Tag: Patriarchy

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: Bros Before Hoes, or How Kidnapping Makes for Great Dance Numbers: on ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’

This is a guest review by Jessica Freeman-Slade. 
When Bitch Flicks first put out the call for a review of the movie musical landscape, this was the first movie that came to mind. It has all the elements of a great movie musical: the hummable ditties of Kiss Me, Kate, the buoyant dance sequences of West Side Story, and the Technicolor treatment of the great Pioneer experience of Oklahoma! But when you add blatant misogyny, barn-raisings and male bravado, and taking women by force as the ultimate romantic gesture, you get Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The 1954 movie, directed by Stanley Donen (Singin’ in the Rain) with music by Saul Chaplin and Gene de Paul and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, with choreography from the great Michael Kidd, is often overlooked when considering the movie musical genre. There are, admittedly, many musicals that enjoy examining the battle of the sexes, and most old-school romantic comedies start with a Dude™ and a Chick™ squabbling over their differences. But very few of those ever let the man be so backwards that he equates courtship and conquering, or has a woman responsible for civilizing and subduing men’s worst impulses. It’s like Lysistrata and The Hangover got together and held a barn dance–a big, beautiful Crayola-colored extravaganza.

In 1821, Oregon Territory, Adam Pontipee (the impossibly rugged Howard Keel) is looking to fetch himself a wife—not for the purposes of high-falutin’ romance, family, and lifelong happiness, no. “I’d like best a widow woman that ain’t afraid to work,” he says, at the general store, where he’d just as quickly pick up a mate as he would 25 pounds of chewing tobacco. “There’s seven of us men, me and my six brothers. Place is like a pigsty, and the food tastes worse….” Adam is out for marriage in the purest economical sense: in this new territory, there are ten men for every woman, and so Adam’s priority is availability, not compatibility.

 

“Bless Yo’ Beautiful Hide,” he booms, and it’s not until he sees Millie (Jane Powell, strong of axe and soft of heart) that he knows he can go out and buy with gusto. She makes great stew, so that’s half the battle, and she is used to tending men in a boarding house, so he considers her the perfect bride.

He offers marriage, she accepts (as she’s fallen for him on first sight), and off they go in his wagon back to his cabin in the mountains, where she meets his six red-bearded, bullish brothers. Millie bristles at caring for her brother-in-laws without some control, and so she withholds a hot breakfast and newly washed clothes until they promise to shave and settle down like gentleman. It seems that what this house has longed for is not an extra hand in the washroom, but a gentle and firm guide to proper etiquette.

What Millie discovers, as she gets to know these boys, is that they long to go out and snatch up girls of their own—which they do, in spectacular fashion, at the town’s barn raising. The brothers Pontipee, all in primary colors, demonstrate through dazzling choreography how dashing and desirable they can be, and sweep the girls off their feet. Just watch how leapfrogging, arm wrestling, log-rolling, and balletic machismo pays off. (This is the most spectacular sequence of the movie, and it’s impossible to watch without a slaphappy grin. Jacques d’Amboise and a very young Russ Tamblyn steal the show as Ephraim and Gideon, defying gravity with every move.)

But of course, the boys get into a fistfight with the girls’ other suitors, and soon they’re back on the farm, suffering through the early days of a long winter. It’s lovely to see these men pining, something so rarely explored outside of the musical theater realm, while maintaining their rugged outdoorsmen personas. (This is, of course, expressed through the delicate art of ax ballet.)
The enlivening force of Seven Brides is male longing, and it makes for great theater. The Pontipee brothers have lived hard, but falling in love is what softens and civilizes them. But all that civilization is for nothing when Adam, modern man that he is, devises a brilliant scheme, pulled straight out of Millie’s copy of Plutarch’s Lives. Why not do like the Romans did with the Sabine women?
And then comes the merriest song about rape ever.
The brothers are shaken out of their depression by the chance to reassert their manhood, and off they go to town, snatching up their girls from backyards and front porches and carrying them off, squealing and crying. An avalanche falls as they are passing through the mountains, preventing the angry families and boyfriends from reaching the Pontipees. Millie, horrified to discover what the boys have done, reasserts her right over the house (the one territory that has become completely hers to control) and sends the boys to the barn for the entire winter, taking the girls inside and keeping them under close watch.

This ends up being a bit of a tease, since the girls get their own dance (about marriage, natch), and Millie discovers she’s pregnant. And though the girls start warming up to the brothers (peeking through windows, running around in their skivvies), the snow that blocks the pass never melts.

Once it does, we get lovely sequences of the girls and boys frolicking together with baby farm animals (no, this movie is not subtle), and Adam stays holed up in his hunting cabin, resentful of Millie’s banishment. But once he learns he has a baby—and at that, a baby girl—Adam breaks down and returns home to be the man he’s supposed to be. Though their families come to retrieve them, and the brothers are ready to set them free, the girls refuse to leave, claiming the newborn as their own. For better or for worse, we get a group marriage of a finale, and a whole bunch of color-coordinated couples once more.
So what do we make of such a strangely backwards story of frontier courtship? For one, that men, without the guiding impulses of a good woman, will behave like savages. Whether they demonstrate that savagery at the breakfast table or at a barn-raising, it’s clear that the Pontipee brothers have impulse control issues, and they just can’t help themselves. Their needs—for food, for dominance, for love—trump almost everything reasonable and refined, and they have been taught, as pioneers of this new and uncharted territory, to take when they can. Though Adam is charming and sexy as hell—seriously, George Clooney and Howard Keel could have a smirk-off—he treats Millie like a servant at best, and property at worst. “It wouldn’t hurt you to learn some manners, too.” she remarks at the barn-raising. “What for?” he counters. “I already got me a wife.”

You can argue that Millie should’ve seen this unfair exchange coming when Adam first walked into her boarding house—and she had no real incentive to get married. Gainfully employed, resourceful, well-liked and respected by her community (especially by the women), Millie could’ve easily stayed on her own in this new country. But she, too, is softened by love, and so she is the one that understands the brothers’ plight, not Adam. You can fault the captured girls a little less than Millie, at least initially—but they too get their attic ballet-in-bloomers about the dream of summer weddings. We are expected, no matter if our house or barn needs tending, to wish for a pairing-off, and the frontier certainly looks less terrifying if you are facing it alone.

But ultimately this is a movie that asks where male compassion comes from—and the last few scenes seem to conclude that it’s when sexual politics are made personal. Holding his newborn baby girl in his arms for the first time, Adam says, “I got to thinking up at the cabin, about the baby. How I’d feel if someone came creeping in and carried her off. I’d string him up the nearest tree. I’d shoot him down as I would a thieving fox.” It’s when Adam has to think about another man out there, treating his daughter like she was property just waiting to be taken, to stir him to a nobler state of mind. Just imagine if a Seven Brides scenario applied to every zealot or backwards politician who questioned a woman’s right to her own body and state of security, if all their wives and girlfriends were subjected to sexual scrutiny. We’ve be living in a very different universe—and this ain’t even Oregon territory.
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers can certainly leave you feeling ambivalent, and possibly wondering whether this lovely closing marriage sequence is a symptom of Stockholm syndrome. But what it mostly offers—spectacular dance sequences, memorable songs, and an interesting take on what it means to be “civilized” by love—makes for a rollicking good musical, and an underappreciated classic.
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Jessica Freeman-Slade is a writer who has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She works at Random House as a cookbook editor, and lives in Morningside Heights.
    

A Gilded Cage: A Feminist Critique of the ‘Downton Abbey’ Christmas Special

This is a guest review by Amanda Civitello and is published with permission. Note: this review contains no spoilers for Season Three.
“Christmas at Downton Abbey” (The Christmas Special). Downton Abbey: Season Two Original UK Edition. Writ. Julian Fellowes. Dir. Brian Percival. Masterpiece Classic/PBS Distribution, 2012.

