Patriarchy – Page 2 – Bitch Flicks

Call For Writers: Sex Positivity

Simply put, sex positivity is the notion that sex between and among adults with enthusiastic consent is healthy. Practicing sex positivity means that we don’t judge ourselves or others when it comes to sex, not the type of sex we enjoy, the number of partners we choose, or the frequency with which we engage in sexual activity.

Our theme week for September 2015 will be Sex Positivity.

Some urge critical analysis of the sex positivity movement because desire exists within our patriarchal landscape and, therefore, cannot be seen as separate or free from that oppressive force. However, it remains very difficult to even find examples of sex positivity in contemporary films and television. For example, the widely discussed film Fifty Shades of Grey showcases sex that pushes the boundaries of convention but has also been condemned as glorifying abusive masculinity. Boys Don’t Cry, on the other hand, is a film that focuses on the female pleasure of Lana (Chloë Sevigny) and the healthy sexual relationship between her and her trans* partner, Brandon (Hillary Swank). Because he is trans*, though, Brandon is tortured and murdered, underscoring the fact that we do not live in a sex positive world.

Show us examples of film and television that practice sex positivity, empowering their participants, or engage in the critical debate that questions whether sex positivity can even exist and whether or not it is compatible with feminism. Because sex positivity is complicated and nuanced, are there iterations of media that, on the surface, seem sex positive but ultimately are not?

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, Sept. 18, by midnight.

The Dreamers

Nymphomaniac Vol. I & II

Hysteria

Bob’s Burgers

Transparent

Spy

Kinsey

Waiting to Exhale

Secretary

Stoker

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

The 100

The To Do List

Boys Don’t Cry

Fifty Shades of Grey

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Say Anything

Masters of Sex

Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency

Duke of Burgundy

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on the Female Gaze.

“… a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed.”

– Catherine Breillat

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has spent her career exploring female sexuality. She hasn’t done so in a comfortable, easy way. When The Woman says to The Man, “Watch me where I’m unwatchable” in Anatomy of Hell, this could very well be Breillat’s message to her audiences as she presents female desire in harsh, jarring narratives that completely subvert the male gaze.

Normally, if we talk about subverting the male gaze and focusing on the female gaze in film, it’s cause for celebration. Finally! We scream. We’re coming!

Breillat’s female gaze is different, though. It pushes us to places of complete discomfort and sometimes disgust, and forces and challenges us to think about the deeply twisted cultural expectations surrounding women and sex.

Sometimes a shock is what it takes to bring us to places of transfiguration. We can’t smoothly transition to the female gaze after centuries of being surrounded and objectified by the male gaze. Breillat delivers shock after shock that serve to transfigure how we see ourselves and our culture. This isn’t comfortable, but it’s powerful.

The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.

Breillat’s first film, based off her novel, Le Soupirail, was A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille). Produced in 1976, it was quickly banned and wasn’t released in France until 1999. The film centers around 14-year-old Alice, who is discovering and attempting to navigate her sexual awakening. A Real Young Girl is avant-garde puberty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FXxS9VevE”]

There are moments in the film that are confusing and grotesque (most notably one of her fantasies that involves barbed wire and a ripped-up earthworm). While I found some of these scenes disturbing, I like being disturbed. The worm scene horrified me at first, but then I realized that when I was in high school, the hit teen comedy involved a dude literally fucking a pie. Teenage sexuality is weird and when we are faced with a teen girl’s sexuality–something we are not used to seeing (unless she is a sexual object)–in all of its confusion and vacillation between intense desire and disgust, we are uncomfortable. Breillat wants us to be uncomfortable; she wants to push us to the edge to that visceral experience that will challenge how we see both female sexuality and film depictions of female sexuality.

Fat Girl (À ma sœur!), released in 2001, follows two sisters–Elena, 15, and Anaïs, 12–as they vacation with their parents. Elena is conventionally beautiful, and while she likes boys and has experimented sexually, she wants to remain a virgin until she’s with someone who “loves” her. She quickly develops a relationship with a young man who is frustrated with her desire to not have sex. He pressures her into anal sex (which hurts her), tries to force her to have oral sex, and finally convinces her he loves her and she has sex with him. In all of these instances, Anaïs is in the room–feigning sleep, asking them to stop, or, when they finally have sex, crying.

Anaïs’s views on sex are very different than Elena’s. She is starting to feel sexual–she’s not a teenager yet, but she’s not a child. Her desires range from banana splits to having sex just to get it over with. She has sexual desires, and her responses to Elena’s sexual experiences show both naiveté and jealousy. Their ages, their exterior looks, their sexual experiences (or lack thereof) all inform Breillat’s treatment of the sisters’ relationship with one another, with their own burgeoning sexuality, and with a culture that insists on sexualizing Elena and ignoring Anaïs. Their desires–Elena as internalized (and then disappointed) object, Anaïs as frustrated subject–are common categories for adolescent girls to fall into.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHRJRbM2EAg”]

Fat Girl (read Breillat’s commentary on the title here) is disturbing in its depictions of some of Elena and Anaïs’s experiences. However, the end of the film is shocking and violent. After Elena and her mother are brutally killed at a rest stop, the murderer rapes Anaïs in the woods. The next morning, she tells the police she wasn’t raped, and she looks at the camera, in an ending that clearly reflects The 400 Blows. Like the Truffaut classic, we are saddened and disturbed at the life trajectory of our young protagonists, and have no idea where their lives will go from here. We just have a frozen young face staring at us, implicating us in their fate.

Anaïs, at the end, seems to embrace her rape (as her meaningless loss of virginity that she wanted) and deny its violence. This is made even more traumatic since her rapist murdered her mother and sister (her sister who had just become sexually active, and her mother who wanted to punish her for it).

The message here is that girls cannot win. A patriarchal culture–full of boys who think they’re entitled to sex and men who violently rape and kill women–cares little for female desire and agency. This world is a dangerous place for girls. This world treats pretty girls like objects, and unpretty girls like nothing. Their desires are complicated and real, but are eclipsed by toxic masculinity.

Released in 2004, Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie De L’Enfer) is a film that pulls together pornography, misogyny, and female sexuality in a way that shocks and disgusts (male reviewers in particular wrote scathing, condescending reviews of the film). The Woman visits a gay bar and attempts suicide in the bathroom–she is tired of being a woman and being hated by men, and surmises that gay men hate women the most. The Man, however, saves her and she offers to pay him to stay in her home for four days to “watch her where she is unwatchable.” What follows is, for some viewers, unwatchable.

The Woman is naked for most of the film (a body double is used for vaginal shots), and The Man is played by an Italian porn star. His homosexuality serves to completely upend the typical male gaze. He’s disgusted by much of what he’s seeing and experiencing, and the understanding that this primal, visceral, shocking female desire is at the focus of the film (and has absolutely nothing to do with male desire) reflects a culture that typically focuses only on the male gaze and male pleasure. In this culture, female sexuality isn’t a consideration.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbFSZiT2-a4″]

When The Man drinks a glass of water with a used-tampon teabag, certainly the audience is meant to feel disgust. Perhaps some audience members actually gagged at the sight. How many scenes, however, in porn (explicitly) or mainstream film (suggested), feature women swallowing male excretions? Do we blink? Or is it just part of what we expect it means to be a heterosexual woman?

Jamie Russell astutely observes at the BBC, “For all the shocks, though, this is a stoically serious movie: it’s anti-porn, a transgressive sex movie that’s not against pornography but against the (male-dominated) objectification of women’s bodies.”

In an interview with The Guardian, Breillat articulated that her female gaze should directly threaten the male gaze, and that men should examine their own sexuality in the face of female desire:

“It’s a joke – if men can’t desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?”

The reporter points out that Breillat had said “that censorship was a male pre-occupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome,” and Breillat goes on to discuss the religious and patriarchal reasons to censor female desire, which is directly connected to keeping power away from women.

Breillat’s 1999 Romance was originally given an X rating (or banned in some countries). At Senses of Cinema, Brian Price notes that “Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.”

And that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Breillat’s work pushes boundaries and forces us to live in the intense intimacy and discomfort of a female gaze that we are unused to due to social oppression of women and women’s sexuality (at the hands of patriarchal religious and government systems). The literal and figurative red X over Breillat’s work–and female sexuality–needs to be stripped away to reveal what’s underneath–which isn’t always pretty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpH-V6kkOwI”]

___________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Pleading for the Female Gaze Through Its Absence in ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’

The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

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

“You guys know about vampires?” author Junot Diaz once asked an audience of college students. “You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, ‘Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?'”

This is the starting point of Blue is the Warmest Color, which contends, and grapples with, the fact that depictions of female pleasure by female artists do not exist in art. This condition, this lack of understanding and representation, is what dogs its protagonist, Adele, as she struggles and ultimately fails to achieve a sense of comfort with her queerness. Female pleasure abounds in the film from the explicit sex between Adele and Emma, whose romance the film charts the rise and fall of, to eating, and the particular pleasure of observing and being observed. Adele is sometimes the subject, as she pursues Emma or when they take in an art exhibit, her gaze on the nude female figures constructed by men the focus of the scene, and sometimes she is the object as she poses for Emma’s paintings, the first representational work of her lover’s career.

The English title of the film, the same as the graphic novel it was adapted from, implies an inversion of the normal way of seeing. We’re used to seeing blue as cool, cold, and distant, but the film challenges us to see it as a vibrant and passionate colour the way that it challenges us to reconceptualize the power and passion of queer love. The French title, La Vie D’Adele: Chapitres I & II are heavy with film and literary allusions. To The Story of Adele H, the loose account of how Victor Hugo’s daughter pursued an unrequited love across continents and La Vie de Marianne, a novel left unfinished, suggesting both tragedy and an unfinished quality, which both come into fruition. Adele remains restless and unfulfilled throughout the film as Truffaut’s depiction of Adele Hugo is, but the irony of the reference is that Blue’s Adele is an inversion. Instead of warping the world around her to believe that an unrequited love is genuine, Adele is dogged by the invisible weight of heteronormativity that propels her to hide her relationship and live in a private shame. The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

The problem with the male gaze and trying to uplift or separate a female equivalent from it is that male gaze as a term and concept has shrunk in its application to a narrow didactic interpretation that borders on being universally pejorative. To wit, the simple unexamined usage of the term was thought to be all that was needed to condemn Blue is the Warmest Color by its skeptics, but the use of “male gaze” as a cudgel that immediately translates into prurience and exploitation does more harm than good to the conception of a female gaze not least because it immediately valorizes the alternative, as elaborated on by Edward Snow in his essay “Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems”:

“Nothing could better serve the paternal superego than to reduce masculine vision completely to the terms of power, violence, and control, to make disappear whatever in the male gaze remains outside the patriarchal, and pronounce outlawed, guilty, damaging, and illicitly possessive every male view of women. It is precisely on such grounds that the father’s law institutes and maintains itself in vision. A feminism not attuned to internal difference risks becoming the instrument rather than the abrogator of the law.

