Poverty – Bitch Flicks

Blindness, Race, and Love in ‘A Patch of Blue’

Fifty years later, portraying disability on screen with empathy and respect is still rare. Showing an interracial couple is also extremely rare (Green says that some people sent terrible letters to him about the kissing scene; in fact, it’s reported that in some areas in the south the scene was edited out for theaters).

‘A Patch of Blue’ manages to weave together themes of disability, race, socioeconomic issues and family dynamics with beauty and grace.

A Patch of Blue movie poster.

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships.

Director Guy Green said of the premise of A Patch of Blue: “basically it’s a very corny story, a blind girl falling in love with a Black man.” He credits the writing of the novel it was based upon (Be Ready With Bells and Drums, by Elizabeth Kata) for ensuring that the story, and resulting film, were not corny at all.

The 1965 film centers around a young blind woman, Selina (Elizabeth Hartman), who has been abused and sheltered, and neglected any formal education, by her family–her mother, Rose-Ann (Shelley Winters) and her grandfather, Ole Pa (Wallace Ford). She’s befriended by a Black man, Gordon (Sidney Poitier), and they form a deep relationship, which centers on Gordon’s desire to help Selina lift herself up.

It would be easy to read that synopsis–blind girl falls in love with a Black man–and come to any number of conclusions about the film, especially since it was released at the height of the civil rights movement, but the film manages to capture something much deeper than being a superficial morality play on racism, and it treats Selina’s blindness with care and dignity.

When Selina was five, her father came home unexpectedly while Rose-Ann was sleeping with another man (it’s insinuated that she worked as a prostitute, and still does). Her father killed the man, and when Rose-Ann threw a bottle–a chemical-laden cosmetic–from her dresser at him, it hit Selina in the face, scarring her eyes and leaving her blind.

Elizabeth Hartman wore opaque contacts to simulate Selina’s damaged eyes. Rose-Ann is the only one who berates her “ugliness”; even her grandfather explains that it’s just that people are nosy, not that she is ugly.

Selina’s life circumstances are desperate and miserable, but she is not. The opening shot of the film focuses on Selina’s hands, stringing together beaded necklaces–that’s what she does during the day to help her family (Mr. Faber, her boss, is presented as an important support person in her life). She yearns to spend more time in the park, and Mr. Faber takes her when he can.

It’s in the park that she meets Gordon (a caterpillar dropped down the back of her shirt and she needed help–a problem not reserved for a person who can’t see–and he helps her retrieve it). He’s friendly and gentle without being condescending, and his generosity helps strike up a quick friendship. He buys her sunglasses because she’s self-conscious about her scarred eyes and tells her she looks perfect with them on (this is presented as a generous act for her confidence, not because he actually feels she needs them).

He’s shocked that she’s never heard of braille and was never formally educated: “You haven’t heard of all blind people can do?” he asks, and she is self-deprecating yet unashamed of her lot in life.

Gordon and Selina eat lunch.

While Selina is uneducated (Gordon corrects her grammar when they first meet) and cannot live outside of her home independently, the audience never feels pity for her because she is blind and helpless. Instead, the focus of our pity is on her lack of support–she has an abusive home life and has been neglected. Her blindness isn’t pitiful; her family is.

When Selina is shown doing tasks that she’s been entrusted with–changing linens, washing dishes, cooking, cleaning–she does so perfectly. This is a reminder that her blindness hasn’t been a hindrance to her life and that she is capable of doing what she’s allowed to do.

Hartman, in studying for the part, spent time at a school for the blind to be able to accurately get into character. She wore opaque contacts (Green said they helped because they naturally obstructed her vision), and her family says she wore them constantly and never left character while she was filming.

This careful and empathetic approach to “acting” blind paid off. Hartman’s performance was incredibly convincing and she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress (A Patch of Blue was Hartman’s first film).

Gordon helps Selina find directions by the sun’s location.

In the film, Gordon attempts to feel as Selina must feel shortly after meeting her. He’s shown at his job–working as a night-shift reporter–getting up from his desk, walking across the room, and attempting to return to his desk with closed eyes (he is unsuccessful, and runs into his coworker’s desk). This short scene is poignant in that it further reminds Gordon–and the audience–what it must feel like to be Selina, if only for a few moments.

Gordon never tries to do things for Selina. From the beginning, he teaches her and empowers her to be able to completely take care of herself. Since it’s clear her limitations are environmental, not innate, she is capable. Her disability–caused and amplified by her family–is not what’s in her way. Her poverty and lack of support system are detrimental to her growth and development.

Gordon could have easily met Selina, befriended her, seen that she could clean and cook, and want to marry her, keeping her dependent and living simply for him. And while his romantic feelings for her are conflicted, he wants her to be independent and educated more than he wants her for himself.

Gordon gives Selina very practical advice (counting steps, listening for traffic) so she can navigate streets by herself–which she finally does, after realizing she doesn’t have to take her home life anymore.

Gordon never belittles or gets frustrates with Selina.

Gordon and Selina’s kiss–one of the first on-screen interracial kisses–was at the same time innocent and deeply passionate. When Selina references the fact that she’d been raped, and wishes she hadn’t so she could be with Gordon, he convinces her that she is not “bad” or “dirty,” like she worries she is. (Someone in 1965 understood how to not blame the victim.)

Their kiss was one of the first on-screen interracial kisses.

The filmography often focuses on Selina’s point of view, and is effective in portraying the sensory details she enjoys (the canned peaches or the music box), and the terrors she lives through–her time alone for the first time on the street, or the memory of being raped (we “see” the man from her perspective–what she could have seen, but only felt).

The racial components of the film are also nuanced and effective. When Gordon tells Selina that “tolerance” is one of his favorite words (and explains that it’s not just putting up with something, but that you don’t “knock your neighbor just because he thinks or looks different than you”), she tells him that he must be full of tolerance. He quietly shakes his head and says that he’s not. He looks deeply affected when white people stare and glare at him and Selina walking together, and clearly has deep inner conflict being a Black man in America in 1965 (of course, these aspects of the film don’t seem nearly as dated as they should be). His brother, a doctor, criticizes Gordon’s desire to help and educate Selina because she is white, and comments on the fact that she comes from a “trash heap” (to which Gordon responds, “She may, but she’s not trash”). Underneath the surface of the film is the fact that socioeconomic factors and family support systems are what determine a person’s opportunities.

Rose-Ann is, unsurprisingly, violently racist. We know that she forbade Selina from spending time with the only friend she ever made because the little girl was Black, so we also know that when Rose-Ann sees Selina and Gordon together, she will erupt–which she does.

The characters to be despised are racist, abusive and neglectful. But Selina and Gordon aren’t perfect–they are complex, sympathetic characters who struggle with their own shortcomings and emotions. Selina is only 18, so her naivety and her quickness to fall deeply in love are believable. Gordon loves Selina as a friend, but is unsure of anything beyond that. He says he’s snapped back into reality after getting lost in their embrace. He deals with anger and frustration, too–not only because of his experiences at the hands of racism, but also because of the injustice of Selina’s mistreatment.

By the end of the film, even the crowd of white people (who before had glared), realize that Gordon is no threat to Selina; Rose-Ann is.

The ending is hopeful, but not saccharine-sweet. The realness of the characters, their struggles and their emotions are highlighted by sparse, black-and-white film and a beautiful soundtrack.

Gordon has called a school for the blind and set up a space for Selina. Before the bus comes to pick her up, she is nervous, and wishes they could just get married. Gordon promises that in a year, they could see if their love has anything to do with marriage. He sits her down to tell her that he’s black, but she already knows.

She says, “I know everything I need to know about you.” As she feels his face she continues: “I know you’re good, and kind, and that you’re colored; and I think you’re beautiful.”

He’s shocked that she knows, and responds “Beautiful? Most people would say the opposite.”

“That’s because they don’t know you,” she answers.

A Patch of Blue portrays disability as a part of a woman’s life that only defines her because she’s grown up with an abusive and neglectful family. As soon as she gets access to a world (literally and figuratively) outside of their little apartment, she thrives, and we know she’s just going to continue to grow. She’s beginning her life–a life that won’t be defined by her blindness.

Her relationship with Gordon allows him to also redefine his own life and helps him see himself for who he is–a beautiful, kind and generous man, who knows how to share life with someone who’s never experienced it.

A Patch of Blue manages to weave together themes of disability, race, socioeconomic issues and family dynamics with beauty and grace. It was nominated for multiple Golden Globes and Academy Awards; Shelley Winters won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and notably, Sidney Poitier was nominated for the Golden Globe, but not an Academy Award.

A Patch of Blue is one of those films that manages to stay with you for years after you see it; and then, when you see it again, it’s just as beautiful as you remembered.

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

‘Monster’: A Telling of the Real Life Consequences for Violent Women

Throughout her life, Wuornos experienced horrific instances of gendered abuse, which eventually lead to a violent outlash at her unfair circumstances. ‘Monster’ vividly documents the life of a woman whose experiences under a dominant patriarchal culture racked with abuse, poverty, and desperation led to a life of crime, imprisonment, and eventually death.

This guest post by Danika Kimball appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

American film audiences love the idea of violence, especially in regard to justice. From Bruce Wayne’s masked forays as Batman, to Frank Underwood’s signature House of Cards sneer, pop culture and media landscapes are bombarded with the image of a vigilante bringing matters into their own hands to enact justice. But what is almost more widely revered is the concept of a woman taking matters into her own hands, as it defies societal norms on numerous levels.

We see this depiction in numerous films. To the audience’s delight, heroine Beatrix Kiddo takes vengeance on her abusers in the Kill Bill series, and Furiosa defiantly defends her right to redemption from evil doers in Mad Max: Fury Road. But sometimes, females who resort to violence aren’t celebrated, and there is perhaps no greater depiction of this than Charlize Theron’s embodiment of Aileen Wuornos in the widely acclaimed dramatic film, Monster.

Monster is a film based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, who was one of the first female serial killers in the United States. Wuornos, an impoverished former prostitute, was executed in Florida in October 2002 for the murder of six men, each of whom were her former customers. She was only the second woman in Florida and the tenth women in the United States to receive the death penalty since the landmark 1976 Supreme Court decision that restored capital punishment.

The film made an impact on most for its graphic depictions of murder, but upon re-watching the film 10 years later, the portrayal of Aileen’s life in Monster was a cruel visualization of the impacts of patriarchy, poverty, and the ways in which the criminal justice system fails violent women.

In the opening scenes of Monster, we see Aileen as an adult sitting under a busy highway overpass, replaying her life story. We see her as a young child, dreaming of being an icon like Marilyn Monroe, wealthy, loved, and the center of attention.

Her fantasy fades as she walks into a gay bar with the five dollars she had just earned from a John which she was determined to spend before she ended her life. It’s here she meets a woman named Selby, a person she would later devote to protect at any cost.

The pair eventually find solace in their shared loneliness and fall in love, which pushes Selby out of her compulsory heterosexuality. Aileen, finally having someone to care for, takes it upon herself to be a provider for Selby. The film follows Aileen’s struggle to support her newfound family, her efforts in making sure that Selby is happy, and the struggle to maintain her own dignity.