The cast of Downton Abbey
The Emmy-nominated second season of Downton Abbey opened with its characters on the precipice of the destruction of their rarified pocket of Edwardian English aristocracy, with the Great War at Downton’s doorstep. [i] The season’s final episode, “Christmas at Downton Abbey,” submitted as part of the PBS Masterpiece 2012 Emmy campaign, mostly avoids talk of social upheaval in favor of returning to the human drama that was so popular in the first season. The Great War, explored at length during the second season, has already wrought significant – though frequently indirect – change at Downton Abbey. Youngest daughter Lady Sibyl, who trained as a nurse during the War, is now married to the family chauffeur-turned-Republican-journalist and at home in Ireland for Christmas; heir apparent Matthew’s fiancée Lavinia has succumbed to Spanish flu, having outlived her usefulness once Matthew recovered from his battle injuries; and Lord Grantham’s wealthy, widowed sister Lady Rosamund has brought home a new beau for the holidays – and that’s just the news from upstairs.
Lady Rosamund’s narrative thread plays second fiddle to the episode’s main concerns, the murder trial of Lord Grantham’s valet, John Bates, and the imploding engagement of eldest daughter Lady Mary to newspaper magnate Sir Richard Carlisle. The tempestuous and controlling relationship between Lady Mary and Sir Richard is worthy of an in-depth feminist critique, but because its development occurs over several episodes, it’s not feasible to do it justice in this piece. However, the Christmas special’s treatment of Lady Rosamund and her love interest, fortune-hunter Lord Hepworth, encapsulates most concisely the paternalistic, patriarchal society in which they lived. Moreover, Lady Rosamund’s story serves as a useful way to begin a discussion about the way that Downton Abbey portrays two of the senior ladies of the family: Lady Rosamund and her sister-in-law, the Countess of Grantham.
In the first and most of the second seasons, Lady Rosamund is essentially a plot device who interferes in her nieces’ lives and runs reconnaissance for her mother when necessary to move the story along. Fortunately, the considerable talent of Samantha Bond rescues the character from marginalized oblivion. Lady Rosamund is compelling, even when her scenes don’t contain very much for her to do. There’s a complexity and nuance to Bond’s performance that makes Lady Rosamund someone worth caring about, in part because she’s an actor who makes excellent use of her voice. She’s very much like Maggie Smith in that respect: they are both cognizant of the voice as a flexible, powerful instrument and exercise it accordingly.
“Christmas at Downton Abbey” finally gives Lady Rosamund a storyline of her own, and one worthy of Bond’s thoughtful portrayal. Lady Rosamund’s suitor’s family fortune is so diminished that, as the Dowager Countess of Grantham puts it, “he’s lucky not to be playing the violin in Leicester Square.” Indeed, Hepworth only apprises Lady Rosamund of his dire financial straits at the insistence of the Dowager Countess. “I’m tired of being alone,” Bond’s Lady Rosamund says, and the brilliance of the portrayal is that she sounds exhausted; there’s only the barest glimmer of enthusiasm for a new romance. Lady Rosamund acquiesces to the best future she thinks she can buy: heartbreakingly, she adds, “And I have money.” In Bond’s hands, Lady Rosamund doesn’t sound desperate, as her words would suggest; rather, she’s resigned to an unfortunate, uncomfortable reality. She knows how society values her – and it’s not for her intrinsic merits, but rather for her late husband’s considerable fortune. She’s shrewd: she knows she’s entering into a business arrangement as much as anything else, but she’s motivated by her desire for a partnership as well. When she catches Hepworth bedding her maid, Shore, Lady Rosamund is certainly stung by the betrayal: “I just can’t stand it when Mama is proved right,” she declares, bitterly. She knew he wanted her for her money; she simply dared to hope for more.
But Lady Rosamund is not the only person charting her course. Unbeknownst to her, her mother and brother discussed the match and its ramifications before she discovers Hepworth’s duplicity. “Is a woman of Rosamund’s age entitled to marry a fortune-hunter?” the Dowager Countess asks her son. Yes, he concedes, providing she’s been made aware of the circumstances, “but for God’s sake, let’s tie up the money.” It’s clear that Lady Rosamund finds herself trapped in a gilded cage. She is twice damned: as a widow, she’s essentially passed back to her family, who permit her to make significant life decisions; and despite the independent image she presents, the final say regarding her finances rests with her brother. 
Lady Rosamund and her beau, Lord Hepworth
Of course, it’s not a personal slight against Lady Rosamund. The paternalism that Lord Grantham exhibits (and that his mother defends) isn’t the fault of the show: Downton Abbey is, after all, a historically-minded serial; writer Julian Fellowes can’t help the prejudices of the time period. While there’s historical precedent for a woman in Lady Rosamund’s position, the show is fictional and so functions within its own universe, with its own rules. We can watch with an eye toward parallelisms because the world of Downton Abbey is a carefully crafted one, and contrasting Lord Grantham’s handling of his own history and his sister’s nascent romance invites the viewer to realize the prevalence of paternalism in aristocratic families. It’s not accidental that Lord Grantham himself was a fortune-hunter actively searching for a bride wealthy enough to rescue Downton Abbey. The Countess of Grantham and Lady Rosamund are commodities, and their value is their net worth. Lord Grantham doesn’t much mind what his sister does with her affections so long as her money is tied up; some thirty years earlier, he didn’t much mind who he married so long as she balanced his accounts. Julian Fellowes’s use of parallelism in the narrative is shrewd: we discuss these issues because of the way he chooses to tell the story.
That’s not to say that Fellowes is waving the feminist flag; he’s not. He’s in the business of writing well-crafted, witty scripts that tell a good story and maintain as close a degree of fidelity to the historical record as possible. The choices he makes as the writer are entirely to that end. Sometimes, they’re pro-woman, whether in a roundabout way, as in asking the audience to consider what life used to be like, or in a more explicit manner, such as Sybil’s interest in woman’s suffrage and ambition to work and pursue a more autonomous life for herself.
In other instances, however, the show shies away from the most challenging of its subplots. The Christmas special is notable for the storylines which it does not address, and the three most prominent of these concern women: the unresolved question of Lord Grantham’s infidelity; Lady Grantham’s sense of purpose derived from running the hospital housed in her home during the war; and the inter-class intimacy that develops between Lady Grantham and her lady’s maid Sarah O’Brien following the former’s miscarriage in the season one finale.
The first two missed opportunities are linked: as presented in the season, Lady Grantham finds such meaning in her work for the hospital during the war that she initially can’t contemplate returning to her old life of attending to her social obligations. Her husband bristles at her newfound direction, which means she has less time for him. During the seventh and eighth episodes, his flirting with a housemaid, Jane, becomes more and more serious, culminating in an encounter halted only by the precipitous interruption of Lord Grantham’s valet. After Bates leaves, Lord Grantham seems to have reevaluated the situation and remembered his marriage vows – and the fact that his wife is next door, gravely ill with the Spanish influenza.
These two storylines, though linked, fail in their portrayal of women in different ways. In the instance of Lady Grantham’s independence, her narrative simply peters out. In the penultimate episode, Lady Grantham apologizes for “neglecting” her husband; by the Christmas special, she has happily returned to playing lady of the manor, worrying over whether there’s sufficient time to change for dinner.
The apology in question occurs just after Lady Grantham’s brush with death; in response, Lord Grantham simply says, “Don’t apologize to me.” But refusing her apology doesn’t absolve Lord Grantham of his guilt; nor does he seem to have any inclination to admit his indiscretion to his wife. From a feminist perspective, this is a perplexing editorial decision. The script allows Lady Grantham’s apology to stand, because she wasn’t the wife she was supposed to be. He might not accept it, but she’s the one who says the words. Lady Grantham’s tentative steps toward greater independence are immediately retracted; she apologizes for it. In a drama serial that deals primarily with interpersonal relationships, there’s no compelling reason to not address Lord Grantham’s infidelity. In the end, it’s Lady Grantham who’s punished and corrected.
The other missed opportunity in the “Christmas at Downton Abbey” concerns Lady Grantham and her lady’s maid, Sarah O’Brien. In the last episode of the first season, O’Brien’s anger at Lady Grantham’s perceived slight takes a fateful turn when she deliberately endangers her mistress and inadvertently causes Lady Grantham to miscarry. Throughout the second season, then, O’Brien channels her guilt into taking extraordinary care of her mistress; their relationship is characterized by increasing complicity and mutual affection. It is O’Brien who nurses Lady Grantham through her grave bout with Spanish influenza. The overtures of friendship are never quite realized, however, and O’Brien’s touching, climactic scene in which she asks Lady Grantham’s forgiveness occurs when the latter is delirious with fever. Having made the affection she feels for her mistress readily apparent (Mrs. Patmore, the cook, comments on it), O’Brien’s devotion is even acknowledged by Lord Grantham, who actively dislikes her. The Christmas special, however, never addresses the issue at all. It’s a missed opportunity to consider female friendship within a socio-economic context: after all, O’Brien has waited exclusively on Lady Grantham for over fifteen years, resulting in a curious master-servant relationship marked by necessary affinity and learned intimacy. Their tentative steps towards greater familiarity would be an interesting avenue for the show to explore, given the increasing social mobility that’s on the horizon. The fact that the storyline is wholly ignored in the Christmas special is disappointing.
Indeed, the lack of female friendships is a curious omission in Downton Abbey. There is minimal complicity between the main upstairs female characters: most relationships are marked by outright dislike or disinterest. It’s disconcerting; these ladies who are perfectly charming, each and all, around men, but who seem to lack any kind of amity with other women. When moments of camaraderie do come, they are typically between the ladies and their maids: Lady Sybil befriends Gwen, a housemaid, in the first season, but Gwen leaves Downton; eldest daughter Lady Mary has an affectionate relationship with her maid, Anna, that’s similar to her mother’s with her lady’s maid. What renders the dearth of female friendship so extraordinary is that it would have been unusual at the time. [ii] By rendering women either objects of desire or economic necessity, and essentially presenting them only vis-à-vis men, Downton Abbey doesn’t engage with its female characters as fully-realized people. They only rarely step outside of a male-defined paradigm, and when they do, they’re inevitably walked back. Gwen leaves Downton, content with her new job; Lavinia dies on the cusp of a budding friendship with Mary (complicated, of course, by Mary’s continued affection for Lavinia’s fiancé); O’Brien cries bitter tears at her mistress’s bedside and is treated no differently from anyone else on the receiving line for the staff’s obligatory Christmas presents. 
Lord Grantham and the Dowager Countess discuss Lady Rosamund’s finances
Ultimately, the lens of patriarchy influences the female characters’ understanding of their self-worth. Lady Grantham tells her daughter that she’s “damaged goods” in the first season after Lady Mary loses her virginity to a handsome, rogue diplomat. Initially we bemoan Lady Grantham’s inability to empathize with her daughter’s plight. As the series progresses, that opinion begins to change. By the Christmas special, when Lady Grantham’s steps to independence have been halted by her husband, it’s possible to see that early scene with Lady Mary in a new light: if Lady Grantham understands her daughter’s worth to be entirely wrapped up in her virginity (read: her marriageability), what does that say about her own sense of self? Julian Fellowes’s tendency to return to similar themes in new contexts enables his audience to reassess those early impressions. In this instance, the audience reconsiders the knee-jerk condemnation of Lady Grantham so as to sympathize with her plight as well. For all that she’s terribly wealthy and beautiful, she’s not expected to be much more than that. What’s sad is that she doesn’t expect to be, either; when she does, she’s put back in her place by her courtly – but no less paternalistic – husband.
Downton Abbey is, in effect, a thoughtful portrayal of the harsh reality of aristocratic women’s lives that lurked beneath the gilded exterior. They lacked autonomy and individual agency, were frequently treated as commodities, and the patriarchal, paternalistic society in which they moved colored their own self-worth. Men like Lord Grantham, as much a product of that society, nevertheless perpetuated their privilege, becoming active apologists for the very hierarchy that constrained their daughters. But beyond the beautiful clothes and the fabulous sets and the compelling acting is strong writing and purposeful manipulation of narrative structure. Julian Fellowes has rightly received glowing criticism for Downton Abbey’s plethora of witticisms and sharp one-liners, but the real achievement is in the narrative’s use of parallelisms to explore a single theme from different angles. 

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[i] While the term “Edwardian” derives from the reign of Edward VII of England (1901-1910), historians sometimes extend the upper bound to include the sinking of the RMS Titanic (1912) or the start of European hostilities in the First World War (1914). For aristocratic families like the Crawley family at Downton Abbey, the rigid classism and social hierarchy (and its attendant mores) continued well into wartime.

[ii] Sharon Marcus’s excellent 2007 Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England is a wonderful, immensely readable but rigorously scholarly exploration of the full spectrum of female friendships, from the platonic to the intensely erotic. However, Marcus’s data is primarily drawn from sources written by historical women of the middle class, and some of their experiences (going to school, e.g.) would not have applied to any of the Crawley daughters. Lillian Faderman deals with the spectrum of friendships in the United States in roughly the same time in 2001’s To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America, which includes chapters on upper-class women.

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Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern alum. She’s written on Daphne and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.

 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Theme Week: The Roundup

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 1 Trailer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a series that redefined television in many ways. It combined drama, comedy, romance, action, and horror in an original and unique way. It portrayed a lesbian relationship as mainstream. It centered around metaphors for the trials and tribulations of everyday life that all its viewers, young and old, could relate to. But most importantly, creator Joss Whedon fashioned a world in which the stereotypes of teenage girls (and ultimately all women) were debunked and left at the wayside.

As a lover of Buffy and a theologian, I want Buffy to be theologically and metaphysically coherent. I want it eitherto establish one metaphysical system as true for the world it portrays, or to represent a believable variety of metaphysical beliefs among its characters. The former is an entirely lost cause; the latter is frustratingly undercooked. Willow’s Judaism is wholly Informed, and her turn to Wicca is entirely to do with magic. There is no sense at all of Wicca (or any other religion) as an ethical code, as a way of making meaning, as a way of personally relating to the world and others in it.

Around dinner tables and over cups of coffee, nearly a decade after the series concluded, I’ve witnessed this discussion unfold time and again. And, I think this is the key interpretative moment: are women, the series asks, dependent on men to create a new field of play? Or might the show call into question the norms and expectations of both genders? The answer to these queries may well be found in Spike’s role in the series’ finale. Certainly a number of conversations turn to Spike’s role. In its layers of ambivalence that call upon men to not only transgress but efface normative boundaries, it points to the latter.

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 2 Trailer

And then, of course, Buffy kicked a lot of ass. A very serious amount of ass. Over the course of the show’s seven television seasons, she averted multiple apocalypses. She punned and killed all very large monsters and vampires that she came across. She added clever insult to injury. She never apologized for not being a dumb, weak girl. And it was very physical — in the canon of the show, a Slayer is given extra-human powers of strength, speed and agility. She was a fashionable girl’s girl, and she slayed creatures that go bump in the night. It was Girl Power at its late-1990s peak and taken to an excellent extreme.

Though the show suffers from no shortage of powerful women, the ways in which they relate to one another throughout the series is a constant struggle. This is because the dominant patriarchal paradigm within which the show is operating insists that one powerful woman is a delightful anomaly, but multiple powerful women are a threat to hegemony. By these standards, Buffy, by herself, is set up as a superior paragon of womanhood: strong, independent, sassy, beautiful, smart, courageous, and compassionate. If all women, however, were empowered like Buffy, or even a small group, it would be a subversive threat to male dominance, which is why Buffy and her power are exceptional and solitary. This, in effect, handicaps her, limiting her power.

Xander sexualizes power, instead of maintaining a respectful attitude towards strong women. He lusts for most of the powerful women he meets, good or bad – Buffy, preying mantis lady, Incan mummy, Willow (as she begins to mature), Cordelia, Faith, and Anya. At the same time, he finds himself at odds with this attraction, which manifests into this strange almost self-loathing that drives him to assert dominance. Since he’s a rather awkward boy without strength, he uses his tongue, throwing insults and off-the-mark opinions as “Xander, the Chronicler of Buffy’s Failures.”

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 3 Trailer

Joss Whedon’s writing for Willow’s dream is clever and filled with misdirection. Characters talk about Willow and her “secret,” a secret that she only seems comfortable discussing with Tara. Dream-Buffy constantly comments on Willow’s “costume,” telling her to change out of it because “everyone already knows.” We’re led to believe that Willow is afraid that her friends will judge her for being gay and being in a relationship with another woman…but this isn’t the case at all.
Instead, when Dream-Buffy rips off Willow’s costume, we see a version of Willow that is eerily reminiscent of season one Willow: a geek with pretensions of being cool.

But its strengths are strengths that none of the other big US dramas have. For one, the flexibility of its form meant that it could be any kind of show it wanted: one week it’s a goofy comedy, the next it’s a frightening fairy tale, the week after it’s an all-singing all-dancing musical. It was clearly the work of a team of writers, too, and when I was young and watching it for the first time it was the first time I really started to learn how TV was constructed – I got a thrill from seeing who had written each episode and guessing at what kind of episode it was going to be by who wrote it. Above all, though, the thing that Buffy has in spades that most shows lack, and the aspect of the show that season five best showcases, is emotion. Even at its most laid back, Buffy is a show spilling over with emotion, and it’s this that gives the potentially goofy premise of show its weight. Whedon et. al. were absolute masters at making us really care about their characters, and every audacious plot contrivance was easily swallowed when viewed through the lens of the real, human emotion that they would imbue it with. 
 