[…]

Under the aegis of demystifying and excoriating male vision, the critic systematically deprives images of women of their subjective or undecidable aspects- to say nothing of their power -and at the same time eliminates from the onlooking “male” ego whatever elements of identification with, sympathy for, or vulnerability to the feminine such images bespeak.”

Simply put, the male gaze is not a monolith, and despite the way that the term is used in criticism and conversation, no one actually views film from the position that the male gaze is monolithic or purely informed by patriarchal values. To actually adopt that stance would require the conflation of Kenneth Anger with Quentin Tarantino, among other laughable absurdities. Male-directed film has always found ways to appeal to women on terms other than internalized misogyny, and of course the male vision in film has been frequently mitigated, influenced, or redirected by the work of women in other roles. Tarantino, for instance, is famous for his collaboration with the late editor Sally Menke, whom he sought out specifically for a feminine influence, which is hardly a rare event. Much recent buzz was generated by another female editor, Margaret Sixel, who worked on Mad Max: Fury Road with longtime collaborator George Miller (she edited Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City for him). Her contribution has been argued as being integral to the strong female reception to the movie, which, again, runs the risk of valorizing women’s work as being inherently superior.

The problem with strictly gendering the gaze is that it can improperly frame collaborations and essentialize the vision of female filmmakers. Mad Max: Fury Road, as a film, is more than the sum of a male director and a female editor, especially for a narrative so committed to dissecting toxic masculinity from within. So too ought Sally Menke’s work with Tarantino be seen more than just a mitigation, but a cornerstone of Tarantino’s desire to achieve more that what the limitations of his masculinity allow for, especially as the roles of women in his films evolved from non existent in Reservoir Dogs to the complete focus in Deathproof. Perhaps the most intriguing recent example of how a female collaborator transformed the work of a male director was in Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of her own novel Gone Girl for David Fincher, inverting the uncomfortable and frequently malicious male gaze that engenders his work, transferring the web of fear that his female protagonists like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander or Alien 3’s Ripley live in to the male protagonist and through him, the male audience. It’s a synthesis that cannot be easily essentialized into a single gendered gaze.

This is compounded by the fact that male nor female are fixed categories, nor are their desires. How are we, for instance, intended to properly frame the work of Lana Wachowski as a trans woman? How trans women engage with gender in our own lives and through our art cannot and should not be subsumed into a lens defined by the cisgender female experience. Which is only the beginning of how ruinous categorizations of gender in the gaze are on queer film and filmmakers. In comic book criticism especially, lenses of queer male masculinity are frequently co-opted and assimilated into constructions of the female gaze, which has the twin repercussions of narrowing queer male desire to a pinprick of feminized male figures and completely alienating queer female desire. If there are to be productive critical frameworks that utilize “male” and “female” gazes, they must be understood as needing a prism held up to them in order to properly understand the full spectrum of what informs a particular vision. There needs to be an understanding of intersectionality intrinsic to their uses.

On that note, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, the stars of Blue is the Warmest Color, are the only actors to have been awarded Cannes’ Palme D’Or alongside their director, Abdellatif Kechiche. It was done by a jury made up of Steven Spielberg, Bollywood actress Vidya Balan, Christoph Waltz, We Need To Talk About Kevin screenwriter Lynne Ramsay, Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu (whose Beyond the Hills and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days have tackled themes including queer femininity and access to abortion), Japanese writer-director Naomi Kawase, Nicole Kidman, and Ang Lee. Nicole Kidman, it must be recalled, co-starred in Stanley Kubrick’s erotically charged Eyes Wide Shut with then husband Tom Cruise. Ang Lee’s career as a director has been built almost entirely out of critically lauded portrayals of queerness and eroticism including The Ice Storm; Lust, Caution; Brokeback Mountain; and Taking Woodstock. The crowning of Kechiche, Exarchopoulos, and Seydoux by this jury, Lee and Kidman in particular, ought to have carried with it all the mythic importance of Quentin Tarantino, as head jurist, awarding Chan-Wook Park the Palme D’Or for Oldboy a decade earlier. Instead it’s treated as a footnote. Presumably because in this instance, that jury was more attuned to the nuances of the male gaze than the American critical establishment that presaged its arrival on US soil with cries of exploitation and misogyny.

The Cannes jury made it clear that they wanted to define the film as a collaboration, and I would extend that further to define it as a conversation. At its heart, Blue is the Warmest Color is a film about performances of identity and how the stresses of assimilation can erode and destroy fundamental parts of our being. One of the primary ways that we can perceive Kechiche’s self awareness that his masculinity limits his ability to conceive of and portray female queerness accurately is the insertion of a viewpoint character for him, an Arab actor Adele originally meets at a party thrown for Emma’s artist friends. He asks naive, well meaning questions about their relationship that queer women the world over hear, but understanding that he’s probed far enough or perhaps too far into her life and identity as an interloper, he opens up to her. He tells her about how he’s an actor and he’s just been to the United States, describing New York City in the same way that we dreamily describe Paris. “They love it when we say Allahu Akbar,” he says with a smile, telling her about how there’s always a hunger for Arab terrorists in Hollywood. Kechiche is, himself, Tunisian, and this is his exegesis.

He’s approaching the queer experience from the perspective of the immigrant experience. This is the Adam’s Rib that he proffers up towards the goal of uncovering female pleasure in art. This is the part of himself that he bares in order to justify the depth with which he probes Adele and Emma’s relationship. The clearest way that we see his Arab identity in the film is in the act of cooking and eating, which easily transcends the specific cultural context he takes it from thanks to the intimacy and care with which it’s handled. Cooking is framed as emotional labor, seen most keenly as Adele frets over making Spaghetti Bolognese for Emma’s friends, fretting over it as she serves it. Eating is, except for Adele’s junk food stash, a communal act, the consumption of the emotional labour of cooking as much as the food itself. This merges with queerness as Adele tries oysters, possibly the most yonic food imaginable, at dinner with Emma’s family. Her hesitance and discomfiture with eating oysters despite the welcoming attitude of Emma’s family mirrors the overwhelming tension she’s experiencing in her performance of queer femininity, and the difficulty she’s experiencing in how accepting Emma’s family is of it.

The broader sense of how Kechiche attempts to conceive of queerness through the best available lens at his disposal is how he constructs France’s queer community as a diaspora. He portrays Adele’s budding queerness and her experience of the queer nightlife in much the same way as the child of immigrants might feel overwhelmed and illegitimate by their first exposure to their parents’ native culture. There are certainly parallels between Adele’s entry into the queer community while still in high school and A Prophet’s Malik’s early uncomfortable interactions with the Arab prisoners after having been forcibly assimilated into the ranks of the Corsicans.

Where they differ is that Malik is able to thrive within the group by shedding attachments to the structures that will never accept him while Adele folds under the pressure of maintaining both a queer identity and the public performance of a straight one, immolating her relationship with Emma and leaving her isolated. Similarly, the Arab character returns to the film as Adele visits Emma’s latest show after their reconciliation. He tells her that he’s left acting, that he got tired of that one narrow performance of identity that the film industry allowed him. He’s never been happier. Adele remains unable to shed that attachment to the normative world and leaves feeling more upset and isolated than ever before.

The pressure of assimilation asserted by heteronormativity and white supremacy are distinct yet similarly functioning forces, which is one of the main achievements of the film. While it is by definition an uneasy attempt at capturing the queer female condition, Blue is the Warmest Color succeeds magnificently by providing a context and a shared struggle with which to build solidarity between marginalized groups in contemporary France. In the scene immediately following Adele’s break up with Emma, we see her leading her children in a celebration of African culture, with Adele wearing a cheaply thrown together pastiche of African fashion, adopting a clearly false and ill fitting identity. It’s a stark metaphor for how poorly Adele assimilates into heteronormativity.

Kechiche’s attempts to conceptualize of others’ struggles by finding commonality is by no means uncommon or uncelebrated in contemporary film. Jim Sheridan found common ground with 50 Cent when making Get Rich or Die Tryin’ by taking him to where he was born in Dublin and exploring their differing experiences of 1980s New York City. In an oddly similar way, Steve McQueen launched his feature film career by exploring the Northern Irish experience of otherness in his account of Bobby Sands’ imprisonment in Hunger.

In regard to the female gaze, Blue is the Warmest Color isn’t an exemplar, but a cautionary tale in how conflating the gendered gaze with the gender of the director can obscure and severely harm incredibly brave and vital filmmaking. Especially in the case of a film that strives to achieve a sense of understanding between distinct groups that suffer similar forms of oppression.

Emma Houxbois is a fiercely queer trans woman whose natural habitat is the Pacific Northwest. She is currently the Comics Editor for The Rainbow Hub and co-host of Fantheon, a weekly comics podcast.

Women in a Man’s World: ‘Mad Men’ and the Female Gaze

In fact, many of the clients grow to appreciate the benefit of the female gaze, making their products truly (for the most part) appealing to women. This makes more profit than the false patriarchal ideas of a woman’s wants and needs. With the character of Peggy, Weiner is able to let us see the advertising world from the female gaze to criticize the falsehood that lies in selling female products with a male gaze.

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

Mad Men is a remarkable portrayal of the 1960s that explores the office and home lives of workers in the New York City advertising industry over the course of a decade. The 60s was a particularly patriarchal and sexist period of history, as was the profession that Mad Men depicts. Advertising, even for women’s products, was driven by the male gaze. Mad Men aims to portray the decade and the world of Madison Avenue advertising as accurately as possible, but does not view it from the patriarchal standpoint of the time.

In the Establishing Mad Men documentary, creator Matthew Weiner states that Mad Men “is about conflicting desires in the American male, and the people who pay the price for that are women.” The leading women in the series who pay that price are Peggy Olson, Joan Harris, and Betty Draper. The struggles of Mad Men’s male characters have ramifications on them. Weiner uses the female gaze of these women to criticize the sexism of the era and profession they inhabit, while rendering fully realized and dynamic female characters. Peggy, Joan, and Betty are depicted as sexual, complicated, and diverse human beings.

In the first season of Mad Men especially, much of the dialogue shows the vast amount of overt sexism in the workplace. The Sterling Cooper secretaries are a smorgasbord available for men’s consumption, objects they can use for their amusement or lust. For most audience members of the 2000s, this blatant sexism is baffling, and some may find it oddly humorous just how much was acceptable or tolerated back then.

