That separation is reinforced by much of the film’s comedy, but Margaret isn’t positioned as an object of ridicule or disgust, as is often the case with fat and/or gender non-conforming characters. She is naive, gauche, and in over her head, but she is also the character with whom the audience empathizes most.
This guest post by Tessa Racked appears as part of our theme week on Fatphobia and Fat Positivity.
This article contains spoilers for The Foxy Merkins.
Selected for the NEXT series at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival along with films like Obvious Child and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Foxy Merkins is a comedy by and about queer women with an episodic structure and humor fueled by social awkwardness and mundane absurdism (think Louie). Simply put, it’s part fish out of water comedy, part buddy film, and all lesbian hookers. Set in contemporary New York City, the film creates a world of sex work in homage to Midnight Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, but populated by women who have sex with other women. As with its progenitors, this subculture is scandalous, but hardly clandestine. These sex workers bide their time on the sidewalk in broad daylight until approached by other women, which occurs with relative frequency.
The film charts unexpected territory by merging stereotypes about seemingly disparate subcultures. Its narrative maintains the beats of taboo sex and danger expected from a story about sex workers, but does so through the filter of lesbian culture and stereotypes. In one exchange between the two main characters, Jo (Jackie Monahan) advises Margaret (Lisa Haas) to market her services by using the hanky code. However, the film’s version isn’t quite the same one used by gay men in the 70s to signify their kinky preferences: “A yellow bandana in your left back pocket means you have more than one cat… a red bandana in your right back pocket means you like women who have been through the Change.”
Jo and Margaret at work. “A lot of the girls hang out in front of Talbots.”
The film predominantly focuses on Margaret, a newbie sex worker with a degree in Women’s Studies who happens to be fat and butch. She is a pastiche of red-blooded hunk Joe Buck (Jon Voight) from Midnight Cowboy and sulky sylph Mike (River Phoenix) from My Own Private Idaho, but her size and gender expression set her apart from their more normative representations of beauty. That separation is reinforced by much of the film’s comedy, but Margaret isn’t positioned as an object of ridicule or disgust, as is often the case with fat and/or gender non-conforming characters. She is naive, gauche, and in over her head, but she is also the character with whom the audience empathizes most.
Margaret bumbles her way through interactions with clients, but this characteristic diverts from the standard depiction of fat and/or gender non-conforming women as undeserving of sexual desire. The Foxy Merkins uses a more nuanced approach. We do see glimpses of her as a sexual being, such as a scene that begins by implying she’s just had an orgasm, even if it quickly turns its focus on her awkwardness. This trait is partially inherited from Joe Buck, who isn’t genteel enough to seduce the rich Manhattanites he targets. It’s charming in its relatability: as someone who can barely navigate small talk in a professional setting, let alone a sexual encounter, I could easily see myself in Margaret’s shoes. But these scenes are also ground for meta-humor, as film trope clashes with cultural expectations. What happens when someone who looks like Margaret assumes the role of soul-searching hustler formerly and famously occupied by normatively attractive men? The Foxy Merkins’ predecessors supply setting, story, and characters, but like a Warner Brothers cartoon character running off their background onto a blank screen, there is a dearth of precedent for a fat, butch film character to communicate sexual allure, either to fellow characters or to an audience who has been groomed to lust after thin, feminine women. The energy that Haas brings to these scenes suggests an undercurrent of resigned bewilderment.
Margaret socially functions as a sexual being by virtue of existing within a subculture of lesbian sex work, but that subculture largely retains real-world beauty standards, rendering her body simultaneously unattractive and sexually commodified. Jo explains to Margaret how she is seen by potential clients: “You’re the type of lesbian they are mortified to be seen with… they do not want to be caught with you. So they’re gonna pay you extra to sneak around with them… honestly, you should have so much more money.” Thin, femme Jo takes on the role of Margaret’s docent, as well as her foil. Carefree (and often careless), Jo opts to do sex work as a way of rebelling against her wealthy upbringing. Despite repeatedly stating that she is not sexually attracted to women, she is more experienced and successful than Margaret in their profession. In one scene, the two walk down a busy Manhattan street as Jo casually claims to have slept with every woman they pass, while Margaret seems to barely keep up with mentally processing what her friend is telling her.
Margaret’s allergies are triggered while visiting a client’s house.
