Mystery – Page 6 – Bitch Flicks

In ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ Remake, Rooney Mara’s Captivating Portrayal Proves Lisbeth Salander Still a Feminist Icon

Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

Cross-posted from The Opinioness of the World.

Lisbeth Salander consumes my thoughts. I’ve spent the last year and a half reading, writing, analyzing, debating and discussing the punk hacker. As a huge fan of the books and the original Swedish films, I was NOT excited to see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Hollywood remake.

Plagued by sexist marketing that seemed to focus solely on Mikael and depict Lisbeth as a sexpot damsel in distress, I feared Hollywood would wreck one of the most unique female protagonists in pop culture. With trepidation, I watched David Fincher’s take on Stieg Larsson’s epic. While some gender problems arose, I’ve got to admit I was pleasantly surprised. And it all hinges on Rooney Mara’s performance.

For those who don’t know, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first part in the global phenomenon of The Millennium Trilogy, features disgraced crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and brilliant researcher Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) who unite to solve the mystery of a woman who disappeared 40 years ago. The gritty, tense plot fuses with social commentary on violence against women, sexuality and gender roles.

Do we really need an American remake? Fincher, a notoriously obsessive and detailed filmmaker, creates a gorgeous film evoking a macabre ambiance. Trent Reznor’s eerie and haunting score punctuates each slickly stylized scene perfectly. Phenomenal actors fill the screen: Craig, Robin Wright (who I will watch in absolutely anything), Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgaard, Vanessa Redgrave. While everyone does their best, the remake isn’t quite as compelling as the original. I never really felt invested in any of the characters. Except for Lisbeth. The sole reason to see the film is Mara’s stellar portrayal.

Lisbeth Salander is a role of a lifetime. Both Noomi Rapace (in the original film) and Mara underwent grueling auditions and year-long transformations including haircuts, body piercings (ears, eyebrow, lip, nose, nipple), nudity, kickboxing workouts, and learning skateboarding and motorcycle riding. A sullen introvert, Lisbeth is strong, fiercely independent and self-sufficient. She possesses a razor-sharp intellect and relentless survivor instincts. She’s endured horrific trauma and betrayal yet refuses to be a victim.

Fincher obstinately fought for Mara as Sony Studios didn’t want her for the part. After watching the film, I can see why Fincher refused to concede. It’s hard to dissect Mara’s Golden Globe-nominated performance and pinpoint precisely what she does that makes her so compelling. And that’s because as Melissa Silverstein writes, she “disappears into the role.” When Lisbeth greets the people she cares about, her guardian Holger Palmgren and Mikael, she frenetically says, “Hey, hey,” a small detail adding depth and nuance to the character. It’s in the clipped cadence of her voice, her slumped shoulders, her wounded eyes. Mara doesn’t merely play Lisbeth. She becomes her.

Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) and Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig)

People have asked my thoughts on Hollywood’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, wondering if I loved or hated it. More importantly, they want to know if I prefer Noomi Rapace’s subtle yet fiercely badass warrior (which is how I envisioned Lisbeth) or Rooney Mara’s vulnerable yet quietly powerful portrayal. I was prepared to hate Mara. How could anyone surpass or even equal Rapace’s critically acclaimed performance?

But I loved them both. For me, neither one is better. Both bring something unique conveying different facets of Lisbeth’s personality. They belong to two sides of the same coin. Mara, who had ginormous shoes to fill with Rapace’s ferocious portrayal in the original, gave a captivating performance. I’m glad the shitty marketing didn’t keep me away or I would have missed one of the best performances of the year.

People have simultaneously praised and condemned The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo for its graphic depiction of rape. The American version doesn’t shy away from the brutal scene. We live in a rape culture often glorifying or dismissing rape and violence against women. Author Larsson tried to show the epidemic of misogyny. The book (originally entitled Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, which translates to “Men Who Hate Women”), original Swedish film and Hollywood remake confront the stigma of sexual assault. Yet it never feels exploitative. Lisbeth refuses to be victimized. She follows her own moral compass exacting vigilante justice. She doesn’t possess traditional power. So she works within the confines of patriarchy to assert herself and take control of her life.

A huge part of the book (and the entire trilogy) is Lisbeth and Mikael’s friendship. Despite his social nature and her private behavior, they both stubbornly follow their own moral code. He’s continually surprised and amused by her unconventional comments and reactions. Mikael’s openness, humor and honesty allow Lisbeth to trust him, something she does so rarely. The movie doesn’t shirk their sexual relationship yet never captures their emotional bond. Lisbeth and Mikael also exhibit overt sexualities. Lisbeth possesses a sexual fluidity, sleeping with both women and men. Yet society views Mikael’s philandering as socially acceptable and perceives Lisbeth as an outcast. It’s a crucial gender commentary absent from the film.

But my biggest problem with Hollywood’s The Girl With Dragon Tattoo lies in one sentence. One teeny tiny sentence that threatens to unravel all of the painstaking work Mara put into her performance. SPOILER!! -> In the scene where Mikael has been cut from the noose, Lisbeth intends to run after his murderous perpetrator. She asks him, “May I kill him?”

Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara)

In an interview with Charlie Rose, Fincher shared what he found so compelling about Lisbeth. Oh, but it’s not her feminist persona as he insists this is NOT a feminist story:

“I think that she is many things to many different people…I was fascinated by the fact that 60-year-old men, you know 58-year-old women, 17-year-old girls were all finding something about her that was you know freeing or empowering in some kind of way. And it had been kind of sold to me as this you know misogynist avenger. But what I felt about it was ultimately that there wasn’t any kind of real feminist tract to it all.

“To me, it was very human. It’s a story of being oppressed, a story of being marginalized, a story of being made to feel less than, it’s a character that’s been made to feel less than who she thinks she is…”

I don’t think Fincher has any clue what a feminist actually is. Newsflash, a feminist story is a “human” story. Neither Fincher nor Mara perceives Lisbeth as a badass feminist (even though she is) because she doesn’t do “anything in the name of any group or cause or belief.” But they’re fucking wrong.

Lisbeth combats misogyny and sexism. She abhors violence against women and avenges injustice. She refuses to be taken advantage of, always asserting her control. She surrenders to no one. She strives for empowerment, living life on her own terms. I agree Lisbeth wouldn’t call herself a feminist, just as she doesn’t identify as bisexual, since she doesn’t want labels confining her identity. Neither her gender, her appearance, nor her sexuality define her. Lisbeth defines herself. Every single one of these components reinforce a feminist message.

Despite Fincher and Mara’s insistent refusal, both The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its heroine are feminist. Saying otherwise completely misses the point of what makes Lisbeth Salander such an exhilarating icon.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan: Viewers’ and Critics’ Miss-steps in a Dance with a Female Protagonist

Black Swan (2010)

As Mila Kunis’s character descends upon Natalie Portman’s in the (dream) oral sex scene in Black Swan, a college-age young woman in the movie theater audibly whispers, “And this is why every guy in the theater is here.”

Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 Black Swan is a film about repression, perfection, and letting go.

It is a film about finding, torturing, losing, and gaining oneself through destruction, much like many postmodern films of the same genre (Fight Club, along with Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler).

But to too many in that theater and in theaters across the country, it is a sexy, crazy, girl movie about ballet.

Even though most of the marketing of the film catered directly to the male gaze (focusing, of course, on that oral sex scene, which had nothing to do with sex in the context of the film), it is considered either a movie about a girl, or a movie for girls. Even in the sponsored post on Jezebel (which was heavily promoting the film through advertising), women were supposed to come see the film because of pretty ballet, and shocking scenes—psychological and sexual—all touted in a juvenile, sing-song manner: “Natalie violently masturbates face-down on a mattress under the gazes of two creepy stuffed bunnies. For real.” “Natalie makes out with Mila!” The advertisers seemed desperate to sell a different film to audiences. Females would surely flock to theaters to see ballet, so how could it be marketed toward men (and as seen here, women)? Frivolous lesbian sex. Because certainly men wouldn’t want to see a film about a ballerina (note that these marketing concerns certainly weren’t an issue for The Wrestler).

The IMDB page describes Black Swan as “A thriller that zeros in on the relationship between a veteran ballet dancer and a rival.”

But it’s not. Nina’s (Portman) rival, Lily (Kunis), has almost nothing to do with the central plot and theme of this film. However, the allure of feminine cattiness, jealousy, and competitiveness is much easier to digest than the idea that a film could focus on universal human conflicts with a female protagonist.

Aronofksy’s 2008 film The Wrestler is described on IMDB as follows: “A faded professional wrestler must retire, but finds his quest for a new life outside the ring a dispiriting struggle. “

Personal conflict, inner-struggle, the gender-neutral “quest.”

In an interview that touched upon gender issues in Black Swan, Aronofsky said, “… to me, if you paint a human character with real emotions and really empathize with them, it doesn’t matter if it’s a 50-something aging wrestler, or a 20-something ambitious dancer, they’re just people.” How unfortunate that we must hear that explanation from a director, instead of simply understanding it.

Lest the blame of this feminine vs. universal (masculine) protagonist issue be placed solely upon the marketing and audience, the feminist lens must also be properly focused. In Debra Cash’s “Swanday Bloody Swanday: Darren Aronofsky’s Sadistic, Misogynistic New Film,” she refers to the film as a “textbook demonstration of what academics refer to as the male gaze… Aronofsky’s fable portrays female powerlessness on every level—youth, friendship, collegiality, retirement, motherhood.” And that in itself is misogynistic? Should we not portray powerlessness because we want to be powerful? Had Aronofsky been celebrating powerlessness, maybe that argument would hold true, but he certainly was not. Showing how destructive powerlessness is should be viewed as a feminist action.

Many feminist film reviewers also lambasted the misogyny of the ballet’s artistic director, Thomas (played by Vincent Cassel), even though his character’s inherent sexism (referring to his principle dancer as his “Little Princess,” for example) is essential to the themes of repression and being able to break free from said repression. Jill Dolan, at The Feminist Spectator, says that “As her [Nina’s] relationship with Thomas gets more and more entwined, she begins to suffer from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, idealizing and even identifying with Thomas and his mercurial cruelty.” This is begging the question that Nina is the victim–would we ever assume a grown man in a similar role was the victim? Perhaps we’d glance at the notion, but never give him the simple, passive role of “victim.” Relegating Nina to the role of the victim belittles and negates the larger focus of the film.

While Thomas’s advice to Nina to touch herself is uncomfortable, it is effective, not purely sexist, in trying to force her to find her Black Swan. What better way to discuss this clearly feminist idea—the female orgasm and the difficulty to attain it due to outside and inside pressures—than in the context of the dichotomy of the White and Black Swans? When she finally does achieve orgasm during the aforementioned dream sequence, it’s clear she can do so only when she has lost herself enough, and lost herself to a point where she can blame someone else for her destruction, that she can let herself (and her Black Swan) free.

While this literal and figurative climax also serves as the beginning of her perfection and destruction, we can see that the destructive nature of this epiphany relies on the fact that she has not achieved freedom by herself. Dolan presents this scene as if it is a lesbian sex scene, as does Cash. In doing so, these feminist commentators take away the importance of the scene by assuming it’s simply for the male gaze, when in fact it is all about Nina overcoming, or attempting to overcome, the passive social and sexual world that she inhabits, while still striving for perfection.

This leaves the feminist viewer to wonder what makes a film feminist? Must sexism lose and the oppressed woman break free and live happily ever after? Instead, perhaps the truly feminist film is one that makes the female protagonist represent humanity, not just womanhood. Dolan ends her article with the line: “That’s a message that’s not good for the girls.” This further proves the idea that the message of success through self-destruction cannot be gender-neutral with a female protagonist.

Aviva Dove-Viebahn, in her Ms. Magazine Blog review “Sex, Lies and Ballet,” acknowledges Aronofsky’s “fascination with the intense humanity and obsessive desires of his characters” in a refreshingly comprehensive review. Dove-Viebahn clearly sees what the others miss—that we as viewers are supposed to be questioning and compelled by Aronofksy’s narrative.

In the Variety article “Stalking the perfect ending,” Mark Heyman (one of the writers of the film, along with John McLaughlin and Andres Heinz) said about the film’s end: “We wanted it to have some kind of emotional weight and significance and somehow be satisfying, even though it’s tragic… so that it felt like she had achieved something even as she had destroyed herself.” It seems that the writers and the director have a clear understanding of the purpose of the film, and the complicated, yet simple, themes. Why did so many audiences and critics miss the point?

