Nostalgia – Bitch Flicks

How Pop Culture Nostalgia Privileges Some and Excludes Others

Nostalgia is not the problem, at least not the main one. … The central issue is that the feeling of nostalgia is often a privilege, and a form of exclusion.

This guest post is written by Manish Mathur.

Hollywood is deeply rooted in franchise culture, where properties from 20 years ago are being resurrected from the dead in order for studios to mine profits from brand recognition. The rise of streaming platforms, digital rentals, and services like Redbox has made movie studios anxious to find ways to bring audiences into the movie theater. Reboots, remakes, and long-awaited sequels are par for the course. Nostalgia is ruling the mainstream pop culture.

Nostalgia is not the problem, at least not the main one. Pop culture, and film specifically, always looks to the past for new ideas even among “original films.” The central issue is that the feeling of nostalgia is often a privilege, and a form of exclusion. The controversy surrounding the woman-led Ghostbusters has been well-documented. Fans of the original Ghostbusters claimed that a reboot of the franchise, and one that stars four women especially, is ruining their childhoods, and a disgrace to the memory of the original film. The backlash was so immense, so loud and hateful, that many pop culture enthusiasts, writers, and critics deduced that the reason behind it was outright misogyny and racism. Their hatred of the movie, fueled by an admittedly lackluster marketing campaign, signaled to me that they were used to pop culture catering to their tastes and childhood memories.

That is a privilege that is slowly being taken away. I can imagine that it’s really frustrating to see stuff these white men love being transformed into something different. Melissa McCarthy, an icon of women who dare to be successful without sexual objectification, replaces Bill Murray, an icon of male eccentricities and aloofness. McCarthy is not only a fabulous comedian and powerful dramatic actress, she’s sexual and desirable without being reduced to a typical masturbation fantasy. The same goes for Leslie Jones, a dark-skinned Black woman who confronts the Angry Black Woman stereotype through her sketches on SNL. Jones has also been facing a perpetual barrage of racist, misogynist harassment. These are two women who dare to be present, without the aid of white male fantasy; they are a definite “fuck you” to the stereotypical male gaze.

Privilege has many definitions, but the one that is most powerful to me is it’s the feeling of despair when something is taken away from someone who assumed it was owed to him. The Ghostbusters fan-boys thought a Ghostbusters 3 or all-male reboot was owed to them; they lashed out when they didn’t get it. Star Wars fans lost their cool when Star Wars: The Force Awakens revealed that Daisy Ridley, a woman, was the protagonist alongside John Boyega, a Black man, with racist fans calling for a boycott. Men complained about Rogue One: A Star Wars Story because Rogue One is the second film in a row of the new phase of Star Wars releases to feature a woman in the lead (Oscar-nominee Felicity Jones). Never mind that Jones is flanked by an all-male, albeit racially diverse, supporting cast. And of course, Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) protested Mad Max: Fury Road for its feminist themes and the horror of a woman as the co-lead with a man.

Disney is giving cult hit The Rocketeer a sequel, this time starring a Black actress (fingers crossed, the sequel will be directed by a Black woman). Comedian Jillian Bell (The Night Before) pitched a gender-swapped remake of the Tom Hanks/Daryl Hannah 1980s comedy Splash, with Channing Tatum in the mermaid (merman?) role.

These examples are mere raindrops in an ocean compared to the countless major movies being made by and for white men. But they stand out as definite attempts to rewrite pop culture history to be more inclusive and better representations of the world as a whole. For some, incremental change can be frustrating, and just as practically unhelpful as no change. Yet these diverse and inclusive steps are viewed by a certain privileged demographic as the pillaging of their childhoods. For some, even small progress is seen as too much, and forests are missed for the trees.

These whiny reactions from the MRA community are amusing for their silliness and for being ultimately ineffective, but they represent a sense of loss within the Mens Rights Activist community. These men feel like their childhoods are being taken away, yet they fail to realize that their childhoods are the only ones that matter to most of mainstream media. They don’t understand that the fact that boy-centric 80s and 90s properties are being brought back to life at all because studios are chasing the white, 18 to 49-year-old, male dollar. Aside from Disney, no other studio is really concerned about women consumers or people of color consumers, even though women, especially Latinx women, purchase 51% of movie theatre tickets. The profits from these marginalized groups are often viewed as lesser, inferior, or irrelevant. This contradicts the countless pieces of evidence that women and/or people of color are a powerful and immensely hungry audience. The Fast and the Furious series became a billion-dollar franchise when it expanded its cast to more women and more actors of color. Diverse movies perform better than those with the typical white male lead. For every half-dozen examples of diverse casting and gender-swapped reboots, there are a hundred other properties made to placate the cis, straight, white man that underperform at the box office. Even among many financial failures, the white male is still the default.

