Jesus. The Ur-example is, for me, Klaatu in The Day The Earth Stood Still (believe it or not, the scriptwriter thought he was being subtle with that one, bless his heart). An alien stranded, alone of its kind, on another planet is the very archetype of a stranger in a strange land, of the returning repressed other, of that liminal hybridity that’s so often figured as monstrous, holy, or somehow both. As a cultural trope, Space Jesus makes perfect sense.

I admit, I just needed an excuse to post this picture, because it’s awesome.
All my life, E.T. has been a favorite Space Jesus of mine, and it’s not just because the film’s human protagonist is, like me, burdened with a severe case of Middle Child Syndrome. E.T.’s Space Jesus characteristics are thunderingly obvious – the magical healing powers, the precious too-good-for-this-sinful-earth-ness, the death and resurrection – but he can also be read as a specifically queer Jesus figure.
Queer theology is a pretty young discipline, but queer figurations of Jesus have always abounded. The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich wrote passionately about Jesus as Mother, endlessly giving birth to us. (As an aside, I would encourage anyone who’s Christian and depressed to read Julian: “God did not say you will not be troubled, you will not be belabored, you will not be disquieted; but God said, You will not be overcome.”). Renaissance artwork depicting Jesus is fairly bursting with homoeroticism. Early-twentieth-century attempts to portray Jesus as ruggedly masculine were a direct reaction to a nineteenth-century Christ popularly associated with traditionally feminine characteristics.
What’s new in queer theology is not the act of queering Jesus as such, but the conscious employment of analytical tools taken from secular queer theory: a deconstructionist methodology, a critical focus on subjectivity and embodiment, and a dedication to problematizing the gender binary.
E.T. definitely problematizes the gender binary. According to IMDb, “Spielberg stated in an interview that E.T. was a plant-like creature, and neither male or female.” Elliott codes him male while Gertie dresses him up femme – both of them projecting their own gender identity on the squashy little guy. Like the Jesus of queer and postcolonial studies, E.T. functions as a blank slate for people to project themselves onto. He is what they need him to be.
This is what a Queer Space Jesus looks like.
There’s also something very queer about the connection between E.T. and Elliott. It’s not just a psychic link – it’s somatic: when E.T. falls ill, Elliott falls ill; when E.T. gets drunk, Elliott gets drunk. The embodied yet mystical link between boy and alien has notes of the in-dwelling Holy Spirit that joins believers to the body of Christ, which is arguably an inherently queer concept anyway.
Medic: “Elliott thinks its thoughts?”
Michael: “No, Elliott feels his feelings.”
(And that scene where he asks the frog if it can talk and then releases all the frogs? Not just psychically-drunken shenanigans. I think it shows Elliott gaining a heightened awareness of the value of non-human life – borderline ecofeminist theology – and it also recalls the plague of the frogs in Egypt. People often spot the Christiness of E.T., but they rarely seem to note the Exodus undercurrents. Which is ironic, given that Spielberg’s Jewish.)
There are other Jesus connections to be made – am I reading too much into it if I note that Elliott’s mother is named Mary, and that the kids occasionally seem to address her as such? That, in an upending of the Mary and Martha story, she plays the Martha role as she bustles around putting groceries away, too busy even to notice Gertie playing with E.T.? And I note that Jesus has always seemed to me like kind of an asshole in that story, and that Elliott’s mom is presented with a good deal of sympathy for how hard she works as a newly-single mother of three, and that seems like a useful queering of a problematic biblical text.
What, then, do we do with our queer Space Jesus? I think it’s important that there’s no dogmatic answer to that question. If there were, he wouldn’t be very queer. Queer Space Jesus isn’t about providing neat answers, or even necessarily about making life easier or better. What we can get from him is a renewed sense of wonder and awe regarding our vast starry universe, our tiny blue planet, and the amazing mystery of life; a promise that we are not alone, that our alienation is understood on a profound and compassionate level by other life-forms on our own world as well as perhaps on others; and an everlasting assurance that, come what may, he’ll be right here.
   