We experience this sexism through the eyes and gaze of Peggy Olson, who, much like the audience, is being introduced to the world of Sterling Cooper in the first episode. Peggy ends up being the female character most tied with the nature of advertising- making her way from Don Draper’s secretary to copywriter and then copy chief. But at first she is just another secretary, a new piece of fresh meat for the men. Peggy has never worked in an office before; she is straight out of secretarial school. Raised in a strict Catholic family, Peggy has likely never experienced male ogling at quite this level. By Episode 2, “Ladies’ Room,” Peggy is already fed up: “Honestly, why is it that every time a man takes you out to lunch around here, you’re…you’re the dessert!” she bemoans to Joan. Matthew Weiner uses the female gaze purposefully in the following scene where the camera allows the audience to identify with Peggy as the men’s prey. As Peggy sits at her desk on the typewriter, the camera cuts to many different men in slow-motion gazing at her, with reverse low angle-shots of Peggy. The multiple and unrelenting gazes of men echoes Peggy’s dialogue from minutes before: “It’s constant from every corner.” The low-angle on Peggy heightens her overwhelming feeling of their gaze.

Peggy’s role puts her in the position of seeing not only the advertising world firsthand, but also the male point of view that it so actively employs, and from her first account, she begins to challenge that point of view. Peggy’s rise in advertising begins with a Belle Jolie lipstick campaign. The Sterling Cooper secretaries are treated to a testing session (viewed by the men behind a two-way mirror) where they can try on as many Belle Jolie lipsticks as they please. The gaggle of secretaries are thrilled, but Peggy sits there unhappily. The camera shows Peggy watching the girls try on lipsticks in slow motion, the seeds of her first copy pitch planting in her brain. Freddy Rumsen asks Peggy why she didn’t try on any lipsticks. Peggy tells him that they didn’t have her color, that she is very particular: “I don’t think anyone wants to be one of a hundred colors in a box.” The men are failing to see the individuality in women, and instead choosing to see them as a limited whole. Peggy’s observations leads her to be promoted to copywriter for that campaign.

In Season 3, Peggy continues to challenge the male gaze in advertising. In a campaign for Patio, the clients want a shot-for-shot reenactment Bye Bye Birdie’s opening: “She’s throwing herself at the camera. No one seems to care that it speaks to men. Not the people that drink diet drinks.” Peggy asks Don about the faux Ann-Margaret. “It’s not about making women feel fat. It’s ‘look how happy I am drinking Patio. I’m young and excited and desperate for a man,’” Don replies. “I don’t mind fantasies, but shouldn’t it be a female one?” Peggy asks. “Peggy, you understand how this works: men want her, women want to be her.” Don is subtly insisting to Peggy that advertising, even for women’s products, is aimed for men. Don is also hinting to Peggy that if she keeps up the criticisms about the male gaze in advertising, she will lose her job.

Another example is the Playtex ad from Season 2 Episode 6’s “Maidenform.” Kinsey comes up with an idea that every woman is either a Jackie or Marilyn. He points to various women in the office pinpointing which one they are. “I don’t know if all women are a Jackie or a Marilyn. Maybe men seem them that way,” Peggy counters. “Bras are for men. Women want to see themselves the way men see them,” Kinsey insists.

As the series progresses into the mid-60s, we see the gradual shift into (slightly) more open-minded ideals about the roles of women in the workplace. Peggy is promoted and works on many campaigns. In fact, many of the clients grow to appreciate the benefit of the female gaze, making their products truly (for the most part) appealing to women. This makes more profit than the false patriarchal ideas of a woman’s wants and needs. With the character of Peggy, Weiner is able to let us see the advertising world from the female gaze to criticize the falsehood that lies in selling female products with a male gaze.

Peggy makes the biggest change as the series goes on, from a meek, mousy girl to a headstrong woman, though her evolution is no surprise upon reflection. Outside of the office, Peggy is seen many times exerting control over her own sexuality and choice of sexual partners. Peggy’s struggles of putting career over having a family are honestly and sensitively executed by Weiner.

Another female character tied to Sterling Cooper is Joan Holloway (later Harris). No other character experiences the male gaze as much as Joan. In the beginning seasons, the camera flatters and accentuates every curve of Hendricks’s voluptuous body. We see her as the men in the office see her. But one scene turns this on its head, in Season 1’s “Babylon,” at the Belle Jolie lipstick testing. Joan oversees the secretaries wearing a gorgeous skin-tight red dress. The camera views Joan (as the men view her) as she walks across the table, slyly looking at the two-way mirror. The camera then glides over to and fixes on Joan’s bottom as she bends over. Cut to Joan smirking, turning around and looking squarely at the mirror, almost straight into the camera. Joan knows the men are gazing at her, and she takes possession of that gaze by giving them what they want to see. The men think they have the power in being able to gaze at her unknowingly, but the power lies in Joan’s hands as she presents herself to be looked at. When Joan looks into the camera, it is almost as if she is also challenging the audience as well.

The character of Joan is frequently seen as a sexual object by all those around her. Many of her storylines revolve around the harmful ramifications you experience when you are only viewed by how you look and your body. The men around her, and even Joan herself, tend to use that sexuality as a pawn. Joan knows she exactly how she is viewed and objectified by the men in the office, and she yields that power for better or for worse. Two significant plot points happen to Joan–the rape by her fiancé and the act of prostitution to obtain the Jaguar account and a higher position in the office. As she lies on the office floor with Greg on top of her, or as awful, the awful car salesman kisses her and takes off her fur coat, the camera fixes on only Joan in a close-up. By doing that we are able to empathize with only her instead of focusing on the act. Weiner visually does not reduce these scenes to moments of exploitation. We are not centered on the event itself, but on what Joan is going through.

The show itself does not reduce Joan to just a sexual object as much as the men around her would like her to be so. Joan is a very smart, capable woman that is excellent at her job, more so than some of the men are. She often goes unappreciated until she does obtain her higher-up position. The show’s finale shows Joan running a production company in her home while raising her son.

Outside of Sterling Cooper, but connected to leading man Don Draper, is Betty Draper (later Francis). Betty’s image is one of passive, docile sexuality and complete perfection. Throughout the series, we quickly learn that there is more beneath Betty’s Barbie Doll-esque façade, for Weiner delves deeper than the false image she presents. Betty’s character seems ripped straight out the pages of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a visual personification of “the problem that has no name” that she studied in housewives. Betty’s character allows viewers of modern day to see the nature of those housewives’ lives; there are multiple scenes of the dull drudgery and loneliness Betty deals with day to day alone in the house.

We first get a glimpse at her underlying sexuality when she tells Don, “I want you so much. I thought about it all day. No I mean it. It’s all I think about…every day. Your car coming down the driveway. I put the kids to bed early. I make a grocery list. I cook butterscotch pudding. I never let my hands idle. Brushing my hair, drinking my milk…and it’s all in kind of a fog because I can’t stop thinking about this. I want you so badly.” From this we learn that Betty is very much at the whim of Don’s actions. One episode delves further into Betty’s brimming sexuality, when we see her pleasuring herself against a washing machine while fantasizing about making love to the air conditioner salesman. In Season 3, after seeing Don sleep with so many other women, there is a scene of Betty controlling her sexuality when she sleeps with a stranger from a bar. Matthew Weiner takes great care in telling her side of the story in the marriage and relation to Don. Betty is not shown to be the demure or child-like woman that Don or others may view her as.

Mad Men is one of the few shows that depicts a successful representation of the female gaze, despite taking place in an era and profession where female’s experiences were often devalued. Weiner does not reduce the women to just mere symbols of the decade’s movements but crafts them as complicated and dynamic human beings living in an equally complicated time. And this is not limited to just Peggy, Joan, and Betty. Mad Men has many women, good qualities and bad, older women, mothers, grandmothers, young girls, teenagers, within the show that Weiner manages–even through small parts–to finely craft. Weiner uses the female gaze as one of many ways to examine the fascinating decade.

Caroline Madden has a BFA in Acting from Shenandoah Conservatory and is working on an MA in Cinema Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design. She writes about film at Geek Juice, Screenqueens, and her blog. You can usually find her watching movies or listening to Bruce Springsteen.

Mina Harker Should Have Her Own ‘Dracula’ Adaptation

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, is an epistolary novel and the equivalent of found footage horror movies today. The protagonists, including Wilhelmina “Mina” Harker (née Murray), are tech-savvy and modern, using resources and skills such as phonographs and shorthand in their efforts to find and vanquish Dracula. As far as heroines of Victorian novels written by men go, Mina is a pretty decent heroine – smart, resourceful, (relatively) observant, and eager to protect those around her – particularly her best friend Lucy and her fiancé/husband Jonathan Harker. Mina reflects the “modern” woman of the time, as she is an employed young woman who is ambitious, determined, and an excellent archivist, gun brandisher, and coach-driver (I can’t overemphasize how big a deal that last one is!). She rightfully demands respect from her husband and the other male characters. She also treats others with respect, even the mentally ill, who were and are looked down upon by society. Due to her respectful treatment of the insane asylum inmate, Renfield (one of Dracula’s minions), he in turn gives a warning about Dracula’s plans, including the vampire’s dangerous plans for Mina.

Judi Bowker as Mina in "Count Dracula" (1977) — Judi Bowker as Mina in *Count Dracula* (1977)

Something not often explored in film and TV movie adaptations is that Mina and other female characters are often inadvertently endangered by the pride of the male protagonists. It is out of misguided respect for Mina that the male protagonists try so hard to protect her, and yet fail so miserably. They fail so miserably that when I first read the novel, I confused my family by laughing out loud at Bram Stoker’s (what seems to be unintended) irony (and I learned that laughing out loud at a classic horror novel tends to raise eyebrows).

Allow me to summarize one particular section of the plot:

Male protagonists: “Let’s go hunt Dracula at his house, which is right next door to where we are!”

Mina (the female lead): “Yes, let’s go!”

Male protagonists: “No, Mina! We want to protect you by leaving you all alone and vulnerable in a house right next door to Dracula’s! All of us demand that you stay here! And try not to think about the warning Renfield gave about how Dracula, a being far more powerful than any of us combined and who can literally get into a room through a crack in the floor by turning himself into mist, is going to target you!”

Mina: “Fine! Ugh!” (Curls up in bed, trying not to feel paranoid.)

(Male protagonists show up at Dracula’s house.)

Male protagonists: “Well, here we are at Dracula’s house. ‘Guess Dracula’s not home. Weird. ‘Wonder where he could be. Ah, well. Good thing we protected Mina!”

(Male protagonists return home to find an ill-looking Mina unconscious with two puncture wounds in her neck, and mist everywhere.)

Male protagonists: “Aw, look! Mina was so worried about us that she cried herself to sleep. So cute! It’s a good thing we decided to protect Mina instead of treating her like an equal.”

Thus, the male protagonists inadvertently provide Dracula with the opportunity to assault Mina – which is oh just sort of reminiscent of how everyday sexism and benevolent sexism both directly and indirectly support rape culture. The very people who claim they desire to protect (White) women are the ones contributing to the danger. They have faulty logic, which can be funny at times, and yet that faulty logic is clearly harmful.