Right now, Hollywood is stuck in a cycle of bringing back old properties. The white male childhood still reigns supreme. The industry will need to experience a seismic change to get out of this routine. However, the best way to combat this narrow view of nostalgia is to create a more inclusive nostalgia for generations to come. I want our kids, of all races, genders, sexual orientations, and religions, to see themselves on the screen. Maybe this current trend of diverse reboots will inspire more marginalized groups to take a chance on a career previously seen as exclusive.

Maybe a young Black woman will become a historian, inspired by Leslie Jones in Ghostbusters. Or perhaps a Korean-American young boy will feel comfortable enough to come out as gay after seeing John Cho in Star Trek Beyond. Pop culture has the ability to shape our future, to inspire the world to be better. It’s time now for all kids to have that privilege of seeing versions of themselves on-screen.

My childhood was sacred, and I cherish those memories. But my childhood is not important anymore. It is of the utmost importance that older generations fosters growth for the future generation. Just look at the picture of Ghostbusters star Kristen Wiig interacting with two young girls in Ghostbusters uniforms at the movie premiere. That photo is a glimpse of the benefits of an inclusive culture, where no one demographic is privileged over the others. Boys, we had our time and it was mostly fine. Now, I (and many others) am hungry for more stories, different characters, and interesting perspectives.

Manish Mathur is a freelance writer in New York, and a major Alfred Hitchcock fan-boy. He writes about diversity and inclusion, Hollywood franchise culture, and analyses of classic films. He’s completely obsessed with Scarlett Johansson. You can read his writing at Mathur & the Marquee, follow him on Twitter @hippogriffrider, and like his page on Facebook.

Rewritten History: Affecting in ‘Brooklyn’, Not So Much in ‘Suffragette’

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made ‘Brooklyn’ is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group.

I’m never enamored of the cleaned-up, ambiguity-free nostalgia that movies, especially mainstream ones, serve to their audiences in the guise of “history” so I avoided John Crowley’s Brooklyn (written by Nick Hornby from the novel by Colm Tóibín) about an Irish immigrant, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) in the US. The Irish have been romanticized in films as early as The Quiet Man (a new release when the film takes place) and romanticized among Irish Americans for as long as the Irish have been coming to the US. But when Brooklyn began raking in awards (especially for Ronan) I decided to see it.

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made Brooklyn is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group. In the actual 1950s, my mother, just a few years younger than Eilis is in the film, lived in an Irish American neighborhood in Boston, much like the one the film shows in New York and wasn’t allowed to date Italian boys because, her father explained, “They beat their women.” We never find out what the main characters in Brooklyn think of Jewish people (since the church still taught then that the Jews killed Christ, that opinion probably wasn’t favorable) because none of them encounter any, even though plenty of Jewish people lived in Brooklyn in the 1950s. And Black people in this film are at the farthest periphery: two women in a crowd crossing a street and a Black couple is shown on the beach at Coney Island.

Eilis’s family in small-town Ireland is prosperous enough that her sister works as a bookkeeper and they live with their mother in a decent house, but Eilis immigrates anyway to a sales clerk job, arranged by a kindly priest (Jim Broadbent), at a department store in New York. In other words, she’s the kind of immigrant even the Republican party of today would like: white and “respectable.” She’s not the kind who comes to the country without papers, or has to learn English, scrub floors or work as a nanny and she doesn’t have an impoverished family in her home country to worry about. When being well-cared-for in her new home becomes too much for Eilis, her suddenly sympathetic boss (Jessica Paré) has the priest swoop into the store break room and tell Eilis he’s signed her up for bookkeeping classes at Brooklyn College. He tells her, “Homesickness is like most sicknesses. It will pass.”