Excuse me. I have something in my eye.    
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Max’s Field Guide to Returning Fall TV Shows

The rosterof newtelevision shows premiering each year in the fall ought to be an exciting time for any TV fan. Unfortunately, I am a jaded, cynical curmudgeon, burned by my previous experiences in the field of new fall shows, and I read the previews with dread roiling in the pit of my stomach. In our age of podcasts, webseries, and countless other competing forms of entertainment, the networks seem to be getting more and more desperate, scraping the barnacles off the bottom of the barrel.
Broad stereotypes? Check.
Dominated by straight white men? Check.
God help us all, a new Ryan Murphy show? Check.
It’s predictably depressing and depressingly predictable. Once upon a time, as a starry-eyed viewer full of hope and gillyflowers, I had a “three-episode rule” for judging any show whose premise piqued my interest even a tiny bit. This year, I don’t expect to watch any of the new shows unless critical opinion snowballs in the course of the season.
However, fall still brings its sweet gifts even unto the cantankerous television fan, in the form of returning shows. Someof these shows have spiraled so far down the U-bend that I can’t even hate-watch them anymore, but there are still enough watchable returning shows to compensate for all the awful new ones (and to wreak havoc on my degree). In the absence of new shows that don’t make me want to claw my eyes out, here is a list of returning shows worth watching.
The Thick Of It (9/9)
I already covered this. It’s on Hulu. Watch it. (N.B. Because it is full of swears, Hulu will make you log in to watch it, and for some reason this entails declaring yourself male or female. If this disgusts you as much as it does me, and you wish to, ahem, seek out alternate methods of watching, I will turn a blind eye.)
Boardwalk Empire (9/16)
A questionable creative decision last season nearly made me rage-quit this show, but it drew me back in with a jaw-dropping finale. Slow, dense, and luscious, this isn’t a show to everyone’s taste, but I remain compelled by the epic-scale world-building of 1920s New Jersey, and especially by the way the show explores the lives of not only the rich white men who run things but also marginalized minorities: people of color, women, queer people. This is not a perfect show by any means, but it fascinates me.
Parks and Recreation (9/20)
Yaaaaay!

This, on the other hand, might well be a perfect show. Leslie Knope, April Ludgate, Ron F—ing Swanson… Just typing the names gives me a big goofy grin. Every episode is a half-hour ray of blissful sunshine, brightening my spirits with a healthy dose of feminism, Amy Poehler, and laughter. Roll on Thursday (by then I might even have stopped crying about the breakup of the century).
How I Met Your Mother (9/24)
I still watch this show, I guess. I can’t really remember why.
Bob’s Burgers (9/30)
The charming adventures of the most delightful animated family since The Simpsons deserve a full-length treatment on this site at some point. For now I simply say: Watch it. If the hijinks of close-knit siblings Tina, Gene, and Louise don’t fill you with joy, you have a shriveled husk in place of a soul. Also, Kristen Schaal! Eugene Mirman! H. Jon Benjamin, for crying out loud! (HEY, FX, WHEN IS ARCHER COMING BACK ALREADY?)
Tina’s my favorite. No, Gene is. No, it’s Louise. Oh, don’t make me choose!
The Good Wife (9/30)
For a sitcom-loving sci-fi nerd like myself, a legal drama is well outside the comfort zone, but this is about as good as they come. The juxtaposition of title and premise alone should grab any feminist’s attention: When her husband is embroiled in an Eliot Spitzer-style scandal, Alicia Florrick returns to the bar in order to make ends meet. The rich ironies and tensions suggested by the show’s title play out on Julianna Margulies’ understated yet beautifully expressive face as she navigates personal and professional life when she has so long been defined as Peter Florrick’s wife. And sometimes Michael J. Fox guest stars, and it’s awesome.
30 Rock (10/4)
For several seasons now, 30 Rock has been but a pale shadow of its best self, but laughs are still guaranteed, and my love for Liz Lemon is fierce and undying. I will almost certainly complain vociferously about every episode, but I wouldn’t dream of missing out on bidding farewell to the TGS crew.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (10/11)
In some ways, this is the anti-Parks and Rec: A crass and often vicious show about crass, wholly unlikeable people. You won’t see anyone hailing the Sunnygang as feminist icons anytime soon (though, for what it’s worth, the jokes are usually on the holders of prejudice rather than the victims thereof). I’d like to revisit the episodes featuring Carmen, a trans woman, to see how they stack up against the generally appalling mainstream pop-culture depiction of trans women, but I’m honestly a little afraid to do so. When Sunny misses, it misses hard, but it’s also capable of making me laugh until I cry; and, unlike a certain other 2005-premiering show mentioned above, I’m actually optimistic about the chance for creativity and entertainment in Sunny‘s eighth season.
Community (10/19)
The date is on my calendar and on my heart. Friday, October 19th, 8:30pm: The stars will align. The cosmos will come into harmony. Wars will end. Justice will prevail. God will be in his heaven and all will be right with the world.
ASDFSDALF;HDSLGJKHSJDK

