Mystery – Page 3 – Bitch Flicks

Murder Spouses and Field Kabuki: The Female Gaze in NBC’s ‘Hannibal’

The show treats the bodies of living women with the same respect that it treats those of dead ones.

This guest post by Lisa Anderson appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

In discussing the female gaze in media, there’s one television show worth considering that may come as a surprise: NBC’s Hannibal. This plucky little drama has toiled away in bad time slots for three seasons now, winning critical accolades and devoted followers that never translated into ratings. In a landscape littered with crime procedurals that exploit women, Hannibal stands out, and not just for its searing visuals or plot twists. There are three ways that the “gaze” in Hannibal is feminine: the way the show depicts women, the way it depicts men, and the way it depicts sex.

You only need start with the pilot to see that Hannibal is a different sort of show. Not only does it cast two characters who were men in the original novels by Thomas Harris as women – Freddy (Freddie) Lounds and Alan (Alana) Bloom, to be specific – but it gives beefed-up rolls to three characters who weren’t central to the novels’ plots. Those are Jack Crawford’s wife Phyllis, forensic investigator Beverly Katz, and Abigail Hobbes, the daughter of serial killer Garrett Jacob Hobbs. Yet another female character, Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist Bedelia DuMaurier, is created from whole cloth. Showrunner Bryan Fuller has been quoted as saying he balanced the cast this way in part because writing a show with only men would have been boring.

As remarkable as the living women in the cast, however, is the way that the show treats dead women, right from the start. Much ink has been spilled about how many law enforcement procedurals fetishize the torture and suffering of women, or depict female murder victims in a titillating way. By contrast, in the opening moments of Hannibal, the protagonist, Will Graham, invites his students (and the viewers) to empathize with a dying murder victim, not with her killer–in spite of his own unfortunate gift for doing the opposite. As he is drawn into the FBI’s investigations of Hobbs’s murders, the first victim is found tucked respectfully into bed, fully clothed. The second crime scene he visits turns out to be one of Hannibal Lecter’s infamous murder tableaus, and while the dead woman there is naked –impaled on antlers – her body is angled in such a way her gender isn’t obvious and the image is fit for network TV.

Hannibal continues its gender-neutral approach to serial murder throughout its run. As many men are murdered as women (if not more), and whenever corpses are found without clothes on, they are shot such a way that they register as human rather than male or female. (The victims of the Muralist in Season 2 are perhaps the best example of this.) Even when a bare breast is shown straight on (such as with one critical character death in Season 2), it goes by quickly and is soft-focused and the nipple is not shown. Most importantly, the murders on Hannibal aren’t driven by misogyny or some twisted sexual motivation. This is not reflective of real of serial killers at all, but the show is more interesting for it. The one exception is Frances Dolarhyde, who comes on the scene in the back half of Season 3, and whose sexual pathology is impossible to get around. Even there, though, his female victims aren’t depicted in a titillating way.

Surely just having lots of good female characters and not depicting crime in a creepy way doesn’t qualify a show has having the female gaze, though, right? No, and in the case of Hannibal, there’s more to it than that. The show makes the most of the attractive male actors in its cast (and their avid fans), and also centers female pleasure in its sex scenes without exploiting the actresses.

The first (and very unsettling) instance of the female gaze that I noticed in Hannibal centers around the above-mentioned Mr. Graham, played by the amazing Hugh Dancy. Early in Season 1, Graham uses his talent for empathy to imagine himself in the place of a mental hospital inmate played by Eddie Izzard. As he mentally reconstructs a murder committed in the hospital by Izzard’s character, we see him with his shirt unbuttoned, smirking at the victim with a mix of smolder and menace before attacking her. In that moment, Dancy seems to be channeling Eddie Izzrard’s own sex appeal. Nor was that the only time the show has made the most of Dancy’s looks: it’s not common for him to be seen shirtless, but it’s not unusual either, and fans on tumblr have gleefully traded stills of the show that feature his rear end. In terms of Will the character, there is, of course, a perennial appeal to a cute man in glasses and cold-weather clothes scritching a dog… but maybe that’s just me. (I doubt it.)

In terms of the female gaze in Hannibal, however, no character is more important than the titular serial killer, played by Mads Mikkelsen. Sex appeal is part of the “Person Suit” that Lecter puts on, whether it’s the dapper, cultured professional that he puts forward in seasons 1 and 2, or the leather-clad, globe-trotting bad boy that begins Season 3. It’s not to lure his victims, though; it’s to conceal his crimes from society. Nor do clothes always make the man–in Season 2, the audience is treated to a slow pan up Mikkelson’s body as he is clad in only swim trunks. (In another example of the show’s twisted vision, Lecter is actually in dire straights at that moment.) In Season 3, there is a brief-but-langorous sequence of Lecter showing off blood. He emerges from the bathroom to have a tense confrontation with another character, rendered decent only by prop placement that would make Austin Powers proud.

The staff of Hannibal make the most of both their talented and attractive lead and the fans’ appreciation for him. The show’s official tumblr literally teased fans for weeks with the prospect of their favorite cannibal in a swimsuit. Even the show’s hilarious and inimitable food stylist, Janice Poon, has described Mikkelson as the “man o’ dreams,” as she jokingly (?) lamented missing the opportunity to brush glaze onto him.

The show’s eye candy doesn’t end with Mikkelson and Dancy, either. Richard Armitage, of Hobbit and North and South fame, joined the cast in Season 3 as Francis Dolarhyde, the Great Red Dragon. Right from his first, dialogue-free scene, he meets the high bar for acting set by Dancy and Mikkelson. But he also got into fighting shape to play the body-building villain of Harris’ novel, and for the most part, if Dolarhyde is in private, he is either wearing only small shorts or implied to be naked.

The way Dolaryhyde is filmed for Hannibal points to the difference between how depicts men and women. His nudity is not necessarily supposed to be titillating – it’s mainly to show off his formidable form and the vivid tattoo on his back, although it certainly won’t be unappealing to those who go in for muscular men. What it is, though, is gendered. By contrast, in the pilot, we see Freddie Lounds sitting at her computer, with her back turned and no shirt on. The mood is casual (especially in comparison to Dolarhyde’s workouts), and there is no posing for a camera that shouldn’t be there, no implication that she might turn. She’s treated as a naked human, not a naked woman. The same comparison can be made between Lecter’s Season 3 shower and the baths taken Dr. DuMaurier, played by Gillian Anderson. The show treats the bodies of living women with the same respect that it treats those of dead ones.

So, what happens when the men and women of Hannibal get together? Speaking strictly in terms of what’s been confirmed onscreen, we’ve had a couple of opportunities to find out. Women are seduced by (and seduce) serial killers, a lesbian character sleeps with a man to get pregnant but later finds a female partner, and there’s even a hallucinatory “five-way” that involves people hooking up with people while thinking of other people (and also… a wendigo. It’s hard to explain). If it all sounds sensational and potentially problematic, only the first part of that is true.

The sex scenes in Hannibal have a few things in common. First, neither female nor male bodies are really exploited. This could be written off as owing to network TV, the networks manage the male gaze just fine in their sex scenes most of the time. Instead, there’s a dream-like, almost art-house quality to the editing and camerawork. Second, they’re always between central, full-drawn characters, who are both acting out of their agency even if there is information that they don’t have. Third, they all have strategic or plot importance – the feelings of the characters and the dynamics between them are as important as what happens physically.

Most importantly, though, the sex scenes in Hannibal always imply that the woman (or women) involved are satisfied. This is usually done with a tasteful shot of an arched back or ecstatic facial expression. Remarkably, in a show where interpersonal relationships of all kinds prove to be fraught and painful, there’s never been a sex scene where it wasn’t clear that a woman was having a good time. This focus on female pleasure, as much as anything else, qualifies Hannibal as a show with a female gaze.

While Hannibal’s female gaze obviously includes the straight female gaze, it’s not strictly heteronormative. Dr. Alana Bloom, played by Caroline Dhavernas, is attracted to both Will and Hannibal, but ultimately ends up in a long-term relationship with a woman. Will and Hannibal both get involved with women, but in a Episode 10 of Season 3, Bedelia DuMaurier – perhaps the person most in Hannibal’s confidence – heavily and repeatedly implies that they’ve been sexual with each other as well. Many viewers were surprised only by the confirmation, based on the homoerotic subtext between the two from the start. While Hannibal still has never had a gay man as one of the central characters, it acknowledges both male and female bisexuality, which is unfortunately a rarity on TV today. Needless to say, this wins the show points in today’s fandom environment, with it’s overlapping interest in social justice and same-sex pairings.

I’m not saying that Hannibal is a perfect show. Feminists have taken issue with it before. I’ve agreed with some of those criticisms and either disagreed with or eventually softened my position on others. With two more episodes left in Season 3 as of this writing, I can imagine ways in which it could still disappoint me. At the end of the day, though, it explodes many of the misogynist tropes of the TV crime procedural and even the texts where it finds its roots, and makes something truly unique and darkly beautiful with the shards.

Sadly, Hannibal has been canceled by NBC, and has not yet found another financial backer. I hope that it finds one, because I’d love for Bryan Fuller to be able to complete his vision. Until then, I’ll probably revisit it on DVD, and encourage those who I think would enjoy it to check it out. I’ll also look forward to his next project: a mini-series of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I’m sure he’ll bring his singular style to it, and hopefully continued nods to the female gaze as well.

Lisa Anderson is a social services professional and part-time writer living in Nashville Tennessee. Her favorite things include reading, good chocolate, and feminist pop culture deconstruction.

The Burden of Carrying On: The Currency of Women in Dystopian Films

I can’t keep count of the number of times the fact that women menstruate has been used as a reason to render us incapable of doing something. However, the fact women can have children (while cis-men cannot) is arguably our greatest power in a time of crisis.

This guest post by BJ Colangelo appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

When I was 8 years old, I was given written permission from my parents to watch Titanic on VHS at my friend’s 10th birthday party. Loaded up on birthday cake, potato chips, and as much cherry Coke as I could stomach, I sat in awe as I watched the seemingly unsinkable ship crack in half and kill approximately 1,500 people. As the string quartet played their final notes, the main antagonist of the film (Billy Zane’s Cal Hockley) grabbed a stray child claiming her to be his daughter in order to secure himself a space on a lifeboat reserved for women and children. My friend’s mother was a feminist, liberal arts school college professor and upon watching this scene uttered:

“Leave it to a man to manipulate the only system put in place where a woman’s life is actually given any sort of value.”

Every day, women are made to feel worthless. Whether it’s the media bombarding us with contradictory ideas on how to be, or the fact politicians still think our rights need to be settled by a vote, women are still struggling for equal treatment in just about every aspect of existence. During the March 10 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly hosted Marc Rudov, author of Under the Clitoral Hood: How to Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze, or Jumper Cables, to discuss “What is the downside of having a woman become the president of the United States?” Rudov’s initial response to the question was, “You mean besides the PMS and the mood swings, right?” I can’t keep count of the number of times the fact that women menstruate has been used as a reason to render us incapable of doing something. However, the fact women can have children (while cis-men cannot) is arguably our greatest power in a time of crisis.

As seen in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later… Christopher Eccelston plays the leader of what appears to be the last of surviving civilians in Britain after the epidemic of the Rage Virus. Eccelston’s Major Henry West is a military man through and through, as are the overwhelming majority of the men surviving at his outpost. Major West sent out a radio broadcast searching for survivors to join him and his men, but once characters Hannah, Selena, and Jim arrive at the sanctuary, the true motivations for the radio broadcast become horrifyingly clear:

“Eight days ago, I found Jones with his gun in his mouth. He said he was going to kill himself because there was no future. What could I say to him? We fight off the infected or we wait until they starve to death… and then what? What do nine men do except wait to die themselves? I moved us from the blockade, and I set the radio broadcasting, and I promised them women. Because women mean a future.”

While Major West’s speech (and the events that shortly follow) opens up an entirely new can of worms regarding the sexual politics of the apocalypse, it’s still a reminder that women are arguably the most important symbols of hope in dystopian landscapes.

We often think of dystopian films set in fantastical and futuristic worlds after some post-apocalyptic cause. What we see in It Follows is the wastelands of Detroit and the aftermath of economic devastation. It’s this backdrop set in a contemporary setting that blurs our vision of the forest for the trees. The value of women in this dystopian world is quantified by the supernatural curse that starts to follow these characters. This outside force makes it so that a sexual encounter is needed in order to survive. It’s blatantly said through the film that it’s easy for Jay (Maika Monroe) to pass it on, “because she’s a girl.” She even has two suitors fight over the opportunity to take on this curse, allowing her to be in the power position to have a choice in which suitor essentially lives or dies. It’s from the male perspective that women are seen as currency, as something holding the most value, and they will do anything to obtain them.

Mad Max: Fury Road enforces this practice through the lens of women fully aware of their value. The plot of the film is centrally focused on gender politics, but it never once feels heavy handed. Surprisingly, the escaped “wives” in the center are also never sexualized, even from their former captor. The girls do discuss the villain Immortan Joe having a “favorite,” but the women are fully aware of their value. Amidst gunfire, these women use themselves as shields, understanding the War Boys’ fear of harming them. However, this fear isn’t rooted in a sexual desire, but in the desire to survive. Sexuality isn’t used as a weapon, but the women use themselves as a weapon to address the fact they are in control of any hope for the future. Immortan Joe’s desire to save the women comes not from a loss of beautiful sex slaves, but from a loss of the possibility of continuing his familial line. Men cannot continue on their own without women, and the world of Fury Road knows it. In this universe, we must work together to make a future.