Priests in the US at the time took collection money from their parishioners and gave them very little in return so to have one dole out college tuition after arranging a sales clerk job seems far-fetched, and for the recipient of both favors to be a young “marriageable” woman the priest barely knows seems like something from a parallel universe. For women in the 1950s, especially those in the working class (even ambitious ones like Eilis) the endgame was marriage, not a career. “Real” men (especially working-class ones) didn’t let their wives work outside the home (unless the family was poor), but Eilis’s middle-class, Italian-American, plumber boyfriend (Emory Cohen, a standout in a very good cast) walks her home from her night classes and loves hearing about her studies. His parents and his brothers seem equally charmed instead of exchanging nervous glances and asking, “You’re not a career girl, are you?” The only way a daughter-in-law in that type of family in the 1950s could work would be in her husband’s business — and even then she probably wouldn’t be given a salary for the first decade or so.

What priests did then (and for decades afterward) was browbeat women for working when they had children at home: if they encouraged women to go to college, the goal was for the women to find husbands there and never work outside the home again. If their husbands then beat or neglected them, the priests told the women they must be at fault (this mindset was a secular one at the time too) and they must never, ever get divorced. At the boarding house where Eilis lives she talks about marriage with a woman whose husband has left her for “someone else.” We never have a clue, in all of Eilis’s longing for her old hometown that a woman in that same situation wouldn’t be able to get divorced in Ireland until the very last part of the 20th century, a detail that a woman screenwriter or director probably wouldn’t leave out.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15syDwC000k” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (with a screenplay by Abi Morgan) is another film I put off watching, because even with its creaky plot device of seeing historical events through the eyes of a fictional “composite” character the film apparently still managed to leave women of color out of the fight for British women’s suffrage as well as omitting another integral element, the queerness of some of the most famous suffragettes.

The film isn’t as bad as I feared it might be (or perhaps it just looked good compared to the film I saw just before it: The Danish Girl) but its problems are not just because it’s about white, straight women. Carey Mulligan does what she can with the lead role, Maud, who works at the laundry and is radicalized by a coworker–and by witnessing police beating up “Votes for Women” protesters. The film could do a much better job of integrating present-day concerns with what happened to “radicals” then, with its scenes of not just police brutality and political groups using bombs and violence as a means to bring about change, but the treatment of political prisoners and the force-feeding of hunger-strikers.

We see Helena Bonham Carter in another old-fashioned role: the audience/main character’s guide to the movement but we don’t see what we do in Brooklyn’s portrait of the women in the boarding house: the sense of the group of women as a clique, a cornerstone of the women’s suffrage movement which needs to exist in any radical political movement. If a woman’s family and old friends think her ideals are anathema, she needs to find peers who share those ideals and who will be her new friends — and new family. Except for a few, not very compelling scenes, we don’t get the sense of Maud as part of a group that supports her, just that she’s an outcast from her old life. The film contains very little we haven’t seen before and what’s new in it is allowed onscreen only very briefly: like the idea that Maud, who has worked most of her life including her childhood, would find motherhood her first opportunity to engage in play.

The film instead becomes a guessing game of what horrible thing can happen to Maud next. Suffragette has the chance to contain more dramatic tension when a police captain asks her to be an informant in exchange for dropping charges (another situation with present day parallels). He tells his men, “We’ve identified weaknesses in their ranks. We’re hoping one of them will break.”

But instead of considering the offer or pretending to inform while acting as a double-agent, Maud just writes an impassioned letter to him about the righteousness of her cause. In the end, Maud is just as dull and unimaginative as the film is, which is a shame, because the real-life figures in this fight were never boring.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=056FI2Pq9RY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘The Master’: A Movie About White Dudes Talking About Stuff

Movie poster for The Master

Well this movie is a piece of shit.

Slim at Gone Elsewhere does an excellent job of explaining the plot, so if you don’t know the plot, go there first … then come back here and let me explain to you why this movie is a piece of shit.

I went into it thinking it had the potential to be good because Paul Thomas Anderson made Magnolia, and Magnolia has some wonderfully nuanced and well-developed women characters, so I know he’s capable of not creating films exclusively about white dudes talking about stuff, but fuck, I honestly couldn’t get over his absolute reveling in the incessant blathering of white dudes to other white dudes.

Don’t get me wrong; Joaquin Phoenix’s emotionally disturbed character, Freddie Quell, totally makes a sand-woman on the beach—complete with breasts and spread legs—that he then proceeds to hump and fingerfuck in front of a group of cheering white dudes (even they get uncomfortable after a few seconds of this) before beating off into the oh-so-vast and Oscar-worthy cinematographically-shot ocean, but as far as women characters go, the sexually assaulted sand-woman left a little to be desired.