‘Gravity Falls’: Manliness, Silliness, and a Whole Lot of Awesome

I am too old for the Disney Channel. The bright candy colors, the rapid-fire pacing, the saccharine music and headache-y flash-cuts and forced zaniness – it all adds up to one massively hyperstimulating, sugar-coated migraine. Half an hour of all that on a Saturday morning and I am ready to bounce off the ceiling before crashing to earth semi-comatose for the rest of the day.
If you can overcome (or, better, avoid entirely) the excruciating commercials and the overstimulation of the Disney Channel milieu, however, you can experience maybe the most exciting television debut of 2012. (Not, I’ll admit, that the upcoming fall season looks to offer stiff competition.)
Welcome to Gravity Falls.
In the nine episodes aired so far, Gravity Falls has already established a pretty dense mythology for itself, jam-packed with occult imagery, cryptograms, conspiracies, clever callbacks, and hidden Easter eggs (and there are already plentyof websitesdevoted to deciphering this stuff). It’s an enormously fun show, chronicling the supernatural adventures of twelve-year-old twins Dipper and Mabel in the creepy, not-quite-right town of Gravity Falls, Oregon. The level of care and detail lavished on the world-building is matched by the depth and – if I can say this of an animated Disney Channel show – realism of the characters.
Dipper and Mabel, voice by Jason Ritter and Kristen Schaal, are wonderfully characterized as not just siblings but true friends: despite their personality differences, they enjoy spending time together, and although they needle and mock each other they always have each other’s back. As somebody whose siblings are my best friends, I find it rings very true to life, and the only other show I can think of with a comparably close sibling dynamic is Bob’s Burgers –where, coincidentally, one of the siblings is also voiced by Schaal.
The twins’ age is a savvy writing choice that allows for some spot-on exploration of themes of growing up, pitching the show niftily at the crossover-hit sweet spot for both younger and older viewers. A grown-up trying to convince other grown-ups to watch a Disney Channel animated show can certainly relate to the twins’ swithering between the childish excitement of their supernatural adventures and their desire to prove themselves cool enough for the local teenagers (including Dipper’s hopeless and completely understandable crush, Linda Cardellini-voiced Wendy). Two specific episodes of Gravity Falls work well as companion pieces exploring Dipper and Mabel’s respective struggles to establish their identities.
Episode 6, “Dipper Vs. Manliness”
A cutie patootie.
Dipper is the more introspective, bookish twin – as Mabel puts it, he’s “not exactly Manly Mannington.” When an old “manliness tester” machine at the local diner declares him “a cutie patootie,” Dipper’s insecurity about being a man goes into overdrive, and he seeks training in the ways of manliness from a group of Manotaurs (“half man, half… taur!” “I have 3 Y-chromosomes, 6 Adam’s apples, pecs on my abs, and fists for nipples!”).
Anyone who’s been a feminist longer than five minutes knows that the enforcement of gender roles harms men as well as women, and this episode features a lot of great jokes lampooning the sheer absurdity of what’s considered manly in our society: the pack of REAL MAN JERKY emblazoned with the slogan YOU’RE INADEQUATE!, the Manotaur council that involves beating the crap out of each other, Dipper convincing the reluctant Manotaurs to help him (“using some sort of brain magic!”) by suggesting they’re not manly enough to do it.