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, he explores probability and the human urge to predict in his Black Swan Theory (typically used to explain world and financial events). He derives the title of the book and theory with the story of the white swan in the “old world”—people had only ever seen white swans, so they assumed all swans were white. The sighting of a black swan was a complete surprise. He says, “It illustrates a severe limitation in our learning from observations or experiences and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans.” The male protagonist is the white swan—the millions of white swans. Aronofsky’s Black Swan—the female protagonist—has shocked the people in our “old” world. We don’t know what to do with it exactly, and are unclear of its purpose.

Taleb goes on to describe the three attributes of the Black Swan: “it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations,” “it carries an extreme impact,” and “in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.” The audiences who quickly categorize Black Swan as a movie for/about women, or the critics who lambast its misogyny, are unable to otherwise grapple with the outlier of a female protagonist who can show us ourselves—male and female.

Unfortunately, we are still entrenched in a culture where men’s stories are universal stories of humanity, and women’s stories are women’s stories. Until we move past that, and realize that just as we don’t have to be aging professional wrestlers to understand the humanity and struggle of The Wrestler’s protagonist, nor do we have to be young female ballerinas to see Nina as a character that speaks to us in Black Swan, we will continue to be in gendered places in the movie theater, where male protagonists are the norm, and female protagonists are only noteworthy if they are being gone down on.

Leigh Kolb is an English and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri, and has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing. She lives on a small farm with her husband, dogs, chickens, and garden, and makes a terrible dinner party guest because all she wants to talk about is feminism and reproductive rights.

Profiling Gender: Punishing the Professional for the Personal on ‘Criminal Minds’

This is a guest post by Brandy Grabow.

Employing embedded feminism and enlightened sexism, Criminal Minds uses familiar tropes to reinforce the idea that women can either be professionals or mothers, but never both. As a prime-time drama based almost entirely in the workplace, how women are treated on the show becomes an important representation, and subtle reinforcement, of the double binds still faced by working women. Criminal Minds, and prime-time shows like it, reinforce double binds because they reach a wide audience, and are typically employed in conjunction with what Susan J. Douglas termed embedded feminism, which is “the way in which women’s achievements, or their desire for achievement, are simply a part of the cultural landscape.” The cultural landscape of the Criminal Minds universe is that women FBI agents are valued, trusted, and competent members of the team. Their abilities and equality within the institution are uncontested; therefore, the workplace goals of the women’s movement have been accomplished, and no longer require representation.

When we look closely at the numbers of women portrayed as professionals in these shows and the number of women actually working in these professions, it is clear that feminism is embedded in dramas like Criminal Minds. In 2009 Kimberly DeTardo-Bora published the results of a study in which she conducted a feminist content analysis of popular prime-time crime dramas from January 2007 through May 2007. The details of her study are fascinating, and I encourage you to read the rest of her article in the journal Women & Criminal Justice. In order to capture the wide variety of professions depicted in crime dramas, researchers looked at the “criminal justice” field, which included police, lawyers, judges, federal agents, etc. What the study found was that among the main characters in their sample of crime dramas, 54.9% were male, and 40.6% were female. In addition to the nearly equal numbers of men and women, women appeared to work in the same types of positions as men; they were just as likely to be prosecutors, or criminal investigators. While in prime-time dramas women appear to have achieved near equality with men in the criminal justice fields, as DeTardo-Bora points out, the reality is slightly different: “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2006), 26% of criminal investigators and detectives [were] female. In [De-Tardo-Bardo’s] study, then, female criminal investigators were in fact overrepresented (39.3%).” Even though Criminal Minds was not in the sample of crime dramas for this study the gender breakdown of its cast reflects the overrepresentation of women. Of the seven main characters (six criminal investigators, and one technical analyst) 4 are male, and 3 female. This overrepresentation of women visually reinforces the idea that the goals of feminism, at least the numerical ones, have been achieved. Women characters, then, do not have to overtly espouse feminist principles, because in their television reality there is no need for them.

As a part of the cultural landscape, embedded feminism, suggests that overt sexism does not have to be confronted, and enlightened sexism can circulate freely. Douglas defines enlightened sexism as, “[the insistence] that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism – indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved—so now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women.” The number of women represented on a show like Criminal Minds supports the notion that equality has been achieved. The fact that women are also overwhelmingly the victims of crime on the show can go unremarked, as can the increasingly voyeuristic torture-porn like depictions of female cadavers. The embedded feminism of the Criminal Minds world also masks the enlightened sexism in the form of double binds the women investigators face.

Although there are several problematic patterns in the way the writers of Criminal Minds treat the female agents on the show, I want to focus on the women characters as they are written off the show. On June 14th 2010 CBS announced that it would not renew AJ Cook’s contract for the sixth season, which as Michael Aussielo put it in his “Breaking” report for Entertainment Weekly.com, “is a fancy way of saying girlfriend was fired.” Not renewing AJ Cook’s contract would mean regular character Jennifer Jareau would have to be written out. Eventually, for what was publicized as financial reasons, CBS also drastically reduced the episode count of Paget Brewster’s character Emily Prentiss for the sixth season. While other women have left the show, I’d like to focus on the season six treatment of AJ Cook, and Paget Brewster’s characters. During the course of the season each character is left with a no-choice-choice that traps them in the womb/brain double bind, and in the end each is punished by losing her position on the investigative team.

For Agent Jareau the womb/brain bind takes the form of family vs. work dilemmas that have plagued her character since she announced her pregnancy at the end of Season 3. Although her pregnancy didn’t seem to have a major effect on her ability to do her job, or travel with the team, once she gave birth to her son, Henry, her character routinely faced these family vs. work conflicts. Until finally, her status as a mother became a reason to question her ability to do her job (was the actress herself pregnant?) Yes the pregnancy was quickly written into the show for her. I think that’s part of why things didn’t get overtly sexist until later.

Agent Jareau’s job as a part of the Behavior Analysis Unit’s team is to choose which cases they will pursue. In the “Mosely Lane” episode of season five her ability to do her job is questioned when she begins to see connections between a recent kidnapping and a case that is 8 years old. As she and Agent Prentiss present the links between the cases to the team, Agent Morgan challenges her by saying, “Have you thought about why you suddenly believe [in the connections]? Do you think it might be because you are a mother?” He, and the other male agents in the room, remain unconvinced the cases are related until Agent Prentiss lays out the similarities, and ends by saying, “…and, I am not a mother.” It is as if Agent Jareau’s status as a mother makes her ability to see connections between the cases suspect; whereas, Agent Prentiss’ status as “not a mother” somehow lends credence to her analysis. Although Agent Jareau has faced difficult choices between work and family in the past, this is the first time her ability to do her job is doubted based solely upon the fact that she is a mother.

The “Mosely Lane” incident is significant because it lays the foundation for the no-choice-choice Agent Jareau must make when she is later forced from the team. The second, and her final, episode of season six is simply titled “J.J.”, Agent Jareau’s nickname. The episode begins with a tense meeting between Agent Jareau, team leader Aaron Hotchner, and his boss, Section Chief Erin Strauss. During the meeting we learn that Jareau has rejected recruitment offers from the Pentagon without letting either Hotchner or Strauss know. As Strauss tries to convince Jareau that the Pentagon is offering her a better job, her primary argument is that, “…there’s less travel with this job, you could stay home with Henry.” The implication being that Agent Jareau’s ability to mother is compromised by the travel required in her current position. By the end of the episode we learn that Jareau has been forcibly transferred from the team to the Pentagon. Since Strauss’ only support for her claim that the Pentagon job would be better was “less travel” and “more time at home,” the course of Agent Jareau’s professional life is now being determined by her personal status as a mother. In the previous season, Agent Jareau’s ability to do her job was questioned because of her role as a mother; and her ability to mother is now suspect because of the travel associated with her job. Forced into taking the promotion, her no-choice-choice is to keep a job by accepting a position she does not want. Therefore, Agent Jareau’s removal from her team can be interpreted as a punishment for attempting to be both a mother and an agent.

Although she is, in her own words, “not a mother,” Agent Prentiss finds herself in a form of the womb/brain bind, and punished by removal from her team. When the two episode arc that marks the end of Prentiss’ presence on the show begins, a case from her past as a CIA operative resurfaces. While undercover to take down an ex-IRA arms dealer, Prentiss becomes romantically involved with Ian Doyle. As her involvement in the case is revealed to the team, we are initially led to believe Doyle, seeking revenge on the woman who betrayed him, is hunting her down. At first it appears that Prentiss’ romantic past, specifically her willingness to use her sexuality to get to Doyle, has come back to haunt her. However, in a series of flashbacks we learn that Doyle revealed the existence of his son, Declan, to her by asking her to take on the role of the boy’s mother. Knowing she is undercover and that the relationship will end when the case is over, she refuses.

In the present as Doyle is about to kill Prentiss, she reveals she has actually compromised her career by acting, like a mother, to protect Declan after his father’s arrest. She explains that she did not tell her superiors of Declan’s existence until she had faked his death. She states, she knew what “they [CIA/Interpol] would do to him” in order to get to Doyle. Prentiss was faced with a no-choice-choice between acting as a surrogate mother to a terrorist’s son (putting herself in danger from Doyle), and acting as an international agent giving him up to the authorities, who she knew would harm him psychologically (at the very least). Prentiss chose to act as a surrogate mother to Declan, protecting him by faking his death, effectively hiding him from his father and the authorities. Choosing to act like a mother in the past is punished in the present when, for her own safety, Prentiss must fake her death and walk away from the job, and team she loves.

That both Agents Jareau and Prentiss are made to leave their team based on either their status as a mother, or their willingness to act like one when faced with a no-choice-choice, is a clear example of the embedded sexism within the show. It is a weekly reminder to professional women that the same double binds they have faced throughout history still apply. They can either be mothers at home, or professionals in the workplace, but not both. The embedded feminism in such dramas, only makes the messages of enlightened sexism that much stronger. Embedding feminism, even if it is primarily through the numbers of women, into dramas like Criminal Minds provides the writers with the opportunity to show the world what real feminist change in the work place could look like, instead of trapping women in the same old double binds.

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Brandy Grabow completed her MA in English at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and her BA in Theatre Arts from Minnesota State University, Mankato. At UNCG she served as a writing consultant and the Graduate Assistant Director to the Writing Center. As the Coordinator of Writing and Speaking Tutorial Services enjoys working with the diverse students and faculty of NC State.

Guest Writer Wednesday: A Review in Conversation of Twin Peaks

Welcome to Twin Peaks.

This is a guest post by Cynthia Arrieu-King and Stephanie Cawley.

Cynthia’s take:

Why do I like Twin Peaks?

I remember dialing through Netflix Streaming back in May of this year as a way of breaking up the cooking of several chopping-intensive dishes. The show was totally unappealing to me when it came out and I was in high school. But this year, for the first three episodes or so, I could take it or leave it: adultery and hysterics and murder with the occasional bright spots of Dale Cooper being absurdly smug about the quality of cherry pie.

Slowly I paid more attention to the idea of intuition present in Cooper’s scenes. I felt more indifference about its postmodern sorta-for-real, sorta-not simulacra qualities: fifties diners, women who all wear bright lipstick and clingy sweaters, a revolving door of high school types, baddies and inscrutable parents.

Then, I saw the clip in which Agent Cooper dreams he is old, a little person talks to him backwards in a red room (redrum! redrum!) as does Laura Palmer who then whispers the name of her killer in his ear.

What.

And by the light of the next day, Cooper makes everyone go out in the middle of the woods, whispers the name of each murder suspect to a successive series of rocks in his hand and well, I’m not going to say more, but I was like what kind of bizarre Jungian Joseph Campbell version of the Trickster versus the Intuition is going on here?

I love these parts but the over-the-top violence constantly involving the women characters wore on me. Because even as satire, Twin Peaks always asks you to recognize that if not at that moment, you once felt real emotion for characters like this, you fell for it, and it is nakedly pushing those emotional sexual violence id buttons to their unbearably absurd extremes, then splashing the cold water of flip logic and optimism in your face.

And over and over until about the beginning of the second season, I felt an edge of incredulity in myself: How could this have been on network television? How in the world did this happen?

What did you like about it Stephanie?