Freddie Quell pinching a sand-woman’s nipple in The Master

Okay, okay, Amy Adams appears a few times, once to read a naughty sex passage from a book to Freddie—who wouldn’t want to hear Amy Adams say “opening the lips of her cunt” (or something) for no discernible reason?—and she shows up again to jerk off her husband (The Master!) Philip Seymour Hoffman over a fucking bathroom sink, so I don’t want to mislead anyone—women exist in this sea of white dudes talking about stuff, but in between giving handjobs, carrying around infants, defending their men, and gratuitously exposing their breasts to drunk and violent sociopaths, they’re just kinda blah.

I don’t want to mislead anyone. I’m not saying I haven’t exposed a breast or two to a sociopath in my day, but that doesn’t mean I found these ladies relatable, and that includes the violated sand-woman.

Amy Adams in The Master, looking pissed

And I wish I knew what to say about Freddie’s love for a 16-year-old girl named Doris, especially since he looks like he’s in his mid-50s throughout the film. Okay, in fairness, Freddie only interacts with Doris in his memories (because this is art, people), so it makes sense that we never actually get to see Doris age. (But still, Freddie was either like 30 when she was 16, or they should’ve hired some better fucking makeup artists.)

Regardless of the potential statutory rape situation, Freddie can’t seem to get over his First Love because then we wouldn’t have the quintessential white dude movie plot dilemma: there’s a girl he can’t have, or a girl who died, or a girl he lost, or a girl he has to save—if there’s one thing we all know about films about white dudes talking about stuff, it’s that women emotionally fuck up white dudes so hard!

Eeeek, bitches, can we cool it already?

Doris and Freddie in Freddie’s creepy memory/flashback in The Master

This film will probably win a million Oscars and other accolades because the people who determine award winners in Hollywood are white dudes who like watching movies about other white dudes talking about stuff. And the critics lauding this film? They’re mostly white dudes who like helping white dudes who determine award winners in Hollywood vote for movies about white dudes talking about stuff. So yeah, expect this to grace the list of Best Picture Oscar Nominees.

Getting back to this movie being a piece of shit, here’s the thing: a million people will say, “Stephanie, you obviously just don’t get this film. It’s genius! You don’t understand art! It’s a metaphor for the ways in which religion and absolute power corrupt! These dudes are supposed to be awful!” Perhaps all of that is true. Except, of course, for the fact that none if it is true.

Freddie Quell, boom

Okay, on a less pissy day, I might go along with the argument that Anderson is attempting a successful metaphor regarding men and religion and corruption, but that doesn’t blind me to the fact that he ultimately uses ~~women characters~~ tropes of women to move forward the fairly boring plight of white dudes struggling with … something. I certainly don’t buy the argument either that this is just how things were back then i.e. whenever this film is supposed to take place; there’s an important difference between depicting a time period and straight-up worshiping it.

The point is, if your film contains about three speaking women total (oh, and a woman made of sand), and each of these women is constantly doing one of the following—standing by her man, carrying around babies, jerking dudes off, existing only in the occasional flashback, lying on a couch and talking about how she remembers a penis poking her when she was still a fetus in the womb—or, if she’s a literal fucking object (i.e. she’s made out of sand), then your film suffers from, at the very least, lazy writing.

The Master and his ladies

Yes, I just said that Paul Thomas Anderson, creator of There Will Be Blood (white dudes all over the place), Boogie Nights (a movie about a white dude with a giant cock), Hard Eight (white dudes), Punch Drunk Love (a movie about a white dude phone sex operator pimp or whatever), and Magnolia (a movie in which we get to hear famous white dude Tom Cruise tell us to “respect the cock”), got particularly lazy with his women characters in this one. Movies made by a white dude about white dudes talking about stuff—stuff like power and corruption in capitalism and religion, for instance—can succeed (There Will Be Blood)—just leave the fucking recycled caricatures of women out of it (There Will Be Blood).

Of course, then we wouldn’t be treated to last-line-of-the-film-gems like this:

Freddie (talking to a woman while she’s riding him): “You’re the bravest girl I’ve ever met. Now stick it back in, it fell out.”