After being raped and brutalized by a client, Aileen kills him in self-defense, vowing to quit prostitution. She confesses her crime to Selby, as Selby has been angry with her for not supporting the two of them.

Aileen’s efforts to find a job prove to be difficult she has no marketable skills, and no job history outside of her years of prostitution. Any prospective employers reject her, some openly volatile, accosting her for wasting their time. We see throughout the film that everyone in Aileen’s life believe that no man will ever pay her for anything aside from her body.

With nowhere to turn, Aileen returns to a life of prostitution, each time killing and robbing her Johns more brutally than the last, as she is convinced they are all trying to harm her.

In this context, it becomes difficult for a viewer to see her actions as evil. Aileen’s actions almost appear to be rational, even moral decisions, when viewed through the lens of extreme gender and class oppression. We see this in her explanations to Selby later, where she implores that she is helping to protect the other women in the world, who might also be victimized these men. She says,

Who the fuck knows what God wants? People kill each other every day and for what? Hm? For politics, for religion, and THEY’RE HEROES! No, no… There’s a lot of shit I can’t do anymore, but killing’s not one of them. And letting those fucking bastards go out and rape someone else isn’t either!

Eventually Aileen’s murders catch up with her, and she is arrested at a biker bar. While speaking to Selby on the phone, Selby reveals incriminating information over the phone while the police are listening in. As her last display of protection, Aileen admits she committed the murders alone. During the subsequent trial, Selby testifies against her in the courtroom hearings. Aileen is executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.

Part of what makes Monster so honest and relevant to feminists is the way that it recognizes and points to the patriarchal conditions in place that frame and constrain women’s choices, sometimes leading to a life of crime.

Throughout her life Aileen has been victimized, raped, and violence is a part of her day-to-day existence.

Emily Salisbury, a professor at Portland State University’s Criminology and Criminal Justice Program, suggests that patriarchal conditions are often a huge part of the reason for women’s participation in criminal activity and subsequent incarcerations. She remarks,

With the work of feminist scholars such as Mita Chesney Lynn, Kathleen Daly, Regina Arnold, Barbara Owen and many others, new ideas about female offending were established. The qualitative life history interviews that these scholars conducted with girls and women suggested that their lives leading up to criminal justice involvement were extremely complex and disadvantaged, with unique daily struggles…such as struggles with child abuse, depression, self-medicating behavior, self-hatred, parenting responsibilities, domestic violence and unhealthy intimate relationships. It’s argued that these problems create unique pathways to crime for women.

Many of the struggles listed are applicable to Aileen’s incarceration. In a documentary called Aileen Wuornos: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, director Nick Broomfield speaks to the infamous murderer, where she expresses that if her life leading up to adulthood had been more ideal, she wouldn’t have entered a life of crime in the first place. Family members and close friends remark throughout the film that she was the product of homelessness, violence, abuse, prostitution, poverty, incest, rape, and mental illness.

Throughout her life, Wuornos experienced horrific instances of gendered abuse, which eventually lead to a violent outlash at her unfair circumstances. Monster vividly documents the life of a woman whose experiences under a dominant patriarchal culture racked with abuse, poverty, and desperation led to a life of crime, imprisonment, and eventually death.

Though on-screen depictions of violent women are portrayed as empowering, as is the case with vengeful Furiosa in Mad Max, or the cathartic revenge plot for Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill, Aileen Wuornos’ story tells a different story for violent women. Monster illustrates that all too often, violent women’s pasts are rifled with oppression, and in defending themselves, they face consequences from legal systems that have proven to fail them in the past. For Aileen, violent self-preservation ended in demise.

Danika Kimball is a musician from the Northwest who sometimes takes a 30-minute break from feminism to enjoy a TV show. You can follow her on twitter @sadwhitegrrl or on Instagram @drunkfeminist.

‘The Hunger Games’: Proving Dystopia Is the Best Young Adult Genre

Dystopia, in its futuristic escapism and its contemporary relevance, is an ideal genre for the young adult demographic. By pushing the boundaries of disturbing content and reflecting on youthful idealism, dystopian narratives trust the YA consumer to be both literary in their consumption of the book or film, but also socially and morally insightful in their view of the imagined world they hold.

This guest post by Rowan Ellis appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Dystopian narratives can generally be described as “An imaginary place where people lead dehumanised and often fearful lives,” which is accurate, but does not fully express key characteristics of the genre.^[1] The Hunger Games, for example, is temporally situated in a future version of America, and this relationship between time periods affects the causes of the dystopian societies and the extent to which our own world is responsible for their making. In this way, and especially looking at The Hunger Games as a Young Adult series, we can examine how dystopian landscapes are an overwhelmingly apt vehicle for social awareness in the younger generation by interacting with their world and self-identity.

The Young Adult label is a recent one, with a distinctive lack of research on the genre; even its definition is contentious as a mixture of both a self-styled labelling by authors themselves, and a marketing tool for publishing companies. Intended readership is perhaps the most useful way of understanding the Young Adult literature, with the genre then defined as those books, films, or TV written and produced specifically for young adults.

The contemporary relevance of YA protagonists ensure that the exploration of self-identity for characters within these films is inevitably reflected back onto the YA audience, helping to shape their own views of themselves and the world around them. By exclusively using protagonists who are young adults themselves, films like The Hunger Games are able to emphasise the need for social change, and the possibility of it, by giving power to its viewers; as the protagonists create a better world, so too can the audience. At a talk at Cadogan Hall, John Green asked for questions from the audience of young readers. On receiving insightful and pertinent questions, and reading aloud one on the pain of writing about unfulfilled lives, and another comparing the use of water in his book to that of James Joyce in Ulysses, he remarked “I wish all the journalists who tell me my books are too complex for teenagers could hear this.” Dystopia, in its futuristic escapism and its contemporary relevance, is an ideal genre for the young adult demographic. By pushing the boundaries of disturbing content and reflecting on youthful idealism, dystopian narratives trust the YA consumer to be both literary in their consumption of the book or film, but also socially and morally insightful in their view of the imagined world they hold. By extrapolating a possible future from wider themes of importance in the contemporary age, the need to change current society is heightened.

Literary critic Robyn McCallum prefaces her work on adolescent identity by proposing the relative truism that “concepts of personal identity and selfhood are formed in dialogue with society, with language and with other people.”^{^[2]} The implication of this for The Hunger Games, however, is far more significant, as the reaction to and rebellion against Panem shapes not only the self-identity of the characters, but also the audience’s attitudes toward them. Dystopian worlds are often a product of mankind’s inability to learn from history, and The Hunger Games utilises this by mirroring its world building with Ancient and contemporary civilisations while creating the new history of Panem. Penelope Lively’s argument that “to have a sense of history is, above all, to have a sense of one’s own humanity” ties Katniss’ identity to distant history, as much as to her father’s death in the recent past.^{^[3]} The use of the name Panem for the dystopian world Collins creates, gives a multi-layered sense of antiquity and contemporary history. The Latin translation of Panem as “bread” is most notably tied to the quintessential Roman phrase “Bread and Circuses,” directly paralleling the Games and historical Gladiatorial contests, with the pre-Games feast even mirroring the cena libera in Roman culture. However, there is also a similarity with the famous Pam Am airline, evoking the past glamour of American globalisation, ironically contrasted with the static divisive state of the future America. Similarly the Capitol ties together ancient Rome and modern Washington with the utopian setting of the high society in Collins’ novel. The film’s costumes and design has a similar relationship with history; District 12 has a distinctive feel of dustbowl America, as if stepping out of the Depression-era photograph of an impoverished farming community.

Although set in our future, Katniss’ outfit undeniably echoes the past.

McCallum argues that “to displace a character out of his/her familiar surroundings can destablise his/her sense of identity,” yet Katniss does her growing within the hostile and unfamiliar landscape of the Arena, as she refuses to mirror the career tributes bloodthirsty methods, even though we as an audience know she is already skilled in hunting and killing.^{^[4]} The Arena is a form of anti-society, as The Games encourage a distrust of society via a distrust of individuals and alliances on which communities are based. By placing Katniss in such a space, it ensures a shaping of her social identity as a victor, but also her internal one, as her compassion is not completely destroyed by the mistrust and cunning she demonstrates in order to survive.

For a dystopian society to flourish there needs to be, as a characteristic of its ruling elite, the ability to block out natural empathy, or to remove the lower citizens from full human status deserving of empathy, in order for these hardships to be justified.^{^[5]} For the Games in The Hunger Games to achieve their purpose, they have to be watched both in horror by the Districts, and with delight and wonder by the Capitol. The Hunger Games uses the Games as an extreme image of where desensitising an audience potentially extrapolates to. The most immediate reflection of empathy within The Hunger Games is the relationship between Katniss, Rue, and Prim, as Katniss finds herself unable to detach her feelings for her sister with those for her fellow Tribute. This creates a sense of her as an unexpected maternal figure, sensing a gap between the younger girls as small children, and herself as an adult with responsibilities to them. Haymitch, as a representation of the experienced, and therefore jaded, adult character, is able to comprehend consequences of Katniss’ actions, whereas she reflects the stereotypical teenage attitude of living in the present, allowing her to focus on empathy over practicality and preserving her as a moral character as she teams up with the defenceless Rue.

The Other is a vital component of social (rather than ecological) dystopian fiction, as the propensity of the ruling elite to create such a nightmarish reality often relies on the subjugation of those who are deemed different. Going through the physical gendering process of puberty emphasises gender divides for YA characters and viewers. Gender in Panem is never raised as an Othering principle, indeed both male and female tributes are treated with the same objectification and callousness, and both genders display compassion and ruthlessness equally. However, the problems of patriarchy are so present in our own society that we project these values onto the characters. The Atlantic magazine, for example, described Katniss as “the most important female character in recent pop culture history” and the success of the film franchise has bolstered support of an increase in films with female protagonists as both morally and financially justified.^{^[6]} In The Hunger Games, Katniss’ unbridled contempt for her Mother’s mental state, shapes her into becoming a traditional father figure, assuming the patriarchal rather than matriarchal role in the house. Similarly, although ostensibly the tribute Johanna Mason subverts the traditional gender stereotypes when fakes a meek sensibility in her own Games before revealing her bloodthirsty nature in order to win, there is a sense within the books that the same ploy would have worked had Joanna been Joseph.

Those of a high social rank in the Capitol become characterised by an extreme aestheticism, mirroring the turn of the Century upper-class preoccupation with art and beauty explored by Oscar Wilde and other Decadent artists. Cinna’s team work relentlessly on Katniss, as the ideals of beauty are vital to gaining support in the Capitol; looks help you win. In Finnick’s storyline, this preoccupation is given an added sinister twist, as he confesses Snow allowed Capitol citizen’s to rape him, inviting a comparison with the sexual exploitation of both men and women from the working-class backgrounds in Panem, with the sex industry in our own world.