The unfortunate reality of the value of women in dystopian societies is that the relegation of women as currency brings out the absolute worst in humanity. They say that money is the root of all evil, and if women are now being valued as a currency, the evil is bound to leak through. In 28 Days Later… the soldiers are willing to rape the first women they see, and in It Follows, a man has chloroform at his disposal, presumably for use in case Jay were to have denied him sex. While there is power in women gaining the ultimate value in dystopian landscapes, there is also a great risk that comes along to being reverted to nothing more than currency.

BJ Colangelo is the woman behind the keyboard for Day of the Woman: A blog for the feminine side of fear and a contributing writer for Icons of Fright. She’s been published in books, magazines, numerous online publications, all while frantically applying for day jobs. She’s a recovering former child beauty queen and a die-hard horror fanatic. You can follow her on Twitter at @BJColangelo.

What Your Doctors Really Think About You: Fatphobia on Medical TV

Fat bodies have a curious position in medical drama, reflecting the fatphobia existing within the medical profession. Doctors tend to assume weight always a cause rather than a symptom and overweight patients are either lazy, uneducated or poor. The wealthier we are, the more opportunity we have to strive for thinness. As a class, doctors are incredibly privileged, both highly educated and wealthy, they have the privilege of deciding to be thin that many of their patients do not.

Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Fatphobia and Fat Positivity.

Most medical dramas draw from a common well of plots. There’s the amnesiac, the guy who wakes up from a coma after 10 years, the deadbeat dad who wants a transplant from his daughter, and the 600-pound (or thereabouts) man who has to be cut out of his house.

Of course, this man is treated like a monster, the rare patient not worthy of sympathy because it is assumed his condition is entirely his fault, and he has chosen to be unhealthy. Fat bodies on TV as well as in Western culture as seen as shameful and disgusting. The 600-pound man on TV is treated as a medical oddity and a living freakshow that doctors within the program and viewers at home are invited to gawk at, assured that as uncomfortable we may be with our own bodies, at least we’re not that.

On House, the 600-pound man is further Othered by the assumption that he is dead when he is first discovered. When he wakes up, groaning and thrashing around, unsure what is happening to him, he is doubly monstrous, both fat and “undead.”

The 600 pound man is treated as a monster on House — The 600-pound man is treated as a monster on *House*

Fat bodies also have a curious position in medical drama, reflecting the fatphobia existing within the medical profession. Doctors tend to assume weight always a cause rather than a symptom and overweight patients are either lazy, uneducated, or poor. The wealthier we are, the more opportunity we have to strive for thinness. As a class, doctors are incredibly privileged, both highly educated and wealthy, they have the privilege of deciding to be thin that many of their patients do not.

The appearance of the 600-pound man compounds on the subtle fatphobia within the medium of television, as all the lead actors, and so all the TV doctors, are attractive and fit.

Lexie Grey’s stress eating and weight gain are treated as cute quirks

Though Grey’s Anatomy stands out from the pack with its inclusion of several lead characters who are a larger size, and are treated as positive figures worthy of love, many episodes also contain fat jokes. In several episodes, Dr. Lexie Grey (Chyler Leigh), one of the thinner characters, is experiencing extreme stress, and her way of coping with it is to binge eat junk food. When she gains a small amount of weight, other characters mock her for it, but it is never treated as a serious problem; the stress goes away and Lexi continues to be thin. The plot line was intended as an in-joke about the actress’s weight gain during her pregnancy, but it stinks of thin privilege that anyone though this was light-hearted comedy.

Fatphobia is the one acceptable prejudice on TV. Characters we are meant to continue to like and sympathize with can be exposed as fatphobic without thought of consequences, such as Dr. Chase (Jesse Spencer), House’s resident heartthrob. In the episode, Heavy, when an overweight 10-year-old girl is admitted to the hospital after having a heart attack during gym class, Chase, usually especially kind to kid patients, is incredibly cruel to her. He laughs at her and suggests that if she wants her health problems to go away, she should “stop shoving her face with food.” He also dismisses her symptoms of fatigue, muscle pain, and difficulty concentrating as due to clinical depression over her weight. The girl, Jessica, has been bullied and is isolated at school and has been abusing exercise and diet pills and the episode is very uncomfortable to watch, even triggering.

Jessica is an overweight 10 year old, treated cruelly by her doctor — Jessica is an overweight 10-year-old, treated cruelly by her doctor

When Chase’s coworker, Dr. Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) attempts to defend Jessica, he laughs at her as well, saying she is fatphobic as well, because she does everything she can to stay thin. She gets by on thin privilege and enjoys the benefits of others finding her attractive. Later in the episode, we learn that Chase himself used to be overweight and because he was able to lose weight and keep it off, believes everyone who can’t is ignorant and lazy. He continues to blame Jessica’s health problems on her weight, refusing to see that it might be a symptom.

However, the show goes on to suggest that Jessica is the rare fat person who is worthy of our sympathy because her weight is not her fault. She maintains a healthy diet and regularly exercises, but is unable to lose any weight. Because of this she is not a “real” fat person so negative stereotypes do not apply. It turns out that she has a pituitary tumor that was causing her to gain weight and the episode ends with a final triumphant shot of Jessica thin and smiling. This shot is notable as House episodes rarely ended with the “cured” patients returning to the hospital or of showing their recovery, its inclusion suggests that the writers though we needed to be reassured that Jessica eventually gets thin.

Jessica is triumphant over losing weight

In House’s 600-pound man episode, attempts are also made to deny him proper medical care as fat jokes are made about him, diagnoses are ruled out without proper consideration because of his weight and he is initially barred from their MRI machine because it is not strong enough to support him.

Grey’s Anatomy’s take on the same plot is handled with a bit more tact. The doctors, most of whom are interns and residents beginning their careers, are given a lecture about proper behavior and sensitivity before they interact with the patient and are warned that anyone who make rude comments will be taken off the case. This rule is strictly enforced, even when the doctors do not feel they’ve done anything wrong. Many of the doctors we are meant to continue to like make fat jokes throughout the episode, but are painted as being young and immature. We are meant to like them, but not support what they are doing.

Doctors are taught to be sensitive about the 600 pound man on Grey’s Anatomy — Doctors are taught to be sensitive about the 600-pound man on *Grey’s Anatomy*

Yet, the patient frequently makes jokes at his own expense and urges the doctors to lighten up, refusing to admit the seriousness of his condition. What gets through to him is the doctors joining him in making fat jokes. With this in mind, it’s difficult to tell whether the show is saying we need to be more sensitive or less sensitive about weight.

The show Nip/Tuck, focusing on plastic surgeons, already comes from a more superficial place than the typical medical drama, but contains some startling examples of fatphobia. Doctors frequently mock fat patients when they are off-screen and discuss acquaintances who need surgery to even be considered normal looking. In one early plot line, an overweight woman who wants to be thin for her high school reunion to show up her tormenters, is denied liposuction because she is also bipolar, commits suicide. This woman’s sad story is not revisited after the single episode and characters continue to exhibit incredible thin privilege. In another episode, anti-hero Dr. Troy (Julian McMahon) has sex with sex-positive, upbeat overweight woman and finds it incredibly enjoyable. He is horrified and after some soul searching, brutally drags her down into self-hatred, making her feel as unhealthy and unattractive as he believes she should feel.

Though it’s a comedy, The Mindy Project also has a conflicted relationship with fatphobia. Protagonist Dr. Mindy Lahiri (Mindy Kaling) is a bright, bubbly woman who happens to be a bit larger that most actresses on TV, and for the most part she is comfortable with her body. She sees herself as sexy and attractive and is treated as such. Still, she refuses to tell people how much she weighs, describes herself as “anorexic” and as wearing an extra small. Mindy though, is not a character who is meant to be perfect or even entirely likeable. She is instead, an exaggerated example of how many of us feel about our bodies.

If I were to chose a TV doctor, I think Mindy would make me feel the best about my body. She reserves her fatphobia for herself and tells her patients they look awesome.

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

‘White Bird In A Blizzard’: A Storm of Crime, Carnality, and Coming of Age

For months, Kat idly notes her mother Eve’s increasingly odd behaviour, but is too busy falling in love and losing her virginity to care, until, suddenly, one day, Eve disappears without a trace. Kat assumes she ran away because she didn’t love them, and attempts to go on with her life, but a police investigation slowly begins circling her family. As an audience, we’ve been conditioned to see a movie with thriller or mystery elements in it as a thriller or mystery story. But Gregg Araki’s film, ‘White Bird in a Blizzard,’ is only part mystery, part coming of age story, and part haunted dreamscape, and refuses to be easily categorized as any of the above.

The poster for White Bird in A Blizzard — The poster for *White Bird in A Blizzard*

Spoilers ahead!

As White Bird in a Blizzard opens, Kat Connors (Shailene Woodley) is a teenage girl like any other, just at that point where she’s realizing how the life she wants for herself differs from the one modeled by the adults around her.

It’s 1988 and she’s challenging the limits for what she get away with, stomping out of her suburban home in heavy make-up and short skirts, enjoying loud music and lots of sex, and through all of it, fighting with her disdainful housewife-in-pearls mother, Eve (Eva Green, popping in to play a variation of the cold, elegant woman role she’s perfected).

As she matures, Kat begins to see the cracks in her parents’ 1950s style-American Dream-marriage. Her nebbish father Brock (Christopher Meloni) is flailing in his attempts to understand Eve, who is displaying depressive symptoms and acting jealous and even cruel toward Kat.

For months, Kat idly notes Eve’s increasingly odd behaviour, but is too busy falling in love and losing her virginity to care, until, suddenly, one day, Eve disappears without a trace. Kat assumes she ran away because she didn’t love them, and attempts to go on with her life, but a police investigation slowly begins circling her family.

As an audience, we’ve been conditioned to see a movie with thriller or mystery elements in it as a thriller or mystery story. But Gregg Araki’s film, White Bird in a Blizzard, is only part mystery, part coming of age story, and part haunted dreamscape, and refuses to be easily categorized as any of the above. The atmosphere, steamed up with Kat’s barely contained lust and Eve’s frosty shadow, dominates.

The real mystery is not who killed Eve or where she disappeared to. In fact, these answers are hinted at early on and are clear to the audience long before Kat even cares to investigate for herself. If a mystery is at important, it’s the mystery of what kind of person Kat will end up being and how her memories of her difficult, often unlovable mother, will shape her in her adulthood.

Eve feels stifled by her role as a housewife

The film follow Kat through two years pivotal years, as she finishes high school and begins college, punctuated with voiceover narration, flashbacks to her earlier relationship with her mother and introspection delivered in appointments with her psychiatrist. For most of this time, Kat is unmotivated to solve the mystery and this plot is sidelined by her burgeoning sexuality.

Things drag a bit in this section, as the film becomes merely a teenager’s sexual odyssey with hints of something darker just offscreen, just outside of her experience. We watch Kat get tired of her dumb and shiny first boyfriend, Phil, the boy next door (Shiloh Fernandez), and move on to the macho cop in charge of her mother’s case (Thomas Jane). Kat is unapologetically sexual. She admits that she is “horny” and excited to have sex again and again, complaining to Phil that it has been too long since they’d last done it. For Kat, this was not true love and she knows it. Her desire is sex itself, not sex with him specifically. In her conscious attempt to seduce of the detective, assuring him she is already 18 and already sexuality active, she is not a lost little girl manipulated by an older man, attempting to use this relationship to make an official move into adulthood. However, besides sex, there is little at stake until the final act.

Kat is overcome by lust and explores her sexual desires

Kat enjoys sex and admires her body, rare things for a teenage girl to be allowed in either movies or in real life. She has reason to be proud, as she has carved and shaped out her body, from beneath the prepubescent baby fat her mother always teased her about. Eve was the kind of mother who tsk-ed at every bite her daughter took, constantly reminding her of how much thinner and more appealing she was at her age. But as Kat relates, her mother only became crueler toward her as she came into her own.

Their dynamic is a Grimm’s fairy tale, the beautiful daughter sucking the life out of her once beautiful mother, slowly killing her and then replacing her as an object of lust. In Eve’s mind, they appear to be in competition. After noticing Kat’s new body, she appears in revealing clothes in front of Phil and flirts with him. She watches Kat dress and do her make-up, hidden in the shadows, and lingers too long to watch her fooling around with Phil. In one harrowing scene, she comes into Kat’s room at night and attempts to physically assault her.

Eve is consumed by jealousy while observing her daughter’s youth

One possible flaw in the otherwise skilled depiction of their difficult relationship is the casting of Eva Green as the mother of Shailene Woodley’s character when she is only 12 years older than her. By casting an actress who is not old enough to be Kat’s mother, the idea of the sexual identity crisis and aging Eve is experiencing is skewed. This is not how she should look at this age, because the actress is not of the right age.