I don’t want to get bogged down about how it sucks in a way that Buffy’s ability comes exclusively from superpowers. I get that, and I could write about it endlessly, but in this moment, I don’t care because Sophia doesn’t care. She watches Buffy and sees a woman who kicks ass, and she wants to emulate that. It’s tough to over-analyze and intellectualize a TV show when you’re watching a young girl practice roundhouse kicks because she wants to be a strong badass like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And I have to say, it’s much more heartwarming to see her excited about becoming a strong woman with martial arts skills than it was to watch her pretend she couldn’t speak–because she wanted to be Ariel from The Little Mermaid. 

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 4 Trailer

When the popular movie Twilight first appeared in theaters, it did not take long for fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) to shame Twilight’s Edward with a fan video smackdown (“Buffy Vs. Edward”). The video shows Edward stalking Buffy and professing his undying love, with Buffy responding in sarcastic incredulity and staking Edward. While it may appear that this “remix” of the two characters was about Buffy slaying a juvenile upstart and reinforcing her status as the queen of the genre, there was more at stake, so to speak. Buffy slaying Edward says more about the perceived masculinity and virility of the vampire in question than about Buffy herself as an independent woman. Buffy was never given that much agency in her own show. Buffy’s lovers stalked her, lied to her, and often ignored her own wishes about their relationships all in the name of “protecting” her. Many of these things are what fans of BtVS pointed out as anti-woman flaws in the narrative of Twilight, yet Buffy did not stake the vampires who denied her agency in her own relationships; instead, she pined for them! 

Equality Now: Joss Whedon’s Acceptance Speech by Stephanie Rogers

In 2007, the Warner Brothers production president, Jeff Robinov, announced that Warner Brothers would no longer make films with female leads.

A year before that announcement, Joss Whedon, the creator of such women-centric television shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Dollhouse, accepted an award from Equality Now at the event, “On the Road to Equality: Honoring Men on the Front Lines.”

Watch as he answers the question, “Why do you always write such strong women characters?”

Xander Harris Has Masculinity Issues by Lady T

When I look at Xander through a feminist lens, I find him fascinating because he’s a mass of contradictions. He’s a would-be “man’s man” – obsessed with being manly – whose only close friends are women. He’s both a perpetrator and victim of sexual assault and/or violation of consent. He’s both attracted to and intimidated by strong women. He jokes about objectifying women and viewing sex as some sort of game, but in more intimate moments, seems to value romance and real connection. He’s a willing participant in the patriarchy and also a victim of it.

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 5 Trailer

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 6 Trailer

So whilst Buffy can defeat demons and save the world over and over, her emotional detachment and self-righteous sense of martyrdom (have some humility woman!) make these fights she doesn’t actually win, absolutely crucial to the Series’ greatness. Ultimately that’s why I find it hard not to let out a little yelp of glee when Dark Willow declares, “You really need to have every square inch of your ass kicked.” Faith, Willow and Anya teach Buffy to lose the ego and remember what she’s really fighting for, and that’s feminism in action right there.

A common criticism of Dawn is that she’s much more immature than the main characters were at the start of the series, when they were close to her in age (Dawn is introduced as a 14-year-old in the eighth grade; Buffy, Xander, and Willow were high school sophomores around age 15 or 16 in Season 1).  Writer David Fury responds to this in his DVD commentary on the episode “Real Me,” saying that Dawn was originally conceived as around age 12 and aged up a few years after Michelle Trachtenberg was cast, but it took a while for him and the other writers to get the originally-conceived younger version of the character out of their brains.  But I don’t need this excuse; I think it makes perfect narrative sense that Dawn comes across as more immature than our point-of-view characters were when they were younger.  Who among us didn’t think of themselves as being just as smart and capable as grown-ups when we were teens? Who among us, when confronted with the next generation of teenagers ten years down the line, were not horrified by their blatant immaturity?  

Willow is Whedon’s version of the answer to the underrepresented gay community. But, Willow appears to have had a healthy sexual relationship with her boyfriend Oz, and there is no hint at otherwise. She also pined for Xander for years. Both men. We see her gradually start a relationship with Tara, but she never talks about or reflects on her sexuality or coming out. We see that she is nervous about whether her friends approve. But, it doesn’t get much deeper than that. No characters have a deep conversation with her about her orientation. It’s not a thorough exploration. She goes from being with men to exclusively being with women and identifying as a lesbian. This is fine for Willow, but because there are really not many open gay or lesbian characters within the entire series we are dependent on her narrative alone.

YouTube Break: Buffyverse Season 7 Trailer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Are You Ready to Be Strong? Power and Sisterhood in ‘Buffy’

Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
 
Guest post written by Amanda Rodriguez.

No one will argue that the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn’t populated with strong female characters. Buffy’s best friend, Willow, is a computer-hacking lesbian witch with the magical prowess to end the world. Her sister, Dawn, is a mythic Key who can open gateways between dimensions. Faith, Buffy’s sometime friend and ally, is a sexually and physically empowered slayer who revels in her body’s physical gifts. The female villains are also intensely powerful and iconic, ranging from ancient vampires, werewolves, and vengeance demons to genius scientists and even the ultimate foe, The First (though technically genderless, this force often takes the form of Buffy herself). Season 5’s villainess, Glory, is even a goddess whose power is only diminished when she is forced to inhabit the body of a human male, and if that ain’t feminist commentary, I don’t know what is.
Though the show suffers from no shortage of powerful women, the ways in which they relate to one another throughout the series is a constant struggle. This is because the dominant patriarchal paradigm within which the show is operating insists that one powerful woman is a delightful anomaly, but multiple powerful women are a threat to hegemony. By these standards, Buffy, by herself, is set up as a superior paragon of womanhood: strong, independent, sassy, beautiful, smart,courageous, and compassionate. If all women, however, were empowered like Buffy, or even a small group, it would be a subversive threat to male dominance,which is why Buffy and her power are exceptional and solitary. This, in effect,handicaps her, limiting her power.
“Into every generation, a slayer is born. One girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness.” | Image of Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar)
Within this context, each woman’s power in the Buffyverse sets her apart from others and often puts her at odds with other powerful women. Buffy laments the isolation that her power causes, feeling as if no one can relate to the magnitude of the unending burden that she must bear alone. On multiple occasions, her power also puts her into a position where she feels she must destroy other women who are abusing their power.
Though Buffy has no qualms destroying evildoing villainesses, her decision-making becomes more complicated when it is a female friend/loved one/ally using her power in ways that go against Buffy’s code. Inevitably in these instances, Buffy struggles with her duties as a slayer but always comes back around to what the dominant patriarchal paradigm expects of her. Buffy begrudgingly conforms to patriarchy’s prescribed dichotomy that polarizes powerful women, steeling herself to kill the love of Xander’s life, her sister-slayer, and even her own blood sister.
Anya, Xander’s ex-fiancee and Buffy’s friend, returns to her vengeance demon ways in Season 6 after Xander jilts her at the altar. In the Season 7 episode Selfless, Anya kills an entire fraternity as part of her vengeance demon work, punishing men who wrong women. Buffy says of her responsibility to kill the rampaging Anya, “It’s always complicated. And at some point, someone has to draw a line in the sand, and that is always going to be me…I am the law.” Here again the series insists that two mighty female forces cannot coexist. Their power will be constantly at odds, and a balance must be struck by either the neutralization or the destruction of one of the women’s powers. Though Buffy stabs Anya in the chest, Anya lives and chooses to “take back” her murder of the fraternity and relinquish her vengeance demon powers, becoming human again. There is a price, though, for this transformation, and another powerful woman pays it. In a cruel twist, Anya’s friend and fellow vengeance demon, Halfrek, is obliterated in order to restore balance. This implies that women are to be punished for their powers and nonconformist desires and, most importantly, that all powerful women are interchangeable.
“The proverbial scales must balance. In order to restore the lives of the victims, the fates require a sacrifice: the life and soul of a vengeance demon.” – D’Hoffryn | Image of Anya
The polarization of powerful women in the series is most exemplified by the relationship between Buffy and Faith. The nature of slayer power allows only one slayer at a time. She possesses all the power until death. Buffy is drowned and dies briefly in Season 1, disrupting the slayer line, causing another slayer to be “called.” The relationship between Buffy and Faith (commonly known as “the dark slayer”) is contentious from the beginning. There is resentment and jealousy between them. Faith is set up as the outsider little sister who has no friends, no home, no family, causing a deep resentment toward the stability of Buffy’s life. This reveals the unspoken power of Buffy’s privilege, calling attention to the economic and educational disparities between the two slayers. On the other hand, Buffy is simultaneously judgmental toward (in a classic big sister way) and intoxicated by Faith’s free sexuality and her love of slaying (fans and academics alike have cited the two as metaphors for each other).
In Season 3, Faith betrays her sacred duty as a slayer, killing humans and aligning herself with the evil Mayor. Buffy decides to kill Faith, but because the two women share the same abilities, this task is easier said than done. The two go round and round before Buffy finally stabs Faith in the stomach with her own knife, putting her in a coma. In Season 4, Faith wakes up, and after more discord, Faith leaves town and turns herself in, choosing prison as a method of atonement. Faith’s threatening power is effectively neutralized behind bars.
 “There’s only supposed to be one. Maybe that’s why you and I can never get along. We’re not supposed to exist together.”- Faith | Image of Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Faith (Eliza Dushku)
The only time Buffy refuses to do her duty and kill someone she loves is in Season 5 when her sister, Dawn (the mystical Key), must be killed to stop her from unwillingly opening a gateway to a demon dimension that will send the world into chaos. Throughout the season, the sisters often have an uneasy relationship due to typical sibling rivalry and the fact that Dawn isn’t truly Buffy’s sister. Monks harness the awesome power of the Key and shape it into human form, using Buffy’s blood and altering her memories so that she will be compelled to protect it. In spite of all this, when Dawn must die to save the world, Buffy chooses to sacrifice herself and dies instead. This is meant to be a beautiful,selfless act of love, and, though it is, Buffy’s death simply reinforces the idea that only so much female power can safely exist in the world.
“This is the work that I have to do.” – Buffy | Illustration by boo21190 via deviantart.com
All these “sister” relationships are deeply dysfunctional and problematic from a feminist perspective. The show itself sits uneasily within the patriarchal paradigm that it is constantly reinforcing. Though the series complies in a circuitous way by systematically disempowering powerful women by divesting them of their abilities (in the case of Anya) or forcing them to reign in their strengths (in the case of Willow), the show refuses throughout to actually kill these women(permanently anyway). To stop another apocalyptic menace in the final season, Buffy,Anya, Faith, and Dawn all work together alongside a host of “potential slayers.”The “potentials” are women who are not actually powerful but could become powerful should a slayer die, further underscoring the notion that female power must be balanced and finite.
This is when it gets really good. The ending of this series gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. It’s a feminist dream come true. They are facing The First, a truly invincible foe who is only able to rear its ugly head when the cosmic balance is upset because of Buffy’s mystical resurrection, allowing two slayers to exist in the worlds simultaneously. One could even posit that The First is symbolic of patriarchal and misogynistic oppression of women, especially since Its right-hand man is a woman-hating religious fanatic. Not only that, but The First appears often as Buffy, herself, implying, perhaps, that female complicity or conformity to an oppressive standard is a major obstacle to equality. That’s a whole other paper, though.
To muster enough force to beat back The First, Buffy creates a new paradigm. She enlists the help of another powerful woman (Willow) to subvert the paradigm that requires only one woman/one slayer to exist at any given time. In a speech that moves me almost to tears every time I watch it, Buffy explains that Willow will use an ancient slayer artifact to release its power to all potential slayers around the world.
“So here’s the part where you make a choice. What if you could have that power, now? In every generation, one slayer is born, because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule. They were powerful men. This woman is more powerful than all of them combined. So I say we change the rule. I say my power, should be our power. Tomorrow, Willow will use the essence of this scythe to change our destiny. From now on, every girl in the world who might be a slayer, will be a slayer. Every girl who could have the power, will have the power. Can stand up, will stand up. Slayers, every one of us. Make your choice. Are you ready to be strong?” — Buffy

The series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer tells us that women must band together to defeat patriarchal oppression. Here Buffy chooses to share her power with other women,creating a community of slayers. Buffy has evolved into a powerful woman who refuses to see other women as a threat. She is now a strong woman embracing and empowering other strong women. Together they create a unified force that changes the world forever.
Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys. 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: The View from the Grave: Buffy as Gothic Feminist

Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Guest post written by Jennifer M. Santos.