In the end, it’s Dipper’s love for a thinly-veiled “Dancing Queen” pastiche that causes him to defy the Manotaurs’ stereotypical definition of manliness. His enjoyment of something considered “girly” opens his eyes to the nonsensical restrictiveness of traditional gender roles. As he says in his climactic speech to the Manotaurs: “You keep telling me that being a man means doing all these tasks and being aggro all the time, but I’m starting to think that stuff’s malarkey. You heard me: malarkey!”
Rejecting the Manotaur’s version of manliness does not, however, answer Dipper’s agonized question about the nature of masculinity: “Is it mental? Is it physical? What’s the secret?” (And how many times have I myself asked that question?) Although the episode puts a neat bow on Dipper’s arc by offering a pat moral – “You did what was right even though no one agreed with you. Sounds pretty manly to me” – it’s made fairly clear that masculinity and femininity do not have to be discrete, oppositional spheres rooted in stereotypes, and the question of what makes a man is left open – as, perhaps, it should be.
Episode 8, “Irrational Treasure”
Mabel is the best. She’s my favorite character, and with every episode I love her even more. Her quest for self in “Irrational Treasure” is not a direct counterpart to Dipper’s search for manliness – Mabel is pretty comfortable with both the ways in which she is conventionally feminine and the ways in which she is not (reflecting the sad reality that girls’ freedom to express masculinity is not mirrored by an equivalent freedom for boys to express femininity). In the show’s fourth episode, “The Hand That Rocks the Mabel,” she confronts the societal pressures around dating while female, as she struggles with how to extricate herself from a coercive romantic relationship with the creepy Lil Gideon – an object lesson in how messed up are our society’s ideas of the romantic pursuit of uninterested women by persistent men – but in this episode she faces a less explicitly gendered problem: how to convince everyone that she’s not silly.
The delightfully goofy hijinks of this episode – involving a conspiracy to cover up the existence of Quentin Trembley, the peanut-brittle-preserved eighth-and-a-half president of the United States – are propelled by Mabel’s quest to prove her seriousness to rival Pacifica Northwest. Pacifica is a pretty stereotypical stuck-up-rich-mean-girl archetype thus far, but it seems distinctly possible that an interesting character arc could await her in future. “You look and act ridiculous,” she tells Mabel with scorn, and Mabel takes her peer’s cruelty to heart the way only a pre-teen can. “I thought I was being charming,” she says dejectedly, “but I guess people see me as a big joke.”
Don’t worry Mabel, you really are so so charming.
As it was Dipper’s non-manliness that ultimately proved him a real man, so it’s Mabel’s silliness that saves the day here, allowing her to crack all the clues for the conspiracy and help President Trembley escape the local police (who, despite being called serious by Mabel, are in fact extremely silly). By the episode’s end, Mabel is impervious to Pacifica’s jibes: “I’ve got nothing to prove. I’ve learned that being silly is awesome.”
Figuring out who you are in the face of societal pressures that buffet you every which way is the trial of growing up, and helping people to do that is one of feminism’s goals. It’s also at the heart of Gravity Falls, which helps cement this for me as the most exciting new show of 2012. (Plus, it’s apparently indoctrinating kids into occult symbolism. Cool.)