The film continues to grapple with the clashing expectations of Margaret’s profession and appearance through a sequence of encounters with a rich, conservative client (Susan Ziegler). During their first encounter, the client asks Margaret to take her clothes off. In opposition to the sexy tone she ought to set, she chastely removes her bra and underwear once she is under the bedsheet. (Her client coquettishly refers to this maneuver as a “magic trick.”) While another film might construct an erotic scene with gliding closeups and sensual music, this one involves a stationary shot of Margaret squirming and rocking under the sheet as her client waits patiently off to the side, amplified sounds of rustling cloth the only soundtrack. The scene self-consciously buys into the mainstream trope that “nobody wants to see” fat bodies or expressions of queer sexuality. The client obviously wants to see Margaret’s body and have sex with her, but Margaret remains in her culturally sanctioned role of chaste lesbian/unseen fat person to the point of absurdity.
Unsurprisingly, this is not a film that passes up a chance to satirize the right wing. Margaret’s aforementioned client has hired two men (Charles Rogers and Lee Eaton) to dress as cops, burst into her hotel room, and terrorize Margaret, who is unaware that the scene is staged. In the second of three scenes to this effect, Margaret is completely naked. Fat bodies in a state of undress are usually cause for a film protagonist to express disgust, with the expectation that the audience will empathize with that disgust. This time, however, the fat body belongs to our protagonist. She isn’t modestly positioned with her back to the camera or cheekily blocked by an object in the foreground. The audience sees her full frontal in the center of the screen, flanked by the two cops pointing guns at her. As with her “striptease,” the camera is unwavering. This static view heightens our sense of Margaret’s shock and embarrassment, but is also confrontational. This is a film that asks the audience to relate to a fat, lesbian protagonist: if a viewer has been trying to empathize with Margaret by downplaying her size or queerness up to this point in the movie, those characteristics have become starkly unavoidable.
The male gaze that reinforces standards of thinness and straightness and is ubiquitous in cinema, even if only present in a handful of scenes in The Foxy Merkins, is embodied in this scene by the two cops. They repeatedly tell Margaret to drop what she’s holding, despite her protests that she isn’t holding anything and attempts to placate them by making dropping motions with her empty hands. They even insist that she has “something tied around [her] waist” and is wearing “a collared shirt,” as if they have no sense of what a fat woman’s body looks like in the nude. An absurdist feedback loop is created of a command that cannot be followed and cooperation that is inherently uncooperative. This dynamic is reminiscent of the often frustrating relationship that queer and fat people have with a dominant culture that demands compliance even when attempts to do so are demonstrably futile. We still hear voices of authority telling us to “drop it” with regards to weight and desire for non-heteronormative love and sex, despite evidence that diets don’t work in the long run and sexual orientation can’t be changed at will.
But these two men have no genuine authority, they have been ordered to act as police by the client. As Jo later explains to Margaret, “It’s her fetish, it’s her kink. She likes to see people naked with the police.” The client watches these confrontations from behind the bedsheets, distancing herself from the situation by feigning shock and claiming that Margaret showed up in her room uninvited. This rich, white, thin woman who is hiding her own queerness to maintain her privilege actively seeks pleasure from seeing the oppression of marginalized people. Their third date even includes a Black woman, ostensibly the client’s maid, getting shot by the cops. Jo, who has the privileges of her appearance and wealthy upbringing, similarly benefits from the situation, as she has been paid to withhold from Margaret that the scenes aren’t real. The client’s fetish parallels the common use of schadenfreude in film to entertain at the expense of not only fat people, but people of color, sex workers, and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people.
Of course, The Foxy Merkins is a comedy, and the scenarios it presents are not as cruel as the realities it satirizes, or even the films to which it pays homage. The pretend bust is the closest Margaret comes to experiencing violence on the job, and even that ends with the cops and their shooting victim laughing and walking offscreen together. Nevertheless, the lighthearted humor speaks to real disparities in media representation. The audience is not allowed to forget that Margaret is occupying a position that the film industry did not historically intend to include someone of her sexuality, gender expression, or size. Both as a lesbian hooker and as a film character, her existence is a struggle. She ultimately realizes that she must move on from the former role, but as the latter, she is a quiet triumph.