“It’s a relief to hear papers that don’t go on about feminism.” Such was Patricia Pender’s report on the mood of attendees at the second Slayage Conference in 2006, just three years after Buffy ended (5). Pender punctuated her discussions of an atmosphere rife with concerns of contextual redundancy with the exclamatory parenthetical, “not more feminism!” (5). Nonetheless, the prevailing mood of 2006 did little to halt the “Is Buffy feminist debates?” during the following year: in 2007, C. Albert Bardi and Sherry Hamby claim that Buffy “revel[s] in her phallic power (yes, phallic –don’t forget the omnipresent stake)” while Misty Hook returns to Joss Whedon’s self-proclaimed “radical feminist” roots (107, 119).
Which perspective reigns in 2012? Which should? Neither. Or both. More precisely, Pender’s 2002 piece – now a decade old – got it right when suggesting that Buffy’s “ambivalent gender dynamics”makes it a “site of intense cultural negotiation” (35, 43). When considered from the perspective of the Gothic tradition from which the earliest English-language vampire first sprang, ready for mischief, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Buffy defies easy categorization. Instead, the show invites viewers, along with its characters, to negotiate – rather than “simply” navigate – cultural gender norms.
The Gothic has long been known for its tendency to transgress boundaries, especially those boundaries associated with gender. So much so, in fact, that an industry of gendered Gothic scholarship has grown from Ellen Moers’ first invocation of the term “female Gothic,” used initially to refer to Gothic novels authored by women (and which typically function as “birth myths”) to Anne Williams’ more inclusive, dynamic formulation wherein female Gothic “does not simply break the rules, it creates a new game with different rules altogether” (172). Buffy not only creates a new game; it suggests a new field of play for the game by transgressing – and then effacing – traditional gender boundaries.
In 2012 – an era of the female as victim (as seen in the Twilight series and even to some extent in the Sookie Stackhouse novels) or “more masculine than the men” (perhaps a holdover from the Lara Croft or Xena) in Gothic and in larger popular culture – the available spaces for female representation are typically depicted as domestic entrapment or usurper of patriarchy (a role distinct, it should be noted, from that of matriarch). From the pilot episode to the conclusion, Buffy enters and redefines each space. She may be, as Hannah Tucker describes, a “Wonderbra’d blond chick fighting vampires” meant to invert the convention of “the blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed” as Joss Whedon has described his vision of the show, who elides the domestic sphere (quoted in Byers185, Belle). She may also be the means of celebrating what Whedon has called “the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it” in the final episode of Buffy – where any female who could receive slayer powers does receive slayer powers  (quoted in Gottlieb). She may elide the domestics pace in each of these examples.
But for all her “on field” triumphs in revising the game, her exodus from domesticity is not “complete.” Nor need it be. In fact, Buffy continually cycles in and out of domesticity, as her mother pressures her to lead a normal life even as her Watcher prods her towards her destiny, and as she sets out for college on her own only to return to the home a year later to care for her ailing mother and, later, her sister. [1] And, notwithstanding the celebratory conclusion of the series, Angel episode “The Girl in Question” situates Buffy in a new domestic space in Rome with the Immortal. These series-wide arcs indicate that the either/or dichotomy no longer reigns as such; Whedon neither wishes to simply “expos[e] perils” (although Frances Early convincingly argues that Buffy does just that) nor create “a dark mirror reflecting patriarchy’s nightmare” (Williams 107).[2] Instead,the series as a whole unpacks, overturns, and undercuts – in other words, it transgresses – traditional understandings of not only female/male, but also of feminism itself.

Buffy in the series finale
The key to understanding Buffy’s contribution to feminism in 2012is remembering that Buffy is more than a simple representation. It is meant, Sherryl Vint explains, to “reshap[e] the subjectivities…of adolescent boys as well as women” (13). [3]
The final episode – “Chosen” – is case-in-point.When Buffy shares her power with all women, vanquishes the First Evil, destroys the Hellmouth, and leaves a literally decimated Sunnydale behind to start a new life, the oppressive, exclusionary, and controlling “signs of the father” are defeated.[4] Buffy,with Willow’s assistance, imbues all would-be-slayers with mystical strength,actualizing power in all women with the potential to receive it.  We may further rejoice in the revelation that a mysterious emissary of female Guardians not only predates man but also contributes to Buffy’s quest in providing a pivotal tool that enables empowerment. But its representational power is complex, and has led a number of viewers – academic and nonacademic alike, in my experience – to probe their own subjectivities.  
One argument goes something like this: given these overtly feminist messages, the troubling intrusion of masculine power structures complicates a “happy ending.”  Recall the scythe that enables sharing of female power.  The visual representation of this tool might well be considered symbolic of the phallus. To be effective in empowering women, Willow must join with the scythe in a scene rife with sexual imagery, from Willow’s initial resistance and nervousness to her gasp of awe (“oh my goddess”) to her physical collapse that implies post-coital bliss.  Of course, female pleasure here is not sublimated to the male, unless one considers that act as coerced for the greater good, much as Victorian mothers told their daughters to”Lie still and think of England” on their wedding nights.[5]  Her virgin-like nervousness before the act –and her statement that such an act will take her beyond anywhere she’s been before – also speaks to a sublimated sense of self for duty in encountering the phallus (“Chosen”). Here, an engaged viewer might ask (and have asked), “can this support a feminist message?”
Indeed, the implications of this act are all the more poignant when one considers that Willow is a lesbian in a committed relationship. That the phallus was thrust upon this woman by other, albeit well-meaning, women speaks to the deep-rooted patriarchal use of women by culture, similarly attested to by the Watchers’ Trials where Buffy is placed in a dilapidated house, stripped of powers that were initially forced upon her predecessors, and exposed to mortal danger – all “in the name of the father.”  Yet it is Giles, the father-figure, who breaks from tradition and assists Buffy in this trial, thus indicating a deeply complex and ambivalent perspective on the cultural positioning of women.
Around dinner tables and over cups of coffee, nearly a decade after the series concluded, I’ve witnessed this discussion unfold time and again. And, I think this is the key interpretative moment: are women, the series asks, dependent on men to create a new field of play? Or might the show call into question the norms and expectations of both genders? The answer to these queries may well be found in Spike’s role in the series’ finale. Certainly a number of conversations turn to Spike’s role. In its layers of ambivalence that call upon men to not only transgress but efface normative boundaries, it points to the latter.

As Wilcox notes, Spike only glows with his own power after power has been distributed to women; it is, ultimately, the eternal man, in the form of the undead Spike, whose heroics save the day (104). Indeed, while Spike assumes his heroic pose, Buffy and her cohort of potentials-turned-slayers operate as helpmeets, distracting the minions of evil until the male sacrifice – reminiscent of the Christ promoted by patriarchal religious structures – can deliver the women from a dark destruction. This comparison gains credence from the fact that this unlikely hero, after the destruction of his vampire form, is again resurrected in Angel,revealing a reification of a patriarchal structure: the female can only be empowered – can only share her power – at the behest of a man. This ambivalent twist on a seemingly-feminist agenda asserts itself further in “Chosen”  when the phallically-named Spike shoots beams of light across the female expanse, with one slicing upwards and directly into the room of the lesbian witch who embraced the phallus to empower others.[6] This final act seems to reclaim phallic power through intrusion.

Buffy and Spike
Seemingly,then, the series remains locked in the outmoded feminist argument, regardless of the subjectivities it invites viewers to explore, that describes a binary power struggle that becomes even more insidious when we consider that Spike refers to Buffy in his final words as “lamb,” implying that Buffy herself must sacrifice power to empower others. Further consideration of this thought is disturbing, as it implicates Buffy herself in the totalizing power of a patriarchal system (as the “one girl in all the world” who is chosen), as does the elitist selectivity of the chosen few who receive the newly redistributed power.  These plotpoints beg the question of whether collective female empowerment can exist within current structures.
The answer to this query, it seems, lays in the very ambivalence that the show’s conventions hint at across the seven-seasons. These various genderings indicate that it is only in comfortable ambivalence that true empowerment can be achieved for all members of society. Perhaps it is our own discomfort with this ambiguity that compels us to return to the either/or feminist debate surrounding Buffy again and again, in print and in casual conversation. Yet, in fact, it is the liminal– the space in-between – that is brought to the foreground, through the characters of Spike and Buffy. As a vampire, Spike exists on the borders, oscillating between life and death,between human and demon and between good and evil (even without a soul, Spike often acts for the greater good).[7]  It is his liminality that makes his identification with the phallus so intriguing: his story is that of a sensitive, somewhat effeminate, human male lacking self-confidence in life thatis gained in unlife. This newly-found confidence sends him on a quest for power as conceived of by cultural norms:his self-assertion takes a violent turn during which he quite literally eliminates the “other,” and, during this time, trades his given name, the ubiquitous William, for his phallically-charged nickname. That he follows the traditional conquest path to “glory” makes his shift to champion of the people all the more interesting: he moves from the effeminate male (the “momma’s boy”) to the”masculine” male, experiencing both worlds before consciously choosing to “be a better man,” as Buffy puts it, a task that for Spike involves embracing both the male and female cultural norms (“Never Leave Me”).[8] It is not insignificant that it is Spike who sacrifices himself – often the female role (excepting, for a moment, the Christ comparison) – to save the world.  By adapting cultural gender norms for new purposes, Spike offers a form of feminism that might be characterized, stripped of jargon, as “human” feminism.
Similarly, Buffy herself operates as a liminal figure, oscillating between her home life and her sworn duties, the human part of her and the demon part of her. She relies on what may be seen as a patriarchal form of power: violence and control.  She further maintains the traditionally-male isolationist stoicism while attempting to reconcile her place in the world with cultural norms, yet only when she becomes comfortable having – and not having – power is she able to empower others.  This is the crux of the issue: only by blurring binary distinctions that constrain men and women can the rules change within the system.  The staples of oppressive conventions have not been overturned: the system remains in place:globalization of female power, then, does not simply cross boundaries or”turn around” as revolution may imply in this context.[9] It instead offers the hope that if one cannot rend asunder what William Blake would call “mind forged manacles” of cultural norms, then it can infuse them with elasticity. And in 2012, when male and female icons alike so often return to the repressed as with Gothic of yore, the role Buffy can play in renegotiating a space for feminism from beyond the grave is worthy of continued attention.
Jennifer M. Santos has taken a break from professoring to do more writing about fun, feisty females. When she’s not writing about Buffy or Lady Gaga, she’s using her Ph.D. in English to unearth nineteenth century vampires. And when when’s not doing that, she continues the never-ending battle to convince her cats that she’s the alpha.