Buffy Week: The Incoherent Metaphysics of the Buffyverse

Contains spoilers for Buffy and Angel. Not the comic books, though. Those never happened.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was famously asking the question: what if, in a typical horror-movie monster-chases-girl scenario, the girl turned around and kicked the monster’s ass? But it’s also, perhaps less wittingly, asking the question: what happens when an atheist – someone who disavows the existence of all things super- or preternatural in the real world – writes a show about the supernatural?

Of course, American TV, and especially the WB in the late 90s, is perhaps not the best forum for a nuanced discussion of faith and religion. Even so, it’s striking how one-dimensional the perspectives on the supernatural are on Buffy. Maybe I know too many seminarians (I know a lot of seminarians), but it seems very odd to me that nobody we know in Sunnydale reacts to the presence of demons and vampires by turning to religion. Especially once the show’s mythos expanded to encompass an elaborate lore of gods, resurrection, heaven and hell, and de- and re-ensouling, the big G remains notable for its total absence. Even after experiencing a heavenly afterlife, Buffy’s only comment about God’s existence is “Nothing solid” (S7E7, “Conversations With Dead People”). And I for one would find this profoundly unsatisfying. Once you have come across the First Evil (as worshiped by an ex-priest, no less!), would your first question not be: So is there an equivalent primordial good?
On a metatextual level, of course, this all makes perfect sense. The premise of the show is not God, religion, or Manicheandualism fought on a cosmic scale. Metatextually, we know that the Buffyverse is a world where the supernatural forces of evil operate, but the question of God is moot, and the source of goodness is people’s love for each other and their willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of what’s right. From the perspective of a viewer looking in on this world, we can accept this, but once we try to imagine ourselves truly inside the Buffyverse, the cracks in its metaphysics begin to appear.
These cracks show themselves most clearly in late-period Buffy, when the series starts to sink under the weight of its own mythos. The show, which had once so brilliantly and wittily allegorized the trials of growing up as horror-movie monsters, lost its focus and its direction in the final two seasons. Buffy tries not to simplistically equate soul with good and soulless with bad, attempting to explore gray areas and moral ambiguities, but this winds up pulling the show in hopelessly contradictory directions: if vamps and demons have the potential to be good, if they are redeemable to the point of being able to want a soul, then how is Buffy justified in constantly staking them? Add what we learn from Angel, and things get even less coherent. If ensoulment and goodness/evilness are, as Angel the supposedly more grown-up show would have us believe, much more complicated than that, how come Angel yo-yos between Good, ensouled Angel and Evil, soulless Angelus with, frankly, comical facility?