Having Katniss act as the face of a building revolution, young adult viewers can see reflected in the films images of fictional young adults with the ability to change the world. They use a combination of fear and hope to allow young adult viewers to feel empowered, both in their internal self-identity and their engagement with the contemporary issues reflected in the films. Hope is traditionally the driving force in children’s fiction–to prevent despair from becoming the ultimate end of the experience, thereby preventing the impetus for creating a better alternative, and the same can be seen in Young Adult fiction. The actor Donald Sutherland, who portrays President Snow in the film adaptations of The Hunger Games has noticed the story’s “potential to catalyse, motivate, mobilise a generation of young people who were, in my opinion, by and large dormant in the political process,” through this combination of alarm and optimism.

Dystopian films relate the horror of the fictional worlds to the future of their own; in The Hunger Games the starvation in the Districts is a clear reflection of the poverty and famine experienced world-wide, even within contemporary America, where 57 percent of American children live in a home which is designated “poor” or “low income” and 20 percent live in poverty. Moreover, the extravagance of the Capitol’s food and clothes holds a mirror to the wasteful culture in the Western World, where up to half of all food produced is never eaten. Furthermore, the life or death conditions for children chosen as Tributes can be associated with the problems surrounding the use of child soldiers in countries such as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The empathetic fear of young adults towards these issues was illustrated clearly in the viral awareness campaign “Kony 2012,” where the plight of child soldiers captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of young people world-wide. Although critic Downey wrote in 2005 that “one of the great difficulties in teaching about horrific periods of history […] is addressing how to help students comprehend the incomprehensible,” she simplifies the abilities of young people by supposing that what is viewed as “incomprehensible” is relegated to the past, and that as adults, teachers are able to better understand these events.^{^[7]}

Hardships endured can both build and destroy characters, and although destruction can be viewed as a more realistic reaction to living in a dystopian society, forming positive identities around interacting with a society and set of values one finds unfair or lacking is a YA viewer’s reality. As the brilliant YA author Patrick Ness puts it, “Teenagers don’t see dystopias as dystopias; they see them as barely fictional representations of their day-to-day lives,” through their own powerlessness and fear. A fear which is inevitable in our world, and a reality to YA viewers–Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, famously composed its terrifying society from real cultures and historic movements. Dystopian narratives gives a YA audience a way of processing this reality at a distance, while potentially using it for personal inspiration, to foster an empathy which allows them to create their own morality separate from and informed by imperfect societies.

^{^[1]} Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature (Springfield, MA: Merriam Webster Inc, 1995)

^{^[2]} Robyn McCallum, Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity (New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1999) p.3

^{^[3]} Penelope Lively, “Child and Memory,” Horn Book, 49/4, (1973), p.400

^{^[4]} Robyn McCallum, Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity (New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1999) p.190

^{^[7]} Downey, A.L., “The Transformative Power of Drama: Bringing Literature and Social Justice to Life” English Journal, 95/1, (2005) p.33

Rowan Ellis is a British geek using her YouTube videos to critique films, TV, and books from a queer and feminist lens.

Scavenging for Food and Art: Agnès Varda’s ‘The Gleaners and I’

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Belgian-born French filmmaker Agnès Varda is nothing less than a cinematic treasure. Her career spans decades and she has gained critical acclaim for both her fiction and documentary films. Varda was, of course, a pioneering figure of the New Wave and Left Bank. In 1962, she directed the ground-breaking, feminist classic Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7). In 1985, her powerful, lyrical film about a young homeless woman, Sans Toi, Ni Loi (Vagabond), won the Golden Lion in Venice. This year Varda was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes. She was the first woman to receive the tribute. At the beginning of the Millenium, Varda also directed the documentary Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000). It is one of the most fascinating ever made.

Poster for The Gleaners and I — Poster for *The Gleaners and I*

Varda begins her documentary by providing the historical, aesthetic and linguistic context of gleaning. We are given the Larousse dictionary definition: “To glean is to gather after the harvest.” The director tells us that it was a mostly female, collective activity in the old days. Today, both men and women glean, more often than not on their own. François Millet’s painting of les glaneuses provides the stimulating starting point for Varda’s creative, humanist journey. Marrying the past and the present, the documentary features interviews with men and women of rural and urban France in the new Millenium who practice various forms of gleaning. People gather everything from vegetables, fruit, and oysters to old dolls, fridges, and TVs. We encounter an impoverished single mother picking potatoes, and homeless young people dumpster-diving outside a supermarket. We also meet a chef scavenging for fruit because he prefers to know where his food comes from, as well as artist gleaners who scavenge for junk to use in their pieces. One of the most interesting people Varda meets is a man with a master’s degree who picks discarded fruit and bread from city markets in the morning and teaches French to immigrants from Mali and Senegal at night.

The Gleaners and I is not directly political but rather a thought-provoking, humanist study of people on the margins as well as those with reject capitalist norms of production and consumption. Issues of waste and sustainable development have become more and more critical, of course, since the film was made. Interestingly, in an effort to combat waste and food poverty, France introduced new laws this year banning supermarkets from dumping and destroying unsold food. They are now encouraged to give edible food to charities.

Millet's Les Glaneuses — Millet’s Les Glaneuses

The tools Varda employs are modest and made for the road. The handheld digital video camera she uses allows for both freedom and intimacy. She puts herself in front of the camera, filming, for example, her aged hands and thinning hair in candid close-up. Can you imagine a Hollywood director doing so? Varda rejects vanity and embraces vulnerability. Her presence is, also often playful. At the beginning of the film, she recreates the actions of the wheat-carrying glaneuse in Jules Breton’s painting of a solitary female gleaner, all the while fixing her eyes on the camera. Varda has the inquiring mind of all great artists. Her humanity and inventiveness are consistently on display in The Gleaners and I. The director seems entirely invested in the subject as well as entirely empathetic towards the people she meets. Varda indeed identifies herself as a glaneuse. She gleans both memories and images in her life and art. In truth, the documentary is not only a study of gleaning but also a beguiling self-portait of an artist as well as an imaginative self-reflexive study of the art and craft of filmmaking.

Villagers being interviewed about the tradition

At once poetic and politically aware, The Gleaners and I offers a captivating portrait of the practice of scavenging. Both very French and very human, it’s a life-affirming film about how people survive and create. There are no subjects more important. The documentary is one of Varda’s essential works, as well as one of the most interesting and finest of all time.

Disney’s ‘Oliver & Company’: Rita’s Voice in Dodger’s Song

Though the villain of ‘Oliver & Company’ is a loan shark, the film mainly portrays poverty as something that just happens through strokes of bad luck, and which doesn’t have institutionalized causes via intersectional oppression from a capitalist society.

Written by Jackson Adler.

Disney’s Oliver & Company (1988), which is very loosely based on Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, is about an anthropomorphic ginger male kitten named Oliver, voiced by Joey Lawrence, navigating New York City and trying to find a sense of belonging. In his day-to-day-survival, Oliver in confronted with issues of class, race, and gender. The title of the film is both indicative of a stage musical “company,” as the animated film is a musical, that of a business company, due to its economic and capitalist themes and its taking place in bustling metropolis New York City, and even to companionship itself, highlighted by most of the characters being companion animals. Oliver eventually finds a friend and what Bitch Flick’s Brigit McCone refers to as an “unruly mentor[s]” in Dodger, a mutt Terrier voiced by Billy Joel, who introduces himself with the song “Why Should I Worry?”

While Oliver may seemingly be the protagonist of the film, the audience in encouraged to see Dodger as the hero that Oliver learns to see him as, and the story is largely from Dodger’s White cismale heterosexual perspective. While Dodger is a flawed character, he is also shown as the ideal urban dog/man, who is going to “cross that line” into success despite his impoverished past. He states that he belongs anywhere, and that he is “love[d]” in every part of town and by all kinds of people/dogs. In the same scene, if not sentence, he switches between slang, Spanish, and a use of language showing “higher” learning. As Natshee Blu Barnd states in her essay “White Man’s Best Friend: Race and Privilege in Oliver and Company,” Dodger is representative of a mixed European heritage, a sort of White “mutt,” and is representative of a blue-collar worker who feels he can “own” the town and is capable of “wear[ing] the crown” of fame and monetary success.

Dodger is able to feel comfortable wherever he goes and with whomever in the city, but Dodger’s friend, Tito, a Chihuahua voiced by Chicano comedian Cheech Marin and whose character is written to exhibit some harmful stereotypes of Latino men, does not have this same privilege. Both Tito’s speaking patterns and behaviors are frequently criticized by other characters, including Dodger. In order for Tito to be even slightly included by mainstream or upper class White society, or even in Dodger’s company (in every sense of the word), he is pressured to change himself, such as when the wealthy White Georgette attempts to make him wear clothing she finds more acceptable of a romantic partner. While Dodger’s appropriation of various cultures is considered “cool,” Tito’s very identity is considered comic relief, at best, despite both him and Dodger being poor, both stealing, both wearing bandanas, and both being able to switch back and forth between English and Spanish. The fact that Dodger is voiced by Billy Joel, a musician capitalizing on a working class background and appropriation of the musical styles and culture of People of Color, is not coincidental.

Tito, representative of a Man of Color, gets more screen time than Rita, a character coded to be a Woman of Color, most likely Afro-Puerto Rican. Both Rita’s speaking and singing voice actresses are Black (Sheryl Lee Ralph and Ruth Pointer), while she is drawn as an Afghan hound (a dog breed often incorrectly referred to as an “African hound”), but having a light brown coloring (though there are black Afghan hounds), and has a name often associated with Latinas. Rita is Dodger’s second in command of Fagin’s “gang,” Fagin being a White semi-homeless man who occasionally but often unsuccessfully steals and cons in order to survive, and who is voiced by Dom DeLuise. Rita and Dodger are good friends and possible love interests, and while they both show sexual interest in other dogs, Rita and Dodger are close and flirtatious with one another. However, Rita, the only female in Fagin’s “gang” of dogs, is always second to Dodger, and even though she questions him and makes fun of him, they do not have an equal partnership.

Rita is the closest character in the film to Dickens’s character Nancy, the sex worker with a heart of gold who protects Oliver. Oliver Twist was serialized from 1837-1839, and yet, sadly, Nancy has a more active role in the original story than Rita does in Disney’s 1988 film. Nancy goes against the wishes of her abusive boyfriend, Bill Sikes, to return Oliver to his grandfather and a wealthy lifestyle. She defies the men in her life, Bill and the successful criminal Fagin, for Oliver’s sake, and risks her own life to do what she thinks is right. Fagin manipulates Bill into murdering Nancy for this attempted act, since he fears it could compromise his safety and his pickpocketing business, but it is the murder of Nancy that brings down not only Bill, but also Fagin and his entire enterprise. Without the threat of these men, Oliver is able to live in safety and comfort with his wealthy grandfather. Though hardly a feminist character, Nancy is crucial to the story of Oliver Twist. Rita’s character in Oliver & Company has much less of a role, is no longer the leading lady, and is much less defiant to the male characters.