Works Cited
Angel: Season Five on DVD.  Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment,2005.
Bardi, C. Albert and Sherry Hamby. “Existentialism Meets Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”  The Psychology of Joss Whedon: An Unauthorized Exploration of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly.  Ed. Joy Davidson.  Psychology of Popular Culture Ser. Dallas: BenBella, 2007.  105-117.
Belle, [E] Slay. “Lady Ghosts of TV Past: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Thinking about Season 1.” Persephone Magazine. 25 Mar. 2011. Blog. 3 Aug. 2012 <http://persephonemagazine.com/2011/03/25/ladyghosts-of-tv-past-buffy-the-vampire-slayer-thinking-about-season-1/>.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Chosen Collection.  144 episodes.  DVD.  Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006.
Byers, Michele. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Next Generation of Television.” Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century. Eds. Rory Cooke Dicker and Alison Piepmeier. Hanover, MA: Northeastern UP, 2003. 171-187.
Chandler, Holly.  “Slaying the Patriarchy:Transfusions of the Vampire Metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”  Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies.  3.1 (Aug. 2003): 62pars. 17 Jan. 2006 <http://slayageonline.com/PDF/chandler.pdf>.  
DeLamotte, Eugenia C.  Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
Early, Frances. “Staking Her Claim: Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Transgressive Woman Warrior.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. 2.2 (Sept.2002): 30 pars. 17 Jan. 2006 <http://slayageonline.com/PDF/early.pdf>.
Gottlieb, Allie. “Buffy’s Angels: The Blond Girl with Cleavage Really Isn’t So Feminist – but the Men in Her Life Are.”  Metroactive.  26 Sept.2002.  17 Jan. 2006 <http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/09.26.02/buffy1-0239.html>.
Hook, Misty K.  “Dealing with the F-Word: Joss Whedon and Radical Feminism.”  The Psychology of Joss Whedon: An Unauthorized Exploration of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly.  Eds. Joy Davidson and Leah Wilson.  Psychology of Popular Culture Ser. Dallas: BenBella, 2007. 119-129.
Jowett, Lorna. “The Summers House as Domestic space in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. 5.2 (Sept.2005): 40 pars. 17 Jan. 2006 <http://slayageonline.com/PDF/jowett2.pdf>.
Pender,Patricia.  “‘I’m Buffy and You’re…History:’ The Postmodern Politics of Buffy.”  Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eds. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery. Lanham, MD:Rowman, 2002. 35-44.  
—. “‘Where Do We Go From Here?’: Buffy Studies and Slayage 2006.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. 6.1 (Fall2006): 24 pars. 9 Aug. 2012 <http://slayageonline.com/PDF/Pender.pdf>.
Wilcox, Rhonda V. Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005.  
Williams, Anne.  Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1995. 
Williamson,Milly.  “The Predicament of the Vampire and the Slayer: Gothic Melodrama in Modern America.” The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy. London:Wallflower, 2005.  
Vint, Sherryl, “‘Killing Us Softly’? A Feminist Search for the ‘Real’ Buffy.”  Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies.  2.1 (May 2002): 26 pars.  17 Jan. 2006 <http://slayageonline.com/PDF/vint.pdf>.
Notes
[1] Jowett’s “The Summers House as Domestic Space in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” provides an excellent account of the Summers’ house as a site of domesticity both with and without the presence of Buffy’s mother. Her analysis, coupled with Eugenia C. DeLamotte’s observation that Gothic heroines perpetuate a cyclical enclosure by venturing out of the home simply to return to it again, reinforces the problematic nature of Buffy’s own empowerment. That is not to say that a woman cannot be a stay-at-home feminist if she chooses the home for herself, but rather to develop the sense of cyclical entrapment that Buffy experiences for seven years.
[2] In her discussion of Buffy as a “narrative of disorderly rebellious female as well as an effective experiment in…’open images,'”Early asserts that Buffy “expose[s]stereotypes and coded symbols that shore up a rigid war-influenced gender system” (3, 29).  Further, Holly Chandler asserts that “Buffy confidently yanks the ugly face of the patriarchy out into the light of day, where, she hopes, it will be burnt to a crisp”(62). Both Early and Chandler author valuable arguments portray Buffy as subversive from a woman’s studies standpoint, and I build on their observations in probing the nature of subversion as applicable to both men and women.
[3] Whedon has articulated his desire to “make teenage boys comfortable with a girl who takes charge of the situation” (quoted in Vint 13).
[4] For additional “signs of the father” in Season 7, witness Giles’ attempted murder of Spike, the villain’s adoption of the patriarchal garb of religion, and even the villain’s assumption of a female form named Eve.
[5] A corollary problem to note is that the female creators of the scythe choose to bury it deep within mother Earth, violating,on a broad level, the natural world. Although one may explain this violation as a justified critique of a world that denigrates women and enslaves them to fight monsters or even as what Williams calls a “metaphor for accomplishment, a mode of self-creation,”the ultimate use of the scythe further complicates the issue (158).
[6] Rhonda Wilcox makes a similar observation, discussing Spike and Willow in relation to subconscious and conscious in Why Buffy Matters (104).  Wilcox also provides further evidence for those who may question Spike’s phallic associations: in “Tabula Rasa,” wherein the characters experience an amnesia spell, Spike discovers the name “Randy” sewn into his jacket and assumes it for his name,complaining, “‘Why didn’t you just call me Horny Giles or Desperate For A Shag Giles?’  Given the fact that the episode after ‘Tabula Rasa’ is ‘Smashed’ (6.9), in which Buffy and Spike first have sex, the names seems more than appropriate. One might argue that the name Randy reiterates the sexual implications of the name Spike” (60).
[7] In fact, it is worth mentioning that the soulless Spike undertakes his own journey and trials to retrieve his soul, while the only other ensouled vampire in the Buffyverse, Angel, is cursed with a soul as a punishment.
[8] Milly Williamson notes that, “[l]ike the pre-twentieth-century Gothic, the appeal of today’s ‘new’ vampire tale is to do with its ability to represent what is disavowed, to speak to anxieties and desires that are difficult to name” (69). That the anxieties of gender remain ambiguous further connects Buffy to the Gothic tradition.
[9] Williams returns to the etymology of”revolution” and reminds us that “the word means to ‘turnaround'” as well as to “cross forbidden boundaries” (172).

Motherhood in Film and Television: Nine Months Forward, Three Centuries Back

Julianne Moore and Hugh Grant in the film Nine Months

This is a guest review by Tyler Adams.

Male Pregnancy

Nine Months, contrary to all expectations, is not about pregnancy. It’s about a man coping with a pregnancy. Yes. Here’s a film whose subject absolutely and biologically requires a woman – and it’s still about a man.

However, Nine Months does achieve sex equality of the most dubious sort – it’s insulting to men and women.

In the world of Nine Months, women have already accepted that their value lies primarily in their fecundity and that raising children is the only thing that matters. And now, it’s time for men to learn the same lesson.

Rebecca, whose unplanned pregnancy kick-starts the plot, knows full well the consequences of pregnancy. And she ignores them. She wants to keep the baby, immediately, after about five minutes of running time where she isn’t even onscreen.

To the film’s credit, it doesn’t demonize Rebecca for subtly, whisperingly alluding to abortion, but the film glosses over it too much to truly be considered ‘pro-choice.’

The conflict in the film’s first act is all about Samuel accusing Rebecca of getting pregnant on the sly. Yes. She tells him she’s pregnant and he turns it into an act of aggression against him. He blames it on her: condescendingly scoffing that birth control could be anything other than foolproof.

Then we get delightful dream sequences wherein Samuel imagines Rebecca as a praying mantis trying to eat him.

As Anita Sarkeesian points out in her excellent video ‘Tropes vs. Women: The Evil Demon Seductress,’ most praying mantis species don’t engage in sexual cannibalism. And neither do women. Except to adolescent men terrified of female sexuality.

Then there’s Samuel’s friend Sean, our childfree Straw-man. His girlfriend says she wants kids, she leaves when he says ‘no’ – a week later, he’s self-admittedly using another woman to ‘get him over the rough spots.’ He describes her breasts, calves, and skin like food, basically making her sound like a golem made of calzones, candy, and cake.

Bobbie, his ‘girlfriend’ is a stereotypically attractive young woman who literally never says a word during the whole film and has no narrative purpose other than temporary eye candy – so the film treats her about as well as Sean does. With Sean, the filmmakers are essentially equating child-freedom with misogyny. Hey, all women want kids, so not wanting to have kids means being anti-woman, right?

There certainly aren’t any major single, childfree, or independent women in the film. Gail is the only other main adult female character, and she has three daughters and one on the way. She talks to Rebecca about how ‘pregnancy is our profound biological right, something men can never experience,’ when Rebecca expresses her one, solitary note of doubt in the film (in a conversation that doesn’t even pass the Bechdel Test, given that it’s all about men and childbirth). This is pretty much the only time the film really deals with Rebecca’s perspective in a way that doesn’t relate to Samuel.

The idea is that it’s a woman’s duty to have children, which is ‘natural’ and therefore good, and a source of female privilege. Gail even frames this in feminist terms, as if Karen Horney’s ‘womb-envy’ concept was a step forward for gender equality (Enlightenment-era chauvinists celebrated women’s fecundity, too – Enlightenment-era feminists spent more time talking about women’s rights), and there’s anything empowering about the idea that women absolutely must have children regardless of their personal feelings, because, apparently, it’s the one advantage they have over men.

Rebecca calls independent single motherhood ‘fashionable,’ and ‘PC,’ basically dismissing it. She says she would rather have a family – as if a single parent family doesn’t count. All Samuel has to do is propose. Why she doesn’t just pop him the question is unexplained. Apparently, even the audience takes it for granted that that’s the man’s decision to make.

Nine Months is trying to celebrate motherhood through the eyes of a reluctant father. Rebecca’s feelings are barely addressed, and Gail doesn’t seem to know how to celebrate motherhood without also demeaning the childfree. She says of Samuel, ‘You have a baby, that means he’s gotta grow up. That’s what he’s afraid of. I mean, the baby’s the fun part…Look at all this stuff.’

She’s referring to the toy store merchandise. Yes. Apparently the joys of motherhood are not bonding with and nurturing other human beings, but buying them things. Gail has the ultimate conservative vision of motherhood – it combines chauvinism and capitalism!

Professional Parents

“What if the baby can see…your penis, coming toward it, that could scare the hell out of a baby…or what if your penis hit it in the head; it could cause brain damage…”

I’m not embellishing. That’s what Rebecca says, five months into her pregnancy, right before she and Samuel have sex. Rebecca is in her thirties, and – well, given the number of biological errors she made in two lines, I’m terrified of what else she doesn’t know about things you should and shouldn’t do during pregnancy.

What does it say about the state of women’s health education that this scene does not read as satire? And if it was supposed to be funny, well – maybe it could work as horror comedy, but I didn’t see any real commentary.

By the way, it should be mentioned that Samuel is a child psychotherapist. Or ‘kiddy shrink’ as Gail calls him. He’s a child psychotherapist and doesn’t know the first thing about pregnancy. He doesn’t know that amniotic fluid in the uterus protects the baby, and the cervix is blocked throughout most of a pregnancy, or you’d think he would have told Rebecca about it during their attempted sex scene.

He’s allegedly successful at his job, but all we see is his being clueless around children, insensitive around women, and ignorant about everything he should be an expert on. The man has to read a book like What to Expect When You’re Expecting, as if he’s never taken any classes on prenatal development. Well, he didn’t know that birth control is only 97 percent effective, so let’s just assume he’s never even taken sexual education at school.

We do see a competent, female gynecologist who more or less helps set Samuel on the right path, but for some reason, we spend a lot more time with bumbling Russian stereotype Dr. Kosevich. All the better to humiliate Rebecca with, I suppose, during her first doctor’s appointment, and later, during the world’s most farcical labor scene where Samuel nearly kills several people trying to get her to the hospital. Oh, and he starts a fistfight during her delivery. How you advocate birth while making it look horrible and playing it for juvenile laughs is anyone’s guess.

Marty and Gail are ultimately the people Rebecca and Samuel turn to for advice. No matter how poorly socialized their daughters are, they’re experts. A child psychotherapist like Samuel has to ask Marty and Gail for help, and as far as the narrative goes, they outrank a gynecologist. Even though Marty believes that you can tell the fetus’s gender by whether the mother’s carrying high or low, and that sexual positions influence sex determination. Although, the anti-intellectualism works well with the film’s overall sneering at creative and professional individuals.

Sean: “…the world is overpopulated; our society has too many starving children.”

Gail: “Well, I would say our society has too many starving artists…this was our parents’ home, but I don’t see you making any contribution…you keep this up you’ll die alone, like a dog, like a bum. Like Van Gogh.”

Sean is an artist, and Gail demeans him for it, because hey, we all know art doesn’t pay. Not like owning a car dealership like Marty, which is a much better contribution to society, of course.

Of course, Sean’s work seems irrelevant. Since he doesn’t ‘have’ a wife and kids, he’s not making any meaningful contribution to the world at all, according to Gail. She equates being single with being isolated, and being childfree with being childish. And the film takes her side.

When Sean argues that she and Marty used to have interests, and are now just obsessed with their children, she doesn’t even deny it. She just affirms that this is the way it should be. After all, earlier Rebecca instantly accepts that she has to quit her job as a dancing instructor – not just take a leave of absence; actually quit. Samuel, after his transformation, says ‘I don’t give a damn about me; I’m in love with my child.’ Apparently, parents of all genders should be denied personhood outside their children, and this is something all women want, and all men should want.

Girl Children

Ashley Johnson as Shannon Dwyer in Nine Months

Marty goes shopping for sports equipment as he’s assuring Samuel he’s having a boy, on no evidence. Apparently, all boys must be into sports, or they’ll be forced to be, and none of Marty’s daughters are athletes or could be.

When Samuel shows his distaste for being hit in the face or punched in the stomach by Marty or his daughters, Marty and the film insult Samuel’s masculinity. Especially when the daughters do it. When Marty gets into a fight with some Barney stand-in over some petty insults, Samuel doesn’t join in until he’s accused of being gay. It’s okay to be genuinely childish, apparently – like beating someone up in public over petty insults – as long as you look appropriately ‘masculine’ while doing so.

When Marty learns he’s having another girl, he complains (at the end, he relents and says, “I guess having another girl isn’t so bad.” Bravo.), and Samuel smirks about his good fortune in getting a boy. Earlier in the film, one of the reasons Samuel comes around and accepts the pregnancy is learning his child is a boy. The film obviously doesn’t value girls any more than it values women.

Samuel’s character arc is not about him overcoming his sexism – it’s about him ‘growing up’ by accepting fatherhood. When he reunites with Rebecca, he says he’s in love with his son, and is in love with her for having him – in love with her as a vessel, not a person, as Eve Kushner at Bright Lights Film Journal astutely observed. He never really misses her when she’s gone, never really asks how she’s feeling, or even has a real conversation with her – when he comes around, he comes around for the baby and not for her.