Come on, it’s a bit silly.
When Darla, staked as a soulless vampire, is brought back as a human, the soul question gets even more inexplicable. If, as established very early on, “When you become a vampire, the demon takes your body, but it doesn’t get your soul” (Buffy S1E7, “Angel”), then why does the resurrected human Darla even remember her life as a vampire? Is the vampire a new, evil creature occupying the formerly ensouled body, whose soul is now at peace (as that line of Angel’s would seem to suggest); or is it the same person, the same consciousness, with some fundamental part removed? Is the soul the individual’s consciousness, their moral compass, an ineffable that somehow endows humanness? What, finally, is a soul?
This is, of course, a hugely complex question, to which I do not expect a coherent real-world answer. In a TV show, however, where the quality of ensouledness apparently determines whether you deserve to live or die – whether or not it’s morally acceptable for our protagonist to kill you – we damn well need our terms defined.
This is… what a soul looks like?
Perhaps this kind of moral and metaphysical incoherence is simply an inevitable result of the Chosen One narrative. (I’m reminded irresistibly of Harry Potter, and of the fancritiquesthat read Dumbledore as a nasty, manipulative figure who deliberately programs Harry to do his bidding, rather than as the wise and kindly mentor Harry sees. There are counter-readings of the Bible that find traditional atonement theory similarly abhorrent, arguing that only an abusive God would sacrifice his own son.) Noting the Powers-That-Be who guide events on Angel, I wonder to what extent it’s possible to engage questions of Chosen Ones, prophecies, destiny and so on without resorting to a Calvinistdeterminism.
Naturally there is a metatextual Calvinist element – it’s called the writers’ room – and Whedon occasionally nods to this. Of Buffy S6E17, “Normal Again,” he has said: “the entire series takes place in the mind of a lunatic locked up somewhere in Los Angeles, if that’s what the viewer wants.” In that same interview he admits that the role of the soul in the Buffyverse is often simply a matter of narrative convenience; and that, I think, is kind of cheating. When we watch a show, our assent to its premise is a kind of contract: we will accept this premise, provided that the show does not flout the narrative rules on which it is predicated. If a show flouts its own narrative rules – say, retconning an entire season as a dream – audiences tend to feel that the contract has been violated. Altering something as crucial to the show’s whole premise as the function of the soul according to narrative diktat is, I think, a similar violation.
As a lover of Buffy and a theologian, I want Buffy to be theologically and metaphysically coherent. I want it eitherto establish one metaphysical system as true for the world it portrays, or to represent a believable variety of metaphysical beliefs among its characters. The former is an entirely lost cause; the latter is frustratingly undercooked. Willow’s Judaism is wholly Informed, and her turn to Wicca is entirely to do with magic. There is no sense at all of Wicca (or any other religion) as an ethical code, as a way of making meaning, as a way of personally relating to the world and others in it.
Ultimately, this is the same problem I have with the show’s self-professed feminism. Joss Whedon is a proud feminist, and yet in the course of Buffy some very unfortunate tropes appear – Bury Your Gays, Psycho Lesbian, No Bisexuals, Token Minority, general racefail – which cumulatively suggest a writers’ room that just didn’t necessarily see the implications of everything it was doing, perhaps because it lacked the diversity of viewpoints necessary to provide checks and balances on overwhelming privilege. Established metatextually, the show’s feminism is taken for granted by all characters in-universe, and it requires extra work on the part of the viewer to critique its problematic elements. Perhaps this fundamental incoherence of Buffy‘s feminism is tied to its fundamental metaphysical incoherence. Both seem to stem from the same failings.
But also, there were really really awesome things.
 