Rita briefly “mammies” the young White Oliver in her song “Streets of Gold,” encouraging him to see New York City as less threatening and to see survival via crime as fun, before Dodger and the others push Oliver into being their “lookout.” Dodger talks before the song, makes room for Rita’s song, then abruptly ends the song, showing his dominance over Rita and controlling her contribution to the story. When it comes to physically protecting Oliver, the closest Rita comes to it is when she sees Oliver blissfully sleeping in Penny’s mansion, and says to Dodger “Honey, let’s just forget the whole thing” about taking Oliver back with them and into poverty once more. Dodger instead chooses to listen to Georgette, a rich White dog show champion, over Rita. The gang then successfully kidnaps Oliver, though it is later shown that Rita was correct in that Oliver is happier living with a rich young White girl than he is with them. Though Dodger declines a romantic or sexual entanglement with Georgette, he still prioritizes the opinion of a rich White poodle/woman over that of a poor Woman of Color’s, even despite having just met Georgette and having worked and lived closely with Rita for what appears to have been a very long time. It’s also sad that while Rita is based on a lower class character from the film’s source material, the film added in a new female character who is wealthy and who takes up more screen time, contributes more to the story, and has more of a character arc than Rita. Wealth and Whiteness are clearly privileged over poorness and Blackness, despite the supposed but badly executed moral of the film being acceptance of one another.

Dickens’s novel addresses poverty and crime in 19^th century Britain, specifically London, though Dickens largely blames these issues on Jewish people, specifically “the old Jew” Fagin, though Dickens also in part blames unjust laws and political corruption. Though the villain of Oliver & Company is a loan shark, the film mainly portrays poverty as something that just happens through strokes of bad luck, and which doesn’t have institutionalized causes via intersectional oppression from a capitalist society. In fact, the film largely blames poor people for being poor, tells them not to “worry” about the challenges and the kinds of stigma they face, glamourizes acts of survival, and overall tells oppressed peoples to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, as it were. Rita shows how this oppression has been internalized when she tells Oliver she will teach him how “the best survive,” implying that poor and oppressed peoples who have difficulty surviving just aren’t “the best,” or at least need to trying harder at their survival. She “others” people who are like her, and teaches Oliver this “othering.” These “others” are implied to be unwilling to learn the “best” ways of surviving, and to be lazy. The story harmfully moralizes that if poor and oppressed people cannot get by without government programs such as SNAP, then they are just lazy, or at best just need to learn the correct way to “survive.” Instead of addressing the underlying causes of poverty and oppression, Oliver & Company gives the conflicting messages of “Why should [you] worry [about your own poverty]” and the message that if you can’t get by in life, it’s largely your own fault. Yet, even characters who find economic success are criticized.

Roscoe and Desoto are Dobermans coded as Black, and having shiny black fur; they work for the loan shark Sikes. Sikes demands strict obedience from Roscoe and Desoto, while the hierarchy in Fagin’s gang is more relaxed. Roscoe and Desoto are drawn very similarly to one another, differentiated only by their voices and their red and blue collars. Roscoe criticizes Rita, saying, “You know Rita, I can’t figure out why you’d rather hang around a dump like this when you could be living uptown with a class act, like myself.” Though the male dogs in Fagin’s “gang” are the ones to respond to Roscoe’s statement, criticizing his intellect and ego, Rita makes her reason in choosing to stay in Fagin’s “gang” clear. When Sikes summons Roscoe, Rita says, “Run along, Roscoe. Your master’s calling,” her speaking voice actress Sheryl Lee Ralph emphasizes the word “master” and Roscoe’s fierce loyalty obedience to a rich White man. While Rita is loyal to Fagin, a White semi-homeless man, and to Dodger, she is not under contract to heed their every call, unlike Roscoe is to Sikes. At the end of the film, Rita interrupts Dodger’s reprise of “Why Should I Worry,” changing it to “Why Should We Worry,” and pulls him away from ogling other female dogs, though this hardly upsets their status quo, and Dodger’s position of dominance is not undermined by the inclusion of her voice in his song.

Rita joins in Dodger's song. — Rita joins in Dodger’s song.

Sikes and his henchmen/dogs are shown to be the villains of the story due to their physical violence, but Dodger’s violence in interrupting or censoring Tito’s and Rita’s words and actions are harmfully shown as good leadership. Rita is permitted a short song of her own so as to benefit Oliver and Dodger. Tito, and other characters representative of People of Color never have their own songs, while White characters Dodger, Georgette, and Jenny do, with Dodger’s song being not only reprised, but being the film’s main theme. Inclusion in an oppressive system/Dodger’s privilege does not result in equality or equity for People of Color. As Audre Lorde famously said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Dodger allowing Rita to change his “I” to her and Tito’s “We” does not negate that Dodger constructed the song, and it is his words, his tune, and his message that he is permitting them to support. America is run by a White capitalist patriarchy, and like Dodger’s song, its occasional and token inclusion of People of Color does not make a post-racial and post-feminist world.

‘Pelo Malo’ (‘Bad Hair’): Coding Blackness and Genderqueer Identity

White and non-Black people can have a “bad hair day.” But only Black folks get labeled with bad hair for life, no matter how it is groomed. Especially Black women. Go to any retail store that sells hair products and the ethnic section (read:Black) has more hair creams, gels, mousse, sprays, relaxers, grease, puddings, pomades, hair butter, oils, lotions, to fry, dye and lay that bushy crown to the side. I won’t even get into the hot combs, wigs, weaves, lacefronts, extensions, and clip-ons used to hide a Black woman’s natural hair state. It’s one thing when little Black girls are indoctrinated early to hate their hair, but what about little Black boys who may also be genderqueer? How is this hair struggle tolerated by a homophobic mother struggling to keep her head above water?

Pelo Malo movie poster. — *Pelo Malo* movie poster.

There is nothing more purifying to the human psyche than when another human being sees you for who you really are and accepts you just as you are. And there’s nothing more soul-crushing than when they don’t. This is at the heart of writer/director Mariana Rondón’s Pelo Malo as it follows the journey of a young Venezuelan boy named Junior (Samuel Lange Zambrano).

Junior is a 9-year-old boy living with his single mother, Marta (Samantha Castillo), and infant brother in a Caracas housing development that looks like an overpopulated urban nightmare. I will call the child Black despite differing racial categories between North America and South America. Every coded Black person on the planet knows who the term “Bad Hair” was created for—persons of African descent with that extra curl in their DNA. Most descendants of enslaved Africans shipped to different parts of the “New World” are a mixture of African, Indigenous (Native), and European heritage. Hair textures will fall anywhere from straight, wavy, to extra thick and tightly curled. Or a mixture of all three.

Most Black boys don’t have hair issues because they are typically shorn of their locks at an early age. I’ve often witnessed Black mothers and fathers letting their son’s hair grow freely while it is still soft baby hair, but the moment it kinks up a little too tight, they cut it off. As long as boys and men keep the scalp lined up right by the barber, and don’t let it get too overgrown and unkempt, the struggle is minimal. Some Black men (and boys) get “texturizers” (basically light relaxers for men), or sport a wave cap overnight to create spiral waves around their scalp. Back in the day it was the Jheri curl or the California curl, where often dark-skinned men suffered chemical treatments like women to get that glossy-curly look that some lighter-skinned men naturally had. Ironically, to me at least, Junior has the silky dream hair that some Black boys and girls in my part of the world would pray for. The boy is naturally beautiful; however, in his mind he knows that the ultimate beauty is straight, European-looking hair. Famous singers who he likes are his role models. They have straight hair. All his little heart desires in the movie is to take a yearbook picture for the new school year with straight hair. Dassit.

Junior tries to figure out his place in his marginalized world.

The one friend Junior has in the whole world, La Nina (María Emilia Sulbarán)

The antagonism stems from his mother Marta, who sees Junior’s fixation with his hair as a huge problem. Not only does her son fuss over his hair and appearance, but he is also effeminate. This is the most painful part of watching Pelo Malo. Marta is a beautiful woman, but her face takes on such ugliness every time she looks at Junior. This child loves his mother to death, spends a lot of time just staring at her, as if trying to figure out the laws of feminine allure. One day Junior sits on a couch watching TV with Marta. He looks over and gazes at her face with such adoration and deep love, but then she snaps on him, “Stop staring at me like that!” From her tone we know he does this often. And we get to witness this longing gaze many times. Marta spends most of her screen time projecting onto Junior her fears of having a gay son. She does some pretty damaging things to try and fix him too throughout the film.

Junior (Samuel Lange Zambrano) is fixated on his mother Marta (Samantha Castillo)

Junior doesn’t break dance like the neighborhood kids, he does a trance-like inner groove with his eyes closed and she is disturbed by it. When she catches him doing this same dance on a city bus, she snatches him up, and Junior doesn’t understand why she is angry. It is literally painful to watch. She piles on the psychological and verbal child abuse. The more that Junior tries to get Marta to love him, she pushes him away. If Venus was a boy, she would be Junior. This fact frightens Marta.

Junior and Marta don't see eye to eye. — Junior and Marta don’t see eye to eye.

Of course, part of Marta’s behavior is rooted in the harsh marginalized environment they live in that punishes perceived deviance. Her son’s burgeoning homosexuality is just one more problem she will have to deal with on top of being poor, single, begging for her underpaid job back, and raising two children, one of which is still nursing from her breasts. Every time she looks at her son, she sees the discrimination, danger, and ridicule they will both have to face against the outside world. But instead of being compassionate, she is angry and perturbed by his mere presence. Her face conveys so much deep-seated hatred for the boy, that at first I thought she was salty with the child because maybe he looked like his father and there was a bad break-up. However, later in the story we find out that she loved the boy’s Black father. Marta’s face softens just talking about him, so the audience has to search for other clues as to her lack of affection towards Junior. She’s constantly pushing/pulling him places, screaming at him outside their bathroom door whenever he locks himself in there to fix his hair in some kind of way that flattens it.

Marta is loving and affectionate with her white-skinned, straight-haired infant son. There is a tender moment where she is topless and bathing the little one. Junior watches (always watching), a sad yearning in his expression. I wondered. Did she ever hold him like that? Kiss him that way? Maybe when his father was alive?

Marta bonding with her lighter-skinned, straight-haired little one.

At one point Marta lies on her bed exhausted from her job search, weary from being turned down for security work, something she is trained for. Junior crawls in next to her and tries to comfort her, and she shoves him away. I began to wonder if it was a combination of his non-conforming sexuality and his Blackness that she despised. There are plenty of non-Black women/men who find Black partners and have children, and yet still harbor racial prejudice. There are even Black-with-Black partners that harbor colorism issues regarding light and dark skin tones.

I admit the colorism/affection issue triggered me in this film. I also come from a single parent household where I am the oldest and darkest child, and the sibling I grew up with is fair-skinned, hazel-eyed, and bone-straight dishwater blonde. My mother was auburn-haired and light-skinned, and although she never had issues with my skin-tone, I was young enough to notice how other people (Black, White, Mexican, Asian, etc) reacted when the two of us went places with our mother. My sister was fawned over (her skin, her eyes, her hair), while I was referred to as the reader. Black children (and non-Black children) learn subconsciously (even before they begin to speak) that whiteness and proximity to whiteness is EVERYTHING, and the opposite is viewed as negative.