If you want a different, slightly more intellectual (ha) take on The Master, you should read this review by Didion, who writes “… this film shows that Anderson has a lot more sensitivity toward women than his prior films would suggest.”

Preach it!

David Lynch’s "Good" Guy vs. Bad Guy in ‘Blue Velvet’

The director David Lynch likes playing with dichotomies. His director’s fetish is portraying opposite worlds that coexist. He carries us from happy-go-lucky settings to dark depths with embarrassingly sincere dialogue, awkward props and too-blunt-to-be-ignored sound design. When writing about Lynch one must incorporate phrases like “seedy underbelly” and “seemingly pleasant.”

While a world of starkly presented binaries is a great place to explore gender roles, this does not always appeal to audiences and critics.

Roger Ebert, for instance, was not pleased with Lynch’s Blue Velvet. He was particularly disturbed by how Lynch presented the character of a woman experiencing abuse. He felt that the contrast between the absurd and evil lent a disingenuous tone to scenes in the film that should have been poignant.

“Either this material is funny, in which case you don’t take advantage of your stars, or it isn’t funny, in which case it shouldn’t have so much campy and adolescent dialogue along with a really powerful sexual scene,” Ebert said in his review of the film.

Blue Velvet movie poster

His argument is a thoughtful one, but it doesn’t fairly represent the message of the film. It doesn’t look like Lynch is trying to be screwy. He’s not trying to make us laugh at the pain others. Instead it seems he is trying to evoke deep sympathy for the foolish-but-kind characters who use “campy and adolescent dialogue.” If Lynch is manipulating the viewer, it is to turn our cynical snark against us and make us respond empathetically.

Lynch is not a master of a feminist message – and while there are good intentions between each line – we are hung up in prescribed roles and never released. His frustration isn’t with the constructs that create a violent world, but simply with the violence itself.

Blue Velvet, released in 1986, is a surreal noir film about a college boy, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who returns to his cheery suburban hometown to tend to an ailing father. He gets mixed up in the dark and violent aspects of his town after discovering a de-bodied ear. He enters this world at his own volition because of his almost-innocent voyeurism. Jeffrey comes by this dubiously ethical curiosity honestly when his friend and romantic interest Sandy (Laura Dern) says, “I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.”

His inappropriate cliché-of-choice response: “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

This is directed at the audience as well. But, we don’t get much of an answer. Lynch portrays Jeffrey as a well-meaning voyeur. But, clearly (and rightfully so), that’s not a culturally accepted characteristic in heroes. Jeffrey treats the discovered ear as if it was an exciting clue instead of evidence to severe criminality. His watching of the following events satiates a selfish desire – however well-meaning.

Through Sandy’s help (her father is the local detective) Jeffrey finds that the ear is somehow connected to a local singer, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). He decides his next step is to break into Dorothy’s apartment to find more clues.

What Jeffrey encounters is ultimately a brutal scene. His detective adventure swiftly plunges into twisted horror. He doesn’t panic, though, but just takes it in.

Dorothy first finds Jeffrey hiding in her closet and assumes – reasonably – that he was spying on her undressing. She turns the male gaze back on him by making him undress. This is not a moment of female empowerment – nor is it really the living-out of a male fantasy. Instead it is the disturbing result of naïve curiosity clashing with Dorothy’s own sexual dysfunction and delusion. She is masochistic. But Jeffrey views his subsequent sexual interaction with her as an expression of his caring for her. This mismatch in attitudes makes for clumsy moments with troubling demonstrations of affection. Jeffrey never consents to undressing, so their initial meeting and introduction to their sexual relationship is even more unsettling.

Kyle MacLachlan and Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet

After this brief encounter, we meet Frank (Dennis Hopper). He knocks on the door and Dorothy rushes Jeffrey into the closet. Frank threatens, abuses and manipulates Dorothy. He has kidnapped her husband and child as a way force her to be sexually compliant. Jeffrey watches as Frank slaps, pokes and mounts Dorothy.

Jeffrey regularly visits Dorothy after the first night, and while maintaining a boyish tone and outward sweetness, ends up slapping Dorothy somewhat in response to her request. It’s “somewhat” because while she begs him to hit her, he doesn’t seem to do so because she asks, but because he is angry at her asking. Because he spends his nights in the ugly side of the world, he has taken on hateful aspects of it. He has seen Frank’s violence and has unwillingly absorbed it. It the morning, as he wakes up in his childhood bed, Jeffrey cries remorsefully. The evil he saw in Frank had changed him.