The film isn’t subverting the tropes that women, family, and children force men to lose personalities, that all women are content to be homemakers, that losing your personality is part of growing up, or that all people’s worth lies in childrearing – the film is just positively endorsing it all.

There’s nothing inherently bad about having children or getting married. One of the problems comes from the sentiment that you need a spouse and kids regardless of personal taste, or even regardless of the spouse and kids. The way many people talk about this is roughly: get a woman, or get a man, or get some kids. Any will do, apparently.

Children are not your unique children you can nurture and bond with – they’re just a burden that forces you to nobly suffer and mature. Marriage isn’t an outgrowth of a loving relationship between two complete individuals, it’s just an item on your life’s agenda to be crossed off, and establish you as an adult with a life worth living. Your spouse and children exist as objects related to you, and since that’s what you were looking for, that’s what you got.

It’s an attitude that not only reduces acceptable lifestyles down to practically nothing, but degrades the lifestyle it should be promoting. It’s a recipe for unhappy children, and unhappy marriages. Good thing Nine Months stops shortly after the nine months, and we don’t see our couple’s future. What we’ve seen – Samuel’s sullen patients, Marty and Gail’s children, as well as Marty and Gail – are evidence enough.

———-

Tyler August Adams is a Master’s candidate in Environmental Science and Policy, and writes decidedly unconventional reviews and reflections on the media at http://nevermedia.blogspot.com.

 

Quote of the Day: Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards

Manifesta by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards

I’ve been reading the 10th anniversary edition of Jennifer Baumgardner’s and Amy Richards’ Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, which was first published in 2000 and revised in 2010. One chapter in particular struck me, and in honor of Mother’s Day this past Sunday–and our upcoming theme on Motherhood, starting Monday (yay!)–I’d like to excerpt from the chapter, “Thou Shalt Not Become Thy Mother.”
The authors discuss the generational divide between mothers and daughters and the tension that often exists because mothers (within the past generation) raised children “with some hint of feminism in the air.” Their young daughters today, though, struggle to avoid becoming like their mothers. Here are two excerpts from the chapter that delve into that theme in greater detail:
Many daughters are scared of falling prey to the indignities we witnessed our mothers suffer. This fear is a challenge to younger feminists. Young women should understand where that fear comes from, rather than simply avoiding it. Unwrapping motherhood from the swaddles of patriarchy means that we will no longer have to work so hard to be different from our mothers.

As it is, we are more likely to notice what our mothers are doing wrong than what they are doing right. We notice if Dad treats Mom like shit, if homemaking appears to be a fake job, or if Mom worked outside the home and was never there to ask us about our day. We may think that when Dad does “Mom’s chores”–picking us up or doing the dishes or cooking–he’s a hero. We notice if we look to Dad for decision making, and to Mom for love and comfort and mending. If the marriage falls apart, we notice if Mom doesn’t know how to write checks, or dates jerks, or if her lifestyle becomes markedly poorer. We notice the passive-aggressive ways that she may work around powerlessness: the boyfriends she takes on to escape her unhappy marriage, the guilt trips, or the migraine headaches that befall her just before the guests arrived every holiday. Throughout or lives, we make mental notes, and swear on our mothers’ lives not to let that happen to us or do what they did. This includes the most trivial sins: we’ll never embarrass our kids, we’ll never have our hair done every Friday at the same time, we’ll never have a comfy-but-ugly outfit that we change into every day after work.

Our expectations of our dads are so much lower than our expectations of moms that dads don’t get such a bad rap from their daughters. We also let them off the hook because their lives appear more liberated–more like how daughters are told their lives should be. (pages 208-209)

 ———-

One True Thing, a Hollywood tearjerker based on a novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Anna Quindlen, successfully analyzed this generational repulsion. In this 1998 film, Renee Zellweger portrayed an ambitious New York City journalist, Ellen Gulden, who returns to her suburban home to care for her terminally ill mother. “The one thing I never wanted to do was live my mother’s life,” Ellen says. “And there I was doing it.” Meryl Streep, as Kate, zaftig and radiant in the housewife role, throws elaborate theme parties and makes a tabletop mosaic from her broken dishes. Creative and delightful as she is, Kate’s domestic achievements are nada compared to the father’s life as a sought-after English professor and would-be novelist (portrayed by William Hurt). After walking many miles (and scrubbing many toilets) in her mother’s shoes, Ellen learns that her mother’s accomplishments–her ability to bring the community together and make her family comfortable–far surpass her father’s inflated dreams of his own literary importance.

“You spend all of your life thinking about what you don’t have, and you have so much,” Kate warns her puffy-eyed ungrateful daughter just before she dies. In that moment, any daughter might be shocked (as we were) into recognizing that we view our mothers in light of what we think they lack–youthful looks, brilliant careers, respectful husbands–not what they have. Finally, Ellen learns that her mother has actually chosen and fulfilled with joy the very life that Ellen had learned to disdain. The film isn’t a call to join a kaffeeklatsch community group or bake up a storm as a one-way ticket to feminine authenticity. It’s a warning to mothers and daughters to take a clear-eyed look at each other, rather than stealing glances and making notes about what not to do. One True Thing teases out a feminist challenge: to understand the choices our mothers made, knowing they were made in a context we will never experience. For mothers, the challenge is to realize that their daughters came of age in an entirely different era, one that makes their lives fundamentally different. (pages 213-214)

The book is fabulous. Buy it.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Disney: The Little Mermaid

This piece by Ana Mardoll is cross-posted with permission from her site Ana Mardoll’s Ramblings.

Disney. The word is so synonymous in my mind with “animated feature films” that it’s like using “Kleenex” for “tissue.” When children come to my house, as they sometimes do, they’re invariably drawn to my huge selection of “Disney movies,” only about 70% of which are actually affiliated with Disney in any way shape or form. I enjoy most of them, or I wouldn’t own them. They each have their own problems, but a good many of them have something truly positive that I treasure. And what better way to start a deconstruction of animated feature films with the one I knew first and loved best: The Little Mermaid?


The Little Mermaid is possibly one of the most contentious movies I’ve ever loved. It was created in 1989, and has been specially beloved by many children in general and by myself in particular since then. I must have watched the movie eighty squintillion times as a child; it was one of the few videos I loved enough to manage to convince my parents to buy, and I watched it until the video literally broke from use. By that point, Disney had locked the reel in their “appreciate for value” vault and when they relaunched the movie in theaters in 1997, I was there to see it on the big screen. I have never been able to watch the movie without sobbing straight through from opening titles to end credits.

I sometimes feel like everyone I meet online has seen this movie at least once. Almost all of them have an opinion on the movie. Most of the opinions are strongly polarized: either Ariel is a free-thinking young woman who bravely rejects racism to forge her own destiny and create a lasting peace between two cultures or she’s an idealized anti-feminist icon, complete with Barbie-doll figure and shell bikini, completely willing to throw away her family, her culture, and her own voice for the sake of a man she’s never even met.

Those who fall between these two views tend to stay out of the flame wars. I don’t blame them.

I like The Little Mermaid. I like a lot of things that are problematic, and I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with liking problematic things as long as a certain awareness is maintained that Problems Abound Therein. Art is complicated like that. But I like The Little Mermaid and I think it’s compatible with valuable feminist messages. Certainly, it was my first introduction into a feminist narrative and I have always considered the problematic romance storyline to be camouflage for the real story. But we’ll see whether or not you agree.

Please note that everything I say from here on in is just my opinion.

For me, The Little Mermaid is the story of an Otherkin girl living in a world that is hostile to Otherkin. Ariel is a human born into a merperson’s body, and in a culture that routinely lambasts humans for the very same things that the underwater world does: eat fish. (Seriously. That shark at the beginning who chases Ariel and Flounder is clearly trying to eat them. These are not Happy Vegetarian Fishes.)

For me, The Little Mermaid is the story of a feminist girl living in a world that is hostile to feminist ideals. Ariel is a headstrong young woman who wants knowledge and growth and her own voice, but these things are being systematically denied to her. The only form of learning her father permits is that of patriarchy-approved women’s pursuits: she may study music, but not other cultures.

For me, The Little Mermaid is the story of a culture-conscious girl living in a world that mandates insularity. Ariel wants to learn about cultures and peoples and practices and histories different from her own, but she lives in a world that holds even third-hand study of such things to be utterly forbidden because the power structure believes that the populace is safer if they are steeped in fear and ignorance. (Fearful merpeople won’t try to make contact with the humans, and thus fear maintains their secrecy.)

And now I’ll walk through the film and explain why I feel these things.

The opening titles air over singing humans as they work on the local prince’s pleasure ship / wedding ship / fishing ship. Well, there are three ships in the movie, and they all look pretty much the same to me, so I’m going to assume that Prince Eric has a fleet of all-purpose boats and this is one of them. But the sailors are singing while they collect fish in their nets and Eric (and the audience!) is learning, and here are a couple of problematic things up-front. 

One, everyone in this universe is white. (We’re going to be seeing this one a lot in the Disney deconstructions.) Two, this is not a working class universe. Oh, the fishermen are fishing, but this is really the only work you’re going to see in this movie outside of a quick shot of laundry-washing and some cooking. I think Eric’s kingdom is supposed to be one of those picturesque smaller ones where the royalty aren’t far removed from the common folk and don’t mind getting their hands dirty, but it’s kind of a muddled message and it only gets worse when we get to Triton’s kingdom. Let’s just place a big sign over the deconstruction that these are Privileged White People with the inherent issues that inevitably follow. 

We pan down under the sea to the King Triton’s Schmancy Music Hall and Combination Throne Room just in time to see Ariel completely fail to show up for a music gig that was intended largely to glorify her father while his daughters display themselves to the populace and use their vocal talents to praise his name. I can’t imagine why a young woman might think she had better uses of her time than to be a public ornament to her father, nor why she might refuse to come to rehearsals (as Sebastian tells us). And when her father realizes that Ariel has failed to show up for the concert, his eyes literally turn red with rage. Yowza. 

And here is an important point: Ariel’s dad is abusive. Oh, I think he doesn’t try to be, and I even think he doesn’t want to be, but he is. And I really do think it’s a function of The Patriarchy Hurts Men, Too. You see this clearly in the scenes with Triton and Sebastian: both men shore up each other’s will to be harsher than they otherwise individually would be inclined to be, and they do this because they think it’s expected of them. When Triton is alone and when no one is looking, his face softens, his expression is sad, and he sighs and weeps for the decaying relationship he has with his daughter. It’s when others are looking — notably, Sebastian, the only other adult male in Triton’s scenes — that Triton is at his most abusively fierce. 

I don’t think this is a coincidence. Triton isn’t monstrous and Sebastian doesn’t callously bring out the worst in him; they both reinforce each other’s commitment to harmful patriarchy ideals, because they’ve been raised to believe the patriarchy expects them to. Neither is it a coincidence that Triton’s final act of redemption comes after he and Sebastian have revisited a previous conversation and they’ve admitted that they were both wrong and that their actions were harmful. But now I’m jumping ahead. 

By giving Triton this characterization, Ariel is immediately given a rich and sympathetic background before she even swims onto the stage. She’s living in a deeply patriarchal and oppressive community where her status as “princess” is largely ornamental and wholly subject to the whims and wishes of her father. While she probably had moments of tenderness between her and her father, particularly when she was younger and could be indulged as a child instead of punished for being a woman, their relationship is strained by his insistence on publicly conforming to aggressive and abusive parenting models whenever anyone is looking. These shifts in emotional tone probably confuse and frustrate Ariel: why is her father so kind at times and yet so harsh at other times? She’s coped with the on-and-off abuse by literally withdrawing. By forgetting rehearsals and the concert and pulling back into her cavern of collections, she’s not passively asserting herself or deliberately catering to the patriarchy; she’s trying to carve out a safe space, mentally and physically. 

We are introduced to Ariel who, at great personal risk to her safety — both from the sharks who seek to eat her and from her father who could severely punish her — she is scavenging human items from old shipwrecks. And this… is amazing! Our protagonist is an explorer. What’s more, she’s a scientist, going to a direct source (albeit a bad source, since the seagull is actually ignorant of human affairs, but Ariel has no way of knowing that) to be educated on the items she finds. She wants to understand the humans, and to study the things they do and the items they create. She has a whole secret museum dedicated to all the things she’s collected over the years. 

Words fail me in describing how incredible I find this. In another movie, or in a book, there would be more time spent on just how incredibly subversive Ariel is being and has been, for literally years and years. This isn’t a trivial hobby or a girlish obsession; she’s the only person in her culture who is both willing and privileged enough (due to the fact that Triton might not blast his own daughter into tiny bits for breaking his laws) to almost single-handedly set up an entire cultural museum of study on a race of people right outside the kingdom’s doorstep. The sheer bravery and gumption and intellectual devotion necessary for Ariel to have done what she’s done is amazing: she’s essentially created her very own Human Studies department right under the king’s nose because studying other cultures is important, dammit. 