Stephanie’s take:

What do I like about Twin Peaks? The Log Lady, the stoplight, the giant and the room service guy who brings Cooper his milk, every second of Angelo Badalamenti’s walking double bass, when Lucy says, “most of his behavior was asinine,” Ben and Jerry Horn stuffing their faces full of brie sandwiches, Audrey Horn’s saddle shoes, Nadine’s glorious silent drape runners, my unflagging belief in Agent Cooper. So many strange, wonderful things to marvel at in this show! You hit some of my favorite scenes, and the scenes that most stuck out to me on my second time through the show: the donut table at the stone-throwing divination and the first dream in the Black Lodge.

What I love about Twin Peaks, and Lynch in general, is his strange intensity and earnestness. What you called “postmodern sorta-for-real, sorta-not simulacra qualities” I actually see as Lynch making some kind of weirdly authentic invocation of the past or a spiritual core of America through the kitschy trappings of Twin Peaks. I don’t think that Lynch sees cherry pie and creamed corn and prom queens as truly “good” or the “true America,” the way that politicians might conjure apple pie and pick-up trucks to signify some idealized version of America. But I think Lynch uses these images and stock characters as potent cultural symbols that he can shuffle and reconfigure, but that carry strong psychological and cultural associations. As you said, I think that Lynch really is trying to wrestle with good and evil with Twin Peaks, using these cultural signifiers, and this is something I kind of love about it, even if it gets messy and maybe fails at making any kind of coherent statement.

Though it seems strange to say, another thing that I like about Twin Peaks is that the violence is actually visceral and horrible. Lynch takes these symbols, especially the prom queen girl-next-door All-American sweetheart and perverts them to the extreme. As you say, “it is nakedly pushing those emotional sexual violence id buttons to their unbearably absurd extremes,” though I would also argue that the violence is of a very different quality from so much other violence in contemporary movies or TV shows.

Violence in Twin Peaks is delivered in a way that is emotional and intense, not so much about cheap bait-and-switch jumpiness or the porno gore splatter, but the horror of the moment of the attack. The horror of violence as an action, as a depraved tunnel that swallows up everything we like about the world. We get so much of humanity being bright and good in Twin Peaks—Cooper, Harry, Andy, Lucy, etc.—but we are also forced to witness and even participate in the spectacle of unspeakable violence.

(Spoiler alert) The scene when Leland/Bob kills Maddy is one of the most intense sequences I’ve ever seen on little or big screen. The clicking of the record player, Sarah Palmer’s bony hands, the glare of the lights as Maddy and Leland/Bob wrestle, their slow-mo distorted voices. My stomach is clenching just thinking about it. This scene is vivid and visceral, very different from the many horror movies or TV crime shows in which bodies, especially women’s bodies, are violated and disposed of with ease, with almost a wink to the viewer. I think that through scenes like this Lynch forces the viewers to confront violence in a serious way and thus to identify more thoroughly with its victims.

Of course, the victims are mostly women. In fact, violence against women is literally at the core of Twin Peaks. I’m not sure what my question to you is, but this is the thing I am trying to figure out—what to say about all the dead and victimized women?

Cynthia’s take:

What to say. What to say. So much victimization. So many women! I agree that Maddy’s murder is the worst violence I’ve ever seen in television or a movie. And I agree that it’s at the core of the story, and different in its tone than almost any other kind of violence against women in television. There’s no wink, as you say. But I think I read the good and evil in a different way than you do and the more I talk to people about Twin Peaks, the more it feels as if the show’s violence gets taken several ways depending on the viewer.

I like all the good characters, so to speak, they are bright, but they don’t risk pure earnestness. They all have a crazy quirk to balance out the sincerity. Nadine’s insane eye-patch and youth. Andy’s inappropriate weeping. Cooper’s hanging upside down in his gravity boots while he dictates notes. It could be delight in life, it could be Lynch’s wish to burden us with quippy or awful silences. I can’t help but like this, but at the same time, it’s part of a problematic equation: The killer gets to say, “It was Bob who made me do it,” and can say he’s not responsible for any of this violence. Oops, he didn’t mean it, and in the world of demon possession, well, he’s telling the truth. No one is responsible for the murder of women. We dads just can’t help it and we’re inconsolable too.

I read this scene when the killer is in prison as a way for Lynch to be responsible, to critique this hands-off, “the devil made me do it” stance so prevalent in the way America does, well, everything. In a system of good and evil, it’s powerful that this (spoiler alert) is the close relative of the murder victim. But then my friend Kyle Thompson said, “No, no, no, it’s an apology, it’s not a critique.”

And I would say that he, as a man, may have a way of reading all of these shuffled signs (I love that you said that) in a way we do not and could not.

Since it is pretty much the worst violence, the most operatic violence towards women I’ve ever seen, in the end I suppose all the dead and victimized women are the thing that kept me from not entirely liking the show up until I realized the show was about intuition, good and evil as you said in a way nothing else was. Twin Peaks flies in the face of our culture in so many ways it’s hard not to want to go apologist for Lynch’s apology. Which isn’t where I want to be. You’re right, it doesn’t have the kind of moral note that stems from sentimentalizing those we oppress – the wink – another-body-in-the-bank-attitude. It’s not network television crime show violence, though I feel it has some hem of magazine shows about murdered women in it, the way it wants to invoke gossip and pity with an old trope, familiar people, manufactured sensationalism. What’s important to me is that Lynch is saying, this is what it looks like close up.

I’ve met so many people who feel this is the best thing they ever saw on television. How accessible do you think the satiric aspect is for yourself or for anyone? Like Mad Men, I wondered if Twin Peaks re-inscribed racist/sexist notions until it started simultaneously to treat violence as serious and mocking us and soap opera for how enthralled we are by story.

It’s the 20th anniversary of Twin Peaks. Why does it still work?

Stephanie’s take:

I am really not sure about how accessible the satiric aspect of Twin Peaks is to today’s viewers, myself included, because of the current TV/media climate. So much TV today, especially reality TV, has this bizarre tone that is slightly self-mocking but is simultaneously dead serious about its extravagance. This is actually kind of similar to the tone of Twin Peaks, but I don’t think it’s that intentional or meaningful today. And I don’t even know if the general audience reads this kind of tone as satire, or as a particular form of humor, or if they just read it straight. After all, there are apparently conservatives who seriously believe Stephen Colbert is on their side, and there is a website of screencaps of people posting The Onion articles on Facebook and commenting as if they were serious news. And I sometimes find myself having to explain to my high school-aged students that the word “literally” does not mean “figuratively.” What I’m saying is basically that I don’t really know, but that today’s viewers might either be better or worse equipped to navigate the slippery nature of Twin Peaks, I just don’t know which!

I think you’re definitely right that Twin Peaks is wide open for many interpretations, and I want to be able to read the killer revelation as a critique, but I just don’t think that it is. I similarly want to be able to read all the gender imbalance in the Twin Peaks landscape as a critique because I really do love so much about it, but I just can’t find enough to back me up on that reading at all. I just don’t think Lynch was thinking about gender that seriously.

We have both admitted to fondness for the more fringe female characters like the Log Lady, Nadine, and Lucy, but they, and all the other women, really only exist according to their relationships with men. We find out the Log Lady, holder of mystical truths and wearer of incredible flannels, is a kind of Miss Havesham, that she only is the way she is because her husband died on their wedding night. Similarly, Nadine is the way she is—batty and amnesiac and eye-patched—because of husband Ed. And all of Lucy’s energy gets sucked up into a boring pregnancy and paternity subplot, though her pluckiness does seem to exist regardless of her poor taste in men-who-are-not-Andy.

And the list continues. Audrey’s character arc consists of her moving from virgin with daddy issues to non-virgin with slightly different daddy issues. Donna does some intrepid sleuth-work, but spends most of her time dealing with her sappy relationship with James. Maybe only Katherine can be said to have a personality and take actions that are not based around her relationships with men, but her wiliness really depends on her ability to use sex as a form of manipulation.

Meanwhile, Agent Cooper and Harry and Ed get to go out and fight for all that is righteous (though they also all have love lives), and Windham Earl and Leo and Ben Horn get to be menacing and threatening and powerful. Even Leland gets to be infected by demons at least! I would like it so much if any of the female characters were at least worthy of demon possession.

At the risk of sounding like feminist criticism is about score-keeping or, as you said, playing apologist for Lynch, I think I could sort of “forgive” the horrific violence against women if the women characters were actually fully drawn and able to participate in the storylines in an equal way to the men. Since you bring it up, I think this is how Mad Men succeeds (though not with regards to its handling of race, ugh) in depicting a brutally sexist world and some seriously misogynistic characters in a way that is not sexist or misogynistic itself.

That said, I still pretty much love Twin Peaks. My boyfriend and I affectionately dubbed our apartment “The Great Lodge” because it has 70s wood-paneled walls, a fireplace, and is surrounded by pine trees. The Log Lady was my Facebook profile picture for a while. But fangirlishness aside, I’ve watched a lot of TV shows and I’m hard pressed to think of any that are as interesting and strange and ambitious as Twin Peaks.

But I think part of its allure is also in its unfinished-ness. Shows that are canceled unjustly in the eyes of their fans gain a kind of cult following and fervor they might not otherwise have if they were allowed to run their course and possibly collapse or devolve into sloppiness or repetition. Many of these shows, Twin Peaks included, are legitimately brilliant, but still benefit from the extra glory that our culture loves to tack on to things (or people!) that come to an untimely end. So, when we think about Twin Peaks, we necessarily think of the disappointing and horrifying and thrilling lack of closure at its end.

Cynthia’s take:

I can’t believe there’s five years of Mad Men and only two of Twin Peaks. Argh.

I like what you’re saying about the degree of gender critique in Lynch. It’s kind of like when my former classmate Kirk Boyle saw Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch and couldn’t read the cultural critique in it – Is it about Clinton? he asked me once. I was struck by how we can look for these systems of meaning out of habit and it makes me wonder right this second if there’s some blind spot in this. It seemed the movie was about a good death, lawlessness in the American vein, and immortality and that can be undetectable to an eye looking for allegory. Maybe allegory is the case here.

I agree with you about the little power of the women in this show, their silly or violent struggle. But I’m not on the same page with you about Audrey Horne. She does some pretty unbelievably audacious moral acts. She looks for Laura’s killer when in fact she had no deep friendship with Laura. She just knows something’s afoot with her father and the murder so she sleuths her way into being hired at the brothel—looking pretty fierce until the moment her father knocks at her door and she’s in a teddy ready for sex work. And doing better work in some ways than Cooper. She takes over her dad’s business by sheer will, but not after clearing out the entire meeting of Scandinavian investors by moping slyly about her sadness at the violence. She liked undermining her dad so that he would pay attention to her power, and in the end saved his business (and notably, threw off Bobby’s advances so matter-of-factly). To me she represents an m.o. something like, “We’re all playing a role in a power-play; at least I’m choosing my role and making it work for me.”

I guess my final word on the series would be that I like how Lynch holds a serious mirror up to our faces about how much we look for the violence and what it really is like. What’s your final read?

Stephanie’s take:

I still haven’t seen Dead Man and I feel like you’ve mentioned it to me before! In my queue. Anyway.

I do think I was being a bit reductive in my characterization of Audrey. She is one of my favorite characters and that scene in the brothel is one of the most unsettling scenes of the show (and on a show that is deeply unsettling so often, that is saying something). I guess I’m just a little hung up on what happens with her storyline with the rich guy in the late second season. But I think I’d prefer to pretend that much of what happens in the late second season doesn’t really happen.

To me, one of the testaments to Twin Peaks‘ greatness is that we’ve had this long exchange about it and could probably still keep going. More than once, I have found myself writing in big, aimless circles when trying to articulate what I think. The show can be read so many different ways, and as you’ve noted, it seems that everyone can bring their own particular interests and concerns to bear upon the show. It fails to resolve neatly, but I think this is what makes it so intriguing, so worth watching and then talking about. For all the interesting, quality TV shows we get to watch today, there is still nothing, to me, that is quite like Twin Peaks.

My last words on Twin Peaks? Everyone should watch it and then invite me to Twin Peaks-themed murder-mystery dinner parties. I’ll bring the cherry pie.

Cynthia Arrieu-King lives near Atlantic City but her cat Kenny lives in Louisville, Kentucky. She writes poetry and grades a lot of papers. On Sundays at 11AM you can hear her and Stockton students Jenna McCoy and Laura Alexander do a talk show about local and visiting writers,The Last Word, at WLFR FM Lake Fred Radio wlfr.fm.