Throughout Pelo Malo there were uncomfortable re-rememberings of myself looking at myself in the mirror when I was Junior’s age, slathering Vaseline or Blue Magic Hair Grease on my hair, trying to slick all that stuff DOWN. Tame it. Control it. Essentially hide all that made me stand out as the really Black one in the family. So I was all in my feels watching Junior struggle to get that elusive straight hair. It’s not a comfortable experience to watch a film that basically shows you your childhood and how painful it was. I realized I had built up a lot of buffers around my own hair/skin color trauma.

Grandma Carmen (Nelly Ramos) teaches Junior to sing and dance. — Grandma Carmen (Nelly Ramos) teaches Junior to dance and get loose.

Junior’s only saving grace is his Black paternal Grandmother Carmen (Nelly Ramos). The moment I see Carmen’s teeny-weeny ‘fro, I know this is a woman who embraces her natural beauty. She doesn’t sport a wig, or straighten her locks. She plays music and likes to dance. She even straightens Junior’s hair when he asks just so he can see what it would look like, but she admonishes him to wet it back up before his mother comes to get him. She spots right off what is evident about her grandson. He is not a hard boy. He is concerned with his appearance. He wants to be a singer. He wants straight hair for his yearbook picture. Grandma Carmen obliges by making him a suit that looks like something the singer Prince would wear. This time spent with Carmen is a respite for Junior, but unfortunately the need for Marta’s love and acceptance is so strong, Junior convinces himself that Grandma Carmen is trying to turn him into a girl. The frilly suit he found so delightful stitched from his grandmother’s hand becomes a suit of shame.

Grandma Carmen straightens half of Junior's hair so he can see his desire. — Grandma Carmen straightens half of Junior’s hair so he can see his desire.

Grandma Carmen (Nelly Ramos) shows Junior how to sing like a rock star. — Grandma Carmen (Nelly Ramos) shows Junior how to sing like the star he wants to be.

In the end, Marta tells Junior he can only stay with her if he cuts off all his curly ringlets. The hair has become a symbol of Black queerness for Marta. It must be vanquished. It’s a devastating blow, and the last shot we have of Junior is a gut-wrencher. He is in his school uniform wearing close-cropped hair. Unsmiling. It is the yearbook photo. But not the one he wanted.

Pelo Malo ends with no issues resolved, and no hints that life will change or be better for Junior. However, there is one ray of hope in the end credits. We get to see what Junior looks like wearing his grandmother’s Prince-like suit. His hair is blow-dried straight and he dances to his grandmother’s favorite song. He looks glorious. And free.

I left the theater thinking, “How many Juniors, male/female/gay/gender-neutral/genderfluid/transgender/non-binary are out there in the world?”

I know there are millions. And we must be vigilant in holding safe spaces for those children to grow, discover, and define themselves on their own terms. Children like Leelah Alcorn, who recently took her own life because she couldn’t be the person she needed to be. That is the lesson of Pelo Malo.

If nothing else, people should see this little gem just to gaze at the beautiful face of actor Samuel Lange Zambrano. The weight of this movie is carried on his thin little shoulders, and he handles it like a pro. He is perfection.

The riveting Samantha Castillo(Marta) and the perfection that is Samuel Lange Zambrano (Junior) — The riveting Samantha Castillo (Marta) and the perfection that is Samuel Lange Zambrano (Junior)

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Lisa Bolekaja is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop and a former Film Independent Fellow. She co-hosts a screenwriting podcast called “Hilliard Guess’ Screenwriters Rant Room” and her work has appeared in “Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History” (Crossed Genres Publishing), “The WisCon Chronicles: Volume 8″ (Aqueduct Press), and the SF/F anthology, “How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens” (Upper Rubber Boot Books). Her latest SF story “Three Voices” will be forthcoming in Uncanny Magazine.

As Goes Missouri, So Goes the Nation: ‘The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,’ ‘Rich Hill,’ and ‘Spanish Lake’

Rural poverty and urban poverty are not the same. Individual racism and institutional racism are not the same. However, these forces are woven together as they are fiercely kept separate in our common mythologies of what America means. We avoid difficult stories that disrupt the narratives we’ve come to understand.

Written by Leigh Kolb.

For over a century, Missouri was known as a bellwether state; a politically split swing state (blue urban Kansas City and St. Louis bookend red rural communities), the state’s presidential vote almost always reflected the outcome of the presidential election. In the Civil War, Missourians fought for both sides. Demographically, economically, socially, and politically, Missouri has often been seen as a microcosm of America as a whole.

In an NPR article, the term “bellwether” is defined:

“You might be wondering where the word ‘bellwether’ comes from. Just think about Mary and her little lamb… she’d tie a bell around the neck of a wether (a castrated male sheep) who would lead the little lamb and the rest of the flock around until Mary came back. And when she returned, the bell signaled the flock’s location.”

The bell around Missouri’s neck has been sounding, tuning a nation in to the economic and divisive realities of a nation divided, economically and racially. Three recent documentaries paint a portrait of tragic desperation that is not isolated to middle America; it’s the struggle of a nation faced with the staggering reality of deep divides in class and race.

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The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, directed by Chad Freidrichs and released in 2012, tells a more complex version of a modern myth. Pruitt-Igoe was a public housing development in St. Louis, built to be a shiny clean alternative to the tenements of the city. It was designed with the goal of “lifting residents out of poverty,” and was built using federal funding after the Housing Act of 1949. The documentary, which succeeds greatly in its usage of historical footage and current interviews with past tenants, paints a picture of a development full of hope. Those interviewed remembered Pruitt-Igoe as an “oasis in a desert,” and their time there had been incredibly exciting and happy. There was also fear, though. A complex portrait is drawn that leaves the viewer wondering, “What happened?”

The complex was segregated. Public housing was racially segregated until 1956; after that, many areas remained or became increasingly segregated due to redlining and “white flight” as suburbs became attractive options and were also subsidized heavily by government funding. Against the backdrop of a post-war economy that was not growing as expected, and the deep racism that permeated the country as schools were desegregated, Pruitt-Igoe was a socialist penthouse built on a racist, shaky free market.

Twenty years after its completion, it was fully demolished. The mythology that has surrounded its failure typically stigmatizes public housing and the residents; however, the real story has much more to do with the lack of maintenance and support, welfare policies that broke apart families, and decaying conditions coupled with increasing rent. While the government built the complex, the maintenance and upkeep was to be paid for with tenants’ rent. This model relied on a vibrant, growing city and economy.

That’s not what happened.

The government was also committed to pro-suburb housing policies, where middle class and working class whites went to live. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth does an excellent job outlining the history of economic decline and housing and zoning laws that were often unfriendly to poor and working class African Americans.

Another reality that the film reveals is the “control” that the welfare department had over those in the apartments who received aid, including the anti-family “man in the house” rule, which dictated that if an “able-bodied” man lived in the home, the family couldn’t receive assistance. For some of the interviewees in the film, that meant that their fathers had to leave the state, or hide when agents came to check and see if a man was living in the house. (And just a few decades later, conservatives decry the breakdown of the family as the cause of poverty and crime.) The rules were restrictive–telephones and televisions were not allowed. The theme of “control” runs through many of the former tenants’ narratives–the control that the housing authority attempted to have over them, and the lack of control they felt in their deteriorating living conditions.

Instead of fixing and maintaining the units, authorities made everything “indestructible” (caging in light bulbs for example). One former tenant said that that “made you want to destroy things.” While The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is ostensibly about a housing project, it is also about segregation, masculinity, poverty, distrust of law enforcement, racism, the decline of the American city, and whites’ deep fears of Black poverty and crime (the mythology of Pruitt-Igoe became a scapegoat to uphold those fears).

This iconic footage of Pruitt-Igoe being destroyed was used in the film Koyaanisqatsi. "Koyaanisgatsi" is a Hopi Indian word, and means "life out of balance." — This iconic footage of Pruitt-Igoe being destroyed was used in the film *Koyaanisqatsi*. “Koyaanisgatsi” is a Hopi Indian word, and means “life out of balance.”

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Rich Hill

On the other side of Missouri is Rich Hill, a rural town with a population of just over 1,000. A former coal mining town, the economy of Rich Hill has declined rapidly in the last few decades, and its inhabitants are faced with poverty and a lack of employment opportunities.

Filmmakers Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo (who are cousins), grew up visiting family in Rich Hill. They stress the importance of showing poverty in America, and that we cannot keep those living in poverty “at arm’s length.” They directed Rich Hill, a beautiful documentary that focuses deeply on the lives of three young teenage boys who are up against a world that seems hopeless.

Between 2000 and 2010, poverty rates in Missouri doubled, at a rate 3.5 times the national average. Rural areas have been hit by declining manufacturing opportunities. The three boys chronicled in Rich Hill are all faced with devastating family situations. Andrew is good-looking and charming, and seems optimistic amid the chaos of his life–a father who does odd jobs, sings country music, and moves his family around constantly. Appachey lives in rage, and chain smokes at age 12. His mother had him when she was a teenager, and his father left when he was 6. Harley’s mother is in prison because she tried to kill his stepfather after his stepfather had raped him, and the cops did nothing. Harley lives with his grandmother. “I don’t need an education,” he tells us. “I just need my family.”

The film spans a year, and it’s punctuated by Fourth of July celebrations. Toward the end, the fireworks are juxtaposed with scenes of Andrew and his father arm wrestling, and the town chanting “USA!” in celebration. These scenes are stunningly beautiful and deeply sad.

Andrew says, “I keep praying. Nothing’s came yet, but I keep trying…”

Tragos said that in making the film, they were trusted because they had their grandparents’ name. She explains that this was “less of a nostalgia piece than for an urgent piece about these kids’ lives.” It’s clear that the filmmakers were pulled in to these boys’ lives (their website features updates and fundraising links for the boys and other organizations).

The plight of the mothers and grandmothers is overwhelming. It’s difficult to watch the one father who is in the picture; he has delusions of grandeur, and we can see Andrew following in those charismatic, aimless footsteps (although most viewers are completely charmed and heartened by Andrew’s grinning confidence). The boys are all smart and funny, yet they are faced with a system–whether it be the juvenile system, or a free-falling economy–that is completely against them and their families.

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Spanish Lake

Spanish Lake is an unincorporated township north of St. Louis eight miles away from Ferguson. Filmmaker Philip Andrew Morton lived there until he was 18. When he returned 10 years later, his childhood home and elementary school were abandoned, and he wanted to explore the phenomenon of “white flight” that occurred in St. Louis in the last half century.