The disappearance of Kat’s mother echoes the conflict between a mother and her daughter as she comes of age. Kat must reject her mother’s influence and ideals in favor of forming her own. Here, Kat’s mother services as a destructive influence on her life, but this influence is pervasive and unshakeable. Kat cannot reject her mother, even when she is sure her mother has rejected her, even that her mother never loved her. Even as she tries to, Eve haunts her memories and she has recurring dream of her naked in the snow and calling out for her.

Kat dreams of her mother vulnerable and in need of her help

Because of their troubled relationship, Kat feels little pain or sadness at her mother’s disappearance. She blames all her and her father’s unhappiness on Eve and encourages him to move on and find a woman who deserves him.

Still, the film resists the temptation to make Eve into a monster. Though Kat struggles to find something redeemable about her mother, some humanity in her that she can love, she never doubts Eve’s essential humanity and that the rational behind her actions. Kat speaks of Eve’s history like a biographer, dissecting her thoughts and motives as if she was there to hear them

As viewers used to suspense plots, we expect from the beginning that something sinister has happened to Eve. With this in mind, Kat’s attempts to reconstruct her mother are shadowed by our idea of Eve as a victim.

This presents a challenge to viewers: Can Eve be both villain and victim? And which is a crueler – the physical violence visited on Eve or the psychological destruction Eve imposes on her daughter?

From Kat’s narration, the viewer is compelled to sympathize for Brock and share her hatred of Eve, a strange position for the narrative as it becomes clear to the viewer that Brock had a hand in Eve’s disappearance. The eventual reveal, that Brock murdered Eve, is not subtle, as viewers we expect this, as we are used to stories where the good-guy husband is revealed to be a killer. Kat, from her biased perceptive as his child, perhaps willfully blind to his true character, is more naive than us as an audience and than other characters.

Kat’s milquetoast father seems broken by Eve’s disappearance

In fact, every one around her, from her cop boyfriend to her two friends, tell her father has long been the chief suspect in Eve’s disappearance. At this point, it has never been in the least implied by Kat’s narration, by the story steered by her point of view. We never see hints of her father’s jealousy or his fits of rage, which Kat is told until the last act, instead we make these realizations along with her. For most of the film, Brock seems like a harmless milquetoast harangued by his dissatisfied wife. This is the view Kat uses to introduce us to her father and to contextualize her parents’ relationship, thus it catches the viewer off guard, and even scares us, when he reveals hidden stores of anger and turns them on his daughter, his long-time supporter

Though the voiceover is relayed in Woodley’s voice with infrequent teenager vernacular, Kat’s view on the events, is cold and distanced, full of beautiful prose (most straight from Laura Kasischke’s source novel) and bloodless dissection of her mother’s motives. The wounds of her mother’s disappearance and her complicated adolescence do not seem at all fresh (note that Kat begins her narration with a suggestion of time passing, “I was 17 when my mother disappeared”). Her narration is composed, even going as far to recall her mother’s prim, patrician energy. The blossoming girl Kat has become a jaded woman, still fighting to care about her mother.

Yet, she seems unaware of events until there are revealed and gives no foreshadowing of Eve’s eventual fate. Eve is posed as the villain and Brock is the victim, even though Kat should know how these roles are reversed. While she struggles to see her mother as sympathetic, she seems to make no effort to rectify the two sides of her father.

The real surprise of the film is the ending twist, which is the sort of twist that seems calculated to give viewers something to talk about as they leave the theater. Instead of revealing that Brock discovered Eve was sleeping with Phil and killed her out of jealousy, as most of the film seemed to imply (and is the ending of the book the film is based on), Eve discovers Brock was sleeping with Phil and he explodes in rage when she laughs at him.

Eve sees Kat as her rival and flirts with her boyfriend, hinting at a possibly affair

If you believe in auteur theory, this is a clear example of director Araki putting his own stamp on the material, as he is primarily known for the Queer themes of his films. Though a unique twist, this ending feels tacked on for shock value, rather than organic to material. There are no hints at this twist to look back on, and in fact it seems as if it was just made up on the spot after the rest of the film was shot with the original ending in mind. Much of Eva Green’s performance and the importance of her dynamic with Kat no longer make sense in light of this ending.

Still, as a coming of age film, White Bird in a Blizzard is a success at depicting Kat as a real teenage girl, hovering in that confusing stage of adolescence where she is neither fully grown up but is certainly not a child. It is a quiet, often very beautiful film about growing up and coming to terms with the sins of your parents, figuring out how you will use their lessons and to form your own identity. In the end, Kat has lost both her parents and has reasons to hate both of them, yet she still has to live in the world and try to figure out how she can understand who they were and what they made her.

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

‘Haunter’: Where Ghost Power Meets Girl Power

In ‘Haunter,’ Abigail Breslin plays a teenager who galvanizes a team of young women to challenge their evil oppressor together! Oh, and they’re all dead.

“We can send this bastard to hell, but we have to do it together.”

Written by Mychael Blinde.

In Haunter, Abigail Breslin plays a teenager who galvanizes a team of young women to challenge their evil oppressor together! Oh, and they’re all dead.

Haunter (2013) is a scary – and yet feel-good! — teenage-lady-driven horror film. It’s creepy but not gory, and Breslin and her character, Lisa, are both fantastic.

The most recent film by Haunter’s director, Vincenzo Natali, was Splice, a film I very much enjoyed.

A wonderful film about wombs and monsters.

Haunter’s horror is very different from the science-driven horror of Splice. In Natali’s words: “I would almost call Haunter ‘fantasmagorica.’ It’s somewhat of a fantasy with darkness lurking around the edges.”

Splice-Haunter — In other words, fewer sluggy hybrid monsters ripping each other to shreds. More fog.

Speaking of films that Haunter is not like, Haunter is not like The Sixth Sense or The Others. In those films, the protaghostnist’s status is revealed as the final twist, whereas in Haunter, we learn relatively early on that Lisa and her family are the dead characters.

We meet Lisa just a few days after she’s discovered that she, her mother, her brother, and her father are all stuck reliving the same Sunday over and over again, trapped in their house by a thick fog that distorts space and prevents escape.

Carol, Bruce, Lisa, Robbie, and Edgar. The family doesn’t have a last name.

Not that Lisa’s family is remotely interested in escape – they seem blissfully unaware of the daily repetition and express concern for Lisa when she tries to explain it to them.

“Some clothes are missing from the laundry. Do you know where they are?”

Lisa is frustrated with her family’s denseness, and also alarmed to discover strange and creepy things happening around the house… and she keeps hearing someone whisper her name.

Then an evil presence intrudes on her family in the guise of a telephone repairman. This character is named Edgar Mullins, but actor Stephen McHattie is credited as The Pale Man.

“Whenever you hear strange noises in this house, or voices calling out to you, ignore them.”

The Pale Man confirms what we, the audience, already suspected: this repeated Sunday – the day before Lisa’s 16th birthday – is her death day. Lisa is the ghost, and the voice she’s hearing is from the world of the living.

The Pale Man warns her: “If you should try to contact the living, or anyone else, you and your family will suffer in ways you cannot fathom.” But Lisa figures out that the living are already suffering, and that she’s been summoned by the living teenager in the house, Olivia, who is seeking Lisa’s help.

Lisa and Olivia, sharing a house and yet worlds away.

Lisa proves herself to be a smart, brave, and determined protagonist. She sends out a message to all of the Pale Man’s victims: “We can send this bastard to hell, but we have to do it together.”

And sure enough, she teams up with Olivia and with all the other young lady ghosts killed by the Pale Man’s evil, and together they vanquish him! Lisa restores order and peace to both life AND the afterlife.

This is a wonderful exception to film after film after film after film of male characters saving the day. It’s especially nice to see a teenage girl not only carry this movie, but succeed as the hero, and to see so many female characters join together to defeat their oppressor.

By making Lisa and her family ghosts and cluing the viewer into their ghost-status early in the film, Haunter sidesteps the most pervasive problem in haunted house films: the JUST GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE HOUSE problem. (I mean, REALLY, why did they even move there in the first place?!)

The question Haunter inspires isn’t, “Why don’t they just leave the house?”

Instead, Haunter asks:

If YOU were stuck in a house reliving the same day over and over, would you risk tangling with powerful forces beyond your control to escape? What if lives are at stake – but you’re dead?

Abigail Breslin:

I wanted to find a horror movie to do that was really smart and unique and different. And when I read this, I thought it was really exciting. I loved the character and the story—and it took me like three reads before I truly figured out what was going on. I love that you can’t really call the shots. It’s not really your typical horror flick. I love supernatural stories—demons and ghosts…I want the suspense, the spine-tingle, the story you’re trying to unravel.

Haunter does get a little confusing at times, primarily because the house exists in one physical space and yet on different planes of existence:

Vincenzo Natali:

Even though the film takes place entirely in this house, the house is in itself a kind of universe. It’s a universe composed of various strata of different time periods and I loved the way the script opened up. We thought we were in one kind of world and then as this thing unravels, we realize that it’s something much larger than that.

I think this overlapping of worlds and women was an interesting idea to explore, and worth the minor confusion. The overlapping timeframes allow these young women to work together to overthrow the malevolent Pale Man.

Sure, he might be scary…

…but she’s scarier!

I never thought I would be so happy to see this face.

I read Haunter as a film about the triumph of teamwork against a tyrannical patriarchy.

The film is driven by the fear of male control and aggression, fear of men’s anger and their capacity for violence. The Pale Man kills by inspiring a murderous rage in the husband/father figure, which results in the death of the entire family.

Trigger Warning for domestic violence. It gets intense. — Trigger warning for domestic violence. It gets intense.

Here’s how Natali describes the Pale Man:

He is the Minotaur in the maze. Or the spider in the center of the web. He is the manipulator. He’s that thing you don’t see, but you know is there and waiting for you.

He is the patriarchy: he enforces an invisible oppression through the systemic subjugation of women. Then a brave young woman overcomes her subjugation and inspires a group of women to join forces, to create a new and better world for the living and the dead alike.

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Mychael Blinde writes about representations of gender in popular culture at Vagina Dentwata.

‘Sinister’: Or as I Like to Call It, “Don’t Move Your Family into a Murder House”

‘Sinister’ is a film in which the viewer is expected to root for a man whose personal dreams trump his entire family’s sense of safety in their own home – which is fucked up and frustrating and detracts from a film with some incredibly freaky moments.

Sinister-Ellison-and-Tracy — “What if I don’t tell my wife it’s a murder house? Then it’s cool, right?”

Written by Mychael Blinde.

Sinister is a film in which the viewer is expected to root for a man whose personal dreams trump his entire family’s sense of safety in their own home – which is fucked up and frustrating and detracts from a film with some incredibly freaky moments.

Sinister-Moving-Day-at-the-Murder-House — Moving day at the murder house!

Here’s the story in a nutshell: True crime writer Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) hasn’t published a hit in a decade, so he has the genius idea to move with his wife, son, and daughter into a house where the previous occupants were hanged from a tree in the backyard. What better way to reclaim his true crime fame and fortune? And the house was so cheap! Murder houses are the best!

Good thing they dressed Ellison like this so we know he’s a serious writer.

He finds a projector and a series of seriously intense and utterly horrifying snuff films in the attic and is like, SWEET! STATUS UPGRADE HERE I COME! Increasingly terrifying things begin to happen in the house and to its occupants, but so what if Ellison is subjecting his family to a living nightmare? After he publishes his book they’ll all be living the dream! HIS dream!

SPOILERS:

Perhaps you’ve seen the film in its entirety and are thinking, “But what about the ending?! Ellison is punished for his actions! Therefore the moral of the story is that it is wrong to force your family to move into a murder house and to lie to your wife about it and to stay there even when super ominous shit goes down repeatedly and your family hates it there – the film doesn’t endorse his behavior!”

To which I’ll reply: Sure, the film doesn’t endorse his behavior, but it does ask us to like Ellison Oswalt, to sympathize with his struggles, and to respect his decisions. Sure, he gets punished – along with his ENTIRE FAMILY who are ALL COMPLETELY INNOCENT – but the film doesn’t ask us to want him to be punished. We’re supposed to root for Ellison.

Sinister writer C. Robert Cargill and Sinister director and writer Scott Derrickson were both conscious of the character’s inherently unlikable nature when creating the film, and in interviews they explain that Ethan Hawke was cast specifically because of his charisma and likability:

Cargill:

“How we ended up with Ethan was that Scott and I knew we had written a relatively unlikable protagonist and needed an actor who could win the audience over with pure charisma. Not a lot of actors can do that. Ethan was at the top of a short list.”

Derrickson:

“After I wrote the script, I loved it and I was very excited about it. But then I kind of had a panic attack and I thought ‘this guy is so unlikable, he’s so flawed, is the audience going to turn on this character and just not like this movie because they don’t like Ellison Oswalt?’ I really racked my brain trying to think of an actor who the audience wouldn’t turn on and would find consistently interesting even though he was making bad decisions from the beginning. It really came down to Ethan. I thought Ethan was the right guy for the movie above anybody else.”

The film’s creators strive to justify Ellison’s stupid decisions in several different ways throughout the film. Here are all the reasons we are given as to why Ellison makes the incomprehensible decision to move his unwitting family into a murder house, and why he doesn’t move out immediately when things get weird, in roughly the order we’re given them:

– Ellison is all about justice; he is like the Superman of literary dudes.