Movie Riffing: A White Man’s World

Last week, there was a RiffTrax live event all across the country. If you’re not familiar with RiffTrax, it’s what some of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew do now. If you’re not familiar with MST3K, well, you’re in for a (possibly life-changing) treat.
In all of its iterations – MST3K, the Film Crew, Cinematic Titanic, RiffTrax – the basic premise is the same: comedians watch movies and make fun of them. It’s a premise so simple, yet so relentlessly compelling, that it’s no wonder the eight main performers from MST3K are all still involved in the movie-riffing business, nearly 24 years after the show first premiered.
As well as releasing DVDs, video-on-demand downloads, and downloadable audio commentaries, both Cinematic Titanic and RiffTrax regularly perform live shows. In the case of last week’s event, the RiffTrax crew mocked MST3K stalwart (and current #4 movie in the IMDb Bottom 100) Manos: The Hands of Fate with all new jokes from a theater in Nashville, broadcasting the event to movie theaters nationally. It was a terrific good time – and if you missed it, never fear: it’s happening again in October, this time with a movie even dearer to my heart, the gloriously incompetent Birdemic: Shock and Terror– but, as devoted a fan as I am of these guys and their hilarious work, I am troubled by one thing:
They are almost all white dudes.
RiffTrax: funny white men.
Cinematic Titanic is composed of four white men and one white woman. RiffTrax comprises three white men and occasionally guest stars such as “Weird Al” Yankovic, Joel McHale, or Neil Patrick Harris.
Why is the movie-riffing business so white? Why is it so male? (Why is it so straight and cis?)
Of course, MST3K got its start in the late eighties in the Midwest, so that might explain why it was very white and mostly male. But it’s now 2012, and I live in the Bay Area. When I saw the RiffTrax live show at SF Sketchfest in January, the guest riffers were David Cross, Bruce McCulloch, Eugene Mirman, and Paul F. Tompkins. All very funny people whose work I enjoy enormously; all white men.
MST3K / Cinematic Titanic: mostly funny white men.
The broader problem, of course, is that the mainstream comedy world is still profoundly white-male-centric. Women and people of color are still tokenized on The Daily Show. Popular sitcoms like Two and Half Men and The Big Bang Theory are squarely focused on the white male experience, while shows that attempt diversity get it appallinglywrong. Even my beloved Community is a show created by and centering on a white man.
And who are the comedians who get their own basic-cable TV shows? Stephen Colbert. Russell Brand. Louis C.K. Daniel Tosh. W. Kamau Bell (which gives me some hope; are you watching Totally Biased? You should be!). The people who don’t get their own TV shows are Maria Bamford, Kristen Wiig, Margaret Cho (well, she once had a show, but let’s not talk about that).
OH MY GOD GIVE HER A SHOW ALREADY
 Of course, the success of 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation has spawned a number of sitcoms with female protagonists, but there still seems to be an entrenched cultural opposition to most feministcomedy. We feminists tend to put the weight of impossible expectations on any comedy that looks to be even the slightest bit feminist – remember how much of the discourse around Bridesmaids last year was centered on the notion that this movie provided proof positive now-and-forever-amen that women could be funny? Or the phenomenal outpouring of commentary this year on Girls? – and, with every passing internet-comedy twitstorm, it becomes clearer that we need to keep having this immensely frustrating conversation, assuring the wider world that comedy can indeed be both feminist and funny. The self-styled defenders of free speech, who seem to think that critique is the same as censorship, excuse the ugliest and most offensive jokes as fair game. Our best way of combating that is to keep proving that you can fight for justice andbe funny at the same time.
And I think movie riffing could be a very good way of doing this. It’s become a bit of a truism that riffing is at its best when it comes from a place of some genuine affection for the material being mocked, when it’s “funny and clever and occasionally a little more generous … not just too mean-spirited and sour.” MST3K and its successors are great because they’re made by people who love movies. The jokes express a sincere wish for the movie under scrutiny to be good.
In the same way, feminist pop-culture commentary isn’t just about slaying all fun so that we can all be miserable subjects of the fiefdom of Nofunnington. It’s a sincere cry for things to be better, a way of telling humankind: You can be better than this.
MST3K improved my critical analysis of film and TV. Feminist commentary improved my critical analysis of the kyriarchy, the myriad -isms woven throughout our culture. If there was a more overtly feminist-slanted, equally hilarious movie-riffing team, you can bet that I would be their biggest fan.

Welcome New Contributors!