He made Spanish Lake, which centers mostly on the white people who left Spanish Lake as they reflect upon the past. While these interviews make up the majority of the film, there is a bit of history that gives some context to the demographic shift. Spanish Lake was kept unincorporated due to anti-government sentiment, which led to a lack of social services and the building of Section 8 apartments, where many impoverished African Americans moved after housing developments like Pruitt-Igoe were destroyed. Realtors redlined neighborhoods, pushing whites in and out strategically. White people–fueled by racism and the lack of what had been strong, unionized labor opportunities–fled to other suburbs or rural areas.

In Spanish Lake, Morton captures a reunion of “Lakers”–former residents of Spanish Lake who have a reunion at Spanish Lake and drink beer while reminiscing about the past. Morton’s motivation in making Spanish Lake was his own nostalgia, as he remembers his childhood in Spanish Lake with a sense of pain and loss. While there’s no doubt that he also has a social awareness (that was certainly heightened as the timing of his film coincided with Ferguson making waves around the world, as Ferguson’s demographic shift has been similar to Spanish Lake’s), the overriding tone of the documentary is nostalgic, peppered with just enough history to give some context.

White former residents talk about the fights, and getting beaten up by “sisters,” and laugh about shooting a Black Santa off a new resident’s roof. The pain in these former residents’ comments is palpable, but it’s left unexamined. The documentary plays for more than 30 minutes before a Black person speaks. There are short clips of Black apartment residents thanking the local police force and their new (white) landlords.

Had Spanish Lake existed in a vacuum, it would have been a fine piece of nostalgic film that briefly illuminated a modern history of segregation and deeply entrenched racism and a decaying middle class as labor and manufacturing opportunities dissolved.

If viewers are looking for a nuanced commentary on “how Ferguson became Ferguson,” Spanish Lake is not enough. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, full of authentic voices that speak to the fear and trauma of growing up in poverty and institutional racism, should be required viewing.

However, Spanish Lake itself does capture how many white Americans react and speak about a recent history of demographic changes, housing segregation, and school desegregation. It’s uncomfortable to hear their voices, but those voices are familiar and loud, all across America.

There’s a lot of talking, but not a lot of critical thinking. And when it comes to talking about race and class in America, that’s a painfully accurate representation.

White voices dominate Spanish Lake — White voices dominate *Spanish Lake*

We don’t want to hear how, in so many ways, Pruitt-Igoe was set up for failure, and fit into a narrative that it was the residents themselves who were failures. We don’t want to listen to the young Black man who was a boy in Pruitt-Igoe, who loved quietly watching insects in a field before he saw his brother brutally murdered–then all he could think about was killing.

We don’t want to hear about rural poverty, and how the economy has gutted middle America and left in the rubble children who are failed by their parents, their schools, and the legal system. One audience member at a Rich Hill screening praised Andrew for his faith and encouraged him to keep praying, as if his optimism and charming smile would someday pay the bills.

We don’t want to hear the racism of former residents of a “nice area,” who can’t see that their own anti-government stance helped usher in low-income housing, which they were also against. Then there weren’t social services available–because they were against centralized government–and that lack of social services harmed everyone. In so many ways, Spanish Lake represents an entire nation of people who vote and scream against their own interests without any sense of introspection. What makes Spanish Lake jarring is the modernity of the footage. In The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, the footage of residents and officials of Black Jack, another township north of St. Louis who wanted to keep a certain “element” out of their neighborhoods is in black and white, grainy news reels of a time that seems so long ago. But it wasn’t. In Spanish Lake, former residents make the same arguments in broad daylight in high-definition.

We want to believe that it’s all simple. Segregated housing policies are a thing of the past, and we’re in a “post-racial” society. Poverty is due to laziness. People should just choose to live in better conditions and pull up their bootstraps, and ignore history. We want to ignore history.

That is the American mythology that has a chokehold on us all.

But the chain is tightening around Missouri’s neck, and the bell is sounding. We must leave the mythology in the past and deal with reality.

Because Missouri–its segregation, its poverty, and its denial–is America.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7RwwkNzF68″]

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/QNp0AuPiZ3Y”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw38xwWu3r4″]

See also: “Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the American City”; “St. Louis: A city divided” at Al Jazeera America; For its poverty rate, Missouri should be placed on child neglect registry. at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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

‘Shameless’: The Most Dramatic Comedy This Season

‘Shameless,’ Showtime’s irreverent story of working-class hardship, has re-categorized itself as a comedy for awards season. That’s a strange choice when you consider that series star, Emmy Rossum, has spent the whole season knocking it out of the park in what is clearly a dramatic role, and clearly the show’s most serious attempt to engage with its subject matter.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Shameless, Showtime’s irreverent story of working-class hardship, has re-categorized itself as a comedy for awards season. That’s a strange choice when you consider that series star, Emmy Rossum, has spent the whole season knocking it out of the park in what is clearly a dramatic role, and clearly the show’s most serious attempt to engage with its subject matter.

Shameless, a remake of the UK series of the same name, has never been the kind of show that could go toe to toe with the Breaking Bads of the world. It has an uneven tone that often seems to make light of the class-based difficulties its characters face, and a sense of humour that slips over the line from “borderline offensive” to “actually, for real, offensive” at times. It’s never been entirely clear whether the series is supposed to be grounded in the real world, or take place in a hyper-reality where actions have no consequences and the characters are supposed to be satirical. The show’s dramatic plot lines lean toward the former and its comedic plot lines lean toward the latter (maybe because there’s nothing particularly funny about being poor in the real world).

The series follows the adventures of the Gallagher family–six children, and their drunken, absentee father, Frank. The eldest Gallagher child (and the only one over the age of majority at the series’ inception) is Emmy Rossum’s character, Fiona, who more or less serves as the moral center of the show.

Over the first three seasons, we watch Fiona struggle to care for her siblings while working odd jobs and dating men who turn out to be bad for her. Every time Fiona tries to better her life, the family drags her back down either through sabotage or (more usually) through requiring things from her that aren’t compatible with what she wants. Through all of these setbacks–and despite the occasional outburst–Fiona, like all of the Gallagher children, displays an almost super-human resilience. Despite being abandoned by her parents and dropping out of high school to raise five children on her own, despite shuffling from low-wage job to low-wage job and scrounging for money for food, despite being repeatedly cheated out of even the smallest opportunities for happiness, Fiona stays positive, optimistic, determined, and focused on doing for everyone else, when no one is doing for her.

It’s the kind of chipper, poor-but-happy attitude the show sometimes displays, which undercuts the seriousness of the situation the characters find themselves in. Events that would scar you for life, in the real world, become funny anecdotes and colourful stories about triumphing over adversity. You might get the impression, watching this show, that being poor is a great adventure that doesn’t hurt anyone’s chances to lead a fulfilling life.

And then season four happens. Wonderful, dramatic, thoughtful season four, which we are now calling a “comedy.”

In this “comedy,” Fiona finally has a stable middle-class office job. She’s a rising star in the sales department, and she has a comprehensive benefits plan that covers all of her dependents. She’s dating her boss, which isn’t great, but he’s a stable, emotionally healthy man who treats her with respect and encourages her instead of dragging her down. With no one trying to sabotage her, Fiona decides to sabotage herself.

Over the course of this season (the last episode airs this week), Fiona torches her relationship, torches her career, and–because that’s not enough–ends up with a felony drug conviction that sends her to prison, passing all of her responsibility onto her next oldest sibling, Lip.

What makes this different from previous seasons is that the story line is played completely straight. Although there’s an element of humour in the earlier episodes, Fiona’s arrest turns this into a Big Deal, and the scenes of her arrest, trial, parole, and incarceration are treated very seriously. They’re much darker than similar scenes on, for example, Orange is the New Black (which is more legitimately classified as a comedy due to its tone), and the show engages in a fairly downbeat explanation of how things ended up this way.

Fiona is a product of the environment she grew up in, and her attempts at mobility are almost pre-destined to fail. At one point, she explains that she never felt like she deserved to have a good job or a stable relationship, and she wanted to prove she was right by destroying it. The values she holds as a working class woman also play a role–she might have been able to get a better deal with the prosecutor if she had sold out the middle-class man who gave her the drugs; she didn’t, because it was unthinkable to her to be a rat.

The penultimate episode invites us, as well, to see the connection between Frank’s poor parenting and the fate of his eldest child, essentially forced into the role of parent during her own childhood. She’s self-destructing the same way her parents did and, in a world of such limited options, when so much pressure has been applied to her, it’s hard to imagine that this wouldn’t have happened someday.

The show also takes a very serious attitude to the way these events affect Lip. The first in his family to go to college, he–like Fiona–struggles with fitting into middle-class culture, and initially tries to sabotage himself by withdrawing. Just as he seems like he’s making progress, he’s forced into Fiona’s role as head (and moral center) of the family, and he looks at her with the same hatred and sense of betrayal that they’ve both directed at Frank.

This is just one of several serious, dramatic story lines this season, but it lends the show a sense of gravity and relevance that it hasn’t always had. It’s also given Emmy Rossum a chance to demonstrate what an outstanding performer she actually is–she’s come a long way from staring into the middle distance while a guy in a mask swarms around her. In fact, I might have liked to see her compete as an actress in a drama series during awards season–I think she might have wormed her way into a nomination, this time.

Alas, this is not the world we live in. In probably the least funny season of Shameless ever, and the season that treated the characters’ situation with the greatest respect, and the season that finally gave the leading actress a meaty, dramatic role to sink her teeth into–one in which, dare I say it, she takes off her clothes to a little more purpose–it’s a comedy. OK, then.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Disabilities Week: Blindness, Race and Love in ‘A Patch of Blue’

A Patch of Blue movie poster.

Written by Leigh Kolb

Director Guy Green said of the premise of A Patch of Blue: “basically it’s a very corny story, a blind girl falling in love with a black man.” He credits the writing of the novel it was based upon (Be Ready With Bells and Drums, by Elizabeth Kata) for ensuring that the story, and resulting film, were not corny in the least.

She’s befriended by a black man, Gordon (Sidney Poitier), and they form a deep relationship, which centers on Gordon’s desire to help Selina lift herself up.

It would be easy to read that synopsis–blind girl falls in love with a black man–and come to any number of conclusions about the film, especially since it was released at the height of the civil rights movement, but the film manages to capture something much deeper than being a superficial morality play on racism, and it treats Selina’s blindness with care and dignity.

Gordon and Selina eat lunch.

Gordon helps Selina find directions by the sun’s location.

Gordon never belittles or gets frustrates with Selina.

Their kiss was one of the first on-screen interracial kisses.

The racial components of the film are also nuanced and effective. When Gordon tells Selina that “tolerance” is one of his favorite words (and explains that it’s not just putting up with something, but that you don’t “knock your neighbor just because he thinks or looks different than you”), she tells him that he must be full of tolerance. He quietly shakes his head and says that he’s not. He looks deeply affected when white people stare and glare at him and Selina walking together, and clearly has deep inner conflict being a black man in America in 1965 (of course, these aspects of the film don’t seem nearly as dated as they should be). His brother, a doctor, criticizes Gordon’s desire to help and educate Selina because she is white, and comments on the fact that she comes from a “trash heap” (to which Gordon responds, “She may, but she’s not trash”). Underneath the surface of the film is the fact that socioeconomic factors and family support systems are what determine a person’s opportunities.