Here’s Ellison calling the police after finding the snuff films. When they answer his call, he hangs up — he’s decided to go it alone.

When Ellison’s wife, Tracy (Juliet Rylance), expresses her frustration with the many ways his true crime research negatively impacts their children’s lives, he responds with:

“Bad things happen to good people and they still need to have their story told. They deserve that much.”

This is classic Manpain – Ellison is burdened with the emotional anguish and literary responsibility to make things right for people he’s never met and to whom he has no relation. Not only must he provide for his family, but he must bring about justice for these strangers, at any and all costs. Nobody’s paid the price like he has paid the price.

– Ellison’s dream in life is to be a famous writer.

“Dear Diary: So far life is super great in my new murder house!”

Later in the film, Tracy – again! – expresses her frustration with the many ways Ellison’s true crime research negatively impact their children’s lives, and he responds with:

Ellison: What else do you want from me?!

Tracy: How about a home where we feel safe, Ellison? How about a life that doesn’t involve our kids drawing and painting the sick details of some horrific tragedy? Or working out their deep-seated anxieties by doing bizarre shit in the middle of the night?…There are plenty of other ways you can provide for this family.

Ellison: Doing what? Teaching? Editing journalism textbooks?

Heaven forbid he support his family by writing college textbooks – that’s no path to fame and fortune. Much better for him to risk irreparably scarring his children’s psyches by raising them in a murder house!

– Tracy will leave him and take the children with her if this book “goes sour like the last two.”

Let’s take a moment to talk about Tracy. She is a woefully underwritten character whose only role in the film seems to be getting mad at Ellison for all the stupid things he does, and then forgiving him and supporting him some more, raising the kids and making him coffee – “Your father’s very particular about his coffee,” she tells their daughter Ashley (Clare Foley).

After (FINALLY!) discovering the truth about her new home’s grisly history (almost an hour and a half into a two hour movie!), Tracy calls Ellison out on his narcissistic, myopic bullshit:

Ellison: Don’t you understand that writing is what gives my life meaning? These [books] are my legacy!

Tracy: I have always supported you doing what you love, Ellison. But writing isn’t the meaning of your life. You and me, right here, this marriage, that’s the meaning of your life. And your legacy, that’s Ashley and Trevor. Your kids are your legacy.

It is incredibly satisfying to hear Tracy say all of the things I want to scream at Ellison, but she inevitably returns to her role as the dutiful, supportive wife, and the Oswalt family continues to stay in the house. This is a story about a man and his dreams and his nightmares and his goals and his fuckups, and she’s relegated to the sidelines, has absolutely no agency, no purpose except to support Ellison and take care of the kids. And she is literally the only adult female in the ENTIRE film.

Her threat to leave Ellison feels like the filmmakers feeding us another reason for Ellison to continue his “work,” despite his family’s growing sense of fear – another burden on his man-pained shoulders.

– He’s doesn’t believe in “any…um, you know…stuff.”

“Whatever it is, I’m sure I can fight it with a bat. I don’t believe in any of that…um, you know…stuff that you can’t fight with a bat.”

After Ellison is ripped through the floor of his attic – the power went out in the middle of the night and he heard weird thumping noises up there, so naturally he clamored on up to go spelunking – he meets the town’s Deputy.

Actual quote from the film: “I wouldn’t sleep one night in this place. Are you nuts? Four people were hung by their necks in the tree in your backyard.”

The deputy is never named; there’s a running joke that his name is (or might as well be) “Deputy So and So.” He plays the Fool to Ellison’s King Lear (another guy who makes a monumentally stupid decision in the beginning of his story that causes everyone in his family to die). Deputy So and So provides comic relief (and I found him to be pretty darn hilarious), but he also serves to shed light on Ellison’s position in this supernatural situation and to speak truth to Ellison’s power.

When Ellison finally freaks out enough about the house’s eerie happenings to seek guidance, he reaches out to the Deputy:

Ellison: Now, I don’t believe in any…um, you know…stuff.

Deputy: Stuff, you mean, the supernatural, the metaphysical, the paranormal, that type of stuff?

Ellison: Right.

Deputy: Right. Of course you don’t. You never would have moved into a crime scene if you did. But here we are, having this conversation.

Ellison is a guy who sincerely does not believe that there exist such things as ghosts, or demons, or evil pagan deities – and if he really didn’t believe in any of that stuff, then the attack of the evil house monster is totally not his fault, right?

Except it’s still a murder house! Even if there were no malevolent presence, his kids would still be taunted and traumatized in school, he still would have to lie to his wife – it would still be a violation of his family’s sense of security.

Nevertheless, his disbelief is trotted out as yet another reason why a viewer should be accepting of his decisions to move to the murder house, stay in the murder house, and watch all the murder footage making faces like this:

It’s not Ethan Hawke’s fault that Ellison is so stupid; the fault lies the premise of the film.

So what’s truly driving Ellison? His sense of justice? His literary aspirations? His love for his wife? His manly skepticism about all things supernatural?

He’s doin’ it for the fame!

Here are two quotes from two separate interviews with the director, Derrickson:

“[H]e stays in the house because he has an even deeper fear of losing his status. It’s really a film about a guy who is trying to recover his lost fame and glory. And his fear of not recovering that riches and fame is the driving fear in the movie.”

“He’s staying because as much as he’s afraid of what’s on those films, as much as he’s afraid of the weird things that are starting to happen, he’s much more afraid of not regaining his status as a great true crime writer.’

There you have it, folks. The filmmakers want us to like a guy who’s more afraid of losing his status than losing his entire family’s sense of safety in their own home.

Ellison accomplishes very little during his time “researching.” He watches snuff films, writes obvious questions on sticky notes, drinks, watches snuff films, drinks, watches old interviews from when he was briefly famous, drinks, and then watches snuff films again.

Ellison doesn’t solve the mystery; Deputy So and So figures it out. And when we finally reach that pivotal moment, when the family’s inescapable doom is revealed, the crucial information that the Deputy has uncovered seems like it should have been discovered way earlier in the investigation.

In a Sinister review titled Mr. Boogie, meet scarier Mr. Google, film critic Peter Howell writes:

“It’s a given that people do dumb things in horror movies, such as failing to switch on the lights when they enter a dark room. Ellison does all these things and more. A certain indulgence is required, but Sinister writer/director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill expect too much.

“Dumb becomes lazy way too often…Why doesn’t Ellison flip when he discovers a scorpion and a poisonous snake in his attic? Why does he need glasses, but takes them off to peer into the darkness?

“Most important of all, why doesn’t Ellison just use Google to research the links between the killings at his house and similar ones across the U.S.?”

Being forced to watch Sinister’s selfish, ineffective, narcissistic protagonist run around being an idiot for two hours ruins the few aspects of this film I do find to be well executed (pun intended): the found footage and the night terror sequences.

The found footage films are shot on actual 8 mm, and both the music and the visuals are utterly horrifying. I won’t post any pictures of them here — the images are that disturbing. The night terror scene – in which the son, Trevor (Michael Hall D’Addario), unfurls out of a cardboard box screaming – is another astoundingly terrifying moment:

Also, I am fascinated by films that implicate the viewer in a character’s crime: Ellison isn’t supposed to watch the found footage, so by extension neither is the viewer, and yet here I am watching him and watching it, complicit in his sin. How does our willful consumption of this hideously gruesome material impact our lives?

But these great moments are invariably spoiled by Ellison’s obnoxious Manpain.

And now presenting the graphic violence in the context of its impact on Ellison!

We see the most gruesome of the snuff films’ content reflected in his glasses, or blurred behind him while he turns to booze to ease his pain. We see the images projected onto his body:

Ellison’s body becomes the locus of the murder footage.

The message becomes

HEY MEN: Everything is about you! Even other people’s murders are about you! GO AND LIVE YOUR DREAM! Lie to your wife if you need to! Traumatize your children! Only you can instill justice in this screwed up world! Only you can make things right! Only your status matters! YOU ARE THE DECIDER!

The family doesn’t leave the house until Ellison is directly confronted by the supernatural being in a face-to-face, unequivocally malevolent encounter. When Ellison tells Tracy that they have to pack up and leave immediately, she hesitates for the briefest moment, and he has the audacity to scream at her: “GO!!!” Nevermind that she never wanted to move into this house in the first place – or that even before she knew it was a murder house she wanted to leave! — now that HE feels frightened, it’s time to get out immediately.

The unfortunate consequence of prioritizing the likability of this mind-numbingly stupid male protagonist: the one woman in the entire film is relegated to the sidelines, serving no purpose but to yell and be yelled at, to make coffee and get murdered.

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Mychael Blinde writes about representations of gender in popular culture at Vagina Dentwata.

‘Gone Girl’: Scathing Gender Commentary While Reinforcing Rape and Domestic Violence Myths

I wish I could say that ‘Gone Girl’ is a subversive feminist film exposing myriad gender biases and generating a much-needed dialogue on rape and domestic violence. Yet it reinforces dangerous myths rather than shattering them.

Written by Megan Kearns. | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger Warning: Discussion of rape and intimate partner violence]

Is Gone Girl a misandry fest, a subversive feminist masterpiece, or a misogynistic mess? All of the above?

I loved Gone Girl. It intrigued me with its labyrinthine plot, complex characters and noir motif. It simultaneously enthralled and enraged me. There is so much to unpack regarding gender. While a whodunit mystery revolving around the disappearance of Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), and whether or not her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) is the culprit, the crux of the film is the dissolution and destructive unraveling of a marriage. It begs the question: Do you ever really know the person you marry?

Deftly written by Gillian Flynn (who wrote the novel as well) and expertly directed by David Fincher, it’s an uncomfortable film that boldly examines the underbelly of love and marriage and how the media shapes perception. Told from the perspectives of both Amy (often through her diary) and Nick, Gone Girl cracks wide open and shines a spotlight on the often gendered expectations within a heteronormative marriage. Society pressures women to be flawless, never wavering in an aura of perfection. Gone Girl takes a sledge hammer to that.

In an outstanding and riveting performance by Rosamund Pike, Amy is a fascinating character. She’s brilliant, pragmatic and narcissistic. We watch her shift effortlessly from a devoted and then fearful wife to a calculating and fearlessly manipulative villain. A ruthless, Machiavellian anti-hero, Amy morphs into whatever persona she needs to don to obtain her objective. She wears personalities like a cloak, shrouding her true nature and intentions. Filled with rage, she discards the role of the docile wife. She’s not going to live on her husband’s or any man’s terms. She refuses to fulfill society’s expectations.

Amy uses her femininity to achieve her diabolical goals. She uses her sexuality, wielding it as a weapon. They are tools in her arsenal to ensnare and punish men. But just as she readily adopts stereotypical feminine traits when she needs them, she also utilizes stereotypical masculine traits of anger and violence. Her gender informs her actions and the way she perceives the world. However, Amy despises gender norms and doesn’t want to be constrained by them. She doesn’t want to be a satellite to a man. She wants to do whatever she pleases, regardless of the consequences.

We don’t get to see women as anti-heroes or villains nearly enough. As it is, we suffer a dearth of female protagonists in film. While an abundance of female anti-heroes in film reigned during the 1930s, we suffer a lack of female anti-heroes in film today. We do see more female anti-heroes on television: Patty Hewes (Damages), Olivia Pope (Scandal), Gemma Teller Morrow (Sons of Anarchy), Skyler White (Breaking Bad), Carrie Mathison (Homeland), Elizabeth Jennings (The Americans) and Claire Underwood (House of Cards). But we still see far more men in anti-hero roles on television.

Now, I don’t believe that female protagonists need to be “likable.” There’s a compelling argument by Roxane Gay as to why they shouldn’t be likable. Conventionally unlikable women don’t give a shit about what others think of them. And neither does Amy. That’s what makes Gone Girl somewhat refreshing. Here we see an unapologetically ruthless woman.

I have to applaud Amy’s rage and defiance. Although I’m horrified by her disturbing, sociopathic and misogynist tactics. This is why I relish Amy’s notorious “Cool Girl” speech. “The cool girl. The cool girl is hot. Cool girl doesn’t get angry. … And she presents her mouth for fucking.” This is a scathing commentary on how men see women as objects, as vessels, as accessories, not as entities unto themselves. I couldn’t help but say, “FUCK YEAH,” while Amy recited it. Her speech succinctly encapsulates the Male Gaze and hetero men’s expectations of women, while shattering the illusion that women are never angry and that women merely orbit men, suffocating their own needs and desires. Amy’s speech illustrates that society tells women to contort themselves to seek men’s approval.

As much as I cheer for the astute and searing commentary in the “Cool Girl” speech, Amy also condemns women complicit in this charade. She despises how women fall into their prescribed roles, all for the enjoyment of men. When Amy recites this speech, she’s driving in a car, gazing at myriad women passing by. As David Haglund points out, director David Fincher chose the images, not of men but of women, to coincide with Amy’s words. So while the words condemn men, the corresponding images implicate women, making everyone culpable. It becomes a condemnation of women themselves, that they shouldn’t fall into the trap of pantomiming this performance.