Stephanie Cawley lives in Philadelphia with her cat, Vincent van Gogh. She writes poetry and reads a lot of comics.

Some Scattered Thoughts on Detective Shows and Geniuses

I often joke here about my obsession with streaming Netflix television shows from 1992. Sometimes I find myself wondering what I actually did during the nineties that made me miss so much television, and then I remember I was hanging out with truancy officers, drinking Zima underage, angsting over my first boyfriend, and coming one horrible grade shy of flunking out of high school. Memories. But maybe it’s ultimately a good thing that I let myself get a little media literate before escaping into the mind of pop culture circa 1992. It’s fun to consume an unacceptable amount of television under the guise of “no really, I’m critiquing this shit in my mind, which is important, so it’s totally fine that I haven’t spoken out loud in three days or showered.” See, I work a second-shift job, while everyone I know works a first-shift job, so I often find myself awake in the wee hours with my good friends Adrian Monk, Cal Lightman, and most recently, Allison DuBois. (The reality is that all these shows first aired between 2002 and 2010, so the fact that I think the 90s are the 00s suggests an even larger problem, like, who am I and what year is it.)My routine looks something like this: If I had a crappy day, I like to start my TV marathon with something light, like an episode or two of Monk (which first aired in 2002). For those of you who don’t know, Adrian Monk is a former homicide detective who had a severe nervous breakdown when his wife, Trudy, was killed in a car bomb explosion. He was discharged from the police force because he was so distraught he couldn’t leave his house for three years, and his breakdown brought on a slew of intense phobias associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He eventually goes into business on his own as a consultant for his former colleagues on the police force, but not without a woman slash assistant slash nurse slash babysitter who follows him around everywhere handing him antibacterial wipes and driving him to and from crime scenes (among other degrading tasks). The show is usually hilarious, mainly because of Tony Shalhoub’s brilliant portrayal of Monk, but it certainly contributes to pop culture sexism (and in turn, real life sexism).

After an episode of Monk, I spend some time with Cal Lightman from Lie to Me, a current show in its third or fourth season that centers around an agency called, The Lightman Group, which specializes in reading facial expressions. Apparently, we all have these things called “micro-expressions” that betray us when we’re lying, but only highly-trained people can catch and decode these micro-expressions, (e.g. the employees at The Lightman Group). Dr. Lightman is literally a human lie detector, and it’s fun to watch him get up in the faces of liars and act like a cocky British bad-ass. He, too, works with women who, while brilliant and talented in their own right, spend a significant amount of their screen-time playing sidekick to Lightman and cleaning up his messes.

All this boy drama started to become stifling, so I browsed Netlix and found Medium (which first aired in 2005), a show I’d seen a few episodes of—and liked—but that I never really pursued, probably because of my embarrassing fear of the occult. Medium centers around Allison DuBois, a woman who can communicate in various ways with the dead, and who also has some psychic ability, such as knowing when a person might die, or experiencing creepy flashes of the horrible shit people have done in their pasts. DuBois interests me because, in addition to holding a job as a consultant for the district attorney (similar to Monk’s role in some ways) she’s also a mother of three young girls and has a rocket scientist husband who gets fed up on a regular basis with her mind-reading, afterlife communing talents. He admires her crime-solving abilities but deep down wishes she’d continued to pursue her law degree instead, in the name of normalcy. In this show, the man slash husband plays sidekick.

These three detective characters are similar in that their main role on their respective television shows is to catch criminals. All three of them aid the police force. All three of them often endanger themselves in the process of tracking down criminals. All three of them always succeed (which is the formula for crime dramas), and we’re led to believe that the criminals wouldn’t have been caught without the help of these characters. Monk, for instance, even with all his quirks and the accommodations he requires, is hailed as an absolute genius by his colleagues and is constantly referred to as “the greatest detective in the world” by his assistant. And he is, in fact, a scary good detective, and it’s for that reason that his quirks and his often abusive behavior (while played for laughs) is forgiven—the audience is led to believe that Monk wouldn’t be a genius detective without these eccentricities. (An episode where Monk takes an antidepressant for his phobias and subsequently becomes useless as a detective confirms that theory.)

Cal Lightman, too, might be one of the most egotistical characters I’ve seen on television, and he’s immensely likeable. He breaks all the rules and consistently does pretty much the opposite of what anyone tells him to do. His lack of respect for authority often helps him win his cases; his immediate contempt for and suspicion of The People in Charge sends him in unusual directions to solve crimes, so the audience is treated to episodes where he (hilariously) and deliberately does things like checking himself into a mental hospital, or going undercover as a coalminer and threatening to blow up the place if he doesn’t get answers—but we, and his colleagues, respect him more for his unorthodox detective work. Yes, he may step all over the people around him, but that’s just how he does things; who are they to get in the way of a genius in his element? But Cal inevitably leaves some sort of mess behind when he operates outside the box (i.e. pisses off so many authority figures), and it’s no surprise that his colleague, Dr. Gillian Foster, a psychiatrist who partnered with him to start The Lightman Group, gets stuck making amends on his behalf. (I’m very much reminded of the Dr. House/Dr. Cuddy dynamic here from the television show House.)

Interestingly (or not), both Monk and Lightman find motivation and success in their careers because of dead women; Monk is literally obsessed with finding Trudy’s killer (which is the one crime he hasn’t been able to solve), and Lightman wasn’t able to save his mother from killing herself; he watches old video tapes of her, repeatedly pausing them to read and reread her micro-expressions. This “I’m avenging the death of my [insert relationship to woman here]” theme shows up in, like, every movie about a man who achieves anything. In these shows and movies, even the dead women exist as nothing more than plot points to drive the narrative forward. It’s sick and demeaning to women. In fact, I should make a list of the films and television shows in which this trope exists and call it the “I’m Avenging the Death of My [Insert Relationship to Woman Here] Trope.” (I’m doing it.)

Did you think I forgot about Mrs. Allison DuBois? I love her. And oh what a difference gender makes on a detective show. In her world, she’s successful not because she’s eccentric or because she has a god complex but because she has special powers. In her world, even though she solves case after case, and sheds new light on past cases, she must always fight to be taken seriously by her boss, by her family, and often by her husband. The audience watches DuBois struggle both with solving the cases (while trying to raise a family of young daughters and keep her marriage intact) and dealing with the way her job directly impacts her interpersonal interactions. She isn’t, as is the case with Monk and Lightman, surrounded by an endless network of supportive characters no matter what; instead, her kind of “genius” is scary and unnatural and not to be trusted.

I get it. Dead people tell her shit, which is a little different than being aided by obsessive-compulsive disorder and a lucky mixture of intelligence coupled with extreme arrogance and defiance. But DuBois must decode the messages she gets, too. A dead person doesn’t just show up and say, “Hey, that dude killed me, and my body’s buried behind that dude’s house over there. Find me. Thanks.” The occult is obviously way more complex than that (eek!). While Lightman and Monk find themselves surrounded by people who worship them, she deals with the extra struggle of convincing people she isn’t crazy—but like, how many cases does she have to solve before people just admit she’s fucking awesome?

Arguably, DuBois is a much more fleshed-out character than Lightman or Monk. She has a husband, a family, a career, unacceptable sleep patterns, daycare to deal with, a possible alcohol problem, parent-teacher conferences to deal with—a life! The men, though, just kind of do the same shit every episode. Lightman does, however, have a teenage daughter, and season two ends with him flipping out about his daughter losing her virginity. I’m not joking. That’s how the entire season ends—in an episode where Lightman gets upset about his daughter not being a virgin anymore. I’m serious. It’s called “Black and White,” and it’s a horrible episode. (Seriously.)

I’m at a bit of a disadvantage in discussing Medium because I’m only familiar with the first season. Perhaps things get better for Allison in later seasons. Perhaps the men in her life stop expressing so much condescension and distrust toward her and endow her with some Lightman- and/or Monk-esque respect. Perhaps she no longer feels compelled to apologize for her own idiosyncratic crime-solving abilities and develops Lightman’s uber-masculine arrogance about it. (But don’t take that confidence too far, Allison—no one wants to work with a bitch.) At the very least, in the first season of Medium, I sort of love her husband. I mean when is a male rocket scientist ever the sidekick, hmmm?

I guess ultimately what concerns me about these portrayals of male and female detectives is that it mirrors real life. Men are geniuses. It’s a fact. I think I once heard someone refer to Sylvia Plath as a genius in a lit class, but it’s absolutely uncommon to hear a woman referred to as such. Being a (male) genius comes with perks, too. You’re forgiven your bullshit, your weirdness, your unorthodox behavior, your screw-ups, your law breaking. I always think specifically of Roman Polanski—a film director who drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, never went to prison, and managed to garner support from thousands in Hollywood who signed a petition on his behalf. He’s a genius! He’s paid his dues! Let him come back to the U.S.!!!!! I also recall the outrage surrounding the Julian Assange rape accusations—men across the globe immediately came to his defense (including “liberals” Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann), arguing: It’s a setup! Those women are lying! He’s a genius! Kneel before Zod!

Even though I really want to end this post on the phrase “Kneel before Zod!” I’d also like to say that while I love DuBois and think she is a genius and want to see her treated as such (in the same manner as her male counterparts) I’d also love to see more regular-ass women characters achieving genius-level shit. We need and love our women with superpowers (Buffy, too, of course), but I personally want to see a woman who looks like me, who does weird and unacceptable shit like me, who sometimes goes out in public wearing sweatpants like me, achieving some genius-level shit. I truly believe, as someone who studies pop culture and media, that we’re not going to make much progress toward ending misogyny in our everyday lives if we don’t deal with the misogyny we’re bombarded with in television shows, music videos, advertisements, films, and children’s programming. If we see it reflected all around us constantly, it becomes the norm. So, we need to call this shit out and keep calling it out, even when it seems like a tiny thing—like douchebag male detectives with unorthodox methods getting a free genius pass while brilliant female detectives with unorthodox methods have to endlessly prove their competence to significantly less competent people.

That right there is fucking patriarchy in action. Now:

Horror Week 2011: Rosemary’s Baby: Marriage Can Be Terrifying

This is a guest post by Stephanie Brown.

Rosemary’s Baby is one scary movie. It’s about a woman’s lot in a hostile world. It is about a terrible marriage to a narcissistic and selfish person. It is about the fear of motherhood and giving birth. It is convincing as a terrifying movie about the supernatural, and as a life lesson about selling your soul to a metaphorical devil. I like horror to convince me that I have learned something about the dark side of human nature…not just play with gore, or supernatural themes, or catastrophic nightmares. It has to name a fear that we really have, or a truth we find hard to believe, and the best horror enlightens us by showing us the darkness that haunts our lives.

The film, directed by Roman Polanski and released in 1968, has been written about at length, for its link to the era’s zeitgeist, its use of everyday people as agents of evil, even its shooting locations. Urban legends have been told about it; real-life events surrounding and following the film have been scrutinized. Rosemary’s Baby is essentially a fable about marriage and motherhood, and its magic is in the sleight of hand that all effective horror movies use: we focus on the scary yarn and are fascinated by it, so that the truth told (in this case, domestic unhappiness) goes down entertainingly. If it were told in a straight narrative arc, it would be kitchen-sink-drama depressing. Ira Levin, who wrote the novel the movie is based on, also wrote The Stepford Wives. How did we ever function without the phrase “Stepford Wife,” such a useful pejorative that has entered our lexicon? We all understand this shorthand phrase to describe a certain kind of too-perfect woman who seems to have lost the ability to articulate thoughts of her own. In Levin’s upper-middle class America of the 1960s, a male-controlled, male-centered marriage meant a slow death for a wife, as she loses control of her mind, her choices, and especially her body. In both novels, the husbands are able to transform the women’s bodies against their will—this is what marriage amounts to. Levin was acutely tuned-in to embarrassing truths about self-centeredness—the man who programs his robot wife to yell, “You’re the champ!” while having sex in the Stepford Wives; Guy Woodhouse, Rosemary’s husband in Rosemary’s Baby, eager to sacrifice his wife for his acting career. And while we all know a Stepford Wife, we probably have met these husbands as well. I find them recognizable. Levin’s characters found themselves in predicaments that were hard to imagine coming true—but the motivations for their behavior (wanting a pliant spouse, selfish ambition) were not hard to imagine at all. These human foibles are at the heart of the matter.