Rose-Ann is, unsurprisingly, violently racist. We know that she forbade Selina from spending time with the only friend she ever made because the little girl was black, so we also know that when Rose-Ann sees Selina and Gordon together, she will erupt–which she does.

By the end of the film, even the crowd of white people (who before had glared), realize that Gordon is no threat to Selina; Rose-Ann is.

The ending is hopeful, but not saccharine-sweet. The realness of the characters, their struggles and their emotions are highlighted by sparse, black-and-white film and a beautiful soundtrack.

She says, “I know everything I need to know about you.” As she feels his face she continues: “I know you’re good, and kind, and that you’re colored; and I think you’re beautiful.”

He’s shocked that she knows, and responds “Beautiful? Most people would say the opposite.”

“That’s because they don’t know you,” she answers.

A Patch of Blue is one of those films that manages to stay with you for years after you see it; and then, when you see it again, it’s just as beautiful as you remembered.

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

2013 Oscar Week: ‘Les Misérables’: Some Musicals Are More Feminist Than Others

Guest post written by Natalie Wilson, originally published at Ms. Magazine. Cross-posted with permission.

While Les Misérables is not your typical musical–or, as this Guardian review puts it, “There’s no dancing, there are no jazz hands and there is next to no speech”–it is typical of the genre in that, like opera, it includes more female characters than do many plays, movies and novels. Regardless if this is due to the fondness for female voices or to the swoon-inducing love ballads adored by so many, this viewer is thankful for the diverse female characters so wonderfully played by Anne Hathaway(Fantine), Amanda Seyfriend (Cosette), Samantha Barks (Éponine) and Helena Bonham Carter (Madame Thénardier).

The film adaptation, based on the musical (seen by over 60 million people), which is itself based on Victor Hugo’s novel, arguably heightens the proto-feminist elements of the original narrative as it allows for a more close-up, more harrowing depiction of the key female characters, all of whom are “miserable” for justifiable reasons.

Though the film has been referred to as a “lobotomized opera,” it can more aptly be described as an operatic musical that not only focuses on macro problems of human existence–morality, freedom, power, forgiveness–but also on how these problems play out at the micro level, particularly how the macro power of men effects women on a micro level. As noted at Democratic Underground, Victor Hugo gets:

“…the plight of women in his society, especially the grisettes (working class young women) and prostitutes, and how they were helpless against not just men of power, but men in general, and how nice poor girls could so easily be discarded and have [their lives] ruined because of becoming pregnant or rebuffing sexual advances.”

Fantine is the key character to have her life ruined in such a manner. Abandoned by the man who impregnates her, she is working in the 19th century version of a sweatshop when we first meet her in the film. She ultimately turns to sexual slavery so as to continue sending money to the unscrupulous caretakers (the Thénardiers) who, unbeknowst to her, are abusing and exploiting her young daughter, Cosette.

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables

Fantine is portrayed sympathetically in the text and musical, but the film adaptation emphasizes the horrors of forced prostitution, something the musical renditions of the song “Lovely Ladies” frequently belie. Often performed in an upbeat, jokey manner, in the film the song instead becomes a battle cry against sexual slavery, with the costuming, make-up, sets and lighting bringing the horrors behind the lyrics to life as the sickly, starving, cold, tattered and abused women sing:

Lovely ladies
Ready for the call
Standing up or lying down
Or any way at all
Bargain prices up against the wall

After her hair has been cut, her teeth removed and sold, Fantine joins the song, singing,

Come on, Captain
You can wear your shoes
Don’t it make a change
To have a girl who can’t refuse
Easy money
Lying on a bed
Just as well they never see
The hate that’s in your head
Don’t they know they’re making love
To one already dead!

Widely lauded in the role (as here, here, and here), her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” further encapsulates the pathos and desperation of her character–something which is sometimes lost in more “Broadway” renditions of the song (a la Susan Boyle).

Of playing Fantine, Anne Hathaway notes,

“What I did was I tried to get inside the reality of her story as it exists in our world. … I read a lot of articles and watched a lot of documentaries and news clips about sexual slavery. And for me, for this particular story, I came to the realization that I had been thinking about Fantine as someone who lived in the past, but she doesn’t. She’s living in New York City right now. She’s probably less than a block away. This injustice exists in our world, and so every day that I was her, I just thought—this isn’t an invention. This isn’t me acting. This is me honoring that this pain lives in this world and I hope that in all our lifetimes — like, today — we see it end.”

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables

Regardless of what can be said about Hathaway’s weight loss for the role (critiqued here), her framing of Fantine as a sexual slave, NOT a prostitute, is key, as it refuses to glorify or joke about what is so often swept under the rug regarding sex work: that the majority of women do not “choose” it but are forced into it–a realization emphasized by Hugo but often lost in musical renditions. Hugo writes of Fantine,

“What is the history of Fantine? It is society buying a slave. From whom? From misery. From hunger, from cold, from loneliness, from abandonment, from privation. Melancholy barter. A soul for a bit of bread. Misery makes the offer, society accepts … it is said that slavery has disappeared from the European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists: but it weighs now only upon woman, and it is called prostitution.”

The film, like Hugo’s novel, blames society for sexual slavery, rather than individual men or women. Each also portrays her “choice” as that between life and death for her and her daughter.

Hugo’s progressive view of sexual politics, as well as his critical attitude towards “polite society” (discussed here) imbue his work in other Les Mis plotlines as well–as with his depiction of the vengeful Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe) and the valiant prisononer 24601, Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), imprisoned 19 years for the crime of stealing bread. Though these two males are at the center of the story, the females are just as (if not more) memorable (and certainly outperform and out-sing Crowe in his bombastic version of Javert).

Amanda Seyfried as Cosette in Les Miserables

Cosette, both as the child abused by the Thénardiers and then as the adult who falls for the revolutionary Marius (Eddie Redmayne), is also a micro picture of a macro problem — the abuse of female children, especially those in foster care and/or poverty, and the fact that one of the few “escapes” offered to such women is love and romance. The same “escape” is the only one that similarly maltreated Eponine is forced into. As noted here, she is “Raised by sociopathic parents and then forced into a life of poverty and crime” and “only wants the man she loves to love her, and sacrifices all to prove her love.”

Samanta Barks as Eponine in Les Miserables

The Funny Feminist takes issue with this plotline in particular, noting that Eponine has sadly become “the international spokeswoman for girls crushing on their male best friends, who swoon over the richer, more popular girl.” Like a 19th century Bella Swan, Eponine is hopelessly devoted to her Edward, in the form of Marius, but he only has eyes for Cosette. If the musical falters in its quasi-feminist politics anywhere, it is here, with the strong , resilient Eponine belting out her song of unrequited love, “On My Own,” while the male revolutionaries prepare to fight for a more egalitarian France–or, as the Funny Feminist puts it “when the poor folk rally against the 1 percent and the Mitt Romneys,” Eponine is busy singing a “pity me, my life is so sad” song. To be fair, while she is indeed lovestruck, she also disguises herself as a boy in order to join in the revolution, and ultimately gives her life to save Marius.

While some reviews slam the film for not being political enough, as here (where the film is described as “a picturesque 19th-century version of Occupy Wall Street” lacking political context), I would counter that the film drips with politics, especially the micro politics captured in the feminist mantra “the personal is political.” From the tragic Fantine to the orphaned Cosette to the maltreated Eponine, the film depicts a story that is still all too true, and does so better than any musical version I’ve seen, showing that women–revolution or no–are all too often beaten, abused, exploited, raped and murdered. While it’s long ranked as one of my favorite musicals, it now holds the number one spot in this feminist heart for best musical film ever.

———-

Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if …? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate.

2013 Golden Globes Week: ‘Les Miserables,’ Sex Trafficking & Fantine as a Symbol for Women’s Oppression

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables

Written by Megan Kearns.

Some writers, like professor Stacy Wolf, have enjoyed yet criticized the film adaptation of Les Miserables for not being feminist enough and turning the female characters into “bit players.” While others have lauded its feminism. Sure it irks me yet another film focuses on the journey, salvation and redemption of a man. We clearly have enough of those. But that ignores the importance of women in Les Mis. It ignores how, as Bitch Flicks writer Leigh Kolb astutely points out, a film featuring poverty and class struggles is feminist.

I have loved Les Miserables for years. After reading it in junior high, the book absorbed me — the horrific tragedy, pain and oppression. The vivid characters and their stories stirred and moved me. I immediately went out and bought the soundtrack, falling under its spell. 5 years later I saw it on Broadway, it mesmerized me. So when I heard a film adaptation of the musical? With Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman? With live singing?? Hearing Samantha Barks as the awesome Eponine belt out “On My Own?” Oh yeah. Saying I was psyched was definitely an understatement.

Sure the numbers 24601 will always be synonymous with Jean Valjean and the cruel incarceration he faced for stealing a loaf of bread. And yes, I love the standoff between Valjean and Inspector Javert or the passion of Enjolras at the barricades. But the person who has haunted me the most throughout the years? It wasn’t any of the men. It was Fantine.

Anne Hathaway embodies the tragic role, giving a phenomenal, powerful and transcendentperformance. She deserves all the hype and accolades she’s received. I’ve always been a fan of Hathaway in anything from Rachel Getting Married to The Devil Wears Prada. But she takes acting to a whole other level in this devastating performance. In “I Dreamed a Dream,” the show-stopping tragic song — which btw, made me weep in ragged sobs in the movie theatre…oh fuck, who am I kidding, even when watching the trailer too — Hathaway pours every emotion, every ounce of herself into the role. She trembles, rages, weeps. Her voice wavering from angelically soft to ragged and hoarse. Her performance alone is reason to watch the entire film. No joke. She’s that outstanding.

Fantine is the archetypal sacrificial mother, giving up everything for her daughter Cosette. But Fantine transcends merely rearticulating tropes and archetypes. Fantine is downtrodden. Life has beaten her down. The tigers at night have torn her hopes apart and crushed her dreams. Hathaway imbues Fantine with a fiery passion balanced with forlorn desperation. She’s angry at her circumstances, angry at her pain, desperate to save her daughter.

Fantine also illustrates the plight of single mothers. Single mothers are 5 times as likely to be in poverty, many working in low-wage jobs without paid sick leave. Fantine struggles to make ends meet to pay for Cossette who lives with the greedy and villanious Thenardiers, at the expense of her own health as she eventually gets ill with tuberculosis.

Fantine works in a factory and is fired after the lecherous foreman discovers through her gossipy coworkers (gee, thanks for the female camaraderie, ladies) that she has a daughter out of wedlock whom she sends money. When she’s thrown out on the streets, Fantine has nowhere to turn. She eventually sells her locket and her prized luscious locks. But then she sells the thing that always makes me shudder. Her teeth. And then, when she has nothing left to sell, she sells her body becoming a prostitute. She sells herself.