Frank is the hyper-violent and dominating side of masculinity. Dorothy was forced to be a submissive woman, broken and tormented by being used as a sexual object. Jeffrey and Sandy instead fit into gender roles in a sunny and nostalgic way. Jeffrey is Hardy Boys curious; amiable, but also direct and flirty. Sandy is kind, demure and willing to play a support role to her male lead. They meet their dark and brutal alternatives in Dorothy and Frank.

A particularly controversial scene takes place when Sandy meets Dorothy. Sandy and Jeffrey return from a date and stumble upon Dorothy walking slowly through the neighborhood – arms outstretched – naked. She has bruises on her body and her face is blank. Sandy’s old boyfriend, who had been jealously chasing the couple, retreats and begins apologizing as Dorothy collapses in Jeffrey’s arms.

Ebert said about this scene: “[Lynch] asked Isabella Rossellini to be undressed and humiliated on the screen as few actresses ever have been, certainly in non-porno roles… That’s painful for me to see a woman treated like that and I want to know that if I’m feeling that pain it’s for a reason that the movie has other than to simply cause pain to her.”

He said that because of the “smarmy” dialogue, it was unfair to include such provocative scenes.

Ebert had a point in that provocative imagery should not be used simply for shock value. But, juxtaposing hilarity and tragedy does not necessarily trivialize violence. When using violence and sex, directors should be wary of gratuity and insensitivity. But, this scene forced us into awareness. We can’t choose a tragedy one day and a comedy on the other in Lynch’s world (or the real one). We can’t chose nostalgic gender roles one day, and violent destructive the other. We have to accept that these things feed into each other. We have to address the destructive aspects.

While Lynch isn’t necessarily challenging prescribed roles, he is challenging our perception of them and the resulting violence. He forces us to acknowledge the ugly side. And then also presents us with surprisingly poignant absurdity. The campiness in Blue Velvet isn’t cruel, but touching. These worlds do coexist and it is funny and heartbreaking and beautiful and ugly.

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Erin Fenner grew up in small-town Idaho where she took solace in cult cinema. Her burgeoning feminist ideals didn’t dampen her enjoyment in viewing even the most obviously gender-norm-dependent films, but created another angle of intrigue. She went to the University of Idaho where she nabbed a Journalism degree. There she was a student blogger, radio show producer and self-described feminist activist. Now she lives in Portland, Oregon, and works remotely for the reproductive rights organization Trust Women where she writes about the state of pro-choice politics for their blog. She also says she is a poet, but refuses to publish, perform or share lest someone offer constructive critiques.

Oscar and Indie Spirit Best Picture Nominee: The Artist: "Peppy Miller, Wonder Woman"

This is a guest review by Candice Frederick.

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You know what they say—behind every man is a great woman.

And that’s made evident in the 1920s nostalgia-soaked silent film, The Artist. Although the movie beautifully captures the difficult fall of silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) from Hollywoodland heavyweight to Hollywoodland has-been, the movie’s heart lies with his heroine, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo).

We first meet Peppy as a face in the crowd, scrambling to catch a glimpse of the one, the only George Valentin on the red carpet. Amid the glitz and glamour of the paparazzi swarming Hollywoodland’s biggest star, we see a “regular” girl. In fact, it’s Peppy’s ambiguity that sets her apart from said crowd. While all the other female fans are elbowing each other to get a chance to see their idol strike a pose on the red carpet, Peppy works her way to the front of the pack and just watches George, studying him. It’s like she sees the man behind the star, a man hidden from everyone else. A man she knocks off his feet.

That’s the thing about Peppy—it’s her authenticity that charms audiences. Unlike George’s man-made celebrity, which seduces his loveliest fans, Peppy’s unflinching compassion for those around her downright enchants the audience.

In that way, Peppy becomes George’s guardian angel. When his career begins to slide downhill, and his once marqueed name can’t even fill up a full row of seats at a theater, Peppy is the only one by his side, his number one fan when he has no one left. She picks him up when he hits rock bottom, when his pride stunts his career from forging ahead. As their careers see-saw one another, it is Peppy who remains the emotional compass throughout the entire film, the one who gets what George refuses to get.