Louis Jourdan's Dracula encourages Judi Bowker's Mina to "feed" from him/please herself, encouraging her to "come" (pun implied). — Louis Jourdan’s Dracula encourages Judi Bowker’s Mina to “feed” from him/please herself, encouraging her to “come” (pun implied).

The novel is heavy in racist, colonialist, and anti-immigration messages. Stoker heavily implies that Northern-European and American White people, especially if they’re Catholic (Stoker’s religion), are awesome, and they should totally be welcomed everywhere. Literally all other peoples (especially those who want to immigrate to Northern-Europe or America)? F*** those guys. (Especially if they’re “dark,” and certainly if they’re Roma.) Stoker demands that (White) men protect their (White) wives and love interests against “dark” men, particularly immigrants (in Dracula’s case, from Eastern Europe). These men are so sinisterly hedonistic in their values, they may actually corrupt a Victorian woman’s purity not only through sex, but by sexually pleasing the woman and not just themselves! (Gasp! Female orgasms?! The horror!) The chauvinism of the (White) male protagonists (three British, one Dutch, one Texan) and their masculine need to “protect” Mina nearly lead to her death, and almost result in her going full vampire.

Peta Wilson as Mina in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (2003) — Peta Wilson as Mina in *The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen* (2003)

Hollywood has a trend of attempting to make female characters seem more important to the story by making them more “badass,” and while I have no problems with the idea of seeing Mina hack up vampires, or seeing a heroic Vampire!Mina (thank you, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), another way of empowering women and combating sexism other than positive representation of women is to point out everyday and even “benevolent” chauvinism. This is exactly the kind of sexism the male characters exhibit in Dracula – even Dracula himself, to an extent, with the female vampires who live in his castle and for whom he provides.

Winona Ryder's Mina is the reincarnated wife of Gary Oldman's Dracula in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992) — Winona Ryder’s Mina is the reincarnated wife of Gary Oldman’s Dracula in *Bram Stoker’s Dracula* (1992)

More Mina representation seems to be on its way, with the reboot of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen evidently to be “female-centric.” Hollywood is always cranking out more Dracula adaptations, but just how many have there been that point out benevolent sexism? How many feature Mina getting frustrated with the male protagonists, delivering them an angry monologue in which she points out all the ways they’ve almost led to her death? Instead of this, Hollywood has been repeatedly attempting to make Dracula, her attacker, redeemable – a tragic anti-hero, often on a quest to find the reincarnation of his long-lost love, who is revealed to be Mina. Wait, so reincarnation is supposed to justify sexual assault? No, Hollywood. No. Nor is stalking romantic (even if it’s done through the magic of musical theatre, Frank Wildhorn).

As this book review points out, there are no films entitled with Mina’s name, while there are many with Dracula’s and at least one with Van Helsing’s. Though not the only protagonist to be left out of titles, most notably Jonathan (the leading male protagonist), Mina deserves a film completely centered on her. And hopefully this Dracula adaptation, unlike most (if not all) adaptations (I’m looking at you, Dracula Untold), finds a way to rid itself of the novel’s racist, colonialist, and anti-immigration messages.

Empowerment in the Imaginary Spaces of Zach Snyder’s ‘Sucker Punch’

By creating her own worlds where she is a force to be reckoned with, Babydoll reclaims that very thing that was taken away from her by her stepfather and the hospital: her humanity.

The women of Sucker Punch — The women of *Sucker Punch*

This guest post by Toni McIntyre appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

At first glimpse, I’ll admit that Sucker Punch looks like little more than Zach Snyder’s latent schoolgirl fantasies brought to life. That Emily Browning, who plays main character Babydoll, has: A) that patronizing name and B) the dewy wide eyes of an anime heroine don’t exactly help. That said I’ve never been one to dismiss a film on wardrobe choices alone, even if they do cater a whole buffet’s worth to the male gaze. Snyder himself has even hinted that the aesthetics of Sucker Punch were chosen deliberately to mock geek culture’s sexualized fantasy version of women. Whether he was successful in that endeavor or not is fodder for another essay. The point is that as waifish as Babydoll appears, and however we may be tempted to dismiss Sucker Punch as just another male fantasy, a close look at the dystopian spaces within the film and how Babydoll exists in those spaces reveals a more woman-friendly, if bittersweet, reading.

The tragedy that starts the movie in earnest takes place in a very tight space. Babydoll attempts to shoot her abusive stepfather as he breaks down the door to a closet where Babydoll’s sister is hiding. The shot misses its intended target, ricochets in a way only bullets in movies can, and fatally wounds Babydoll’s sister inside the closet. Taking immediate advantage of the situation to unburden himself of his remaining stepdaughter, Babydoll’s stepfather carts her off to a mental hospital. Babydoll trades one menacing patriarchal force for another as crooked orderlies loom menacingly over Babydoll and the other broken but beautiful patients.

Rocket, Sweet Pea, and Blondie in the bordello world of Babydoll’s creation

Unable to cope with the reality of being in the hospital, Babydoll escapes inward and creates the first of two imagined worlds in her own mind. The first space is a richly adorned bordello and exists as the real world askew. The women from the hospital are still trapped, to a degree, in the bordello, but they have noticeably more power in how they present themselves to each other and to their male customers than they do in the hospital. It’s enough for Babydoll to become much more vocal once she’s imagined to be in the bordello—she becomes a plotting, rallying force for the other women.

It’s Babydoll’s second imagined world, one she accesses while she dances and enters a trance-like fugue state within the bordello, that Babydoll acts out her readiness to fight. While in the bordello everything is secrets and plans, in this second world, it’s all action. This second space is where things expand, where we get wide shots of extravagant landscapes—feudal Japan, a dragon’s den, a maze of soldier’s trenches. This second world is the tiny space of the closet where Babydoll fought her first battle, and where she lost in every sense of the word, blown wide open, given the space Babydoll needs in order to imagine battles she can fight and win.

Babydoll in her second world, armed and ready

Famed author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was observing a patient who experienced “transports” similar to Babydoll’s. Sacks pitied his patient and described the man’s imagined worlds as a “deceiving surface of illusion” that lacked anything deep or true. I’m not going to say Oliver Sacks is wrong in his observation, but I think it’s a simple way of looking at mental worlds or spaces—as untrue. I don’t think we’re meant to view any of the worlds Babydoll creates as false. And to quote another very wise and bearded man, Albus Dumbledore, even if something is happening only in your head, “Why on earth should that mean it’s not real?”

Babydoll had to travel within herself to worlds she created and could control, in order to discover a truth. We get a glimpse of what that truth is in a bit of dialogue delivered by the older matriarch figure the bordello:

“You see, your fight for survival starts right now. You don’t want to be judged? You won’t be. You don’t think you’re strong enough? You are. You’re afraid. Don’t be. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight.”

By creating her own worlds where she is a force to be reckoned with, Babydoll reclaims that very thing that was taken away from her by her stepfather and the hospital: her humanity.

Sucker Punch strives for optimism. The film wants to tell us that we have all the power within ourselves to rally against an unjust system. For a film bleeding special effects, it hits a real gut-punch worthy note of reality when we watch Babydoll fight—and fail. Again. The patriarchal forces at the hospital resurface and Babydoll sacrifices herself to ensure the escape of one of her fellow patients. Babydoll is lobotomized, her physical being trapped in the hospital, her mind free to sink down within the worlds she made for herself. Sucker Punch wants to tell us we have all the power we need to fight a unjust system, but, also, that that system sometimes still wins. It’s honest and brutal. Babydoll is made a prisoner twice over, and it’s a cold comfort that at least the second time, the decision to become locked in her own mind is hers. Sucker Punch is a story of finding your strength. It’s about looking in when those in control take away your ability to look out. It’s about making your own space when the space they give you is too small and too controlled for you to actually be. It’s equal parts a suggestion and a warning of what happens when you travel far enough into your own subconscious to really know yourself and all you’re capable of when the world outside may still beat you down. When I think about Babydoll, locked in her own mind, I think about when Gatson Bachelard warned that “he who buries a treasure, buries himself with it.”

Toni McIntyre is a native of Philadelphia but a Pittsburgh hockey fan. She once wrote a paper in grad school on Inception and couldn’t sleep for a week. She’s very often, too often, on Twitter.

The Margins of Dystopia: Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Noah’

It certainly isn’t a feminist world she lives in, but she does her level best to undermine her husband in an enclosed space. As Noah himself veers away from his family tradition of life-supporting environmental husbandry, Naameh continues to practice what he (used to) preach, preserving her daughter-in-law, the animals, and the land once they find it again.

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

I’ve written before about a Darren Aronofsky film that I liked tremendously, Black Swan. I was a fan of The Wrestler and The Fountain. So when news of the director’s intent to tackle a Biblical epic in Noah was revealed, my reaction was a cautious excitement, but also: “Huh?” After seeing it, the “Huh?” response is pretty much still there.

But I was fascinated by Noah as a representation of dystopia, and, by its conclusion, of a supposed utopia. Its thinly veiled save-the-earth message seemed to simultaneously re-tell the Bible story with a new twist, and reinterpret it for non-believers (see also the “updated” environmental message of Scott Derrickson’s 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still). It was rather a strange experience, however, that for much of the film I had no idea what was going to happen next. That is not how I expected to experience a semi-familiar Bible story I heard many times as a child. These “inaccuracies” comprised the bulk of the negative reviews of the film, like this one from The Guardian.

It was easier then, perhaps, to see its story as a cautionary tale about our own time and place, removed from specifically Christian ideologies (except maybe for the Rock-Biter-esque Nephilim). So while it was clear enough how the film addressed environmental issues such as sustainable growing practices and the exploitation of natural resources, what did it say about other resources, like people? Human capital? Gender roles? Well, these topics were also disintegrating in the dystopic mess.

How dystopian is Noah’s opening act? Well, after a brief VFX sequence summarizing Creation, we fast-forward right to the murder of Noah’s dad at the hands of a young Tubal-Cain (sorry, spoilers…also something I didn’t expect to say in an essay about a Biblical story). Quite frankly, after sitting through the two hour and 20-minute movie, the plot points of the Bible story and the film have blurred a bit. What viewers know for sure is that Adam and Eve have been dispelled from the Garden, murder is a thing (thanks to Cain), and there are two factions of humans. One is the followers of Tubal-Cain, Biblical forger of bronze and iron, who are aggressively industrial, environmentally exploitative, and eat meat (sometimes human, sometimes CGI, pre-flood fantasy animals). Their existence is shown to be difficult, dirty, warrior-like, and (of course) patriarchal. It is only by accident, for instance, that a raiding party of these denizens leaves young Ila (Emma Watson) alive, and their violence has left her barren, though Noah’s wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) is able to save her life. This interaction, specifically, highlights differences between the two groups: essentially, one carries death, the other life.