I dare you to bring me a Disney heroine who has demonstrated similar levels of bravery, intellect, scientific pursuit, and proactive awesomeness within the first 15 minutes of her own movie. 

Then we cut over to Ursula, and… I have mixed feelings about Ursula. On the one hand, she’s a fat woman and a villain in a movie that has problematic body portrayals. Ariel’s sisters are almost uniform in body type, expect for Adella who kind of sort of maybe looks a little bit bigger than her sisters, in the Lane Bryant model sort of way (i.e., same breast and hip proportions, just slightly bigger all over) and who was promptly slimmed down for the sequel because Disney got the memo that fat people are not sexeh because DEATHFATS. The only other fat women in this movie are the castle servants, who are fat in the non-threatening happy-servant kind of way, and the fat woman in the Ursula song who “this one [is] longing to be thinner.” And — rage! — the fat merwoman’s tail extends up and over her breasts like Ursula’s does, but the thin incarnation of the fat woman has the bare-stomach shell-bra combo that Ariel sports. Because nude fat stomachs are obscene and ugly, but thin fat stomachs are normalized and pretty! Grr, Disney. 

But! Ursula is sexy. Her breasts! Her butt! The way she moves! Her voice! I don’t honestly remember really… noticing this as a child, but it’s there and it’s largely treated as… normal. Ursula isn’t evil because she’s sexy, nor does she seem really to be evil because she’s fat. She’s just evil and fat and sexy, all in the same package, and I guess that’s kind of cool? I’m not sure. But then when I noticed that in this viewing, I realized that this movie is actually VERY filled with women’s bodies. Can we say that about any other Disney movie? 

I don’t just mean the bikinis and the tummies; the women’s bodies here move. Ursula struts realistically around her cave and gods but those breasts and butt are there and they move. And — skipping forward a bit to Ariel’s “I Want” song — Ariel shakes her hips when she sings about “strolling along” the street; she undulates her whole body sensually when she imagines being “warm on the sand.” There are bodies in this movie! And… while they are sexy bodies, I don’t feel like I’m being clubbed with Male Gaze. I like it. I like how it seems to normalize women’s bodies as real, as things that come in different sizes, as things that can be uncovered and sexy and yet not objectified into T&A without a head or a personality needed. I’m just sorry that we have to leave the 1980s in this regard. 

Coming back to the movie, Triton yells at Ariel for missing rehearsal. He cuts her off multiple times in this scene, and calls humans “barbarians” which is a nice bit of othering to throw onto the pile of objections to Triton’s character. He then tosses a tone argument at Ariel, which effectively cuts off not only what she was going to say but also punishes her for reacting realistically and legitimately to his bullying. Then Triton tells her that as long as she lives under “my ocean,” she’ll obey “my rules,” which is totally not controlling or an abusive conflation of kingly privilege and parental privilege. And then Triton and Sebastian decide that Ariel, who is a young woman budding into her sexual awakening, needs “constant supervision.” Patriarchy for the win. 

And then we have Ariel’s “I Want” song and it still gives me shivers. The opening lines — “If only I could make him understand. I just don’t see things the way he does. I don’t see how a world that makes such wonderful things could be bad.” — reinforce that Ariel is not only longing to be human already, but she’s also inherently more open-minded than her close-minded and prejudice liege-father. Her fantasies of being human conflate with her fantasies of living in a feminist-friendly society where she can speak her mind freely and grow intellectually: “Betcha on land, they understand; bet they don’t reprimand their daughters. Bright young women, sick of swimmin’, ready to stand. And ready to know what the people know; asking my questions and get some answers.” 

MORE WOMEN! The picture of fire and the wind up toy that shows dancing both have women in them. The parallel is obvious in that Ariel wants to be these women, but I’m still blown away looking at how many women are in this film in places where I frankly think nowadays they’d be edited out. Maybe it helps that this movie wasn’t made or marketed with the All Important Male Demographic in mind, I don’t know. 

Sebastian tumbles out and informs Ariel of what she already knows: her father would be furious if he found out about the museum. Which makes so much sense, really, that his racial hatred of humans extends so far that he would deny his subjects the ability to even study them, if only to come up with more effective ways of avoiding the humans, because studying leads to understanding and understanding leads to compassion and compassion doesn’t mesh well with racial hatred. And, yes, I know they’ve woobied him up with two decades’ worth of backstories and personal tragedy, but I think that waters down the message that sometimes even people we love can be racist assholes. 

We zip up to the surface for Ariel to see Prince Eric and for some character establishing shots. And I have to say that Eric is probably my favorite Disney prince. He’s hanging out with his working class and while that could be seen as slumming, he doesn’t seem to mind getting rope burn on his hands and he knows how to steer the boat, so he’s at least not adverse to learning. And he goes back to a fiery burning ship to save his dog. 

Ariel saves his life. 

They didn’t have to do it this way. They could have had Ariel and Eric catch a glimpse of one another and fall in love that way. Ariel could have been singing in a quiet grotto and Eric could have been drawn to the sound and seen her for a split moment before she disappeared. It would have been pretty and feminine and sweet. But they didn’t do that. They had her proactively search the burning wreckage of a ship, and drag an unconscious man to safety on the shore. And that tells me two things. One, in 1989, being saved from death by a woman didn’t emasculate you forever in the eyes of the (probably) male screenwriters. Two, in 1989, saving a handsome man from drowning was considered an acceptable female fantasy with all the strength, verve, and determination that accompanies that.

Haha, no, there’s totally not a backlash against feminism today in 2012. IT’S ALL YOUR IMAGINATION. 

Sebastian tries to convince Ariel that life under the sea is better than life as a human. He has a jazzy musical number and Ariel gives him quirky yeah-I’m-not-buying-it looks before it becomes clear that she’s not really needed for this song routine and goes off with Flounder. And here is a big ol’ world-building mess because apparently the fish neither work nor eat, and they all live off of plankton delivered to their doorstep every morning by magic. Or so Sebastian seems to think from his position of Privilege? I dunno. This is why deconstructing movies with talking animals is hard. 

Triton calls Sebastian into his throne room and interrogates Sebastian while cheerily pointing his weaponized triton at the little crab. Haha, that is not scary at all! Sebastian breaks down and tells Triton about Ariel’s museum, and Triton shows up and brutally destroys it all while she weeps and begs him to stop. And this scene? Wrecks me every time. The bit with Triton building himself into a rage — “One less human to worry about! … I don’t have to know them — they’re all the same. Spineless, savage, harpooning fish-eaters, incapable of any feeling…” — is both horrifying and priceless because it really gets through how xenophobic and racist Triton truly is. He doesn’t care that he’s frightening his daughter; the rage has built in him to a point where terrorizing her makes more sense to him than actually talking to her or doing anything other than abusing his position as both king and father. 

And this scene is so utterly valuable. Because now Ariel will go to the sea witch and trade her entire life away (and her voice) to go chase after a man she’s never met. Remember that anti-feminist message referenced way back up there at the beginning? But that’s not what she’s doing, not really. As much as Ariel laments in a moment that “If I become human, I’ll never be with my father or sisters again,” her father has driven her away. Ariel isn’t safe under the sea, not emotionally or psychologically. Her life’s obsession with studying and understanding and educating herself on human culture will never be accepted — and if she persists in trying to do so clandestinely, it will only be a matter of time before someone discovers her secret, betrays her to the king, and all her work is destroyed. She knows that fate is inevitable, because it’s just happened not ten minutes ago. 

Ariel can either go home and be a good mermaid and play with her hair and go to voice rehearsal and marry a merman who will never share her interests or understand her and she can live and die frustrated and unfulfilled. Or she can take a chance and become everything she’s ever wanted: a human. And she can become that human by finding true love — “Not just any kiss,” Ursula cautions. “The kiss of True Love.” — with the first human she’s ever met, a man who attracts her with his courage and bravery and adventurous spirit. It’s a gamble, and possibly not a good one, but it must seem like the one hope for happiness left available to her. 

Human! Ariel washes up on Prince Eric’s beach and is taken for a traumatized survivor of a shipwreck, which seems plausible enough. And while I’m not 100% sure I like Grim pressing Eric to woo the traumatized survivor of a shipwreck rather than, say, provide for her education and psychological care and place her in the best possible position to choose how she wants to live the rest of her life, I do love that Eric is shown as being highly reluctant to treat Ariel with anything less than courtesy and respect. A privileged man who doesn’t react to a pretty half-naked woman washing up on his beach like Christmas has come early? Yes, please. 

There’s a scene with a French chef that is so heavy on the cultural stereotypes that I don’t even know what to say. I was going to say that this was one of the only animated feature film songs that features a foreign language, but then I remembered the Charo song in Thumbelina, which is also heavy on cultural stereotypes. *sigh* 

Then Eric and Ariel go on a tour of “his kingdom,” which seems to basically be this one decent-sized town, and Ariel is in complete Manic Pixie Dream Girl mode, but for once this makes sense because everything she sees is literally new and exciting and amazing and a dream come true. And then he lets her drive the carriage and she loves it and clears an oddly-placed death-defying jump and once the panic passes, Eric settles back like this is the good life and Ariel is clearly having a ball. I think that’s sweet, frankly. 

And then there’s a lot of singing and near-kissing and Ursula showing up to ruin things and Ariel being towed out to the ship which is not nearly as awesome as her swimming out there under her own power, and I get that it makes sense that swimming-with-legs would be something she’s not mastered, but still it feels like the Feminism Power has run out, and then Ariel and Eric reunite just in time for it to be TOO LATE and Ariel is a merperson and Eric does not care even a little bit because Eric is not a racist asshole like Triton. And then Eric saves Ariel’s life with a harpoon while Triton watches, and this is hilarious given Triton’s earlier rant about humans-who-wield-harpoons. 

After the exciting showdown scene, Eric recovers slowly on the shore while Ariel watches from her rock. Triton and Sebastian watch from further out, with Triton realizing that she really does love him and that this hasn’t all been About Him and her special butterfly rebellion. Gee, ya think? Sebastian tells him “children got to be free to lead their own lives” and Triton references as earlier conversation where Sebastian said the opposite. And this is the moment where everything is unspoken, but for me it seems like they’re saying yeah, this whole Patriarchy thing is garbage and we were wrong. And then Triton gives Ariel her legs back, she marries Eric, and there’s a new era of peace for both kingdoms, and it is awesome. 

And… yeah. It ends in a 16 year old marrying a guy she’s known all of three days. (Assuming we don’t go with the standard handwave that between cuts there could have been years and years of dating that we didn’t see. Because movies don’t work like that.) And, devoid of context, that is Very Problematic. Hell, even with context, it’s not something that gives me warm fuzzies. I do not like the Mandatory Marriage at the ends of these movies, or the implication that it’s not a Happy Ending without one. And I like the Mandatory Marriage even less when it happens to two teenagers (or one teenager and one guy in his early twenties) who’ve known each other only over the course of a few adrenaline-packed and hormone-driven days. I don’t feel like this is a healthy formula. So there’s that.

But it’s also one of the few movies I can think of where an Otherkin protagonist gets the form she’s always felt was really hers. And it’s a movie where a brave young woman defied the racist and xenophobic laws of her homeland in order to create a greater understanding between two cultures and almost single-handedly engineer a peace between both kingdoms. And she did all this while she was sixteen, as a young woman in an abusive family where she was only valued for her ornamental status. She held on to her inner essential self and managed to forge her own path without ever once beating herself up for the abusive things that others did to her. Throughout the movie, the entire narrative seems to scream that being strong-while-female is not a bad thing: it’s okay to defy your racist asshole dad, it’s okay to save the life of the handsome guy who won’t then turn around and act all emasculated and shun you, it’s okay to own your “acceptably feminine” talents in ways that make you happy, social expectations be damned. And for a movie that is now over twenty years old, that seems kind of awesome. 