This natural clairvoyance propels her own film ambitions. Peppy’s career skyrockets into superstardom, but, with the exception of one significant scene where she tries to play up her career by essentially downplaying those who came before her (like George), she remains unaffected by the Hollywood allure. It’s fascinating to watch a charismatic leading lady remain grounded even after her career takes off.

And it’s even more interesting to see her come to the rescue of her masculine counterpart, even if he did become a washed up star by the time of his rescuing. That’s something that would have never happened during the era the film is set in. In fact, Peppy would have more than likely have been drawn as a mere shallow competitor to George’s steadfast—however delusional—career. Since she was not written that way, it gives this wistful film the modern boost it needs to stand out.

But The Artist doesn’t just paint Peppy as George Valentin’s superhero. Peppy is also a trailblazing woman on her own. Much like many George before her, she knows how to play to a crowd and to the hungry paparazzi. She became such a power player in Hollywood that she was able to negotiate George’s reacceptance into Tinseltown after threatening to drop out of a project herself. That’s major move for a film actress, a bold one her part (that ended up paying off).

Peppy is that person you want in your corner—a bubbly (but not annoyingly so), impossibly adorable, smart, caring person with a good head on her shoulders. She never gets involved in any overblown scandal in order to get her name up in lights. She doesn’t sleep her way to the top of the Hollywood food chain. She never had to. All she was interested in was being a good friend, becoming an actor like her idol George, and spreading happiness to everyone along her path.

This all plays to the deep complexities of her character, which go far beyond uplifting the lead male character. Peppy is a strong character by herself, without even relating to George. They are both equally rounded characters who supply the substance in a movie that’s heightened by their stories and the actors who play them. Their relationship helps stack every layer of this film, therefore elevating it past its seemingly cursory exterior.

While we never really learn much information about Peppy’s background (she remains mostly anonymous on that front throughout the entire film), somehow we still feel as though she gives us a window to her soul. You relate to her, you empathize with her, and you cheer for her each time she steps in front of the camera. In short, Peppy has that likability factor that fans crave. How can they not? She practically waltzes from scene to scene and, before we know it, we’re smitten by her magic.

Although this season’s awards race may have you under the impression that Peppy is indeed a supporting character, Bejo’s performance of her will have you believing differently. Bejo brings out all the key qualities of Peppy in a performance that’s not emotionally powerful, but emotionally resounding nonetheless.

Even in silence, you hear the tapping of her shoes, the pep in her step, and her infectious laugh. How can a film with no words emit such a roaring character? Put Bejo front and center and she becomes one with the music. Every sympathetic look, impossibly happy reaction and playful gesture becomes a full fledged sympathy with Bejo. She doesn’t need any words, because the audience just knows. And, you know what, she and us are right here.

Too often people equate a good performance to one that’s grandiose, a powerhouse portrayal. Though some of those performances are in fact riveting, Bejo’s performance isn’t less so. She sparkles as Peppy, bringing out her magnetism as the gargantuan starlet she becomes, while also humanizing her and keeping her grounded. In other words, you take Peppy out of the City of Angels and she’d still be the same Peppy, girl wonder. Superhero to George Valentin, fallen star.

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Candice Frederick is an NABJ award-winning print journalist, film critic, and blogger for Reel Talk. She is also the co-host of Blog Talk Radio’s “Cinema in Noir.”

Mad Men and the Role of Nostalgia

The cast of Mad Men — aren’t they lovely?

There are two significant moments in Mad Men when nostalgia is overtly discussed. The first comes in season one, episode thirteen (“The Wheel”). Don/Dick has just learned that his brother committed suicide, and he brings his feelings about his own past—particularly his strong desire to construct a past that erases the Whitmans—to sell a product. In a pitch to Kodak, for a campaign to sell a storage device that holds slides and allows you to click through them, he says,

Technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter–a Greek, named Teddy. Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is “new.” It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels – around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.

It’s a lovely pitch (which sends Harry, who was recently kicked out of his home for cheating, out of the room in tears) and an effective one: Don seals the deal. (Watch the clip here.)

In season four, episode six (“Waldorf Stories”), Don–drunk on booze and ego after his CLIO award win–recycles his “nostalgia pitch” for Life Cereal and the proposed “Eat Life by the bowlful” campaign.

But I keep thinking about, you know, nostalgia. How you remember something in the past and it feels good, but it’s a little bit painful. Like when you were a kid.