The tribe of Noah are the descendants of Seth (brother of Cain and Abel, for those following along in the Genesis story), who possess a particular set of skills when it comes to the Earth. Members of their line appear to be caretakers of the land and perhaps the first environmentalists. They’re also vegetarians, in case you were wondering. Their existence is also seen to be difficult, and yet because of their family dynamic, close relationships, and respect for all living things, viewers understand that their ethos is preferable. Their costumes are softer, natural fabrics rather than metal armor and leather; they have names and distinct personalities as opposed to a mob-like, metalwork-blackened horde. The film goes a pretty long way to ingratiate these characters to us, most likely because later Noah himself will come close to tearing them all apart. But throughout most of the film, we see two clearly demarcated factions with clearly defined ideological beliefs in direct opposition to each other. Pretty divisive, and therefore pretty dystopian.

Of course we know that the story goes further than just setting up a conflict on the human scale. Noah’s main internal conflict lies in his troubling dreams and visions. His confusion creates tension not only within Noah’s own mind, but also within his family, as he tries to discern what exactly the Creator wants him to do, and to what end. Much of this conflict has to do with reproduction. Throughout the film, he successfully alienates almost everyone dear to him when he comes to believe that the Creator is so distressed with the human state of affairs that He wishes humanity to completely die out. He refuses his sons’ wives, and threatens to kill his grandchildren. His narrative becomes one of punishment for the variety of ills humankind has visited upon the Creator’s Earth, of which he comes to see himself and his family as equally guilty members in spite of their life-focused ethos.

Charting Noah’s emphasis on life and reproduction may illuminate the film’s dystopian arc. Early in the film, Noah experiences a vision of seeing a flower sprout spontaneously from a drop of water. Disturbed by this vision and his frequent dreams of a destructive flood, he seeks out his grandfather, Methuselah (incredibly, Anthony Hopkins). Methuselah gives Noah a seed, which, when planted, sprouts an entire forest full of trees from which to build the ark. While this seed is certainly a sign of life, and gives life to all of this lush CG greenery, it is a resource grown to be exploited in a way not unlike Tubal-cain’s mining operation. Is this permissible because it’s in the service of the Creator?

While the ark-building is happening, Noah’s children are growing up. Including Ila, who has become an adopted daughter, beloved of Noah’s eldest son, Shem. Because she is barren as a result of her childhood encounter with those violent raiders, Noah goes looking for wives for his two younger sons (after all, they have to repopulate the Earth after the flood). But when he arrives at a neighboring encampment, he sees chaos, violence, fire, and animals being ripped apart for food. It isn’t pretty, and we can understand why this vision seems to support Noah’s new interpretation of the Creator’s plan: his family’s purpose is only to save innocent animals, and when that task is done, humans will die off as the last of his family perishes. It is Naameh who cannot reconcile this plan, and she visits Methuselah to ask him to intercede. Here, we have the restrictions of a patriarchal society functioning within the life-driven Noah clan, where the potential for the continuation of the human race seems to rest not with the women who might bear the children, but with the aging male progenitor: his word may sway Noah and save humanity.

Meanwhile, Noah’s son Ham refuses to abide by his father’s wishes (rejection of the patriarchy) and goes to find his own wife. When he’s captured and imprisoned by Tubal-Cain’s league, he meets Na’al, a female captive. As the flood rains begin, the two escape, and Ham leads Na’al toward the ark to save her. But Noah has waded into the forest to find Ham, and as they run from the Cainian hordes, Na’al’s foot is caught in an animal trap and Noah forces Ham to leave her behind (re-establishment of the patriarchal law). They barely make it to the ark in time to be saved from numerous crazy CG geysers contributing to the rain and rising floodwaters.

And, in a surreal but somehow predictable turn of events, Ila encounters Methuselah in the forest and he magically cures her infertility. With his supernatural blessing, she seeks out Shem and they have a passionate moment in the forest just before boarding the ark. We can see where this is going—Ila will become pregnant and bear Noah’s grandchildren—but it’s significant that her ability to reproduce is granted her by the patriarch of Noah’s family.

All the while, Naameh maintains her role as an herbalist and a midwife and maybe the first organic farmer. Though she’s continually shot down, she does consistently object to Noah’s rule; I can’t quite reconcile this review’s characterization of her as a “drip.” And because representation matters, it’s worth noting that I think Connelly is channeling Linda Hamilton’s arms in Terminator 2 even as she participates in traditionally feminine activities like midwifing and healing. It certainly isn’t a feminist world she lives in, but she does her level best to undermine her husband in an enclosed space. As Noah himself veers away from his family tradition of life-supporting environmental husbandry, Naameh continues to practice what he (used to) preach, preserving her daughter-in-law, the animals, and the land once they find it again.

The end of the film predictably sews things back up between Naameh and Noah, especially after he is moved to mercifully spare his twin granddaughters’ lives after feeling only “love” when about to kill them. The patriarchy is duly restored. Yet there are cracks. In an epic case of middle-child syndrome, Ham quells his rebellious attitude but strikes out on his own just as the rainbow covenant moment glows through the denoument. Additionally, I couldn’t help but notice that there STILL isn’t a wife for Japheth, the youngest son. And who’s going to marry/mate with Ila’s daughters? In its final adherence to the Biblical source, Aronofsky’s film leaves some troubling questions even as its narrative may—through its departures from that source— subvert ancient patriarchal structures that are still part of the female dystopia.

Rebecca L. Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodramas, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Can a Dystopian Society Be Redeemed? Lessons from ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

And, although The Citadel is ruled by powerful men with disabilities, we understand it to be a fundamentally ableist society. Immortan Joe is questing for a “perfect” son and has clearly chosen The Wives for their beautiful, unblemished, able bodies in an attempt to breed one. We understand that this is a patriarchy in its most extreme form where women have no personhood at all.

This guest post by Gabrielle Amato appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Often, dystopia is about exposing where we’re going wrong and giving us a reason to course correct by showing us the worst case scenario of consequences. Human folly is a common undertone in dystopian fiction, especially sci-fi and horror, showing us an exaggerated form of the suffering we will have to endure if we cannot change. In Battle Royale, we see a world where the criminalization of youth has lead a society to fear its own children so much that middle-schoolers are forced to murder each other. In I Am Legend, a proud doctor informs the world that she has cured cancer using an engineered virus, but her hubris is our downfall. The virus kills 90 percent of the population and turns the other 10 percent into ravenous zombies. In Fahrenheit 451, rampant anti-intellectualism produces a world where books are illegal.

Mad Max: Fury Road is less about illustrating for us what consequences await if we don’t change our ways and more about what we must do once those consequences befall us. It’s about whether or not society can, as Furiosa hopes, be redeemed. Fury Road shows us a quick sketch of our situation: the world is a barren, wind-blasted desert; Immortan Joe controls the water and the people, using women to breed and feed an army of War Boys who maintain his grip on The Citadel by sacrificing their lives in battle. The driving plot of the movie is Furiosa and The Wives looking for a way out of this oppressive dystopia.

Although Fury Road does not show us how we arrived here, it does a very good job of identifying exactly who and what is wrong with society. Women are livestock, used for breeding and milking to maintain Immortan Joe’s army. With the exception of Furiosa and her honorable position as the driver of a massive war rig, the only place we see women in The Citadel is within Immortan Joe’s chambers, imprisoned there for his use. In the chase through the desert, The People Eater frequently refers to The Wives as “assets” to be protected.

The Wives have been specially chosen to breed a “perfect” son

When The Wives flee their chambers, they leave behind two explicit messages: “we are not things” and “our babies will not be warlords.” Immortan Joe’s patriarchy doesn’t only objectify and exploit women. Though only older boys are sent riding to war we see many War Pups, boys who haven’t reached puberty yet, some barely more than toddlers, in The Citadel.

Indoctrination starts early for boys in The Citadel

Though these War Pups are too small to drive and fight their faces are still painted like skulls, their little bodies pressed into the service of Immortan Joe. In The Citadel little boys do not enjoy a childhood. They have no experience and therefore no concept of compassion or kindness or human connection. The moment they are useful they are put to work and, more importantly, begin receiving the brainwashing that will eventually render them into fanatical War Boys willing to die at the whim of their leader. Women are livestock and boys are weapons.

It doesn’t matter how the world got this way, but it does matter who made it this way because those people are still in power. Who Killed The World? The implication is clear; it was the patriarchy. It was men like Immortan Joe, The People Eater, and The Bullet Farmer who even now continue the same destructive habits. Resources are tightly controlled by these men to satisfy their greed, and only doled out to others if it will serve the masters. Immortan Joe goes so far as to stage the ceremonial release of water down onto The Wretched just to display and revel in his own boundless power.

It’s a surprisingly explicit reference to the connection between power and abuse: Immortan Joe positions himself as a savior figure while at the same time turning the blame for the suffering of The Wretched back onto their own “addiction” to water. The systematic oppression of The Citadel is denied.

So what can Furiosa and The Wives do under these circumstances? Their first strategy is one most of us would choose. If the place where you live is terrible, you leave it behind. You try to find a new place, a green place. But escaping isn’t so easy. When Furiosa’s war rig breaks down and the fugitives realize that they are being pursued, Cheedo has a crisis of courage. She runs off across the sand toward the coming army, insisting, “We were his treasures. We were protected. He gave us a life of luxury, what’s wrong with that?” Cheedo has learned to survive as an object, and still believes that the best possible life she can hope for is one with the meager privileges of being chosen as the treasure of a powerful man. Although they are far from The Citadel, Cheedo has not left it yet. But it isn’t only Cheedo’s internalized oppression that conspires against these women. When Furiosa at last brings her companions to a place she remembers, the remaining Vuvalini they meet tell her that The Green Place is now barren. Even that piece of earth has gone sour like all the rest. Now there are only two choices left: keep running and hope to stumble across an oasis or return to the only place they know to be capable of sustaining human life.

They cannot escape this dystopia and find a utopia; the former must be refashioned into the latter. Mad Max: Fury Road shows such a remaking of the world is possible by first showing such a remaking of people. When Capable discovers Nux stowed away on the war rig she treats him like a person. She is kind to him and when she touches him she does so with tenderness. This is the first time that Nux has experienced human interaction that isn’t based in violence, as far as we can tell. Early in the film we see that his relationship with other War Boys is based on masculine posturing and competition. In a moment when he is vulnerable, lost, and humiliated Capable meets him with compassion and empathy, and we see how quickly it changes him. Having his humanity validated immediately turns Nux’s loyalties – he doesn’t want to be a thing anymore.

When Cheedo reaches for Rictus Erectus from the hood of the war rig we wonder if she has given up hope once and for all. But instead she uses her own fragility as a trick, and we understand that she has changed too.