What could have potentially been a feminist manifesto mutates into something ripped out of a misogynist’s or Men’s Rights Activist (MRA)’s warped fantasy.

The biggest problem with Gone Girl lies in the tactics Amy utilizes to punish men — by faking intimate partner violence and rape. Amy ties her wrists with rope, squeezing and tightening them while turning her wrists and she hits her face with a hammer to simulate abuse. She repeatedly shoves a wine bottle up her vagina to simulate the bruising and tearing from rape. Amy falsely accuses men of rape, stalking and abuse, all for her own ends. Amy convincingly plays the role of an abuse survivor. It’s scary because this is the kind of bullshit people believe — that women lie and make shit up to wreak vengeance on men.

Author/screenwriter Gillian Flynn said that Amy “knows all the tropes” and she can “play any role that she wants.” But therein lies the problem. Abuse victims and survivors are not merely “tropes” or “roles.” Amy pretends she is being abused in order to frame Nick by writing in her diary that she fears for her life and worries that her husband might kill her. She says she feels “disposable,” something that could be “jettisoned.” Women murdered at the hands of abusive partners are typically treated as disposable in our society. People tell victims/survivors that they should have known better, they must have provoked their abuse. People question why victims/survivors stay with abusive partners. People put the onus on women to prevent rape. These are the myths that films, TV series and news media reinforce. It’s extremely problematic to equate Amy playing “the role” of an abused rape victim with actual women abused and raped.

As a domestic violence survivor, I find the turn the film takes extremely offensive. This is the narrative too many people already have embedded in their minds — that women exaggerate, fabricate and lie about abuse and rape in order to trick or trap men in their web of lies. This is one of the biggest, most pervasive and most dangerous myths about abuse. Here’s the reality. One in four women in the U.S. report intimate partner violence. One in three women worldwide will experience partner abuse. One in five women report being raped. Yet here is this film (and book) contrasting reality and reifying rape culture.

We also see victim-blaming underscored in the film from Amy’s neighbor Greta. When they first meet, Greta comments on the bruise on Amy’s face saying, “Well, we have the same taste in men.” Yet when the two women are watching a news program on Amy’s disappearance and how the leading cause of death for pregnant women is homicide (it is), Greta calls on-screen Amy (feigning ignorance that the real Amy is right next to her) a “spoiled,” “rich bitch.” She goes on to say, “While she doesn’t deserve it, there are consequences.” While this is a commentary on privilege and Greta has survived abuse too, this also amounts to victim-blaming 101.

But the victim-blaming doesn’t stop there. One of Amy’s exes talks to Nick and tells him how she falsely accused him of rape and had a restraining order placed on him. He tells Nick that when he saw her on the news missing, “I thought there’s Amy. She’s gone from being raped to being murdered.” Again this underscores the myth that women lie about rape and abuse. But the numbers are so low for reports of false rape and domestic violence that they are almost non-existent.

Victim-blaming myths permeate every facet of our society. Janay Rice’s abuse and the resulting #WhyIStayed conversation recently highlighted the myriad myths people believe about intimate partner violence, particularly when it comes to women of color. People feel they need “proof” to verify or corroborate a victim/survivor’s trauma. Society perpetually places the onus on women for their abuse rather than on where it belongs: with the abuser. As we’ve seen with Marissa Alexander, the legal system doesn’t reward but rather punishes domestic violence survivors. This happens again and again, over and over. Women are not believed. And it’s dangerous to keep feeding this narrative.

Rape is “an epidemic.” Violence against women is an epidemic. We live in a rape culture that inculcates the abuse and objectification of women and dismisses violence against women. Society makes every excuse for abusers while it unilaterally shames and blames victims and survivors of intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault.

Some might try to assuage Gone Girl’s misogyny by declaring Amy’s misandry or by underscoring that there are two female characters – Detective Rhonda Boney and Margo Dunne – who are onto Amy’s game. But it doesn’t. When you have a protagonist doing despicable things, the film/TV series often straddles a fine line between condemnation and glorification. However, there is a way for a film/TV series to delineate their message: by the comments and perspectives of ancillary characters. Breaking Bad illustrates this beautifully. Despite what many fanboys got wrong, we are NOT supposed to identify with power-hungry, abusive, rapist Walter White. We may be fascinated by Walter’s fierce intelligence. But we are supposed to identify with Jesse and Skyler, both of whom are the heart and conscience of the show. They are the ones telling us the audience, both overtly and covertly, that Walter’s actions are despicable and monstrous.

In Gone Girl, almost every character condemns and despises Amy. They loathe her for her manipulations and how she has framed Nick. But no character comments on how Amy’s actions reinforce rape culture. Not one. Rhonda could have easily mentioned the stats for women reporting rape or domestic abuse, how few rape and abuse cases are brought to trial and even fewer convicted because of victim-blaming biases. Nick’s sister Margo could have said how horrible Amy’s schemes are not only for her brother but the implications for other women too. But everyone in the film only focuses on how Amy’s actions impact Nick. Nick even says at one point in the film, “I’m so sick of being picked apart by women.” (Boo hoo, poor Nick. Isn’t that every misogynist’s anthem??) So when Nick slams Amy’s head into the wall and calls her a “cunt” towards the end of the film — despite his abusive actions and misogynist language — we the audience are supposed to sympathize with him because he just wants to be a good dad, because he’s the one victimized by this manipulative shrew.

I wish I could love this film without reservations. I wish I could say that Gone Girl is a subversive feminist film exposing myriad gender biases and generating a much-needed dialogue on rape and domestic violence. Yet it reinforces dangerous myths rather than shattering them. The embedded “Cool Girl” speech rails against the patriarchal notion that women serve as nothing more than accessories and sexual objects to men. But the film falters by playing into a victim-blaming narrative reinforcing rape culture.

We need more complex female protagonists. We need more female anti-heroes and villains. If only we could have one in a film that doesn’t simultaneously perpetuate the misogynist notion that women lie about rape and abuse.

Megan Kearns is Bitch Flicks’ Social Media Director, a freelance writer and a feminist vegan blogger. She’s a member of the Boston Online Film Critics Association (BOFCA). She tweets at @OpinionessWorld.

Rape as Narrative Device in ‘American Horror Story’

I recently began watching ‘American Horror Story’ on Netflix to see what all the hullaballoo was about, and I quickly became a die-hard fan of the series. I’ve heard some feminist criticism that popular television’s rape trope is abused and unnecessary. Many viewers find rape scenes more difficult to endure than the goriest and bloodiest of murder scenes in film and on TV. ‘AHS’ depicts rape in each of its three seasons (season four: “Freak Show” begins in October of this year), and I’ve been trying to make some sense of these scenes: all very different, yet centered around the idea that rape is its own horror, worse than murder. Sexual violence in film has always been controversial, in part because it works as an acknowledgment of something so many victims are afraid to share or discuss, even with other victims. ‘AHS’s handful of rape scenes reference gender roles, mental illness, and identity politics, and do in fact have a place in the storylines in which we find ourselves so invested.

Written by Jenny Lapekas.

SPOILERS GALORE, PEOPLE!

I recently began watching American Horror Story on Netflix to see what all the hullaballoo was about, and I quickly became a die-hard fan of the series. I’ve heard some feminist criticism that popular television’s rape trope is abused and unnecessary. Many viewers find rape scenes more difficult to endure than the goriest and bloodiest of murder scenes in film and on TV. AHS depicts rape in each of its three seasons (season four: “Freak Show” begins in October of this year), and I’ve been trying to make some sense of these scenes: all very different, yet centered around the idea that rape is its own horror, worse than murder. Sexual violence in film has always been controversial, in part because it works as an acknowledgment of something so many victims are afraid to share or discuss, even with other victims. AHS’s handful of rape scenes reference gender roles, mental illness, and identity politics, and do in fact have a place in the storylines in which we find ourselves so invested.

We frequently discover rape in the horror genre for obvious reasons, and the well-known rape-revenge narrative (I Spit on Your Grave, Last House on the Left) is present on AHS, as well. While this marker of feminist feedback surfaces in the series, the show also works to introduce the rare female-on-male rape scene (a game-changer, for sure–see Descent) along with some very disturbing mommy issues.

AHS addresses all of our darkest fears, but the good news is that horror actually helps us to deal with our personal fears because it gives them shape and helps us to rationalize our feelings, thus unshackling us from the unknown and destroying our dread in the process. The moment something mysterious is given a name, its spell over us is broken, and we’re free to discover something else that goes bump in the night. Girls and women are told that rape is the worst thing that can happen to us (“He could have killed you…or worse”), and it’s no surprise that we find it in every season of AHS thus far, so I think it’s worthwhile to consider how the show constructs these unnerving scenes and to assess our response to them.

AHS offers the recurring theme of characters’ pasts catching up to them, reminding us that we can’t outrun the tragic mistakes we’ve made; Ben impregnates his young mistress in “Murder House,” Anne Frank recognizes Dr. Arden as an ex-Nazi in “Asylum,” and Fiona spends eternity in a farmhouse with the Axe Man for being such a wicked bitch in “Coven.” It would only make sense that the show’s rapists pay for their crimes, and this is our reward for watching some very problematic and complex rapes for three seasons.

In season one, “Murder House,” Vivien (Connie Britton) is raped by “the Rubber Man,” who is a stranger to us for a few episodes, until we discover that he’s actually Tate. The well-intentioned Ben finally forces him to admit that he raped his wife and fathered one of Vivien’s twin boys. Obviously, Tate is troubled; he shoots up his school, killing several students, and also sets his stepfather on fire, which permanently disfigures him, but we root for him anyway–not simply because female fans are in love with Evan Peters’ charm and good looks, but because we want to believe that deep down Tate is a good guy who loves Violet. It’s also significant that Tate dons the creepy rubber suit when he kills and rapes; in this way, Tate forfeits any identity associated with the costume, as if an idea were assaulting and impregnating Vivien, rather than a teenage boy.

We see Tate's potential to become a good person when he's with Violet. — We see Tate’s potential to become a good person when he’s with Violet.

Plenty of innocent people are injured and killed throughout the series: the eerie yet lovable Addy is hit and killed by a car in “Murder House,” Grace is savagely killed with an axe by Alma in “Asylum,” and Nan is drowned in a bathtub by Fiona (cinematic goddess Jessica Lange) and Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett) in “Coven” precisely because she is “innocent,” and the guilty parties always seem to pay for their crimes, in one form or another. For example, the mentally disabled Nan (the lovely and talented Jamie Brewer has Down Syndrome in real life) is sacrificed to Papa Legba (a sort of voodoo Boogie Man) as an innocent, but Fiona explains, “She killed the neighbor, but the bitch had it coming,” an example of the show’s signature black humor and also our willingness as viewers to play judge, jury, and executioner as we watch the addictive carnage of AHS. After all, the oh-so-devout neighbor did kill her husband and son both, magnifying the hypocrisy we often encounter in seemingly the most pious of individuals. Whether we’ll admit that we gain some joy and satisfaction from watching this horrid lady drink bleach and die determines what kind of viewers and people we happen to be.

I think one of the themes AHS wishes to convey is that none of us are entirely innocent…or evil for that matter. “Original sin” runs rampant throughout season two, “Asylum,” where many scenes are structured around religion and humanity’s treatment of God as deity, concept, and man’s invention. In this season, Lana is chained to a bed and raped by Dr. Thredson, a man she trusted and confided in before he abducts her. Because of his deep-seated abandonment issues with his mother, he declares, “Baby needs colostrum” and begins “nursing” from the helpless Lana. Since colostrum is the first milk produced during pregnancy, this sentiment is deeply symbolic, as the nourishment ensures bonding between mom and baby. Lana’s rape serves as a catalyst for her journalistic career and bestselling memoir, and she ultimately kills the product and evidence of the crime: her estranged son, who’s just as whacked out as his father.

At times, Lana tries to appeal to the doctor's obsession with his mother in order to escape. — At times, Lana tries to appeal to the doctor’s obsession with his mother, in order to escape.

After an exorcism is performed on a patient, of course Satan chooses the most innocent and pious resident at Briarcliff Manor: Sister Mary Eunice; yet, we’re not prepared to watch her rape the good-hearted Monsignor. An important current discussion surrounding rape culture is how any woman can overpower a man, and this scene utilizes the binary of good and evil to build on that reality. This scene also works well because the Monsignor seems to be fighting biology, trying desperately to resist what he really wants–sex with a beautiful woman, the very thing God tells him he must resist at all cost. Fittingly, the Monsignor is the one to finally rid Briarcliff of the evil spirit by throwing the sister down to the ground level, killing her (symbolism, much?!). This rape, then, is the climax of the devil’s reign at Briarcliff before he’s sent back to hell. When a strange little girl is abandoned at Briarcliff, Sister explains, “All I ever wanted was for people to like me.” Her possession story can be seen as the Sister gaining some control and self-confidence in both her personal life and her duties at the mental hospital, but sacrificing her virtue in the process. Sister Jude (Jessica Lange) tells her, “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately, Sister, but it’s a decided improvement,” alerting us to the idea that we can find evil more appealing than righteousness.