You’ve probably noticed some wonderful new writers around here. They’ll each be writing weekly posts, so you’ll definitely want to check back here often to read their fabulous pieces. In case you missed any of their introductions last week, I’ve included excerpts below. Make sure to read their full bios to learn more about them–and then welcome them to the Bitch Flicks team!
Myrna Waldron: I am a lifelong film enthusiast, but my particular passion is animation. (I like live action television too, but I’m fairly picky) Since a young age I have obsessively consumed animation in all forms, whether they be slapstick cartoons like Looney Tunes or abstract experiments like Begone Dull Care. I am particularly interested in American animation (Chuck Jones is my hero), but I have some interest in Canadian (particularly the short films distributed by the National Film Board of Canada) and Japanese animation (mostly from the 90s) as well. It is a pet peeve of mine when people refer to animation as a genre rather than a medium, or, even worse, to assume that all animation is for children – so don’t do it! 😉 [click here to read more about Myrna]
Lady T: If I can describe my approach to feminism in one sentence, it would be this: “There’s always room for improvement.” Occasionally, I blog about media that really grates my cheese, but I’m more likely to criticize and analyze works of media that I really love and admire. I like the female characters on The Vampire Diaries, but I think the show’s portrayal of its black characters leaves a lot to be desired. I love the late, great George Carlin for many reasons, particularly his stand-up about abortion and grammar, but I don’t agree with his opinions on rape jokes. Most works of art that I love have some problematic aspects and I think it’s worthwhile and necessary to analyze our favorite things. [click here to read more about Lady T]
Robin Hitchcock: I’ve been a movie lover since I was a young teen, when my dad instituted “Movie Camp” in our house to fill in the gaps in my cultural heritage.  I’ve been a feminist since longer than I can remember.  I have a small amount of formal gender studies training in the form of a certificate in Women’s Studies from my alma mater the University of Pittsburgh (2006), but that department was so small they couldn’t even offer a minor in Women’s Studies, much less a major degree concentration.  I also have a J.D. from the University of Pittsburgh (2010), but I do not practice as a lawyer.  I am always trying to learn more and strengthen my feminist muscles.  I find it more or less impossible to see a movie and not want to write about it.  Even when I really hate a movie, I still tend to enjoy watching it, thinking about it, and writing about it. [click here to read more about Robin]
Erin Fenner: I love cult films, “bad movies” and directors who try their damndest to say something new in a different way. I love black and white, foreign and Cannes Film Festival. I get excited by trying-to-be-subtle symbolism and am a sucker for allegory. I value the filmmakers who push a feminist agenda, and even those who willingly ignore politics but still manage to convey a message that is keenly relevant. Not to say that I don’t like blockbusters and Oscar nodding. Explosions and played-out sensuality don’t titillate me, but I am fascinated by the process, the message and am obsessed with the mistakes. [To be clear, my notion of “liking” or “loving” something is often interchangeable with most people’s notion of “morbid fascination.”] [click here to read more about Erin]
Max Thornton: I am a third culture kid who grew up in the USA, Kenya, and Great Britain. I am a trans* queer person who gets angry a lot. I am a grad student in theology, which I define broadly as the processes by which people create meaning in their lives, and my especial interest is the interrelationship of politics, culture, and religion.

I love film, books, and sci-fi in any medium, and I have an especial passion for television. My favorite show of all time is Mystery Science Theater 3000; my favorite show currently airing is Community; the list of shows I love is ever expanding with series both new and new-to-me, but among my very favorites are Adventure Time, Archer, Arrested Development, Breaking Bad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Farscape, Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, The League of Gentlemen, Parks and Recreation, Phineas and Ferb, Pushing Daisies, Spaced, The Thick Of It, Venture Bros, and Wonderfalls. [click here to read more about Max]
Rachel Redfern: While I grew up in California and still consider it home, I’ve moved around a bit since then; currently, I live in South Korea where I teach English and stuff myself with Kimchi and Toblerone bars and watch way too much TV. My tastes extend into the realm of the eclectic and some of my favorites are Arrested Development, Castle, pretty much anything by HBO but specifically True Blood and Game of Thrones (ditto for BBC), and loads of old shows, Star Trek, I Dream of Jeannie, Murder She Wrote, Northern Exposure, most of which are campy and nostalgic (who else loves the original Doctor Who?). [click here to read more about Rachel]
Leigh Kolb: It was only after graduating college and working in the real world (where one male boss actually told me women’s lib was a bad idea) that I realized feminism needed to be a part of my life. I opened my eyes and saw a world of gendered roles and expectations–from the media to the workplace–and I didn’t like it. I embraced the f-word.

My love for pop culture, analysis, argument and feminism created the person at this keyboard. I’ve learned to bring notebooks with me to the movies, keep one handy in the living room when we watch TV, and keep my eyes and ears open constantly to connect representations of gender roles in the media to our culture. [click here to read more about Leigh]