Even Cheedo, so fearful that she wanted to turn back, has decided that it is better to risk everything for the chance to be a person than to return to being a treasure. She doesn’t want to be a thing anymore either. It is through the transformations in Cheedo and Nux that we see how Furiosa, the Vuvalini, and The Wives will transform the entire Citadel.

“Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland in search of our better selves?”

At first, The Wives leave with Furiosa because, as she tells Max, they are looking for hope. But Max knows that hope is a mistake; you have to fix what’s broken. It’s Furiosa’s desire for redemption the reveals the right path. The fact is, it is too late to avert disaster. We are already living in an oppressive patriarchy that treats women like breeding stock and men like weapons, and our environment has already been drastically altered by global warming. But there is no green place we can escape to. We cannot leave society and we cannot leave the planet; this is what we’ve got to work with. Further, even if we could run away to some hidden oasis to form our utopian feminist society, who would we leaving behind? Is it right to abandon the War Pups, the Milking Mothers, and The Wretched to save ourselves? Mad Max: Fury Road teaches us that the only way out of the dystopia is through it. You must choose to remake it, and yourself, into something better.

Gabrielle Amato received her BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College where she focused on women’s studies. Currently she works in violence prevention, and in her spare time attempts to write useful and interesting articles about feminism, pop culture, and rape culture.

‘Mr. Robot’ and the Trouble with the White Knight

This guest post by Shay Revolver appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

You’ve probably seen the poster art for Mr. Robot everywhere in the past few weeks. It’s pretty good show and it deserves the attention.

Poster for Mr. Robot Starring Rami Malek — Poster for *Mr. Robot,* starring Rami Malek

From the very first scene of Mr. Robot you are hooked. You find yourself invested in Elliot’s life. You feel connected with him and you hope that he succeeds. It’s a strong opening for what I feel will be an amazing show. The wait between the sneak preview and the next episode has been torture so I’ve watched the pilot more than once with my partner and my son because I can’t get enough. But somewhere in between each of the viewings I’ve had some thoughts that in some way take a part of my love away. The problem with loving good storytelling and being aware of the varying forms of patriarchy or misogyny in some stories is that once you’ve had a chance to digest a piece of media, you find yourself questioning all the little things that you find problematic and sometimes you can’t tell if it’s just you over analyzing or if there really is a problem there.

That space is where I find myself after seeing and loving Mr. Robot. Rami Malek plays the shy and socially awkward Elliot well. In the beginning of the show he takes down a pedophile and you root for him. Throughout the show he seems to inwardly clash with any of the Alpha males that surround him. Mr. Robot (played by Christian Slater) is as much of an embodiment of a man’s man as Brad Pitt/ Tyler Durden was in Fight Club. This statement is true, minus the Fight Club part, with most of the other men in his life, but they seem express all of the “masculine” traits you’d expect from a cis white male. Elliot, on the other hand, gives off a sense of humanity that makes you feel connected almost instantly as you join him on this adventure through his world. Elliot isn’t your typical male. He doesn’t exude all of the traits that you’d expect in a show’s lead. He’s not incredibly charismatic, he doesn’t put out an err of bravado, he doesn’t even have that uber masculine sense of entitlement. He’s not out swilling beer or doing any of the things you would expect. He is in no way a “man’s man.”

The problem doesn’t come from the viewing of this show, it comes from the aftertaste. Elliot is a traditional lone wolf type of man. He has his own rules and own mind and lives his life according to his own ideals. This makes him a nice contrast Amanda’s boyfriend. He’s the uber masculine type of guy that uses niceness as a weapon. He’s smarmy and even before we got into his indiscretions you couldn’t help but not like this guy. He has all the trademarks of a cis white male frat boy. He oozes all the traditionally masculine character traits that are the hallmark of the patriarchy. He has a sense of entitlement and this cloud of arrogance so thick you could choke on it.

Watching Elliot interact and rebuff him makes you feel like you’re on his side. This is where things start to get a little tricky for me. The thing that feels homey about Elliot is that despite his social awkwardness he generally cares for other people like his best friend Amanda (played by Portia Doubleday) and his therapist Krista (played by Gloria Reuben). The problem isn’t with the caring, the problem is with the way he shows it when they’re not around. In this regard he exudes a hyper masculine sense of over-protectiveness. During one of his exchanges with Amanda’s jerk of a boyfriend, Ollie (played by Ben Rappaprt), you find out that Elliot has been cyber stalking him. He discovered fairly early on that he was cheating on her and had been since shortly after they exchanged “I love yous.” But Elliot hasn’t told her yet. His reasons are self-serving–he doesn’t want to deal with the mess she’ll become after another break-up and he feels like he can “manage” him better than whatever guy she’ll find next. So instead, he keeps this secret from his best friend. This behavior runs parallel with the fact that every time that Amanda seems to be faltering at work, he swoops in to save the day and defend her from anyone who tried to make her seem less that capable. He can’t help himself from trying to save the day, from being a “White Knight.”

Gloria Reuben as Elliot's Therapist Krista — Gloria Reuben as Elliot’s therapist, Krista

I have long had a problem with this archetype both in media and in real life. To me this whole phenomenon of men feeling the desire to swoop in and “Save the Princess” seems to be more of a hindrance to feminism than a companion. Women are not helpless creatures who need protecting, at least not in the White Knight type of way. There is always an undertone in their actions that seem to convey the message that they’re just letting us have our way and will wait in the wings until they have their moment and can save us from ourselves. One of the biggest shows of Elliot’s underlying muber masculine White Knighting actions was him deciding to frame the CTO of E-Corp because he was rude to Amanda. In that moment he had the choice of two envelopes, one leading to the real culprit in the hacks, the other leading to the CTO. He was set to turn in Mr. Robot and his crew until the moment that the CTO kicked Amanda out of the room. Elliot took issue with that and in an effort to “protect” her and “defend her honor” he sets the CTO up to take the fall. I will give the writers credit for what they choose to do with Amanda’s character. To her credit, she calls Elliot on his choice to jump in during a meeting with their bosses to cover for her, she didn’t know to what extent he tried to defend her. But, the scene seems in a way that the show is aware of this element of the dynamic and makes sure that we know it too.

Elliot (Rami Malek) Seemingly Confused That Angela (Portia Doubleday)

Unfortunately, the problem with the White Knighting doesn’t end there. Elliot is fond of his therapist, Krista, and feels sorry for her and her relationship issues, mainly her trouble finding a suitable man after her divorce. His solution to facilitate keeping her safe and teaching her “to read people” involves him digging up dirt on her current online dating love interest. This is a side note in the pilot episode. Toward the end of the episode, shortly after you realize how awesome this series is going to be, he finds the dirt that he as looking for. Once again, instead of telling her himself, he chooses to confront him and blackmail him into telling her the truth about himself and breaking up with her. In the next scene that his therapist appears in she’s obviously shaken and appears to have been crying. He knows that his plan has worked. She is now “safe” and he seems pleased with his work.

Elliot and Mr. Robot Talk Business — Elliot and Mr. Robot talk business

This is another one of the problems that I have with White Knight syndrome. The types prone to exhibiting this behavior tend to have a lower opinion of women that than their outwardly sexist counterparts. White Knights take up the causes of the women in their lives and speak out for them, but it is usually done in a manner that seems to suggest they think that these women are incapable of speaking up for themselves. Elliot unfortunately seems to be as textbook as it comes in this regard. In some ways he seems more sinister in his actions because he seems so nice and unassuming , these traits make it so you don’t realize he’s moving pieces around in the lives of the women in his life.

He is resolute in his thinking that he knows what is best for them and will “protect” them from themselves by any means necessary. He does all of these things from the shadows while outwardly expressing genuine concern.

I can’t tell if Elliot’s behaviors are a sign of the times or if they’re his true feelings left out exposed like a nerve , a gift from the writer expressing the realism of White Knights, and I’m not sure where the show will go from here. I love the premise; the show itself comes off as a cross between Fight Club and Hackers–two of my favorite films–and the writing, direction, and camera work are amazing. I hope that in future episodes the women speak out more and he proves himself as less of a panderer and more of a genuine person whose actions toward the women on the show relay the words that he speaks to them. It’s hard to tell where this characters interactions will take the story, but I hope Elliot evolves into something better than the anti-hero that he is now because, as I said before, the show I plan on watching is phenomenal.

Elliot Does a Victory Stance After Taking down the Man (because the man was mean to Amanda) — Elliot does a victory stance after taking down the man (because the man was mean to Amanda)

Shay Revolver is an inked vegetarian, mom, feminist, cinephile, insomniac, recovering NYU student, and former roller derby player currently working as a Brooklyn-based microcinema filmmaker, web series creator, and writer. She’s obsessed with most books, especially the Pop Culture and Philosophy series and loves movies and TV shows from low brow to high class. As long as the image is moving she’s all in and believes that everything is worth a watch. She still believes that movies make the best bedtime stories because books are a daytime activity to rev up your engine and once you flip that first page, you have to keep going until you finish it and that is beautiful in its own right. She enjoys talking about the feminist perspective in comic book and gaming culture and the lack of gender equality in mainstream cinema and television productions both on screen and behind the camera. She prides herself on using all (or damn near close) to an all female crew because it’s harder for women to build up their reel. She also thinks that everyone should check out the weekly @bitchflicks twitter chat about feminism and media every Tuesday at 2 because it’s awesome and she loves engaging with other women.

Twitter : @socialslumber13

Tumblr : Shay Revolver

‘The Loneliest Planet’ and the Fracturing of Masculinity

This guest post by Cal Cleary appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

It’s a frequently stated truism that the patriarchy hurts men the same way it hurts women. The system of rigid gender expectations can be punishing for anyone who doesn’t conform to its strictures. Those punishments aren’t just external; failure to live up a made-up masculine ideal can cause considerable internal anguish. Few films have dealt with the transformative strength of that failure as powerfully as The Loneliest Planet. Written and directed by Julia Loktev, loosely adapting Tom Bissell’s short story “Expensive Trips Nowhere,” the film is, in part, a powerful meditation on the way a single moment can clash with a man’s internalized expectations to destroy his sense of self.

The Loneliest Planet is, essentially, a movie with three characters. Nica (Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal) are engaged, a pair of active world-travelers who can tackle any challenge together. Before their wedding, they visit the country of Georgia, where they hire a guide, Dato (renowned Georgian mountaineer Bidzina Gujabidze), to take them on a long hike through the nation’s incredibly scenic countryside. Along the way, they meet a group of heavily armed men who are suspicious of the trio, questioning them briefly. Then, they walk back, exploring more of Georgia’s gorgeous natural landscapes.