In the film, Mia Farrow is Rosemary Woodhouse, and John Cassavetes is her husband, Guy, an actor whose career is stalled and going nowhere. The two of them move into a spacious apartment in the Bramford building (shot on location at the Dakota building) in Manhattan. Rosemary meets a neighbor in the laundry room, a young woman who speaks highly of the people she lives with, Minnie and Roman Castavet whom, she says, took her in off the streets and saved her life. Just a few days later she is found dead on the sidewalk outside the building, a suicide. Rosemary and Guy meet Minnie and Roman that night; they are both strolling home to the building and arrive at the same time. Minnie and Roman are an older couple, in their late 60s or 70s, played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer. They soon insinuate themselves into the younger couple’s lives, forcing themselves onto the couple, who are too polite to reject them, but soon Guy is seduced by them. You don’t see it happen but later you come to understand that Roman has proposed a deal to Guy and Guy has accepted it. Guy has sold his soul to the devil so that he can have success in his career, and it works. The man playing the role he covets suddenly goes blind, and Guy gets the part.

The price for his success? His wife will be impregnated by the devil and bear his child. The young woman who has fallen to her death was supposed to bear the child, but maybe killed herself or was killed when she realized what she was involved in. In a terrifying scene, Rosemary, surrounded by the coven that includes Minnie and Roman, is held down and raped. She is hallucinating as this happens but some of the action she sees is taking place, and eventually she screams what has become a signature line from the film, “This is not a dream! This is really happening!” The next day, Rosemary discovers long claw marks on her back, and Guy tries to pretend that he made the marks during sex with her the night before. Rosemary looks at him differently than she has; she had seemed to adore him and now she looks at him with confusion and fear. If he scratched her like that, it’s very strange; if he is lying, it’s worse still. Much of the rest of the movie is about Rosemary trying to figure out what is happening to her, understanding what is happening, and trying to convince others that it is “really happening.” After she gives birth, the coven members tell her that her baby has died, and Guy expects her to move on and forget about it. The baby hasn’t really died, and the ambiguous ending makes it clear that the coven will use the baby to gain power and wreak havoc.

One of the reasons the film is so effective is because of the fine performances by all of the actors, even those in small roles such as Patsy Kelly as Minnie’s dim-witted friend, and Ralph Bellamy as a bellicose doctor. Ruth Gordon’s Academy Award winning performance, however, is a stand-out. She makes the conceit of devil-worshippers-who-look-like-your-grandma work, and it works beautifully. Her Minnie seems to be a batty old lady, kind of nosy but endearing and well-meaning, eccentric but not dangerous, and most importantly, harmless. It is hard to believe—nearly impossible to believe—that this old woman with her badly applied lipstick, gaping handbags and herbs from her herb garden, is sinister and evil. Gordon is entirely convincing as someone who is a skilled liar and con artist. She wiles her way into their lives because a person like Rosemary is too polite to refuse her. By the time she is sick of the Castavets and is ready to politely refuse them, Guy has been seduced and will not hear of her rejecting them.

If you take away the supernatural element, Guy could be any man who is seduced by his neighbors—wanting to keep up with the Joneses, wanting to get in on the deal, wanting to be famous, wanting to impress the others, whether it be in the building, on the job, or to the world. These people are a ticket to a bigger life and more success, money, and fame. He is willing to use his wife’s body to make it happen. Surely this is a metaphor for a person who sells his soul for success. The wife in this situation can be sacrificed in many ways to make it happen: to work hard while he pursues his dream, to be ignored or be ashamed of when he realizes he wants another kind of life than the one she can offer, to help him become a success until he is successful enough for a trophy wife. One of the tenets of a religious marriage vow is the promise to keep sexually faithful and even, in some vows, to “worship” each other’s bodies, perhaps in a holy sense of worship; what happens in the Woodhouse marriage is a complete blasphemy of this idea. A selfish person puts his or her own desires ahead of the other—with that person, there can really be no union. Stories of the “black mass” and Satanic stories may even reinforce the validity of the religious idea that they purport to trample, as may Satanic fables reinforce our most basic values: when you think about it, there could be nothing more appalling than betraying your spouse, and when it happens to you it feels horrific, like being fucked by the devil.

I’ve watched Rosemary’s Baby at different points in my life, and when I watched it after giving birth, it resonated with me about the experience of childbearing. Rosemary finds herself craving raw meat and having terrible pains—due to the fact that she is birthing a devil baby. However, cravings, pains, sickness—these are real and miserable parts of pregnancy. Having had my pregnancy nausea and sickness start around Valentine’s Day, I only have to think of Valentine’s Day to feel nauseous, and that happened to me nearly twenty years ago! I remember the fear and mixed feelings I had about having a baby, and I wanted to have a baby, and so did my husband. But I had sensitivity to smells, felt dizzy, threw up every day, and felt completely out of control of my body; I felt invaded as well as afraid, in the first part of my first pregnancy. That changed; I felt happy and calm as time progressed. But having a baby is a change that marks your life forever, and there is no turning back once it happens. It’s something that is seldom talked about or admitted to; we are annoyed or disgusted by women who feel that their pregnancy is less than ideal, or that their passage into motherhood was not easy. We do not talk about how we fear that we could be bearing a monster or a “bad seed,” how we may not know what to do, that we fear we may not have enough love or patience or mothering instinct. We do not want to hear about those fears, and we do not want to hear about how pregnancy changes a man and woman’s relationship, maybe for the worse. In Rosemary’s Baby, Guy is shown as not caring much about the baby; he knows that it will be taken away and given to the coven. How many women have found that their husband is not really interested in their pregnancy, or feels it interferes with the attention given to them, to their needs? Guy is really only interested in his burgeoning career. The knowledge that one has made a mistake, that the person one is tied now to is not the person you thought you married—Rosemary’s Baby reveals that bleak, depressing, and real-life scary story. Rosemary realizes it when she sees the scratches on her back, and she never feels the same way about him again. When Guy sees what is waiting for him in a glittering future, he realizes he’s set his sights too low in a life with Rosemary. He is no longer an understudy and is ready for more.

Horror stories like Rosemary’s Baby tell the truth about our darker natures. We can look at our bad feelings, hatreds, misgivings and betrayals without knowing too well what the story really reveals about our feelings—it’s displaced onto a monster, a Thing, a killer, a mist, a contagion. We can see the truth and the horror refracted, like looking at a Medusa head in reflection so that we do not turn to stone. We can look at our darker natures, and accept that they exist somewhere, displaced into a place we call the supernatural.

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. She’s published work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and The Best American Poetry series. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in 2001 and a Breadloaf Fellowship in 2009. She has taught at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California.

Horror Week 2011: A Feminist Reading of The Ring

“Before you die … “

Note: This article contains spoilers for the Japanese novel and movie Ringu that “The Ring” gets its story and concept from.

Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries

–Emily Dickinson

By some stroke of fate, right around the time I had gotten over my fear of Samara enough to want to rewatch “The Ring” multiple times in order to analyze it, I happened to be taking a feminist lit class whose major concern was how patriarchal narrative patterns and male-centered heroic stories where women are often silenced or marginalized influence women to reproduce those stories. The theories we studied were built around Gilbert and Gubar’s “Infection in the Sentence,” which explores how these harmful fictional patterns spread like a sickness and infect unsuspecting minds with their problematic views of women. This is a metaphor that has stayed with me, and it’s something “The Ring” seems to play into, so my reading of this movie may be more feminist than was the intention of the people involved. I won’t try to decipher what the writers/directors meant to do with this movie except to say that they are definitely interested in how stories spread, evolve, and infect people who consume them. I will primarily attempt to deconstruct the aspects of the movie that speak to the feminist themes touched upon by Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis of women’s literature.

“The Ring” opens with two young girls flipping through the channels as they discuss how the energy waves of the television influence people’s minds. As they do this, Becca tells Katie about the rumors she’s heard about a video tape that kills, elaborating on the elements of the tape. As we later find out, this story holds only bits of truth and seems to have gained some elements in its retelling. Already the movie is exploring evolution of stories through word of mouth. The end of the teaser sees the death of Katie, who has seen the tape, setting up the first mystery of the movie.

Rachel Keller, Katie’s aunt, happens to be an investigative reporter and, perhaps more importantly, a writer. She’s asked by her sister Ruth to look into the death of Katie, leading her to discover the stories about a tape that kills. She’s rightly skeptic until she herself watches the tape, which in Becca’s words is like watching “sombody’s nightmare.” Rachel sets out to deconstruct this nightmare and its originator, and the movie’s metaphors take a turn towards a feminist gothic discovery.

At the center of the mystery are Samara and her mother, Anna, both women whose sanity is questioned by the narrative. At first glance, the movie seems to be Anna’s creation, and it’s her face that we see in the images on the tape. Anna is implied to have been driven to the brink of insanity and eventually to suicide by Samara, who somehow creates images that burn themselves into the minds of those around her. Samara herself is an ambivalent figure that the movie does not seem to be sure about, which leaves her open to interpretation. While I was convinced of her pure evilness initially, subsequent viewings have made her emerge as a less sinister figure, especially given her portrayal in the Japanese version of the story. I believe that Samara retains the echoes of that positivity even in this version, particularly in the light of some of the gothic themes the movie is playing with.

“And it’s, like, somebody’s nightmare.”

“The things she’d show you,” exclaims Richard Morgan, Samara’s father right before committing suicide, and we’re told by Dr. Grasnik that Anna needed psychiatric help because of Samara. Given the gothic themes the movie seems to be playing with, I have to wonder about the exact nature of Anna’s sickness. Certainly, the movie implies that Samara was the root of the problem, but is the movie also implying that Anna is somehow responsible for Samara’s condition? The initial description of Anna’s visits seems to imply some sort of post-partum depression, but we’re also led to believe that there was something wrong with Samara. Particularly noteworthy is the scene where Rachel talks with Dr. Grasnik about the two women. Dr. Graskin says, “When Darby there was born, we knew something wasn’t right with him. But we loved him anyway. Takes work, you know. Some people have limits.” The last bit seems to imply that whatever was wrong with Samara tested the Morgans’ limits rather than implying that whatever was wrong with Samara would’ve gotten any parent to reject her.

At this point, Rachel beings to question the treatment of Samara as well, despite suspecting that something was wrong with her. As it happens, Rachel also has a child who could be called a little out of the ordinary, so it makes sense for Rachel to cast Samara in a more positive light than she’s been given reason to. These suspicions reach their peak when Rachel discovers the barn room where Samara was kept in isolation. While the movie’s treatment of Samara is ambivalent (possibly to add to the shocking ending), the use of yellow wallpaper inside Samara’s attic-like isolation room seems to be deliberate.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short feminist story by Charlotte Gilman that explores the narrator’s slow descent into madness brought on by the isolation imposed on her by her husband, who is also her doctor, in order to cure her of her post-partum depression. The woman, trapped in a room where the most stimulating thing is its strangely patterned yellow wallpaper, is forbidden from engaging in most socially and/or mentally engaging tasks. She becomes obsessed with discovering the secrets of the wallpaper and convinces herself that there’s a woman trapped inside the wallpaper who crawls inside the walls at night and creeps by the windows during daytime. The narrator, in time, becomes obsessed with the need to tear off the wallpaper and free this creeping, crawling woman from her prison.

It’s hard not to see Samara as the creeping, crawling woman trapped inside the wallpaper, while Rachel as the protagonist bent on freeing her. Given this, perhaps it’s no coincidence that Rachel’s final discovery of Samara’s resting place comes through her own tearing away of the yellow wallpaper. However, before she tears away the wallpaper, she expresses concern over the isolation of Samara, and Noah points out that Samara had the company of a television set.

The TV, and not the yellow wallpaper, then, is Samara’s lone stimulant in this confinement, so she uses that as her medium of communication with the outside world, just as the crawling woman uses the wallpaper as her way of letting people know that she’s trapped inside. Initially, the movie seems to warn against spreading people’s tragedies “like a sickness.” However, it should be noted that Richard Morgan is perhaps our most sinister character, given the control he exerted over Samara’s life and how he used it to isolate her and how our protagonist views him.

Gilbert and Gubar note that women’s fiction is filled with themes of weakness and silence, a reflection of how their stories have been repressed in the male-authored texts they see themselves reflected in. They suggest that the only way to overcome these themes would be to create a model of writing/story-telling that empowers, “To heal herself, the woman writer must exorcise the sentences which bred her infection in the first place; she must overtly or covertly free herself of the despair she inhaled.” As much as Rachel is a writer, Samara, too, can be read as a sort of artist.