Sister Mary Eunice tells the Monsignor, “Your body disagrees with you.” When he tries to explain, “I gave my body to Christ,” she (Satan) responds, “What has he given to you?” — Sister Mary Eunice tells the Monsignor, “Your body disagrees with you.” When he tries to explain, “I gave my body to Christ,” she counters, “What has he given to you?”

In season three, “Coven,” we find the rape-revenge narrative when Madison is gang-raped at a frat party in New Orleans. There’s some obvious foreshadowing when she tells a boy to get her a drink and asks him if he wants to be her slave. Within rape culture, Madison’s assault can be seen as “putting her in her place.” When the boys flee the party, she uses her powers to flip their bus and not only kill everyone onboard but break their bodies into pieces. Probably the only kind thing she does throughout season three, Madison helps Zoe to put Kyle (Evan Peters) back together using the body parts of his frat brothers. Madison says, “We take the best boy parts, attach them to Kyle’s head, and build the perfect boyfriend.” The grotesque objectification of the male body (in death, no less) is oddly refreshing. Kyle’s heart, soul, and mind are still intact after he regains his senses, and he eventually falls in love with Zoe.

Madison tells Zoe that Kyle is still "kind of cute," even when he's in a thousand pieces in a morgue. — Madison tells Zoe that Kyle is still “kind of cute,” even when he’s in a thousand pieces in a morgue.

Madison’s tight dress, celeb status, and rude treatment of a random frat guy all point to the possibility of victim blaming, but the witch doesn’t let the young men live long enough to point the finger at her. Their quick exit and attack on the innocent Kyle, however, are enough to confirm their guilt, or rather the acknowledgement that a crime had in fact been committed that night. Madison’s magical powers and ability to turn over the huge bus with a swipe of her hand are reflections of a feminist fantasy: an eye for an eye. This rape takes place early on in the series both to convey Madison’s metaphysical powers and to remind us that despite this alliance with the occult, she can still be the target of a sexual assault. We likely find ourselves joyful that these young boys die in a gruesome way after what they do to Madison. Here, the witch archetype is presented as a source of feminine power and feminist vengeance. The moral of “Coven”: Don’t piss off a witch.

A reflection of real-life headlines, the boys film the attack using their cell phones.

Another female-on-male rape takes place when Zoe visits one of Madison’s rapists in the hospital. We may be hesitant to view this as a rape scene since Zoe is a woman raping an unconscious man. Some critics may even say that the crime couldn’t possibly be rape because of course he would “want it” if he were conscious, but we should be careful not to default to that logic, because it’s the same logic used by rapists in victim blaming. Although this doesn’t seem an act of violence, Zoe rapes the boy because she has discovered that any man she sleeps with soon dies (vagina dentata, anyone?). I suppose this rule doesn’t apply to Kyle since, in a sense, he’s already dead.

Zoe tells us, “Since I’ll never be able to experience real love, I might as well put this curse to some use.”

Indeed, retribution is at work on AHS. We discover that the college-aged Kyle is chronically molested by his mother, and we’re surely cheering when he bludgeons her to death with a lamp. Evan Peters gives a stellar performance in every season of AHS thus far, and acts as an ally when he attempts to stop his frat brothers from raping Madison. While AHS clearly depicts the rape-revenge storyline in “Asylum” and “Coven,” “Murder House” offers a slightly different representation of rape. When Vivien is raped by a ghost, she’s unable to completely make sense of the situation until she becomes a ghost herself after dying in childbirth. And even after Ben forces Tate to admit all the wrongs he’s committed in both life and death, Tate is not granted any forgiveness or reprieve; rather, he’s banished by Violet, who he claims is “everything he wants.” Funny enough, what Vivien wants most–a functional family and a new baby–is partially achieved via several acts of violence: her rape, Violet’s suicide, and Ben’s scorned mistress hanging him above the stairs. In fact, the family’s last name “Harmon” sounds a lot like the word “harmony.”

Vivien thinks it's her husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) inside the rubber suit. — Vivien thinks it’s her husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) inside the rubber suit.

Biology dictates that we avoid the grotesque, the disturbing, and the bizarre, while AHS pleads with us to confront the demons and monsters around and within us, unveiling the reality that we are capable of the same evils we meet throughout the series. We can learn something from the unbelieving nun, the bible-thumping murderer next door, the ironically retarded clairvoyant: not only are appearances deceiving, but if we continue to construct our own realities from them, it will inevitably bite us in the ass.

Rape sequences are supposed to be horrifying and unsettling, and it’s important to examine how we watch rape and why its inclusion in film and television is not meant to demoralize us or assault our senses, but rather to make us think. Other than the obvious crimes of rape and murder, the show investigates adultery, the gross abuse of power, heresy in its many forms, and betrayal; in fact, there are so many knives sticking out of characters’ backs throughout each season, we’re uncertain who is going to be next. The rapists we meet on AHS inevitably pay for what they’ve done, rendering the series a feminist work and a platform for further discussion of what scares us the most and how we navigate that fear.

5 Ways ‘American Horror Story: Coven’ Both Conforms to and Challenges Misogynistic Tropes, ‘American Horror Story: Coven’ Exposes Rape Culture: Is this Social Commentary Effective?, ‘American Horror Story: Freak Show’ to be less campy than ‘Coven,’ FX chief says

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Jenny has a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at Alvernia University. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.

‘Non-Stop’: Gate-Check Your Brain

I want to give ‘Non-Stop’ the benefit of the doubt, because I truly enjoyed it, certainly more than any of the other films in the Grizzled Action Hero phase of Liam Neeson’s career. It deftly plays with audience expectations and genre-savvy to yield more red herrings than a Lenten Fish Fry to keep the whodunit simmering for most of its tight 106-minute runtime.

Liam Neeson in Grizzled Action Hero mode in 'Non-Stop' — Liam Neeson in Grizzled Action Hero mode in *Non-Stop*

I want to give Non-Stop the benefit of the doubt, because I truly enjoyed it, certainly more than any of the other films in the Grizzled Action Hero phase of Liam Neeson’s career. It deftly plays with audience expectations and genre-savvy to yield more red herrings than a Lenten Fish Fry to keep the whodunit simmering for most of its tight 106-minute runtime.

Julianne Moore in 'Non-Stop' — Julianne Moore in *Non-Stop*

An example of how Non-Stop plays with tropes is its use of lead actress Julianne Moore. “The Most Famous Person Did It” is such a classic problem with mystery film and television I remember noticing it in reruns of Murder She Wrote when I was in grade school. Non-Stop knows you are wondering if Julianne Moore is slumming it here because she wants that juicy villain monologue at the end. So she gets lots of opportunities to do suspiciously weird things, but also plenty of opportunities to be vulnerable and likable, so we don’t just assume she’s the bad guy and decide to just watch Air Force One again. At some point we wonder… could she possibly be an age-appropriate love-interest for Liam Neeson? It’s almost inconceivable!

"You do know she's ONLY eight years younger than him, right?" — “You do know she’s ONLY eight years younger than him, right?”

Then there’s a half-dozen or so recognizable character actors taking turns being potentially sinister and/or mean enough we want to see Liam Neeson punch them, even if they might not be the terrorist in question. (Liam Neeson will ultimately punch nearly all of them). Is it the shifty businessman? The genteel captain? The John McClane wannabe who is already making fists with his toes because he’s got so much anger? The squirrelly oversharer played by that guy named Skeet or Street or Poot or something? The brown guy in the kufi (please don’t be the brown guy in the kufi)?

Maybe it is Lupita!!!

Lupita Nyong'o in Non-Stop — Lupita Nyong’o in *Non-Stop*

Spoiler alert: it is not Lupita. In fact, one of the most precious things about this movie is that it clearly got a last-minute Lupita-heavy re-edit to reflect her It Girl status. Her character is named (Gwen) but she’s really just an extra (Flight Attendant #2), with no significant dialogue (the film would even pass the Bechdel Test without her!) and zero characterization. But there are so many pointless cuts to Lupita B-Roll. Liam Neeson sneaks around the galley. But what is Lupita doing? (Checking the latch on an overhead bin.) Liam Neeson defies his superiors at DHS. But what is Lupita doing? (Picking a piece of lint off her uniform.) Liam Neeson punches a guy. BUT WHAT. IS. LUPITA. DOING!? (Making a “who is this punch-happy jackass?” face.)

"Quick, cut to Lupita!" — Lupita ruefully thinks, “Get off my plane.”

But I digress. Everyone’s a suspect (I seriously entertained the notion that the shy unaccompanied minor would be an accessory to the terrorist plot somehow), and that’s a big part of why Non-Stop works. But scratch that seemingly clever surface and Non-Stop has a quintessential Idiot Plot, as defined by Roger Ebert: “a plot containing problems that would be solved instantly if all the characters were not idiots.” It’s cat and mouse between a villain doing asinine things for incomprehensible reasons and a hero who responds irrationally, which could all be avoided if the pilot would just make an unscheduled landing (I know from long-haul flights, and you’re not “in the Middle of the Atlantic!” When Halifax is 45 minutes behind you).

Often the most plausible explanation for the main character’s strange behaviors is “because that’s the way a man’s man would do it.” Liam Neeson doesn’t tell anyone he was [minor spoiler] just forced to kill his partner in self-defense because… that makes him all the more tragically guarded with his emotional pain? (He’s got the requisite dead daughter backstory and surprisingly not-inconvenient drinking problem.) I don’t really understand why being tragically guarded with emotional pain is on the Action Hero Checklist to begin with. Look, I’ve got dead family and stunted emotions too, and I’m decidedly not a badass.

Non-Stop is usually gripping enough to distract you from its various weaknesses, but it’s got no choice but to tear open its nonsensical underbelly when the villain (or villains!?!) are revealed, and no, there isn’t some hidden agenda that makes all the ridiculous stuff that’s happened make any more sense. Fortunately the movie is almost over then.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town. Her feelings about Lupita Nyong’o are comparable to Key & Peele’s valets’ regarding “Liam Neesons.”

“Post-Feminist” ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ is a Difficult Labor

Though the core idea of story–a young woman’s fear and uncertainty of what is happening to her body during pregnancy–is timeless, the execution of the remake is fairly dated. In the original, Rosemary is a naive housewife, yet she still manages to be tougher and emerges a more fully realized character than the remake’s Rosemary who stops struggling and pretty much does what she’s told once she becomes pregnant.

On one hand, the rational behind NBC’s two-night miniseries of Rosemary’s Baby is clear. Take a best-selling event novel, the type everyone was reading and talking about at dinner parties in 1967, and make it into event television. Along with the network’s recent live production of The Sound of Music and upcoming live musicals and limited series on the other networks, it’s an attempt to bring audience back to live TV viewing, commercials and all.

But Rosemary’s Baby, based on Roman Polanski’s 1968 film, itself based on the novel by Ira Levin (also author of The Stepford Wives), is a strange choice for a miniseries. There aren’t a lot of plot points in the story; basically young couple Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move in next door to an older couple who quickly grow fond of them; after a night of dark hallucinations she can barely remember, Rosemary becomes pregnant, and goes through a difficult pregnancy where she loses weight and craves raw meat and awakens after giving birth to discover the baby is the antichrist and that earlier she was raped by the devil.

As a result, the story is stretched thin over a four-hour runtime and many new and ultimately pointless plots are added in, along with increased gore and violence in comparison to the original film. Perhaps the choice of story was influenced by the recent popularity of horror TV programs, like American Horror Story and Hannibal.

The miniseries also carries the baggage of its association with Polanski, an old friend of the miniseries’ director Agnieszka Holland. Though the original film is commonly accepted as a masterpiece, many critics, Hollywood players, and viewers have spoken on their desire to boycott his work (through just as many have spoken out in his support) due to his sexual abuse of a child. Choosing Rosemary’s Baby out of all the classic films available to remake suggests at least a tacit approval of Polanski and Holland had even planned to give him a cameo role, though scheduling didn’t work out.

Rosemary is told her pregnancy is making her look like a zombie

In interviews, Holland has mentioned her desire to portray Rosemary’s Baby from a “post-feminist” standpoint and to make the character stronger and more active. Postnatal and prenatal depression are important to her adaptation, where horror is derived from the nature of pregnancy where, as she says, Rosemary is “dependent on the people who decide, instead of her, what to do with her body.”

To modernize the story, 2014’s Rosemary (Zoe Saldana) is a former ballet dancer used to be being the primary breadwinner, while her husband Guy (Patrick J. Adams) struggles to write a novel. After a devastating miscarriage, the couple leaves New York for Paris, where Guy will take a one-year teaching job at the Sorbonne and attempt to support her while she recovers from the trauma.

Though the core idea of story–a young woman’s fear and uncertainty of what is happening to her body during pregnancy–is timeless, the execution of the remake is fairly dated. In the original, Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, is a naive housewife who spends her days decorating her apartment and buoying her husband’s acting ambitions, yet she still manages to be tougher and emerges a more fully realized character than the remake’s Rosemary who stops struggling and pretty much does what she’s told once she becomes pregnant. The casting of action star Saldana as Rosemary suggests the character is meant to be strong, independent women who takes control of her own life.

And at first, she appears to be. In part one, there’s even an action sequence where Rosemary chases a man who stole her purse and gets called brave by a cop. For a while, she acts as an amateur detective, attempting to investigate the disappearance of the couple who lived in her apartment previously, who appear to have met a tragic end; however, throughout part two, which chronicles her pregnancy, she floats around, quiet and weak, allowing her husband, neighbors and doctors to tell her how to take care of herself, ceding her investigation to a police detective and a friend.