That really is it for plot. But the key twist in the film’s halfway point is what gives the film its power, and there’s no real way to discuss what the movie is saying about masculinity without first talking about the twist. So, for the spoiler averse – and this is the rare twist best experienced without knowing quite what to expect – I suggest taking a break and checking the movie out now. For those who’ve seen it, or who don’t mind a bit of foreknowledge, however, read on…

The key moment, the scene that gives the film its shape, happens at the halfway point, when the trio meets the armed men. Neither Alex nor Nica share a language with him, so they aren’t sure what the confrontation is about. Despite the presence of guns, Loktev shoots the scene in a fairly low-key manner, highlighting not the tension but the lack of control for the two tourists. It is this lack of control that makes Alex so uncomfortable. He tries to insert himself in a conflict that Dato appears to be handling well, demanding to know what’s going on – only to find a large rifle leveled at his face. Alex’s immediate response is to push Nica in front of the barrel and hide behind her – but only for a second. After that gut reaction, he reasserts himself, pushing Nica back behind him and aggressively posturing for her, recklessly pressing his forehead to the rifle’s barrel.

It turns out to be a false alarm. Dato talks the armed men down, and then he accompanies Nica and Alex as they walk back home. At no point do any of the characters discuss what just happened. Alex grows immediately taciturn, and Nica is clearly uncomfortable. Something very fundamental about their relationship has changed, and Julia Loktev does an amazing job at showing how differently Alex and Nica see that event without ever coming out and saying it.

Throughout the first half of the film, most characters outside the small group instinctively defer to Alex, a role he happily relegates to his equally competent partner. A group of locals approached as they seek out a guide ask Alex if Nica is his wife – she answers. They ask Alex if Nica can carry a heavy-enough load to be an effective hiker – she answers. Early in the film, during a perilous river-crossing, Dato has concerns that Nica can make the trip safely, but Alex lets Nica go first, and has no doubts that she’ll be able to handle herself. Alex is comfortable not taking the lead, despite what everyone else expects, and Loktev constantly reinforces that through the staging and the shot composition, as well as frequent interludes that highlight the physicality they have in common, the confidence they have in their own bodies working precisely how they want.

Alex is, in many ways, the ideal of the modern man: Handsome, athletic, intelligent, well-traveled, well-off financially but still environmentally sensitive, and with a romantic partner he treats as an equal. Because of this, he has no trouble shrugging off the gendered stereotypes expected of his relationship in the first half of the film. But as soon as he is given reason to doubt his own traditionally defined masculinity, it all falls apart. Suddenly, he thinks Nica needs help lifting her own pack, needs help steadying herself while she takes off a shoe – help he himself refuses to accept from her later, when he twists his ankle and tries to shrug it off. It isn’t the external expectations that get to him, the fear of judgment from other people, but his own concern that he isn’t man enough. The specifics of how masculinity presents may have changed from the days of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a story with thematic and structural ties to Loktev’s film, but the way some men react when they begin to question their own masculinity has not.

Nica, of course, is shaken up just as much as Alex by the event with the gunman, but the way Loktev and her performers portray the aftermath, their violations seem very different. As portrayed by Furstenberg, Nica seems to feel betrayed by Alex’s action, but she is clearly willing to forgive him as she processes what happened. She begins to open up again. Alex, on the other hand, seems to feel unmanned. Both characters are profoundly shaken up by the incident, but Nica fears for her life, no longer certain if she can trust her partner, while Alex fears that he looks weak. Which is, I guess, a purely visual way of expressing Margaret Atwood’s classic sentiment: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

The Loneliest Planet is a difficult movie in a lot of ways, telling almost its entire movie nonverbally. Indeed, the characters’ feelings and relationships are mostly defined by their staging and the camera’s movement, which can make the long, dialogue-free stretches feel slow. Until you start to notice the way the landscapes change to counter the emotional state of the characters, or the way walking order during the hike can define relationships. Until you realize that the film is very much about language, and that the things Alex and Nica can’t bring themselves to say are far more important than any words they may use to paper over the issue.

The Loneliest Planet ends in uncertainty. Alex and Nica are back together, but the casual intimacy of the film’s earliest moments is gone, perhaps forever. Even at the end, Alex is more withdrawn. He has learned something very dark about himself, and it’s something he still can’t quite process. You can be a sensitive multi-lingual world-travelling guy who looks like Gael García Bernal, but can you still consider yourself a man, he seems to wonder, if you’re a coward?

Cal Cleary spends most of his time judging others, writing film and comic reviews for GeekRex and novel reviews for Luxury Reading. When he’s not writing online, he’s librarianing in rural Ohio, and he definitely hasn’t figured out that librarianing is not a real word. Follow him on Twitter (@comicalibrarian) for links to more of his work.

Negotiated Identities and Gray Oppositions in Ridley’s ‘American Crime’

With that said, even the traditional gender binary is flipped on its head—the women of the show uphold the patriarchal system that controls them, while the men are often portrayed as effeminate and oppressed by the same system that is supposed to give them power. Yes. Take a second while you process that.

This guest post by Sean Weaver appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

When I was a young preteen kid, my dad told me tales of how Miami Vice and Magnum, P.I. once helped him entertain the dream of becoming a private detective. He was so enamored by detectives and the law that he took a college course on crime, criminal investigation, and the law. Unbeknownst to him, I remember stumbling across one of his old tape recorders, hitting play, and listening to his own secret sting operation play out. Perhaps that’s where I began my long career of advocating social justice–justice against a system that is seriously flawed.

With all nostalgia and conspiracy theories aside, at first glance, Jonathan Ridley’s (director of 12 Years a Slave) American Crime seems like one of those old school detective thrillers, the likes of which have entertained American television and cinema since the 1980s. Up to its premiere on March 5, 2015, I had seen previews on ABC. I imagined it would be everything I had hoped in a detective drama: the gritty neo-noir tone, the masculine detective hero out to solve the un-solvable case, and the plot line driven by suspense and a nagging “Who dun it?” Instead, what I came across is a show that is powerfully poignant, thought-provoking, and one that delves the viewer deeper into the conditions of the human experience.

This isn’t a show aimed at entertaining. It is a show that relies on provoking the viewer into moving past that cushy comfort zone of self-identification, and questioning the very foundations that control our daily lives: social justice, race, and gender. In her review on American Crime in The New York Times, Alessandra Stanley beautifully captures the sentiment and driving force of this show. She states, “This series is at heart a murder mystery—someone has been killed, and the show withholds who did it. But solving the crime isn’t the point. The murder is a clue to the mysteries of character, experience, and self deception…”

It is a murder mystery. But, as Stanley so eloquently puts it, it isn’t. It’s so much more. In the introduction to her book Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective, film critic Philippa Gates writes:

“The detective genre has traditionally been a male-centered one based on the social assumption that heroism, villainy, and violence are predominantly masculine characteristics. The detective genre has traditionally been a male-centered one based on the social assumption that heroism, villainy, and violence are predominantly masculine characteristics…Not only is the genre male-centered, it is also hero-centered, tending to adhere to a structure of binary oppositions— good/bad, civilized/uncivilized, law/crime, order/chaos, and heroes/villains…[However] Not all detective films make absolute distinctions between these oppositions, and the examination of the indeterminate, ‘gray’ area between heroism and anti-heroism also proves illuminating in terms of the social mores and attitudes toward crime and law that it can reveal.”

Gates rightly points that not all detective films, and in this case show, make absolute distinctions in these traditional masculine tropes/themes. American Crime focuses on illuminating this “gray” area that reveals the social mores and attitudes toward crime and law, and in turn attitudes on crime, race, and gender in American society. It forgoes the masculine detective hero out to solve the crime, and instead focuses on those impacted by such crimes—whether they are guilty by circumstance/hearsay, victims in their hurt, or even willing participants. Like Stanley also points out, this “gray” area exists in the things the characters fail to say or do. By focusing on this “gray” area, viewers can truly come to appreciate the complexities of this astounding show.

Set amidst the dark and drug-filled backdrop of San Modesto, California, the show centers primarily on four families and the suspects associated with a high profile murder, all poised to give into the collision course of hate, fear, and suspicion that guide their highly racialized and gendered lives. In short summary for those who haven’t yet seen American Crime, the driving plot is that a White man is killed by a Black man, under the guise of a “hate crime.” Hold on to that for a second. A Black man is charged with committing a hate crime against a White man. Talk about flipping the traditional binary. With that said, even the traditional gender binary is flipped on its head—the women of the show uphold the patriarchal system that controls them, while the men are often portrayed as effeminate and oppressed by the same system that is supposed to give them power. Yes. Take a second while you process that. And finally, each character is hell-bent on seeking a social justice, whatever that may be, that reasserts their own existence. I’d rather not give away to many more details. Take my word for it, watch it.

With all the background stuff out of the way, the task of unpacking the complex lived realities of the Skokie and Nix families is rather daunting. However, at the head of the Skokie family is Barbra Hanlon (Felicity Huffman), mother of the murdered White man, and ex wife of Russ Skokie (Timothy Hutton). Barb fits all the characteristics of the stereotypical suburban middle aged White woman. She is assertive, grieving, and every bit fearful of those she perceives as “other.” She is the walking parrot of the patriarchy, and embodies all its masculine ideals. She wields power, through her very own existence. So much so, that if you hadn’t watched the first few episodes, you would swear that she was the intended murdered victim.

She creates fact from the truths she is unable to face. She decries her son a hero, even after authorities question her son’s involvement in an illegal drug cartel: “You want me to say stuff about my son that isn’t true? He is a war hero, a veteran.” Finally she gives into the easy out of declaring racism and her son’s murder a hate crime, knowing that the lead suspect of her son’s murder is in a relationship with a White woman. She groups people by the stereotypes engrained in her social upbringing—even going as far as declaring, “It was probably one of those illegals.” At one point, she comes into her power and wields it, well, like a man—even going as far as purchasing a firearm. The feminist in me cringes at this description. Because on the surface it seems like the stereotype of the grieving hysterical mother is being perpetuated once again. But there comes a point in the show where the viewer realizes she is not just a woman facing “hysteria.” No, the show is pushing past the perceived identities we take so much stock in. Instead, it shows how easily it is for the oppressed to become the oppressors by wielding fear and distrust. It also shows how people often negotiate the power of their identities at the expense of others.

The antithesis to Barb’s masculine ideals is her ex-husband, Russ. Like his wife, Russ takes stock in illusions that the exterior just needs to be brushed off. Russ is the failed man. When I say failed man, I mean he fails to live up to the expectations of the patriarchal world that controls his life. He is weak, timid, and ultimately unable to hold ground with his wife. At one point Barb delivers the ultimate emasculation speech, concerning where and who should bury their dead son exclaiming, “You walked out. You no longer get to say you’re his father.” The viewer becomes perplexed and is left with figuring out whether she is right or wrong. Is he the hero because he has returned? Does he return to step into the perceived masculine role of putting the pieces back together? Does his masculinity rely on the perceived social norm that the man is the back bone of family? Has he really overcome his gambling addiction? For Russ, the answer is yes, because countless times he declares, “We need to be a family.” In the end, Russ can only reclaim his own lost masculinity by taking his own sense of justice. In the final episode, Barb is distraught that the man she deems murdered her son is released. Her masculine veneer fades, and the viewer is left with a defeated woman realizing the realities she has fabricated are nothing but lies. After being cast off by Barb in a moment of rare intimacy between the two, Russ returns home to the gun that Barb has entrusted in his care. She has rejected his last attempt to once again reunite the family, his last attempt to be a man. He fails to be the hero, and instead becomes the villain he has tried to protect his family from by murdering Carter Nix (Elvis Nolasco).