“Anna and Samara.”

Given that the opening scene plays with the idea of evolution of stories, it’s useful to examine the evolution of “The Ring” story itself. While the American version de-ages Samara to a child and makes her more overtly sinister, her Japanese precursor, Sadako, is initially a much more sympathetic figure who is a victim of male perpetrated violence in both versions. In the “Ringu” novel, Sadako is a 19-year-old actress who has inherited her mother’s supernatural abilities. In the course of the story, she’s raped by a doctor who then murders her and throws her down the well. In the movie version, her father kills her after her powers begin to emerge. For the original Sadako, the creation of the tape is really the only way to get her story out and she views it as a form of revenge.

“She just wanted to be heard,” Rachel says about Samara, after discovering her fate. And Rachel inadvertently heals herself by giving Samara more power (something that unsettles both Richard Morgan and Aiden), ensuring that her story is heard. Taking into account the long literary and historical tradition of suppressing and erasing women’s histories, stories, and the violence perpetrated against them, “The Ring” really seems to be endorsing the passing on of Samara’s story. It helps that the narrative rewards the people who agree to pass the story on. Certainly, there are more sinister ways to read the ending. However, let’s see the two possible life trajectories of those who view the tape: Watching the movie and remaining silent about Samara’s story would lead to death. However, if the person agrees to make a copy and passes it on with the cure, what’s the worst that’ll come out of that cycle? Some creepy nightmares and a look inside Samara’s head that lasts for seven days. Really, given the usual fate of people in horror movies, Samara at least gives her victims a clear and relatively easy way out, but perhaps, it’s a cure that could only have been discovered by someone who cared to deconstruct Samara’s elusive nightmare.

Given all of these themes, the origins of Samara’s story, and the ominous use of the yellow wallpaper in Samara’s prison, I can’t help but read this movie as a warning against suppressing women’s stories and silencing women’s voices. It deals with the infection of ideas that comes from consuming media, and at its heart is a woman searching for and trying to free another woman who seems to have been abused. Now, it’s entirely possible to read Samara as a completely evil figure, and really, the movie is scarier that way. However, a lot of feminist and race-conscious readings of texts emphasize reading these narratives from the point of view of the Other because history is written by the winners and women, people of color, and other minorities are continually being silenced. So yeah, Samara’s story isn’t pretty, and it comes with its own dangers, but the consequences of suppressing that story and of remaining silent about what happened are much, much worse.

Sobia spends her free time consuming media and thinking a lot. She uses her English lit degree for little else than critiquing media’s portrayal of gender and race, which is possibly just another excuse to consume more media with awesome women.

Horror Week 2011: Let This Feminist Vampire In

This piece by Natalie Wilson previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on October 13, 2010.

Cross-posted at Ms. Magazine

Warning: spoilers

Vampires have become so common in contemporary texts that they have lost some of their bite. With most of them falling into the emo, brooding, love-struck and angst-ridden variety (Edward of Twilight, Damon of The Vampire Diaries and Bill of True Blood), the female vampire featured in Let Me In (the U.S. remake of the Swedish film Let the Right One In) presents a refreshing change. Abby (Chloe Moretz), the 12-year-old lonely-yet-resilient vampire in a world populated by male violence, is a feminist vampire worth rooting for.

While the original film was also excellent, it lacked some of the more overt gendered analysis of the U.S. version. Though this may be due to discrepancies in translation (I saw the film both in Swedish with English subtitles and dubbed in English), the bullying theme running throughout the narrative was framed very differently in the Swedish version. In it, the young male protagonist, Oskar, was repeatedly told to “squeal like a pig” by his tormentors. In contrast, the male protagonist in the U.S. version, now named Owen (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee), is attacked by bullies with taunts such as “Hey, little girl” and “Are you a little girl?”

Owen’s burgeoning friendship with the young vampire Abby (named Eli in the original) furthers this gendered meme when she advises him “You have to hit back … hit them back harder than you dare.” When she promises to help him, he says “But you’re a girl,” exhibiting the belief the bullies have instilled in him that girls are scared and weak. Even though an earlier scene showed Owen smiling as he views a girl punching the lead bully in the arm, this approval of female resistance has not erased the anti-girl taunts the bullies have polluted his brain with.

With an existence shrouded by his parents’ ugly divorce, the film suggests Owen has turned to voyeurism as an escape from his prison-like existence at both home and school. As Owen watches the world from his bedroom telescope and from behind his wide-eyed gaze, we see the daily injustices humans enact upon one another: bedroom fights, schoolyard torture, sibling abuse, interpersonal violence. Much of this violence is linked to codes of masculinity, including the muscling-up men do to create bodies capable of violence.

In comparison, vampire Abby’s thirst for blood becomes less violent and a lesser evil: Killing is something she resorts to in order to survive, in contrast to it being a sport (as with the bullies) or a means to secure and keep a mate (as with her “father” figure). The everyday violence in the film is more horrific and has more lasting effects than Abby’s monstrous thirst.

Unfortunately, the opportunity to further the suggestion that “average humans” are plenty monstrous is rendered less horrific in the American version by removing the references/suggestions of pedophilia in the original novel and film. Nevertheless, the remake provocatively suggests that our cultural proclivity to focus on exceptionally violent crimes of the “stranger danger” variety allows enduring, daily acts of violence to go comparatively unnoticed. Owen has adopted this view as well–he never mentions evil until he learns Abby is a vampire, failing to see that what the bullies do to him is actually more evil.

Though the film drips with gendered representations (although ones not as graphic, nor as queer as the original novel, as discussed here), reviews such as those in The New York Times and at MovieFone offer no gender analysis–an omission that seems particularly odd given the misogynistic bullying the film depicts as well as its focus on a girl vampire, a rarity in our male-dominated vampire tales of late.

To find such analysis, one most go back to reviews of the original film, including here at Feminist Review. Noting the tendency for a “queer sensibility about female vampires in film, whether explicit or subtextual,” Loren Krywanczyk argues the “gender non-normativity” of the two young protagonists presents us with a queering of gender as well as of childhood sexuality. Such queer readings are even more apt if Abby/Eli’s centuries-earlier castration (cut in the American film and only alluded to in the Swedish version) is taken into account.

While there has been much rallying against the necessity of remaking the film to appease Americans subtitle-avoidance (as here), I feel this new version offers yet another useful spin on a very complex tale–one a bit less queer but also one that links the cultural disdain for femininity to the ubiquity of horrific daily acts of violence. If only our mainstream news media would similarly let that argument in.

Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. She previously contributed posts to Bitch Flicks about The United States of Tara, Nurse Jackie, and Lost.

Horror Week 2011: The Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Viewers might hope that with its unconventional approach, shoestring budget, and status as the first blockbuster powered by Internet buzz, The Blair Witch Project could offer horror fans something they haven’t seen before, specifically in terms of how women are represented. At first, the flick looks promising because it centers on a female lead in a position of authority. While it’s arguable whether The Blair Witch Project’s through-the-viewfinder conceit is actually innovative (cinephiles like to point to the correlations between Blair Witch and Man Bites Dog and Cannibal Holocaust), it’s safe to say that—in 1999, at least—no films with this particular conceit had enjoyed such widespread popularity. The presence of this conceit might account for the film’s success, coming as it did in the watershed era of reality television. Its lo-fi, DYI qualities lend the film a realism that at that time felt new and potentially persuasive. While the ensuing years have brought us further variations on the motif—Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, and Super 8, among others—it’s also become much easier to see how The Blair Witch Project, for all its putative realism, renders unduly harsh judgments on its female lead.

In case you haven’t seen it, the film is supposedly “found” footage, recovered long after the three filmmakers depicted in the footage disappeared in the Maryland woods. There is little metaphorical space between the framing device (specifically, a shakey title card explaining when the footage was found) and the film-within-a-film. The film-within-the-film is the movie, it is the whole story. We are invited to view the footage as the unvarnished artifacts, the evidence of all that remains of Heather Donahue’s film project. Yet, the footage is edited for pace, laughs, and content with scenes that alternate from video to Hi 8 repeatedly. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez attempt to cover their editorial tracks by purposefully leaving in moments showing equipment checks and goofing around. Ideally, this approach would sustain the realism while allowing the filmmakers to craft a watchable film. Problem is, the edits also clearly posit Heather as the one responsible for what happens to herself and her crew. Heather is not blameless, yet for all her blunders, she is no more responsible for the bad turn of events than either of her male cohorts. But the film itself, and possibly its two male directors, want to lay the lion’s share of the blame at her booted feet. Her treatment both in the film and by the film belies a grave discomfort with a woman in charge. (This same discomfort might explain why Heather is pictured without a mouth on the DVD packaging, seen at the top of the post.)

Ostensibly, actress Heather Donahue’s portrayal of student filmmaker Heather Donahue seems positive. She’s no scream queen, scampering topless into the underbrush with breasts a-bob. This character is a product of her time: a self-possessed, driven, and adventurous young woman of the Lilith-Fair generation. The film opens on her, videotaping her preparations for what she knows will be a challenging shoot. Audiences see volumes on local history and wilderness survival among her possessions, and we see her forthrightness when it comes to dealing with the two male members of the crew. She drinks with the guys, and even chokes down some scotch. In the wilderness she casually dismisses both the risk of sexual violence and the appearance of impropriety by joking about her having two men in her tent. In directing Josh and Mike, she is self-assured. Her stern directive to them before they begin filming in earnest is that she “wants to avoid being cheesy” in the documentary. Similarly, in the early scenes, she comes off way more professional than the male crew members.

Her initiative stands in stark contrast with the lackadaisical insouciance of Josh and immature foolishness of Mike. When Josh arrives at her apartment, she dubs him “Mr. Punctuality.” After the three record an interview with a local eccentric, Josh complains (rightly) that the focus was off and blames it on the camera’s having only metric designations. When Heather observes that the lens also has U.S. measurements in brown letters, Josh only mumbles that the white numbers are more obvious. Then Heather states that she thought he used this camera before, and Josh is forced to acknowledge that he’s only used it once before. This moment may seem incidental, but it suggests that Josh may be out of his depth (or at least as out of his depth as Heather). Compared to Mike Williams, though, Josh is an old hand at the movie-making game. It’s made clear at several points that this is Mike’s first filmmaking experience. Mike is shown to be easily rattled and prone to angry confrontations. In particular, his rage over the first time the three become lost is especially irksome because, despite acknowledging that he has no ability to understand a map, he claims that he doesn’t “fully trust” Heather to get them out of the woods. The two males are quick to blame Heather for their situation because they are ultimately uncomfortable with her leadership.

Despite Heather’s capability, the film allows the two male characters to use the cameras to subtly undercut her authority. Josh directs the camera at a clearly agitated Heather as she struggles to find a hidden spot to urinate. He says, “What’s that? Is that the Blair Witch? No, it’s Heather, taking a piss.” When she expresses displeasure at being filmed, he shouts “Just go already!” While it may seem that Heather takes the same sort of liberties with the camera herself, particularly when she films Mike shirtless and makes fun of his “sporadic” chest hair, it’s worth noting that he fires back at the taunting with “You should see my ass.” Heather doesn’t take him up on the offer. Yet later, when Mike himself is holding the camera, he centers it on Heather’s muddy backside and cries, “I see a dirty behind!” Even in the woods it seems that men are still afforded a degree of privacy denied to the female character. While Heather is shown bursting into tears at three or four points in the film, Mike bars her from taping Josh as he sobs under a tree, keeping her at a distance.

It’s not just her cohorts that denigrate Heather; it’s the film itself. The directors include several confrontations that show Josh blaming Heather for their plight, criticizing her enthusiasm and drive. At these points, the film becomes self-conscious in a way that suggests the “hands of the directors” at work, rather than the loose improvisational feel of other scenes. The repeated taunting by Josh shows that he feels she is largely responsible for their situation. At one point, he asks, “You gonna write us a happy ending, Heather?” as if she has scripted all this out. Also, when he screams, “OK, here’s your motivation. You’re lost, you’re angry in the woods, and no one is here to help you. There’s a witch and she keeps leaving shit outside your door. There’s no one here to help you! She left little trinkets, you took one of them, she ran after us. There’s no one here to help you! We walked for 15 hours today, we ended up in the same place! There’s no one here to help you, THAT’S your motivation! THAT’S YOUR MOTIVATION!” like he’s in a method-acting exercise. He places the blame on her and, in response, she bursts into tears.