In the original, the true star of the story is Rosemary’s increasing paranoia and the suspense and darkness that manage to permeate the film despite most of action taking place indoors in brightly lit rooms. The miniseries could have given Rosemary more agency without changing her actions too greatly if it brought viewers deeper into her mind and dreams; despite the title and her near constant presence onscreen, for most of the second half, it’s difficult to intuit what Rosemary is thinking.

Rosemary’s investigation falls away after she becomes pregnant

With the internet as a resource for medical information, it would be very easy for 2014’s Rosemary to research the herbs in a drink she’s given and the host of prenatal conditions her doctor claims are perfectly normal. Though doctors in both versions tell her not to read pregnancy books or ask her friends about their experiences, it’s difficult to believe a modern-day woman would agree to stay so ignorant about her own body, accept chastisement for daring to question her doctor’s medical advice and refuse to consult friends, mommy blogs or even WebMD on her condition. It’s believable enough in the 60s, an era when men were expected to know more about women’s bodies than they did. It recalls a conversation in an episode of Masters of Sex, set around the same time, where a group of women agreed that they found the very idea of a female gynecologist creepy. The addition of an earlier to miscarriage to the plot appears to be an attempt to take this into account, suggesting Rosemary put up with the pain because she is determined to have a heathy baby this time and do everything her doctor tells her that maybe she didn’t do last time.

The choice of Paris as a setting appeals to the city’s place in the North American cultural imagination as the seat of old world sophistication and mystery. The move may also be an attempt to isolate the characters in a strange city where they don’t know the language, but this is idea is quickly abandoned. In an early scene, Rosemary complains that it’s difficult to be at a party where everyone is speaking French, but the partygoers realize this and quickly switch to English, which they default to for the rest of the series.

The original’s Castevets, Roman and Minnie (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon), an elderly Manhattan couple, are replaced by Roman and Margaux Castevets (Jason Isaacs and Carole Bouquet), much younger, urbane Parisians, whose relationship with the Woodhouses is suspicious from the very beginning. Much of the appeal of the Castavets in the original was the supposed harmlessness–yes, they were noisy and eccentric, but no one would ever suspect that a couple of kindly grandparent figures were satanists. But it’s hard to understand why the Woodhouses originally trust the 2014 Castavets, who impose themselves into the lives of a young couple they barely know, to the point of offering them a lavish apartment for free and inviting them to fetish parties.

Roman lounges in the trappings of his extreme wealth

More and more, it seems that our tendency when viewing modern movies is to be suspicious of the characters who seem the most trustworthy; charming, handsome psychopaths have become the norm. Perhaps that was the thinking behind the change, that it would be too easy to immediately suspect something was off about sweet old folks, better to do away with suspense all together and attempt to seduce viewers with glamour, foreign accents, and wealth. The things we yearn for, grow jealous of and thus, can be truly terrified of.

Despite its too-long runtime, the miniseries manages to feel rushed. By sticking too faithfully to the 1968 film, intriguing original plot lines are left no room to develop and seem pointless. We never find out why the building’s superintendent walks around on all fours like a dog or delve into the relationships between Guy and Margaux and between Guy and Rosemary’s friend Julia. There’s also the odd inclusion of multiple kisses between Rosemary and Margaux, which are linked to Margaux’s satanic ritual and suggest lesbianism goes hand-in-hand with devil worship. The miniseries gives a needlessly complicated solution to the mystery of the missing couple and the devil’s identity, suggesting Roman is also the devil, an immortal named Steven Mercato and maybe even Rosemary’s cat.

The Devil appears infrequently in the form of Steven Mercato

Moreover, because the miniseries is structured so that Rosemary is only pregnant in the second half, much of the original’s prolonged post-birth scenes are eliminated. This leads the story to rush through the last act, taking away a great deal of the strength and refusal to submit that the character displayed in these scenes.

Though Holland has spoken of her feminist intentions and Rosemary’s powerlessness is obvious, it’s unclear from the miniseries that Holland is making is a feminist statement about it. There’s a lot of material to explore in the story that Holland easily use make this point, but ignores. In both versions, Rosemary is shocked to find that her husband supposedly had sex with her while she was unconscious. She quickly moves on and it’s never acknowledged that even in the version of the night’s events that Rosemary accepts, the child was conceived through martial rape. In addition, the original attempts to explain Rosemary’s meekness through references to her strict Catholic upbringing; no attempts are made in the miniseries to suggest such a background for Saldana’s Rosemary. Instead, the only mention of religion in the miniseries is the dead woman’s Coptic Christian faith.

There’s also a clear feminist idea in the basic plot, which suggests that women are often discredited and called crazy because of the functions of their bodies, commonly seem in the idea that periods make women too irrational to take leadership roles or in the idea of “pregnancy brain” as explored in recent sitcoms. When Rosemary suggests that something is wrong in her pregnancy and her neighbors are witches, she’s dismissed as being delusional and experiencing pre-partum psychosis. When, in the original, Rosemary says she can hear the baby crying next door, it’s dismissed as post-partum depression. Holland appears uninterested in this theme, as she told the New York Times, “We’re not sure if it really doesn’t happen inside her head.”

Rosemary accepts the devil-baby as her child

Holland could be suggesting that the story is meant to be allegorical. In the miniseries, Guy says he is surprised he is still able to find Rosemary attractive, though he refers to his decision to let the devil rape her. This statement recalls a woman’s fear that pregnancy will make her unattractive to her partner or cause her to be seen as an incubator. Rosemary’s discovery that the baby is the son of the devil and her desire to hurt him could refer to post-partum depression. However, if these are attempts at allegory, they are unclear and appears half-hearted.

I think the most interesting element of the story for a modern viewer should be the relationship between the Woodhouses. There was nothing special about their relationship at the start; they were young, attractive and constantly about to tear each other’s clothes off, but never had the chemistry, shared interests or inside jokes that would make the eventual deterioration of their partnership compelling. Guy is a secret sexist masquerading as a modern equalitarian man; early on his suggestion to Rosemary that he wants to support her for awhile seems innocent, but in light of his betrayal of her later, suggests he may have felt emasculated by her earnings. He wants to be a famous writer, but when he’s stalled by writer’s block, he’s easily convinced to sell his wife and her reproductive capabilities as if they were his property. Rosemary becomes a victim without ever being given a choice. Rosemary’s only choices come after the birth when she decides to help raise her child, suggesting that her maternal love has a stronger hold over her than anger over her abuse or fear of her son’s satanic paternity. The couple are each vulnerable to gender roles–Rosemary’s role as a parent and Guy’s career ambitions are their weaknesses.

Rosemary and Guy never have an appealing or convincing relationship

It is often difficult to read media with explicitly sexist set-ups; the original story probably attempted to expose Guy’s betrayal and the view of Rosemary as his property by the other characters for its negative connotations, but the film’s refusal to do anything extreme or subversive (What if instead, Rosemary was the ambitious one who made the deal, or the couple decided on it together? What if she found out what had been done to her midway through the story and was allowed to struggle with it? Or if she obsessively researched her pregnancy and was dismissed as a hypochondriac? What if Rosemary’s pregnancy blog became a media sensation, or the Castavets shepherded Rosemary through fertility treatments?) in its modernization, suggests the filmmakers did not truly grasp the sexism inherent in the plot. Instead, by limiting her agency and sticking her in a retro-gender role, they merely create a passive tragedy of a meek young woman’s abuse at the hands of her husband and friends.

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

“I Choose Gru!”: on ‘Despicable Me 2’ and Lucy Wilde

I only recently discovered the ‘Despicable Me’ movies, and I’m overjoyed that I have an excuse to review the second one and to explicate its feminist elements, especially since so many women have primary roles in the ever-changing life of villain-turned-hero Gru (Steve Carell). In fact, I love these films so much, I enjoyed a Despicable-themed birthday cake earlier this week. It’s no mistake that the second movie concludes while Cinco de Mayo festivities ensue–my birthday!

Written by Jenny Lapekas.

I only recently discovered the Despicable Me movies, and I’m overjoyed that I have an excuse to review the second one and to explicate its feminist elements, especially since so many women have primary roles in the ever-changing life of villain-turned-hero Gru (Steve Carell). In fact, I love these films so much, I enjoyed a Despicable-themed birthday cake earlier this week. It’s no mistake that the second movie concludes while Cinco de Mayo festivities ensue–my birthday!

Gru returns to us in Despicable Me 2 (Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaid, 2013) as a nurturing father to three wonderful little girls–Agnes, Edith, and Margo–and we find that he’s able to merge his fatherhood duties with his exciting lifestyle. In the first film, Gru’s main priority is to become the most evil villain in the world, and he competes with the nerdy yet skilled Vector (Jason Segel) for the title. While Gru’s evil deeds range from cutting in line for coffee to encouraging his ugly dog to poop on his neighbor’s flowers, he literally gives up the moon for his girls, which now includes his new wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig), sent from the Anti-Villain League to request his help in pursuing a new villain. Because Lucy completes the image the girls maintain of the exemplary family before they were adopted, and she finds a way into Gru’s heart as well, I would like to focus primarily on her in this post.

Gru is slow to recognize that Lucy's antics complement his nicely. — Gru is slow to recognize that Lucy’s antics complement his nicely.

The various roles Lucy plays in this movie are pivotal to the plot and character development we see throughout as we come to understand her as a professional, a cunning and intelligent woman, and an undeniably feminist hero. That isn’t to say that Gru is not a feminist character as well–indeed, he is very much so. Lucy becomes Gru’s work partner as the two get themselves into trouble, only to come to each other’s rescue. She then becomes the temporarily unattainable love interest, then the damsel in distress, and finally Gru’s bride and a mother to the precocious girls, who find their new mom pretty amazing. As Gru is busy uncovering clues for the Anti-Villain League and combating Margo’s (Miranda Cosgrove) newfound interest in boys, he can’t help but fall for the poise and quirky charm that Lucy emanates.

At Agnes’s birthday party, an unnamed woman is persistent in setting Gru up on a blind date. Why the push to find someone to love and marry? This buzzing in Gru’s ear is symptomatic of the heteronormative agenda Gru is struggling to resist. Gru rejects the woman’s invitations both intellectually and socially by not-so-politely declining, and bodily by spraying her with a garden hose. His comical proclamation “I did not see you there…or there,” as he knocks her off her feet, signifies the ex-villain’s outright refusal to acknowledge his own “aloneness” (not to be confused with “loneliness”) that others may see when they look at a single (and new) father. Quite simply, Gru feels perfectly fulfilled by his daughters and his rather eccentric life fighting villains and manufacturing delicious jams and jellies.

However, I think it’s important for us to notice this dynamic as a downtrodden Gru admits to “liking” Lucy to his youngest daughter Agnes (Elsie Fisher), trusting her with this intimate and sensitive knowledge. Although Gru inevitably gives in to the social contract that we should all marry, especially when we have children, he does so on his own terms and in the name of true love.

Dressed as a fairy princess for the birthday party, Gru is excitedly told, “I know someone whose husband just died!”

Lucy arrives quite unannounced and throws Gru in the trunk of her car after assaulting him with her “lipstick taser,” a handy tool that helps her to take advantage of her femininity while fighting crime. After Gru proves his strength and cunning in the first movie, it’s a bit of a surprise to watch an unknown character take him down so quickly. However, it’s only fitting that the pair then fall in love and marry; Gru has met his match in more ways than one. Lucy is kind yet assertive, and possibly most important, she knows how to balance these qualities to embody the type of woman that Gru’s daughters can hope to become someday. We love her even as Gru’s minions are chasing her car to save their boss, and we continue to adore her even as she embarks on her journey to Australia to take a new job far away from Gru and the girls, only to jump out of the plane and claim Gru as hers.

As we'll see, the violence in the film is naturalized as a source of comedy. — As we’ll see, the violence in the film is naturalized as a source of comedy.

When Gru is forced to go on a date with the insufferable caricature Shannon (Kristen Schaal), Lucy takes the initiative to end the date prematurely because she sees that Gru is being demeaned by the shallow woman, specifically for wearing a hair piece in order to hide the fact that he’s bald. In perhaps one of the darker scenes in the film (along with Gru indirectly threatening to kill his neighbor’s dog in the first movie), Lucy shoots Shannon with a tranquilizer dart, and the two load Shannon’s inanimate body on the roof of Lucy’s car, reasoning to bystanders that she has drunk a bit too much wine with her meal, and they proceed to dump her body at her doorstep as if she’s dead. If we look carefully later on, we see that Shannon is actually a guest at the couple’s wedding.

Gru is thankful to Lucy for rescuing him.

In the final action scene, I think it’s important to refrain from classifying Lucy as purely a “damsel in distress,” although this is how I reference her above–because this is, after all, what she is when she’s strapped to a rocket–along with a comically large shark–that’s set to launch into a volcano. However, from the moment we meet Lucy, we know she’s self-sufficient and more than anything, smart; after all, her decision to love Gru is smart as he’s likely the only person capable of defeating El Macho. In fact, every decision Lucy makes throughout Despicable Me 2 is for the betterment of Gru and his growing family. He doesn’t rescue Lucy–just as he rescued Edith, Agnes, and Margo in the first movie–because these characters are helpless females; rather, this conclusion confirms his placement as a hero rather than a villain. On the contrary, the women found in the Despicable movies are quite capable of protecting themselves and those they care about.