One can surmise, if at all familiar with Don’s state of mind and lifestyle at this point, that this pitch doesn’t go as well. The meeting is a mess, and Don inadvertently pitches someone else’s idea as his own. (I couldn’t find this clip available online.)

These are two brilliant, meta moments in a show that is, in some ways, all about nostalgia. If we think of the show itself as a product, it works on both levels described in Don’s eloquent pitch. For viewers who didn’t live through the sixties, the show provides a uniquely detailed window on an era we never experienced and may only vaguely know, and the culture has produced plenty of “calamine lotion” for this group. For those who lived through the sixties, the show itself can be the Kodak carousel–taking viewers to that place they may ache to go again: their own past.

Surfaces are everything in Mad Men. In response to Mad Men’s critical and popular success, Brooks Brothers and Banana Republic have launched “Mad Men” clothing collections, so you can dress like Don or Betty. If you’re a woman with curves, you can buy the “Mad Men-inspired” bra to “banish those unsightly bulges” (not that the model pictured has bulges anywhere). You can style your hair like the characters of Mad Men and go retro. You can serve Mad Men-inspired cocktails or have an entire Mad Men-themed party (if you’re a guest, you can buy the host a Mad Men-inspired gift). If it’s the interiors that excite you, Woman’s Day magazine–which finds “the show’s visuals even more spectacular than its storylines”–will help you out with its “Mad Men-Inspired Home Decor,” and if you have money to burn, you can buy CB2’s Draper Sofa. If you’re the bookish type, here’s a Mad Men-Inspired Summer Reading List. If you really can’t get enough of the era, tune in this fall to The Playboy Club or Pan-Am.

The above barely scratches the surface of the cultural and commercial impact of Mad Men. You could virtually live your life as a Mad Men character. But why?

A major theme in Mad Men is gender, and it is one of the few shows on television that overtly critiques institutionalized sexism—and we can even, justly, call the show feminist. Here’s what I fear may also be happening: in a culture that claims to be post-feminist, post-ironic, and even post-racial, in which social justice movements lack unity, and even many educated people believe women have achieved “enough” equality (enough, at least, to no longer fight for our basic rights like access to health care and equal pay), aren’t people also maybe a little bit, even unconsciously, nostalgic for a time of clearer definitions? While I would never argue that anyone would want to return to gender and/or racial dynamics of the early 1960s, shouldn’t we attribute at least some of the show’s success to the conservative desire to ‘return to a simpler time?’ Is it not possible that we have an unconscious (or even subconscious) desire to return to a place where we can clearly point to a behavior and call it like it is: Sexist. Racist. Homophobic. Wrong.

In a culture where third-wave conflicts with second wave, where there is a conservative-led war on women’s access to health care and bodily autonomy that the liberal party largely ignores, in which the celebrity status of a couple of female politicians (who happen to hold extremely regressive positions on issues affecting women) passes as achievement of gender equality, in which women have suffered greatly in a recession dubbed the “Mancession” by media, wouldn’t it be nice if things were a bit clearer? Doesn’t our society wish we could call it in real life like we call it on that show? And don’t we also enjoy that feeling of superiority–that we’re oh-so enlightened compared to the barbarous behavior of those characters–when in reality things haven’t changed as much as we’d like to think?

In a show that quietly argues that sexism and misogyny severely harm women and men, what do we make of all the damn cultural imitation? Where and how do we draw the line between admiring and desiring the surfaces (the clothes, the decor, the general air of coolness), and wanting what’s underneath?

YouTube Break: Peggy Olson on Women in the Workplace

Ah, Mad Men. I have such mixed feelings about the show, which is part of the reason I haven’t written about it here. Yet.* With seasons 1-4 now streaming on Netflix, and with the fifth season premiering sometime in 2012 (delayed while star Jon Hamm inked a 3-year, 8-figure deal), now is a good time to really look at the show. (Hint.)

Here is a cheeky little ad the FX network created for the show, highlighting feminist fave Peggy Olson.

If you haven’t seen Mad Men, how do you feel about this advertisement? If you’re familiar–or a fan–devoid of its context, doesn’t the ad appear to be promoting the very sexist ideology the show attempts to critique? (Oh, right, but it’s ironic, which excuses it from everything, am I right?)

*Stay tuned for our announcement and Call for Writers for Mad Men Week here at Bitch Flicks!