But the film itself denigrates Heather because she accepts responsibility, almost agreeing with the taunts. The most famous scene in The Blair Witch Project is Heather’s tearful confession into the lens. The substance of this confession is that she is responsible for what’s happening to them, but it’s infuriating that Heather takes responsibility and does so at this point. The confession scene tries to make Heather an Ahab-like figure. On the one hand, her tendency to tape allows the narrative conceit of the film to operate. When events take a turn for the eerie and tense, Heather’s obsession with documenting the experience keeps the cameras rolling and allows us to see the ensuing tumult. On the other hand, it puts her energetic striving for a quality film on trial and coaxes from her a confession for a crime she doesn’t actually commit.

First of all, unless Heather herself is also somehow the Blair Witch, she is not responsible for what’s happened to them. If the witch has caused disruptions in the compass, or somehow made the woods alter its appearance, or through black magic made the woods grow, then this could hardly be the fault of the student filmmaker who stumbled into this situation. What’s more, if we believe that the Blair Witch is responsible (rather than sadistic locals), then what motivation does the witch have for tormenting and disappearing three college students? It seems significant that the nocturnal sounds begin in the dead of night after Josh accidentaly disturbs one of the rock piles while filming in the cemetery. This gaffe horrifies Heather, who gently replaces the rock and plants a kiss on it, saying “You can’t be too careful.” Heather also didn’t kick the map (possibly their only salvation) into the river; Mike did that. Heather’s foibles are no more or less destructive than those of her peers. She’s inexperienced and becomes subject to the hunger and fatigue of the situation. So do her male counterparts. She exhibits poor decision making (not telling Mike about Josh’s severed finger), but it’s no worse than Mike’s decision to kick the map into the creek because he was angry. Yet her confession doesn’t have the feel of a woman taking responsibility for something she shouldn’t. Instead, the scene seems like the despairing of someone who has irrevocably screwed herself. The film wants us to agree that it’s her fault, hers alone.

Alex DeBonis has a PhD in fiction writing and literature from the University of Cincinnati. He currently teaches fiction writing, literature, and journalism in rural West Tennessee. His work has appeared in WordRiot, FictionDaily, eclectic flash, Storyglossia, no touching, and is in the current issue of kill author. He lives with his wife and son in Paris, TN.

Horror Week 2011: The Silence of the Lambs

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

This post by Jeff Vorndam is republished with permission.

The horror movie genre has historically exalted the objectification of women. In slasher movies, teen exploitation flicks, and even seemingly innocuous thrillers, women are cast for the purposes of screaming and disrobing. The antithesis within the horror/thriller genre is the 1991 Academy Award winning film The Silence of the Lambs. Although not thought of as a “women’s movie,” a feminist undercurrent is present in the film through its protagonist, a strong female character who contradicts previous genre stereotypes. Her scenes impart an objection to the objectification of women and depict the difficulty of working in a male-dominated institution. Furthermore, her character’s success in the movie is her own doing; there are no male rescuers or helpers.

Jodie Foster plays Special Agent Clarice Starling, the protagonist of The Silence of the Lambs. Starling is an autonomous woman; her mother died at childbirth, and her father was killed in the line of duty when she was ten. She is intelligent (graduated magna cum laude), skilled at her work, and intrepid. Significantly, the film opens with a shot of Starling running alone in the woods, completing an obstacle course in the type of dark sodden forest where one might expect to find a naked dead body. The viewer’s attention is immediately drawn to Starling, and we already sense that she will be in danger. It is the movie’s triumph that it sets our expectation to see her as a doomed victim, and then subverts it by establishing her as a multi-dimensional person in the following scenes.

Roger Ebert wrote about The Silence of the Lambs, “Never before in a movie have I been made more aware of the subtle sexual pressures placed upon women by men.” Ebert refers to the numerous scenes which, taken collectively, give viewers the uncomfortable knowledge that Starling is constantly subjected to stares, condescension, and harassment. By depicting Starling as an object rather than a person in certain scenes, the audience is transposed with her, and feels her apprehension. The first such scene occurs after she is pulled off the obstacle course to meet her superior. There is no dialogue, just a simple shot of Starling, standing 5 feet 2 inches tall in a blue jogging suit, dwarfed and surrounded in an elevator full of burly men over a foot taller than her. Starling stands out even further as an object because her blue sweat suit contrasts with the loud red outfits that each of the men are wearing. It is a situation that any of us would be nervous in, but Starling shows little trepidation. She copes well with the uneasy feeling of the men looming over her. The movie’s self-conscious attempt to display Starling as an object works, though. As an audience, we do feel trepidation.

The same concept applies to a scene in which Starling is holding a punching bag and must withstand the blows of her larger co-workers. The camera’s vantage point is that of the large man delivering the blows. The angle is shot downward so that Starling appears smaller and more vulnerable. Quickly, the viewer sees her as an object–as her male co-workers do as well. It is uncomfortable to watch Starling get hit, and we realize she is objectified this way all the time.

Starling must unfortunately endure many such difficulties because she works in the male-dominated institution of the FBI. As an attractive woman, Starling receives lascivious looks from nearly every male in the movie. When she and her roommate go jogging in one scene, a group of men jogging the other way turn around to ogle the women’s behinds. Earlier, when Starling is looking for Agent Crawford’s (her boss) office, the men gaze at her as if she were an exotic delicacy. Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist Dr. Chilton tries to pick her up initially, “Are you familiar with the Baltimore area? I could show you around.” When she explains she has a job to do, Chilton becomes angry, “Crawford sent you here for your looks–as bait.” Lecter surmises that Crawford fantasizes about Starling and that is why she was selected for the assignment. Even the bespectacled etymologist asks her out. In fact, it is only Lecter who is more interested in getting in her head than her pants.

Starling does not simply accept the oppression of her job. Upon arriving at a small town where one of the murder victims has washed up, Starling and Crawford are waiting in a room full of local deputies to see the dead body. The deputies are all staring at Starling, wondering why a woman is with the FBI. Crawford announces it’s time to inspect the body, but adds that Starling may want to stay outside because it’s something that a lady shouldn’t see. Afterwards, in the car on the ride home, Crawford says he didn’t want to offend the local authorities. Starling excoriates him for not setting a better example. By reprimanding her superior officer (while still only a trainee), Starling exhibits her strong personality and stands up for herself. Not only does she rebuff her sexist colleagues though, she is victorious over them.

In most thriller or horror movies (Terminator 2, for example), even if the hero of the story is female, she frequently still requires assistance from males to succeed. In The Silence of the Lambs, Starling succeeds on her own, despite various male interlopers. She cracks the vital points of the case, locates and defeats the killer–with no help save from Lecter. It is arguable what type of “help” Lecter gives her. In exchange for clues to the murderer’s identity, Starling provides Lecter with personal information. Lecter only cooperates with Starling because she is the only person who has treated him with any respect. In fact, as Lecter learns more about Starling’s tragic personal history, he becomes even more impressed with her. In their first meeting he calls her a “rube–one generation up from white trash.” Starling admits that he is perceptive and responds, “…but can you turn that high-powered perception of yours inward on yourself, Dr. Lecter?” At this point, Lecter realizes that he is not dealing with just another suit who’s out to use him–Starling is trying to communicate with him on a personal level. Lecter now sees Starling as a person, and is ironically the only male who does. This is emphasized overtly when Starling finishes talking to Lecter. As she exits the prison, an inmate named Miggs two cells down from Lecter throws his semen at her. Earlier, as Starling makes her way to Lecter’s cell, Miggs screams, “I can smell your cunt!” By framing Starling’s first visit to Lecter with two grotesque symbols of male objectification of women, Lecter stands out further as an asexual mentor.

Critics still point out, however, that without Lecter’s cryptic clues Starling could not have solved the case. Moreover, Lecter uses Starling’s investigation to get himself out of jail. Most damning to the notion that Starling is wholly responsible for her success is the charge that Lecter was sexually attracted to her, and aided her out of lust. These claims are spurious. Recall that Lecter appears to be asexual, especially in comparison with Miggs and Dr. Chilton. Symbolically, Lecter is neither male nor female. He is death incarnate. Director Jonathan Demme always photographs Lecter with a harsh white light on his forehead, the rest of his body ensconsed in shadows. The effect is to give Lecter the appearance of a ghoul. In the only camera shot in which Starling and Lecter are shown together, Lecter’s wraithlike apparition grins like a skeleton next to Starling’s determined composure. When their fingers touch seductively at their last meeting, it is not a sexual advance on Lecter’s part, but the film’s chilling reminder that death’s icy grip is stalking Starling. The movie would not be as frightening without Lector’s embodiment of death.

The victim is the daughter of a female Senator, and, because she fights back against the killer, she is portrayed as strong and independent. In an earlier scene, the victim’s mother makes an announcement on television in which she keeps repeating her daughter’s name–Catherine. After watching the plea, Starling comments that it is good that the Senator kept repeating her daughter’s name, “If he sees her as a person and not an object, it will be harder to tear her up.” Unfortunately, as we see in the next scene, Buffalo Bill refers to Catherine as “it” at all times, even when talking to her: “It places the lotion on its skin.” His goal is to make a woman-suit out of women–the ultimate in objectification.

In the end, Starling purges herself of her inner demons and is victorious. The story vindicates Starling and punishes those who have wronged her. Shortly after Starling’s first visit with Lecter, Miggs chokes on his own tongue and dies. Starling shoots and kills Buffalo Bill. At the end of the film, after Lecter has escaped, he calls Starling to congratulate her. He implies that he is going to eat the sexist Dr. Chilton, “I’m having an old friend for dinner.” Because the “bad sexist” people meet grisly deaths, and Starling is rewarded, The Silence of the Lambs takes a clear stand on the evils of sexism in its denouement.

Jeff Vorndam is a film buff living in the Bay Area. In the past he has reviewed movies for AboutFilm and Cinemarati, but he just watches for fun now. His favorite horror movies include Rosemary’s Baby, Kwaidan, and Martin.

Emmy Week 2011: Why Steely Homicide Detective Sarah Linden Is So Refreshing

Mireille Enos as Sarah Linden in The Killing

Guest post by Megan Kearns.

Who killed Rosie Larsen? This is the pivotal question that motivates The Killing. While a murder mystery, the true catalyst of the show resides in the nuanced characters, particularly steely homicide detective Sarah Linden.

Often I lament the gender inequity in films and TV shows, bemoaning their flagrant displays of sexism. Many gendered problems could be solved if movies and series employed more female writers, directors or producers. Too often, when you have a staff of all white males, that’s what you see on-screen: all white male characters. That’s what’s so exhilarating about The Killing. Not only does the show boast a predominantly female crew, numerous female characters exist individual and distinct from one another. We see the plot told from a female perspective.

Based on the Danish TV series Forbrydelsen (The Crime), the gritty series premieres with Linden, played superbly by Emmy-nominated Mireille Enos, jogging in the woods. It’s her last day in the Seattle police department as she’s moving with her son, Jack, to marry her fiancé in California. But she gets pulled back in to her work in homicide by the murder of teenager Rosie Larsen.

Unlike many other crime shows, the plot continually shifts from the murder investigation to Detective Linden’s home life to how Rosie’s family handles their grief to a local mayoral campaign. Through the unfolding case, we see how grief affects each of the characters differently. Raising themes of misogyny, racism and xenophobia, the show uniquely focuses on how a tragedy affects a family and ultimately how those ripples affect a community.

Linden’s stoic and quiet reserve yields a driven detective. She pensively surveys crime scenes, taking it all in, absorbing every detail. When questioning witnesses, she isn’t typically brash or bold, preferring a subtle approach. When her partner Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman) brags about finding the potential crime scene “the cage,” Linden warns him, “Assumptions are your enemy.” Holder acts impulsively, while Linden remains cool and clear-headed. Yet we learn she possesses a tendency to compulsively obsess over cases, letting them consume and unhinge her life, even to the point of jeopardizing custody of her son.

While I revere clever dialogue in a film or TV show, an adept actor reveals a character’s inner thoughts and emotions through their body language and facial expressions; never having to utter a word. Enos does this superbly, a testament to her acting abilities. She revealed in an AMC interview that her character’s silence is what she enjoys most:

It’s kind of my favorite part of this role — how much of this story is told just through Sarah thinking and letting the audience sit with her in her thoughts.