On the receiving end of the prosecution is the Nix family. Carter Nix stands accused for the murder of Matthew Skokie. While the show never reveals whether or not Carter killed Skokie (which to me is a nod to the infamous system in which the guilty go free and the innocent accused), the viewer is left to come to their own conclusion. The facts are plentiful, but the truth is even harder to discern, and is found only in what is left unsaid. On the surface, it might seem like the show is reproducing the Black “thug” stereotype; Carter is a drug addict dating a White woman with the same problem. In fact, every chance they get the prosecution tries to save Carter’s girlfriend Aubry (Caitlin Gerard) from the menacing Black man: “Give us something to put him away.” However, Carter is far from the stereotypes that seem to define his life, and consequently his actions. Like his White counterpart Russ Skokie, Carter is a defeated man, emasculated in every sense of the word. While the circumstances differ, the same power structure is at play. The reason Carter relies on drugs is to create realities he wishes to see as truth. In one scene, Carter discusses how Aubry has saved his life with his sister Aliyah Shadeed (Regina King). He states he was miserable being an accountant, subservient to the White men that controlled his life. He then shares with her a magazine clipping of a Black man and White woman, the reality he wishes to share with Aubry, but cannot due to the interference of what is socially acceptable and not. He must negotiate his identity for drugs, and perceived lived realities, all while fighting an impenetrable system of control.

Finally the last person who seems to take a central role in the unfolding drama is Aliyah, Carter’s sister. She is every bit the counterpart to Barb Skokie. In fact, she is just as strong and willfully powered. She becomes the spearhead of a campaign to free Carter and is right to point the finger at a system that is massively corrupt. In one brilliant dialogue with Carter she states, “You sleep with their women, use their drugs, and take their guns. And you don’t expect to be locked up here?” She is a strong figure and is masculine in her own rights. However, in her fight to free Carter from his metaphorical chains she becomes just as guilty of upholding and instilling fear and hate. Like Barb, she becomes the victim; it is no longer her brother’s fight. In doing so, she manages to push Carter into breaking up with Aubry, forcing Carter to take sides in an invisible war. Just before the final scene in which her brother is murdered, Aliyah gives a speech in her mosque stating, “If we as a people cannot forgive, then we are cursed to hate.” The irony is that Aliyah was only able to forgive once her cause had been won. But her victory comes at the cost of her own negotiated identity, proving that the true American crime is not the physical act of murder itself, but something far more harmful: the negotiation and deception of one’s self.

Sean Weaver has a MA in English/Literature from Kutztown University. He is currently News Editor at Vada, an online magazine from the UK with a new queer perspective. When he isn’t reading or writing, he is hard at work looking for new ways to understand what it means to be queer.

Twitter: @levirush8

Blog: http://post-colonial-scholar.blogspot.com

Misogyny Demons and Wesley’s Tortured Masculinity in Joss Whedon’s ‘Angel’

Not only does the characterization of this violent misogyny as “primordial” imply that violence toward women is the natural state of men, it also implies that gender itself is an essential and natural state of being. Men are men and women are women. In a universe that generally operates in gray areas, such a distinction is uncharacteristically black and white.

This guest post by Stephanie Brown appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

In their DVD commnetary on the season three Angel (1999-2004) episode “Billy” (3.6), writers Jeffrey Bell and Tim Minear explain that the episode has been both “widely acclaimed” and “much loathed.” Admittedly, my opinion of the episode changes almost every time I watch it. During the summer of 2012 when I binge-watched nearly all of Joss Whedon’s oevre, this particular episode stuck out to me with its oddly in-your-face treatment of misogyny, gender, and gendered violence. While such topics are generally treated with nuance and complexity in the Whedonverse, “Billy” ditches the usual complexity in favor of portraying the show’s good guys, namely Wesley, channeling their base (and as the episode seems to argue, natural), violent instincts. Not only do the episode’s final scenes resemble The Shining, with Wesley trying to kill Fred (a character he has had unrequited feelings for) with an ax, they also seems to take a dark pleasure in “allowing” him to act out in such a violently misogynistic way.

Evil Billy, in all his demon smarminess.

In case you haven’t seen this particular episode, the plot revolves around Billy, a demon from a rich and powerful family who has recently escaped from the hell dimension in which he was imprisoned. While Billy himself causes no physical destruction, he “infects” men who come into contact with him with violent misogyny. After handling Billy’s blood, Wesley becomes infected and tries to chase down and kill Fred. Though Fred ultimately forgives him, Wesley fears that Billy revealed a very real and violent part of his masculininty. The incident also sends Wesley’s character down a road of brooding intropsection, acting as a turning point in his series long character arc from a buffoonish Watcher (on Buffy The Vampire Slayer) to a troubled, interesting and complex character at the end of Angel’s run. In my humble opinoin, Wesley’s evolution is one of the most fascinating and masterful character arcs on television, and this episode is a key part of that arc.

Critics of “Billy” may see it as yet another instance of Angel’s problematic treatment of female characters, as this particular episode brings questions of gender and morality to the forefront in an especially unsettling manner. Billy, as Lilah puts it, brings out in men “a primordial misogyny” that causes them to react violently toward the women around them. Not only does the characterization of this violent misogyny as “primordial” imply that violence toward women is the natural state of men, it also implies that gender itself is an essential and natural state of being. Men are men and women are women. In a universe that generally operates in gray areas, such a distinction is uncharacteristically black and white.

“Billy,” of course, isn’t the only episode Angel to be critiqued for its treatment of women and gender more generally. While Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer is, as you likely well know, frequently heralded as feminist or is at least the topic of much feminist-based discussion (even meriting a theme week from this very site), some critics regard Angel as much more problematic in its portrayal of women. Though to be fair, just as Buffy is often an exploration of the complexities of feminity, Angel can be seen as a similar exploration of the complexities of masculinity, perhaps at times at the expense of its female characters. For instance, every major female character in the Angelverse dies by the series’ end, with Cordelia and Fred both being stripped of their identities and then killed by demon possession (in season four’s “Shiny Happy People” and season five’s “A Hole In The World”.

And while this episode and Billy’s character can be read as a reinforcement of masculinity as both essential and naturally violent, I think Billy’s character can also be read as a device through which the episode demonstrates how essentialist notions of masculinity can be dangerous. As I noted earlier, one of Whedon’s signatures is that he works in gray rather than black and white, and this applies to his villains as well as his heroes. Billy, though, is a notable exception and is one of a few villains that fall short of Whedon’s usual character complexity.

Rather than a fully formed character, Billy acts as an extreme symbol of the The Patriarchy with a capital P, who forces our flawed heroes to rexamine and start to grapple with their underlying ideas about gender and mascunilinty throughout the episode. For instance, the episode opens with a scene in which Angel is teaching Cordelia to fight. In her former life on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia used to rely on handsome, strong men to protect her from the various demons of Sunnydale, but she is now ready to fend for herself. She faces, however, some resistance from Angel, as evidenced in their exchange about the reason for her defense training.

Angel: Then – just keep moving the line. You’ll be able to keep an attacker busy until, you know.

Cordelia: What? Until he dies of old age or until you swoop in to save me? Angel, I didn’t
ask you to train me so I could stave. I already know how to stave; now I need to learn how to fight!

Angel: You don’t think that I would?

Cordelia: Would what?

Angel: Save you.

Cordelia: Men-folk not always around to protect the women-folk, you know?

Angel is willing to give Cordelia the training she needs to stay alive, but he is more reluctant to give up his role as protector and savior. While this attitude may come from a place of caring, Cordelia rightly mocks him for his antiquated view of gender relations. Throughout much of the episode, Cordelia pushes back against both Wesley and Angel’s paternal concerns about her ability as a women both to fight and handle the violence that comes along with the job. Wes and Angel are both “good guys,” but they nevertheless struggle with predefined notions of what consitutes proper mascunilinty and femininity. While Angel and Wesley come from a place of concern; however, they still tend to treat Cordelia as inferior, unable to give up what they see as their masculine duty to protect her.

More troubling than Angel’s reluctance to trust Cordelia with full demon fighting responsibilities, though, is the ‘infection’ of Wesley by Billy’s misogyny-infused blood. Because Wesley is not only a white man from a wealthy family but also former member of the highly patriarchal Watcher’s Council, he’s prone to inner turmoil about gender, masculinity, and power.

The Watchers Council: Mostly Old White Men

Billy’s demonhood brings these latent issues violently to the forefront as Wes spends the final two acts of the episode first sexually harassing and then lashing out violently against Fred. As his generally affable, fatherly demeanor morphs into that of a terrifying, calculated killer, his once sweet crush on Fred is warped into a violently perverse sexual attraction. In this transformation we can see how seemingly benign characteristics of traditional masculinity and Billy’s twisted misogyny often fall under the same patriarchal umbrella. While they lie on opposite ends of the spectrum, they’re nevertheless symptoms of the same oppressive system.

While Wes is of course not actually a homicidal misogynist, his actions while under Billy’s spell do force him to face his inner demons (pardon the pun) and fundamentally change his relationship with both Fred and the rest of Angel Investigations. In the final scene of the episode, Wes sits alone in his dark apartment, staring at the wall when Fred comes to see him.

Wes: Fred, I tried to kill you.

Fred: That wasn’t you.

Wes: How can you know that? Something inside me was forced to the surface. Something primal, something…

Fred: Do you wanna kill me?

Wes: Oh, God, no.

Fred: It wasn’t something in you, Wesley. It was something that was done to you.

Wes: I don’t know what kind of man I am anymore.

Even though he was posessed by Billy, Wes nevertheless saw something of himself in his actions that he feels he must come to terms with. Wes of course is not only a victim of Billy’s, but also of the patriarchal definitions of masculinity that he was taught both by his father and by the Watcher’s Council. It’s these unresolved issues that Wes is now being forced to face.

Wesley and Fred talk after he is no longer possessed.

At the close of the episode, Fred seems relatively unaffected by the fact that her friend and boss nearly hacked her into little pieces, while Wes sits broken and weeping. His dejection shows us that while we tend to focus on the harm that befalls those who define themselves as feminine within a patriarchal society, rigid gender roles and misogny are just as harmful to those who define themselves as masculine.

Stephanie Brown is a television, comedy, and podcast enthusiast working on her doctorate in media studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. You can follow her on Twitter or Medium @stephbrown.