Anne Hathaway tried to relate to her character but couldn’t as their lives wildly diverge. But she realized that while Les Mis is a period piece, it parallels the struggles women face today, particularly with Fantine being forced into sexual slavery. Hathaway (who has come out in support of the One Billion Rising campaign to fight violence against women) said:

“There was no way I could relate to what my character was going through. I live a very successful, happy life. I don’t have any children that I’ve had to give up…or keep. So I tried to get inside the reality of her story as it exists in our world. And to do that, I read a lot of articles and watched a lot of documentaries and news clips about sexual slavery. And for me, and this particular story, I came to the realization that I had been thinking about Fantine as someone who lived in the past, but she doesn’t. She’s living in New York City right now, probably less than a block away. This injustice exists in our world. So every day that I was her, I just thought ‘This isn’t an invention. This isn’t me acting. This is me honoring that this pain lives in this world.’ I hope that in all our lifetimes, we see it end.”

As Ms. Magazine‘s Natalie Wilson points out, the distinction between prostitute and sexual slave is crucial:

“Her framing of Fantine as a sexual slave, NOT a prostitute, is key, as it refuses to glorify or joke about what is so often swept under the rug regarding sex work: that the majority of women do not “choose” it but are forced into it.”

Traditionally, people view the sex industry in two ways. There exists a range of ways to be in it, either by choice, circumstance or coercion, but regardless it’s work and we must make it safe for sex workers and regulate disease. Or the sex industry is a form of violence against women and girls, exploitative and a form of gender-based violence.

Choice is the keystone in the argument. Do people choose sex work? Or are they forced into it via trafficking? Or do they choose it only because they have no other options or means to earn a living, negating its categorization as a “choice?”

In the book Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn “confront theliberal myth that prostitution is a voluntary vocation for women.” As a reproductive justice advocate, I believe a woman’s body should be her legal and personal domain. While some sex workers may choose their profession willingly, too many women – 3 million women and girls – are forced into sex trafficking. Traffickers coerce, beat and rape women into submission. Trafficking is human slavery, a human rights travesty. Numerous women, children and men are savagely sold. Whether people choose sex work willingly or are trafficked, they shouldn’t face criminalization. People who’ve survived trafficking lose jobs or can’t get jobs due to convictions.

Les Mis fuses these two views. It shows that sexual slavery is exploitative and a human rights violation — Fantine enters prostitution for she has no other choice, she has no other way to earn money. But it simultaneously reinforces that we shouldn’t punish sex workers for their circumstances. Les Mis doesn’t devalue, demonize or erase the humanity of those in sex work.

Some assert Les Mis suffers from outdates gender roles and gender stereotypes. Sure it’s set in 1810s-1830s Paris and Victor Hugo wrote it in 1862. But that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t critique Les Mis through a current lens, especially considering the film is current. But I don’t think Les Mis is chained to the past.

Sexual slavery and oppression aren’t merely in history books. Women today face poverty, trafficking, domestic abuse, rape, assault. Even if we don’t personally confront these struggles, we all must deal with binding constrictions of sexism and rape culture, which Les Mis illustrates.

When Anne Hathaway infamously (and awesomely!) shut down Matt Lauer’s douchebaggy slut-shaming on the Today Show after paparazzi took a crotch shot of her, she said:

“Well, it was obviously an unfortunate incident. Um, I think — It kinda made me sad on two accounts. One was that I was very sad that we live in an age when someone takes a picture of another person in a vulnerable moment and, rather than delete it, and do the decent thing, sells it. And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants, which brings us back to Les Mis, because that’s what my character is — she is someone who is forced to sell sex to benefit her child, because she has nothing and there’s no social safety net. And I— Yeah, so, um, so let’s get back to Les Mis.”

Hathaway is right, Fantine — and so many other women like her — have no safety net. Without healthcare, education, paid sick leave, adequate day care and social assistance programs, today’s impoverished single mothers have few options.

Les Mis also sheds light on rape culture. After Fantine fights back against a man harassing her, putting snow down her dress, she’s the one punished, not the assailant. Inspector Javert wants to arrest Fantine, reinforcing a victim-blaming rape culture which criminalizes and demonizes women’s behavior and punishes victims/survivors, rather than the perpetrators of abuse and assault. With the global rape epidemic now taking center stage — Steubenville, Jyoti Singh Pandey in India, Notre Dame’s rape cover-up — we must question how we as a society perpetuate and enable violence against women.

Feminism and social justice push us to not only see the world from our own perspective and privilege. But to see it from others’ perspectives and circumstances as well. Now I recognize it’s problematic that Fantine can only achieve salvation and peace in death. Or that she becomes a saintly prostitute, a symbolic Mary Magdalene. But through Fantine’s eyes, we see the horrors of poverty, trafficking, sexism and rape culture. She symbolizes the oppression women combat — throughout history and today.

Fighting oppression, looking at the intersectionality of gender and class, critiquing – these are the core of Les Mis’ message. Isn’t that what feminism is all about?

Happy Birthday, Occupy Wall Street!

No, this is not a post about film or television.

Today, September 17th, marks the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street’s existence. I first wrote about OWS at Bitch Flicks on October 6, 2011 in a piece called, “We Interrupt This Broadcast … for an Occupy Wall Street Update,” in which I discuss my first experience marching and protesting with OWS. I wrote two more pieces for Bitch Flicks after that–once I started to feel a little disenchanted with the misogyny in the Occupy movement: “Occupy Wall Street and Feminism and Misogyny (Oh My?)” and “Why Facebook’s ‘Occupy a Vagina’ Event Is Not Okay.”

I published another piece I wrote about OWS at the Ms. Magazine blog, and I’ve decided to reprint it here.

Contrary to what many people think, the movement is stronger than ever, and women have taken leadership roles and created Feminist General Assemblies (courtesy of WOW, which stands for Women Occupying Wall Street) and sites like Occupy Patriarchy. Much has been written about misogyny and feminism in the movement, and I’ve included links to articles at the Women Occupy tumblr (although I’m very behind on updating this, so the most recent pieces aren’t included here).

Basically, I want to say congratulations and thank you to all the women who’ve worked tirelessly to make OWS safer for women–and to push the needs of women to the forefront of the conversation.

What Occupy Wall Street Owes to Feminist Consciousness-Raising

previously appeared at the Ms. Magazine blog on December 13, 2011

On the November 17th national day of action for the Occupy Wall Street movement, I was interviewed by a man from a Swedish newspaper who wanted to know why I was there. I smiled and said, “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Everyone wants to know, still, even after the two-month anniversary of a movement that’s only continued to grow stronger and gain more momentum, why people are occupying, who and what they’re protesting, and what they hope to change. I regurgitated what has effectively become The Message, “We want the power back in the hands of the people.” He seemed satisfied. But as he started to put his microphone away, I panicked.

“Wait!” I said. “There’s another reason I’m out here: I’m here to represent women.”

Dozens of articles have been written about why Occupy Wall Street matters for women. It boils down to one simple fact: Women suffer disproportionately in the current economic climate, which means that a protest for economic equality is a feminist protest—whether it admits it or not. A majority of the nation’s poor and unemployed are women, especially women of color and single mothers.

But the issue is not just what Occupy Wall Street can do for women; it’s what women have already done for Occupy Wall Street.

1970s feminists coined the phrase “the personal is political” when they noticed, by organizing a handful of women and sharing their private experiences, that their everyday struggles were embedded in larger political systems. For instance, women’s unacknowledged and unpaid labor, especially as caregivers for children, directly contributes to our country’s capitalist gains, yet women see no real compensation for it, only a persistent wage gap.

And one of the things I love most about the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it borrows so much of its activism, specifically pertaining to how the protesters interact with one another, from the feminist consciousness-raising model of the 1960s and ’70s. Like consciousness-raising, Occupy Wall Street started with small groups of oppressed people who spoke to one another about their personal struggles, and in doing so, learned they weren’t alone or insane or weak or lazy, the way Those In Charge suggested. That discovery gave them the strength to channel the individual anger and suffering they experienced into a larger collective call to action.

If the personal has ever been political in this country, take a look at the concerns driving the Occupy Wall Street movement: home foreclosures, college loan debts, health problems representing the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, lay-offs and skyrocketing unemployment rates, rapidly diminishing pensions, unaffordable education, unaffordable and inaccessible childcare. On the November 17th day of action, protesters hopped onto train cars and shared their personal stories of how the current economic inequalities have impacted them. One, using the people’s mic, said:

My name is Justin. I was a teacher before my school lost its budget and I was excessed. This is the United States of America, the richest country in the world, and somehow we can’t afford public high school teachers.

And another:

My name is Troy, and I’ve been unemployed for 10 years. Both my sisters lost their homes. I am here fighting for economic justice for everybody on this train … I am united with you in your struggle to pay your bills.

Other examples of consciousness-raising at Occupy Wall Street include discussion groups reminiscent of those started by ’70′s feminists. There’s the Divine Feminine, a group in which female-bodied or female-identified women talk about the oppressions they experience; Ambiguous UpSparkles, started by Eve Ensler, where people come together and share their personal stories of oppression using the people’s mic; and similar groups, like POCcupy (People of Color), a group for people of color to talk about oppression; WOW (Women Occupying Wall Street) and Safer Spaces, two groups that focus on the presence and safety of women in the movement.

Of course, a large part of consciousness-raising exists on the Internet, and I’ve heard people refer to Occupy Wall Street as the first-ever Internet revolution. Suffice it to say, Occupy Wall Street wouldn’t exist without the fast-as-hell sharing of information over Twitter, personal e-mail exchanges among both participants and skeptics, blogs such as We Are the 99% (a site that showcases photos of people from all over the world sharing personal stories of economic struggle), Facebook (where pages for new feminist groups devoted to Occupy camps crop up daily) and YouTube footage that captures precisely how personal struggle translates into collective political action.

It’s important to note that while early feminists focused much of their energy on gender oppression—and consciousness-raising groups later formed in which women discussed the impact of race—the protesters at Occupy Wall Street have turned the conversation toward class oppression. Of course, race, class, gender and sexuality remain interconnected, but as Felice Yeskel, who cofounded the nonprofit organization Class Action, argues:

Women talked about their experiences growing up in a gendered society as girls and the differential experiences of males and females. And when the issue of race was raised, feminists started to meet in same-race groups, with consciousness-raising for white women about white privilege … But it has never happened in any widespread way about issues of class.

By raising consciousness about the economic divide in this country, the Occupy movement protesters have the opportunity to finally start a conversation about an issue we rarely discuss in the United States—how the poorest people in this country, most of whom are women, manage to survive.

The simple fact? Without the feminist movement and discourse of the ’60s and ’70s, and the consciousness-raising tactics of the civil rights movement before it, Occupy Wall Street wouldn’t exist. We owe it to the women within the movement—and our feminist foremothers—to acknowledge women’s work, and to understand that a movement claiming to fight for the disenfranchised can’t afford to erase the contributions of women. And so I’ll leave you with the words of a woman from a 1969 consciousness-raising group, words that I can see plastered all over Occupy signs everywhere, “Women aren’t in a position to make demands now. We have to build a movement first.”