Seeing the case unfold from Linden’s perspective is a welcome change. When asked if there’s a difference stylistically in the shows that are run by women, Emmy-nominated Veena Sud, executive producer, writer and showrunner of The Killing, said:

The female leads are very human and very real and very flawed, yet are good cops. Maybe that’s the difference: women are interested in creating real female leads.

I’m thrilled to see a fully formed, realistic female role. The role isn’t groundbreaking, following in the footsteps of the stellar Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect, The Closer, Saving Grace, Cold Case, Rizzoli & Isles, Cagney & Lacey. All of these shows’ characters face difficulties: sexism, hostile work environments, alcoholism, strained personal relationships due to their demanding careers. But Linden is unique in that she’s a single mother.

Throughout the series, we witness Linden struggling to juggle her consuming career with her role as a mom. In one scene, Linden has to leave a crime scene to fetch Jack from school after he’s kicked out for smoking. In another scene, Linden looks crushed when Jack complains that she cares more about the murdered victims than him. In another episode, she talks about how she yearns for him to be happy again, hoping the remedy lies in a “better life” in California. We alternately see her disciplining and guiding him, all with a rough tenderness.

In the fantastic episode, “The Missing,” we see Linden’s insecurities about how her troubled childhood might affect her parenting abilities when her son goes missing. Actor Enos drew on her own experiences as a mother to enhance her character’s role, particularly her character’s empathy for Mitch Larsen, Rosie’s grief-stricken mother, played by the perpetually badass Michelle Forbes, in a devastating performance.

Single mothers are common in TV shows: Gilmore Girls, Murphy Brown, Sex and the City, New Adventures of Old Christine. While many laud the sacrifices single mothers make, they simultaneously face criticism in our society. Asshats Bill O’Reilly and Mike Huckabee condemned celebs Jennifer Anniston, for saying women don’t need a man to be a parent (damn right they don’t), and Natalie Portman, for getting pregnant out of wedlock (oh gasp, the horror!). Several months ago, two single African-American moms were arrested for sending their children to school districts they didn’t live in to have a better education.

Many single mothers are blamed at best, vilified at worst. So it’s refreshing to watch a TV show, particularly a crime drama, where the lead character is an accomplished single mom striving to keep her son out of trouble all while maintaining her demanding career.

Linden’s unyielding dedication to her job strains her romantic relationship as well. Initially, her fiancé Rick doesn’t make her choose between her job and their relationship. Exasperated, he waits for her to wrap up the case as she’s supposed to have already joined him in California. SPOILER!! -> As their relationship begins to crumble, Rick eventually returns to California without her after Linden chooses to stay in Seattle. <-END SPOILER!! It kind of pissed me off because men never seem forced to make this choice. It’s always the woman expected to follow a man, uprooting her life.

For those of us who lament the lack of female actors, writers and directors and stories told from women’s perspectives, here’s a show containing all those traits. Many reviewers spewed vitriol after the season 1 finale, outraged that we didn’t find out who killed Rosie Larsen. But they’re missing the whole point. Yes, it’s a whodunit. But that’s not the crux of the show; it’s merely the vehicle in which to reveal the characters’ compelling stories. The Killing depicts subtle portrayals of real, flawed women (and men), haunted by their past pain. While interesting male characters exist, the show doesn’t merely revolve around them. Rather it orbits a determined and resolute woman, unrelenting in her pursuit of justice.

Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World, where she writes about gender in pop culture, sexism in the media, reproductive justice and living vegan. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, and A Safe World for Women. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. Megan lives in Boston with her diva cat and more books than she will probably ever read in her lifetime.

Megan contributed reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Something Borrowed, !Women Art Revolution, The Kids Are All Right (for our 2011 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), The Reader (for our 2009 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), and Game of Thrones (for our Emmy Week 2011). She was the first writer featured as a Monthly Guest Contributor.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: Atonement

This is a guest post from Marcia Herring.

I’d like to start this review with a confession: Atonement is the second book in my long history of reading that has made me so angry, so upset, that I literally threw it across the room.

My anger was directed at the narrator, Briony Tallis, who I had no idea was pulling the strings of the story I had grown so engrossed in, the story that, had I stepped back for one moment, I would have realized was being shaped and tugged by an even larger narrator.

First published in 2001 by Ian McEwan (author of one of my favorite gender-questioning novels The Cement Garden), Atonement was adapted to film by Joe Wright in 2007 (he’d previously directed Pride & Prejudice and has since directed Hanna). I’d heard of the novel sort of peripherally, “Oh, everyone’s reading it! You’ve got to!” and as consequence, avoided it until forced to indulge for a class and found myself (cliché alert) unable to put it down.

Both as an Academy Award-nominated (and winning, for soundtrack) film and as a book adaptation, Joe Wright’s Atonement succeeds. The film is a gorgeous and gritty, if frustrating, portrait of childhood, of war, of love, of lies and the lies one tells to correct them.

The first section of the film and novel set up the plot. The wealthy Tallis family has temporary custody of their lesser-off red-headed cousins, the Quinceys, and young Briony (Saoirse Ronan) is determined to lead them all in a play to celebrate her older brother Leon’s homecoming. Mother Tallis is sick in bed, and older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) is awkward around the son of the Tallis’s lawn worker, Robbie (James McAvoy) and excited to hear that her brother is coming home, despite news that he’s bringing along a friend, cocky Paul Marshall.

Briony lives in a world saturated with innocence. She still writes fairy tales, slaying imaginary dragons in the tall grass. The politics of childhood become confused with budding sexuality–something that Briony witnesses in cousin Lola, and becomes obsessed and terrified with an encounter she witnesses between Cecilia and Robbie. This desire for her own sexual awakening and simultaneously not being ready for it leads to Briony witnessing and misunderstanding the encounter at the fountain, the stark near-nudity of her sister, the tableau of Robbie standing by, the broken vase.

In direct contrast to this innocence comes Paul Marshall, introduced as a dapper gentleman who intends to make money off of the war with his Army Amo chocolate bar factory. He descends upon the safe haven of the nursery where Lola is meant to be watching over her twin brothers. “You have to bite it,” he says, handing her a bar of chocolate, his face stony.

The sexuality, too, of Robbie has another angle. His attempts at a polite apology devolve quickly into crude sexual expression. Robbie is faced with the sheer absurdity and irrationality of expressing sexual attraction to one who is of a higher class. Paul Marshall experiences the opposite problem, his power over Lola used to his advantage as he inflicts first rough treatment and then a rape in the woods. That power keeps Lola from seeing the truth, that she has been mistreated, brutally; Paul Marshall keeps Lola at his side, and she eventually marries him.

Mistaken perception continues as the plot device for the first section of the film, as Briony intercepts a note from Robbie to Cecilia–the word “cunt” startling her into dangerous assumption–and interprets a hasty sexual encounter between them as rape. She tells Lola that she has read “the worst word you could possibly imagine,” the idea of desiring or expressing desire after such a secret and surely filthy part is appalling to Briony, more appalling perhaps than accepting innocence or guilt, more appalling than recognizing shades of gray. As cousin Lola is, nigh simultaneously to the romantic scene, being raped by Paul Marshall, the twins go missing and Robbie tracks them down. Because of his absence and because of her surety that Robbie’s crude note was that of a “sex maniac,” Briony accuses Robbie of Lola’s rape. Surely his wildly expressed sexual appetite is equal to and capable of no less than rape. There must be a villain, there is in all of Briony’s fairy tales, and that villain appears to be Robbie.

What follows is Rob and Briony’s means of atoning for their crimes. Rob, unable to fight the accusation against the wealthy and certain young Tallis, is sentenced to prison and then to fight in WWI. Briony, realizing years later that there were cracks in what she witnessed, that there are, perhaps, alternate truths, becomes a nurse in an attempt to undo some of the wrong she has inflicted upon Cecilia and Robbie.

On the issue of alternate truths, it is nearly impossible to discuss Atonement without discussing its construction, and therefore, its twist ending. Atonement is a movie directed by a man, adapted from a book by a man, about and concerning a woman and her version of the story of her sister and a man they both knew. To say there are layers of subterfuge to consider is an understatement.

A story is being crafted, an attempt to fill in the blanks. An attempt to create rational cause and effect as happens in all stories when we are young. An attempt to understand what must be truly random and unpredictable. Motive must be established.

But of course, things don’t follow a logical order. The wrong person is blamed for a tragedy while another gets off scot-free. War happens and the best and worst of us are lost, caught in causes we might not respect ourselves. Illness, a car crash, a lightning strike. Do we blame Briony, then, for trying to set order in her confusing world? Do we blame her for attempting to set things right that she helped to set wrong? I remember upon first completing the novel, my rage was so complete, so strong. I hated Briony for what she had done, for creating ugly and beautiful lies to cover up the truth, for believing that life was as simple as “Yes. I saw him with my own eyes.” I hated Briony for the very reasons that I love reading and watching films: writers and directors create lies for us, and we indulge in them. Fiction is called such for a reason–it isn’t real.

And as much as we would like to believe Briony’s version of events, as much as we sit, dutiful audience members and readers, we know simultaneously that life is not that simple. It is not as simple as letting oneself fall into a pond and be saved by the handsome hero. Romantic notions of rescue and war come with real danger–something which the film explores with gusto. Countless romantic tales, such as the sort that Briony is enamored with, feature a hero away at war, returning to his true love. But that is simply that: a story and one we buy into with such eagerness that it is easy for Briony, for McEwan, for Wright to pull the wool over our eyes. We want to believe that Robbie lives, that he and Cecilia are reunited, that Briony somehow makes peace with what she has done. At the end of the film, older Briony states in an interview that she could no longer find any use for honesty or reality, but where do the lies actually come in to play? As moviegoers, we anticipate a story. We know that story is not real. So what makes Briony’s betrayal any different?

The soundtrack, interlaced with the sounds of a typewriter, never lets us completely forget that this is a story that is being crafted. It is no mistake that the first shot of the movie is Briony typing away at her play, “The Trials of Arabella,” taking her work very seriously. Briony expresses the difficulty of writing: that a play depends on other people.

The difference between play and story, as Briony postulates, are similar to the difference between novel and film. McEwan spends pages describing the intricacies of the vase, complete and then broken, whereas in a film, the vase is simply there. A long camera shot transports the viewer from room to room; instead of the turn of pages, the soundtrack interacts with the actions on screen instead of, for example, a rowdy neighbor or interrupting child pulling attention from the work.

While it is, in a way, refreshing to give the narrative over so completely to a woman in what is most certainly not a “chick flick,” and while Cecilia appears to be a strong, fierce woman in charge of her own sexuality, and while Briony, if not the most trustworthy of narrators, is more than skilled enough to do the job of telling this story, both of their stories center around Robbie. Even small conversations between Briony and Cecilia, Briony and Lola, Briony and a young nurse at training devolve quickly into a discussion of Leon, or Robbie, or marriage.

Briony’s obsession with atonement, with losing herself in the quest to right the wrongs she has committed is decidedly un-feminist. Though this is, essentially, Briony’s story, her story is consumed with the stories of others, so much so that she undergoes an erasure of self to ensure the happiness of her protagonists. Briony has been stuck for her whole life revising and rewriting her story, trapped in her youth (her hair-style remains the same), only able to present the truth upon her death, and even then her tidied up version of the truth.

Any deconstruction of the traditional romantic narrative does have the potential to be feminist, however in this case, because the story is filtered not only through Briony Tallis’s obsession with that very narrative but through a male author and director, the deconstruction is seen as a loss of something good. A loss of cherished innocence, of childlike femininity.

There is no denying the technical mastery of Atonement. Simply look at the long shot as Robbie arrives at Dunkirk, despair and small hope surrounding him and swooning around him as the camera floats through soldiers waiting. Look at small consistent hints of cracks in the narrative, look at changes in perspective looped together by setting and soundtrack. Atonement is a master work of fiction and of film, but feminism is not something I believe it can claim.

Marcia Herring is a rollergirl receptionist from Southeast Missouri. She is still working on her graduate degree, but swears to have it done someday. She spends most of her time watching television and movies and wishes she could listen to music and read while doing so without going insane. She previously contributed an analysis of Degrassi, Teens, and Rape Apologism and a review of X-Men First Class.