Ana’s Happy Feminism Fuzzies Scorecard 
– Otherkin narrative where protagonist proactively gains the form she wants 
– Feminist narrative where protagonist longs to be taken seriously as a cultural researcher 
– Intellectual narrative where protagonist values museums and cultural study 
– Racial/Cultural narrative where protagonist demonstrates that Racism Is Bad 
– Body Positive (with caveats) narrative where women characters abound of different body sizes 
– Patriarchy Hurts Men narrative where good men are abusive because of patriarchal expectations 

Ana’s Sad Epic Fail Scorecard 
– Narrative that is entirely cast with white people and has a Angry French Chef stereotype 
– Narrative that contains muddled class portrayal and is largely about privileged people 
– Narrative that contains no openly QUILTBAG characters 
– Narrative that ends with a teen marriage between two almost-strangers  

Final Thoughts: The Little Mermaid is — like most Disney movies — rife with issues of class, race, hetereonormity, and body portrayal. But in my opinion it’s ironically one of the least problematic movies in the set (“ironic” because the current cultural narrative is that we’re now BETTER at those things than we were in the 1980s), and if you’re a white heterosexual class-privileged girl living in an oppressive patriarchy — as I was when I came to the movie — it may just resonate with you. Maybe.

As a final link, here is a picture of Disney Princesses dressed as the villains in their movies. I like the Ariel/Ursula swap so very much.



———-

Ana Mardoll is an avid reader and writer. She loves cats, fairy tales, and intense navel gazing. She blogs on a near daily basis from an undisclosed location in the wild, untamed, and astonishingly dusty Texas wilderness. Her photo-realistic avatars are a gift from best friend and invaluable writing buddy, J.D. Montague.

To read more of Ana’s writings, including her snarktastic literary deconstructions, visit her website at www.AnaMardoll.com.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Bee Movie

Bee Movie (2007)

This is a guest post from Nicola Mason.

While shopping one day recently, I happened upon and purchased Bee Movie, the 2007 animated film featuring characters voiced by Jerry Seinfeld and Renee Zellweger. I had taken up beekeeping a few months before—had a hive of some 10,000 bees in my backyard—and I’d been educating my four-year-old daughter on how a hive’s vast population of wee six-legged arthropods work together to produce that delightfully sweet amber end-product, honey. I thought Bee Movie would be the perfect mom-daughter flick, and that it would reinforce much of what my little girl had been learning over the course of our bee-centric summer. To my horror, the movie not only presented a slew of factual inaccuracies, it also imposed a decidedly male worldview on the most successful matriarchal society in nature.
The movie begins on the graduation day of young Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld), who, along with the rest of his class (including his best friend, Adam, voiced by Matthew Broderick), must choose a job within New Hive City. A tour guide takes the class—made up of male and female bees—through the bustling inner complex and describes the choices available as we view (largely male) bees hard at work in the Honex industry.
The problem here is that, in actuality, male bees don’t work in the hive. At all. There are only a few drones in any given bee population, and their only “job” is to meet at a designated outdoor spot every afternoon in the hope that a virgin queen will pass by so they can fertilize her in an insect-world version of a gang bang. When the queen returns to the hive, she is so well fertilized that she need never mate again. All the eggs she will lay within the course of her life are already primed with the necessary genetic material to make the burgeoning brood of daughters that is necessary for the group’s survival. I feel compelled to point out that drones are considered so . . . inessential . . . that when winter sets in, they are summarily forced out of the hive and blocked from re-entering. The workers don’t want to waste precious honey on them, since it takes on average 40 lbs of the sweet stuff to sustain a hive through the cold months until nectar flows again. Drones would be an unnecessary drain on resources—and the workers can easily make a new bevy of boy-toys in the spring.
Weirdly, Barry lives in a private residence inside the hive with both a mother and father bee. The mother stereotypically worries over him and scolds him: “Don’t fly in the house!” Later in the film, the fact that the queen is his “real” mother is made clear. The Bensons are his adoptive parents. It seems worth mentioning, however, that this most powerful female force—the queen bee—is never seen and rarely mentioned. In essence, her role, and her significance, are downplayed because the movie is centered on its male hero—Barry—who, unwilling to be simply subsumed by predestined bee duties, dreams of a life of adventure.
In search of this life, he fixates on the “pollen jocks,” an eponym the film pins on forager bees, which in actuality are, of course, female. Here is where the movie takes, to my mind, a flat-out appalling testosterony turn. Its foragers are depicted as a military battalion of super bees—much larger than the workers, uniformly male, their chests puffed out with muscle and, one gathers, masculine pride. They are referred to by their drill sergeant as “monsters” and “sky freaks” as they line up at “J Gate” for their daily mission while a throng of starry-eyed female bees giggle and wave and gasp admiringly nearby. Moreover, these jocks are equipped with “nectar packs” that they carry on their backs. When Barry joins them one day (on a dare), we discover these are collection devices that, held like guns, violently siphon nectar from the flowers without the bees even having to land. Barry looks on in wonder as nature is raped and laments that he was not bred to be a pollen jock. (Insert retching sound.)
As the moviegoer expects, Barry finds a way to make his own mark. He takes the forbidden path and communicates with a human—a ditzy female florist (Renee Zellweger), who then largely drops out of the film as Barry pursues his solo crusade to keep humans from “stealing” the honey that bees work so hard to produce. The scandal goes public, and Barry, interviewed by a bee version of Larry King, becomes famous. A lawsuit ensues (bee world and human world collide), Barry wins, yadda yadda. There is an additional plot twist that brings his florist crush—with her oh-so-feminine love of lots and lots of pretty flowers—back into play, but even my four-year-old had lost interest at this point, so I will not bore you with the details.
Clearly the movie was intended as a star vehicle for Seinfeld. Obviously a male conceived of the movie (David Moses Pimental is listed as Head of Story). The writers of the screenplay—all seven of them, including Seinfeld—are, big surprise, male. What they created was not just a fiction but a male fantasy. The human female is even lured away from her big hunky boyfriend by tiny-but-charming Barry. Sure, you can give the film credit for a cross-species romance, but how difficult would it have been to simply reverse these roles? How about a female bee nonconformist hero? A male florist who adores all things prettily petaled and whose greatest aspiration is to attend the annual flower festival/parade, manning his own float? Humor could still be the heart of the film, but a slant, surprising, and more fulfilling humor that arises from challenging culturally-ingrained gender expectations instead of reinforcing them—emphasis on the forcing. I would give my weight in honey to see a film like that.


Nicola Mason is the managing editor of The Cincinnati Review, a lit mag based at University of Cincinnati. Her fiction has been widely published and anthologized. She is also a visual artist:www.nicolamason.com. 

Some Scattered Thoughts on Detective Shows and Geniuses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That right there is fucking patriarchy in action. Now:

Quote of the Day: ‘Movie-Made America’

Movie-Made America by Robert Sklar
I came across this interesting piece from Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, in which author Robert Sklar talks about a fairy-tale aspect of acting (being “discovered”), the patriarchal foundation of casting, and the behind-the-scenes women of the 1910s and 1920s. I’ve added some links to the original text for further reading.
In the World War I era–an unsettled period when late-Victorian mores persisted side by side with an emerging image of a “new woman”–it could only have been disconcerting to respectable Americans to see photographs of determined young women in the ankle-length dresses, high-button shoes and broad-brimmed hats standing in long lines outside a Hollywood casting office. The American middle class had only just begun to regard movies as something other than immoral trash for working-class people; and suddenly their daughters were packing up and leaving home to seek their fortunes in the movies.
If they had to go, the least one could do was give them sound advice, most of it intended to be discouraging. A girl should plan to have enough money to survive for a year without additional income; authors of advice books and articles for the movie aspirant set the minimum figure at $2,000. She should have resources enough to be able to acquire her own wardrobe, since extras in those days had to supply their own outfits for scenes of contemporary life. She should consider what abilities she possessed and perhaps direct her ambitions to other interesting work in motion pictures.
Studios needed talented dress designers, set decorators, film cutters, all jobs that were open to women. In fact, the motion-pictures studios in the 1910s and 1920s gave more opportunities to women than most other industries, far more than they ever did again. Many of the leading scenario writers were women, among them Anita Loos, June Mathis, Frances Marion and Jeanie Macpherson. Lois Weber was a well-known director and independent producer, and Elinor Glyn, Dorothy Arzner and other women directed films during the 1920s. Women were occasionally found in executive positions in Hollywood producing companies. And if a woman possessed none of these talents, there were always jobs as secretaries, mail clerks, film processors, and in other modest but essential roles in the making of movies.
But what women wanted was to be actresses. They could see that other girls, many still in their teens, without acting experience, were making it. Why not they? But no one informed them that a fair share of the young girls with film contracts were “payoffs,” as Colleen Moore called them: players who were hired as a favor to influential people or to pay back a favor they had done the studio. Moore got her start because her uncle, a newspaper editor, gave D.W. Griffith help in getting his films approved by the Chicago censorship board, and Griffith repaid him with a contract for his niece. In Silent Star, Moore reports that Carmel Myers, Mildred Harris (a bride at sixteen to Charlie Chaplin) and Winifred Westover, who began acting as teen-agers, were all “payoffs” in similar ways.

2011 Post-Oscar Response

Might as well dive right in! Here is the list (short version) of the winners:

Best Picture: The King’s Speech

Best Actor: Colin Firth in The King’s Speech

Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale in The Fighter

Best Actress: Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo in The Fighter

Best Animated Feature Film: Toy Story 3

Best Director: Tom Hooper for The King’s Speech

Best Documentary Feature: Inside Job

Best Documentary Short: Strangers No More

Best Foreign Language Film: In a Better World

Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network

Best Original Screenplay: David Seidler for The King’s Speech

Well. As we said earlier in the week:
“the Academy Awards are the most visible celebration of filmmaking in the United States–and possibly the world. Yet–and despite the misnomer of ‘liberal Hollywood’–they continue to exhibit cultural values and norms that are conservative and simply unacceptable. Women are typically rewarded for playing roles that support a central male character in films. People of color are rarely nominated for–and even more rarely win–major awards. This year (as in most years), all Best Director nominees are white men. (Only one woman has EVER won this category.) The Best Picture nominees are about white people (or white cartoon characters), and are lauded by mostly white male critics. Even in a movie about lesbians, a man takes center stage. We could go on, but you get the idea.”

So now that the 2011 Academy Awards have aired, what did you think? I love the discussions that’ve been happening leading up to the Oscars, and I’ll highlight a few of the ones I found particularly enlightening. For starters, the Feminist Frequency video below is an absolute must-watch:  

In our Best Picture Nominee Review Series, we (with the help of our Guest Writers) showed that most of the films were about men, with the exception of Winter’s Bone, Black Swan, and The Kids Are All Right–with the latter two still exhibiting some major problems with their portrayals of women. We also showcased Ten Years of Oscar-Winning Films (in posters), which further illustrated the accolades presented to male-dominated films.
Add The King’s Speech to the ever-growing list.
For those of you who watched the 2011 Academy Awards, you heard Steven Spielberg list several Great Films that had previously won Oscars for Best Picture. He then listed several more Great Films that were nominated for Best Picture Oscars but hadn’t won. His lists included the following films: On the Waterfront, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, The Deer Hunter, The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, The Graduate, and Raging Bull. What do they have in common? They’re all movies about Heterosexual White Men. So I ask, what would’ve been wrong with including some of these films in the list: Rebecca, The Sound of Music, Kramer vs Kramer, Terms of Endearment, or Driving Miss Daisy … ? At this point, I’m honestly starting to wonder if The Academy gives a flying fuck at all about people who aren’t Heterosexual White Men; they sure as hell have no interest in pretending they do.
The following Oscar analyses deepen the discussion.
“Talking About the 2011 Oscars” from The Funny Feminist:
It would appear that expanding the Best Picture category to include ten films instead of five has resulted in more recognition for movies about women.

It hasn’t, though, seemed to improve the field for other marginalized groups, because, as Shakesville pointed out, not a single person of color was nominated in the acting categories.  I guess no people of color acted in any movies last year!  Or else, the Academy filled their quota last year by giving nominations to Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique and don’t feel the need to recognize any other people of color.  Excuse me while I go roll my eyes.

The Academy also filled their quota of female directors last year.  In 82 years of the Academy Awards, they finally recognized a female director (Kathryn Bigelow) and awarded her for her work on The Hurt Locker. I guess no women made movies this year, because the Best Director category is all male.

“Oscar was a Dude: America’s Celebration of Men” from The Sociological Cinema:

Hollywood didn’t invent patriarchy, but that doesn’t preclude it from being implicated in reproducing it. The cultural critic, Stuart Hall, once observed that the people who work in creating media stand in a different relationship to ideology than the rest of us. That is to say, those who produce, direct, and act in films have at their disposal a powerful tool, which can be used to transform how people come to understand the world in which they live. Movies–especially the ones the Academy deems worthy of its coveted Oscar–pose answers to questions many people never asked, such as, “whose story is likely to matter most?” or just, “who matters?” As evidenced from the list of nominated films this year, those who were hoping for a revolution in the kinds of stories Hollywood tells may be disappointed. For now, a critical awareness of the men and masculinity America is (also) celebrating on Sunday may have to suffice.

Thoughts? Concerns? What the hell?