As Gru attempts to deactivate the rocket, Lucy offers her expertise: “Is there a red one? It’s usually the red one.”

In the wedding scene, which of course involves some skillful dancing, Agnes recites a monologue that she struggles with earlier in the film: an homage to her mother. The meaning of this recitation has now shifted since she’s gained a mother. Earlier, we also enjoy a private moment when Agnes first meets Lucy at the mall and she’s simply dazzled by her presence, a nice precursor to the girls coming to know her as their own mother and celebrating their status as a complete and unique family.

Agnes recites, “She kisses my boo-boos, she braids my hair, we love you mothers, everywhere, and my new mom Lucy, is beyond compare.”

Because of Lucy and the girls, Gru comes to understand that he’s not merely a villain in a perpetually bad mood; he’s a caring father, a loving husband, and a boss who’s willing to give goodnight kisses to each and every one of his funny, yellow workers, who are, after all, part of his family as well. Both Despicable films can be read as feminist pieces as Gru is transformed by the feminine energy he finds pervading his life, influencing his decisions, and causing him to reevaluate his ideals as a villain and a single man. A concurrently responsible yet offbeat character, Gru represents the new family man in this second film. With the introduction of the delightful Lucy, Gru finds yet another reason to strive to be his best possible self by taking on the role of husband and learning that if he overcomes his fear of the unknown (and women!), he can attain true happiness.

A lovely wedding photo, complete with Gru's cranky mother and adorable minions. — A lovely wedding photo, complete with Gru’s cranky mother and adorable minions.

With the upcoming release of Despicable Me 3 (2017), we can expect more zaniness from the extraordinary family!

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Portrait of the Dead Girl: Victim, Saint, and Enigma of the Crime Narrative

More often than not, the victim of violent crime in film and TV is a woman. With your average procedural, almost every episode features a woman who has been raped or one who has been raped and murdered. In real life, women are disproportionately the victims of violent crimes and these stories increase awareness of the physical and psychological aftermath faced by these women, their friends and family and society.
However, by positioning a narrative to begin with the victim already dead and voiceless, she is only that, a victim in the story, never allowed to become a person.

More often than not, the victim of violent crime in film and TV is a woman. With your average procedural, take for instance, Law and Order: SVU, almost every episode features a woman who has been raped or one who has been raped and murdered. In real life, women are disproportionately the victims of violent crimes and these stories increase awareness of the physical and psychological aftermath faced by these women, their friends and family, and society.

However, by positioning a narrative to begin with the victim already dead and voiceless, she is only that, a victim in the story, never allowed to become a person. This structure also creates distance, so the viewer is less likely to identify with the dead girl and feel true fear and sympathy for experiences.

The exploitation of the her person and body is also seen as evidence of sexism in the crime narrative. As in horror movies where the murders of women are more graphic and garner more screen time then those of men, the dead girl usually suffers extreme sexual violence and disfigurement, which are shot it graphic, loving detail. The crime scene or crime scene photographs are frequently shown and her suffering is discussed at length in near fetishistic tones.

Twin Peaks begins with the discovery of Laura, dead and wrapped in plastic

There is an appeal to the public imagination in the image of a beautiful young woman in peril, particularly a young, white women known to be popular among her peers and viewed as sweetly, saintly, and virginal. The much-loved cult TV show, Twin Peaks, originally centered around the investigation of the murder of beautiful, blue-eyed blonde Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and promotion for the series depended on viewers’ investment in the mystery of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” When The Killing premiered in 2011, its advertisements asking, “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?” were clearly influenced by Twin Peaks.

Along with the evocative question, the series was known for two iconic images of Laura, the dead girl, that stand in for the show in popular imagination: the homecoming portrait, which shows her rosy cheeked and smiling, and her dead body, fished out of the water wrapped in plastic, shades of gray and blue. The central importance of the portrait, which hangs at Laura’s high school as well as her family home, was inspired for the 1944 Otto Preminger film, Laura, where a detective fixates on the portrait of a glamorous murdered ad-exec and falls in love with her through it (luckily, it’s a case of mistaken identity and Laura’s not really dead).

Viewers so latched onto the idea of Laura Palmer, that actress Sheryl Lee, originally brought on to appear in a few scenes in the pilot, made reoccurring appearances in flashbacks as Laura and regular appearances as Laura’s look-a-like cousin Maddie Ferguson, as well as starring in the prequel film after the series ended.

In early episodes of the show, it’s suggested that lead investigator FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) has romantic feelings towards her and has a dream/prophetic vision of a seductive Laura, sitting with him in a mysterious red room. At the end of the dream, she whispers in his ear the identity of her killer. Though Cooper forgets what she said upon waking, his eventual memory of her words gives him certainty of her murderer’s identity. A victim of incestuous rape, abuse, and murder at the hands of her father, Leland (with an ancient demonic spirit, BOB, inside him–or something), Laura is allowed the satisfying and cathartic opportunity to name her killer and help to catch him.

In the fantasy of the series, this room is described as a sort of way-station to the afterlife, a refuge between good and evil and a part of the dangerous realm of pure evil, the Black Lodge, that holds onto human souls while demons walk the earth in their bodies, so Cooper’s dream is not in fact a dream, but Laura’s first opportunity to speak for herself. Before her death, she wrote in her secret diary (different from her regular diary) about her dream of this same encounter with Cooper.

After her death, the dead girl’s reputation is often changed according to the flawed Madonna/whore dichotomy and her neighbors, family, and peers come to realize she was not the person they thought she was. In procedurals, boyfriends learn their girlfriends had other lovers, and parents learn their daughters had sex lives. Though it’s rare, sometimes there’s the opposite revelation, as the boyfriend who murdered his girlfriend for cheating learns she was always faithful.

When Laura’s body is found in the series, most people in town know her only as the Homecoming Queen, a model for the perfect American teenage girl. Early on, she shows up in flashbacks and home videos, kidding around with her best friend and smiling lovingly at her boyfriend (himself introduced as the perfect American teenage boy). However, as her murder is investigated, the people of Twin Peaks come to see a darker side of Laura, mired in sex, drugs and a heretofore unknown seedy underbelly of their picturesque little town. As Laura is no longer around, and the abuse she had suffered are originally unknown, her reputation is tarnished in the eyes of many townsfolk and she is unable to give any sort of explanation to the people who would condemn her.

Sheryl Lee also played Laura’s cousin Maddie, who meets a similar fate

The duality of Laura is suggested through the character of dark-haired identical cousin Maddie Ferguson. Maddie is everything Laura was not–innocent, naive and close to her family. While Laura is glamorous and sexual, making coy recordings for her therapist and advertising herself in adult magazines, Maddie is mousy and eager to please. Becoming more like Laura (by ditching her glasses and taking more control of her sexuality) gets Maddie killed as Leland mistakes Maddie for Laura.

Though there are other readings of the duality of Sheryl Lee’s two characters, it is easy to see them as Madonna and whore. Unusually for the trope of identical cousins, where the blonde is commonly presented as good and the brunette as bad, Twin Peaks suggests Maddie is the embodiment of goodness and purity. By contrast, Laura, a victim of rape and abuse, has one foot in darkness and is revealed to have had sex or sexualized dynamics with almost everyone she interacted with.

In addition, Laura questions her own goodness and independently seeks out a therapist to help cope. In her last week alive, she quits her position heading up the Twin Peaks Meals-on-Wheels program, suggesting she has given up on trying to help others. In the prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me , it is clear she feels unworthy of salvation, as she tells Donna she believes the angels have abandoned her and she will burn forever. Later on, she watches as angels disappear from a painting in front of her.

This storyline, though suggestive of the self-loathing felt by abuse victims, makes the unfortunate implication that the abuse Laura has suffered has made her a bad person, or at least lesser than Maddie.

Laura realizes she is not a bad person when an angel appears to her in the red room after her death

The film allows Laura to emerge on the other side, in the Black Lodge’s mysterious red room, to see her own angel waiting for her. It ends with her smiling and laughing, assured that being abused did not “corrupt” her or make her undeserving of love, a great relief after watching her suffering throughout the TV series and film.

Focusing on the last week of Laura’s life with her as the main character, Fire Walk With Me has dark undertones of hagiography, the story of the life of a saint, as it revels in her suffering, allowing it to elevate her and cast her as a hero for enduring. It also gives her a chance to speak and show viewers who she was in her private moments, reconciling the two opposing views of her as both a saintly meals-on-wheels volunteer and cocaine-addicted prostitute into a complete person.

Perhaps what endears viewers to the dead girl as a character is our culture’s glorification of female victims, specifically for being tragic and fragile. In an essay at Rookie, Sady Doyle writes, “We love Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic and bright blue, tortured and murdered just as surely as good St. Dymphna.” Accordingly, many dramatic teenage girls look to women like Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe as heroes, not for their achievements but for the glamor and depths they see as going along with pain.

However, the film can also be criticized for its unflinching portrayal of the graphic violence visited on Laura and her friend Ronette Pulaski. They are shown tied up, screaming and bleeding, while they are brutalized for extended sequences. At one point, Laura is forced to look at her face in a mirror while she is raped, suggesting her abuser wants to make it impossible for her to pretend to be anywhere else or that this is not happening to her.

In her last moments, Laura is forced to watch her own abuse

There are a lot of reasons fans of the series disliked Fire Walk With Me; most wanted more time with the kooky inhabitants of Twin Peaks and missed its quirky moments. The film is much darker and more violent then the series and almost entirely lacking in comedy. Though it has David Lynch’s trademark surreal touches, the story at its heart is also much more real. The film forces viewers to try to understand the horror Laura has gone through as a victim of incest and abuse, how the Palmer house has become her own private hell and she has watched her death draw nearer, sure it would come for her soon. With this in mind, the film is harrowing and difficult to watch, but its existence is integral to the understanding of Laura’s character as a developed character and complex human being. The release of a book, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, intended to be the character’s diary discovered on the show, has a similar effect. It was a best seller, particularly remembered among people who were teenage girls at the time of its release.

Fire Walk with Me is often hard to watch due to Laura’s suffering at the hands of her father

The dead girl continues to be popular figure in crime narratives, though some more recent examples have tried to give her a voice in interesting ways. In the TV procedural Cold Case, the murdered character in each episode was shown in flashbacks throughout the episode, following him/her right until the moment of the murder. However, these flashbacks, and those on several other procedurals with similar narrative styles, are the memories of living characters, filtered through their perception of the events, rather than the way things were experienced by the victim. At the end of each Cold Case episode, the dead character’s ghost appears to watch their loved ones, allowing them a slight voice in the narrative, as if set free by the discovery of the killer.

The dead girl’s ghost hovering around postmortem and giving advice on the investigation is a storyline that’s been used on almost every fantasy series, from Buffy to Charmed. Unlike these stories, where the existence of something supernatural is undisputed, crime narratives often use the ghostly figure of the dead girl to suggest the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind. In the first season of Veronica Mars, the titular character’s (Kristen Bell) murdered best friend, Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried), often appears to her. Like Laura Palmer, Lilly managed to become one of show’s most beloved and enigmatic characters with minimal screen time.

Lilly appears to Veronica in the clothes she was wearing when she died, still bleeding from her head wound

Lilly appears to Veronica to comment on how much she has changed since Lilly’s death, becoming tougher and wiser and to give cryptic hints. In one scene, Veronica sees her out of the corner of her eye, running around the Kane house and leading Veronica to the scene of the crime.

She appears in several flashbacks and at the end of many episodes, in Veronica’s imagining of the murder taking place as she entertains new suspects.

Her appearance is also used as a reward for Veronica after she finally solves Lilly’s murder at the end of the season, when she imagines herself in paradise, lying in a pool full of flowers with Lilly. Lilly’s final appearance is in Veronica’s dream at the end of season 2, as the marker of what Veronica’s life could have been like if she wasn’t murdered. The scene doesn’t successfully give Lilly as voice as it focuses on how Veronica would have been different, not on the tragedy of what Lilly would have been able to experience if she had lived and will now never be able to.

Veronica imagines Lilly set free by the arrest of her killer, allowed to relax in paradise

The posthumous narrator is a rare and interesting devices, used most memorably in American Beauty and Sunset Boulevard, where murdered characters look back on their lives. As it’s already a rare concept, a posthumous female narrator is even more rare. A notable example, The Lovely Bones, focuses on Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan)’s family trying to rebuild after her death, rather than the search for her killer. Her murderer is not caught, either with her ghostly help or without, but is punished only by his own accidental death.

The dead girl is an interesting figure in the landscape of crime fiction–one who can easily become a victim or a caricature. Experiments with flashbacks, fantasy, dreamworlds, and narration are intriguing ways to give her a voice and return some humanity to her and the real life victims she mirrors.

See also on Bitch Flicks:

Hannibal’s Feminist Take on Horror Still Has a High Female Body Count

A Review in Conversation of Twin Peaks

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.