Tessa Racked is a Women’s Studies major who makes a living as a social worker, writes about fat representation in film at Consistent Panda Bear Shape, and dispenses witticisms @tessa_racked. They live in Chicago.
For ‘Frances Ha’ is not a film where “boy-meets-girl,” and there is definitely no diamond ring. The love story of ‘Frances Ha’ is between the titular character, Frances (Greta Gerwig) and her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), and it is precisely this friendship between two women which questions, resists, and challenges the definition of love posed by the (primarily) heterosexual and (almost always) heteronormative romcom genre.
This guest post by Sarah Smyth appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.
The film opens with a montage of the central couple play-fighting, dancing, reading, cooking, and doing laundry together, which establishes the seemingly blissful and idyllic domestic set-up between the two characters. As the narrative progresses, however, the couple become subject to the usual trials and tribulations of the characters in romantic comedies. Their relationship is complicated by external forces, which becomes intensified by jealousy and miscommunication, before the couple are finally reunited and reconciled.
However, despite the possibility of reducing Frances Ha to a set of generic conventions, to do so is not hugely productive. Firstly, this undermines the charm, intelligence, and self-awareness of the film. Secondly, by only examining Frances Ha in terms of how it upholds generic conventions, we remain unable to see the ways in which the film challenges this very generic set-up. For Frances Ha is not a film where “boy-meets-girl,” and there is definitely no diamond ring. The love story of Frances Ha is between the titular character, Frances (Greta Gerwig) and her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), and it is precisely this friendship between two women which questions, resists, and challenges the definition of love posed by the (primarily) heterosexual and (almost always) heteronormative romcom genre.
Frances Ha is a love story between two friends, Frances and Sophie.
Frances and Sophie are sitting at a table outside eating
Discussing the friendship between Frances and Sophie in an interview in Sight and Soundmagazine, Greta Gerwig claims:
“We never started out saying we were going to make a love story between these two friends but it just emerged in the writing of the scenes. Then we went back and actually beat it out like a romcom: she has the girl, she loses the girl, she tries to make the girl jealous. It’s like a will-they-won’t-they tension to the story but you’re never quite sure what they will or won’t do.”
Co-writing the film with Noah Baumbach, who also directed Frances Ha and is Gerwig’s real-life partner, Gerwig’s comments make clear the intended underlying “romantic” trajectory and generic mapping of the film.
Although the friendship between Frances and Sophie sits within the structure of a conventional romantic narrative, Frances Ha never presents these two women as having an explicitly homosexual relationship. Frances and Sophie never engage in sexual activities with each other, nor share anything other than an asexual bed. Yet, within the heteronormative romcom genre and, indeed, wider Western society, which rigidly privileges the heterosexual, monogamous, and cis-gendered couple, the friendship between Frances and Sophie is figured as distinctly queer. In one moment, Frances even jokes to Sophie that, “we are like a lesbian couple that doesn’t have sex anymore.”
In “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich writes, “if we consider the possibility…that all women exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify as lesbian or not.” I move away from Rich’s use of the term “lesbian” in favour of the term “queer” as, in this context, the use of “lesbian” reinforces the binary construction of gender and sexuality which, in turn, undermines her proposition of a fluid sexuality. Nevertheless, Rich helpfully dispels the notion of heterosexuality as naturally or essentially given, broadening out the consideration of a fulfilling and satisfying love as going beyond the constraints imposed by rigid heterosexuality. In addition, Rich also demonstrates the way in which Western society’s continual re-iteration of “natural” heterosexuality only serves to reinforce patriarchal interests and perpetuate gender inequality: ‘”The enforcement of heterosexuality for women [is] a means of assuring male right of physical, economic, and emotional access.” In this way, through the centrality of the female friendship to the film’s love story, Frances Ha suggests the possibility of women breaking free from the oppressive constraints of heteronormativity and heterosexuality. By suggesting the possibility of finding love, commitment, satisfaction, and fulfilment from female friendship, Frances Ha not only breaks down a construction of sexuality, love, and relationships which privileges patriarchal power, dominance, and authority. It also proposes a future where there is an alternative, or at least coexistence with, the conventional heteronormative “female” script of marriage, children, and a house in the suburbs.
Frances and Sophie lying in bed together indicates their queer, but not homosexual, relationship.
Frances and Sophie are lying in bed together
However, before we proclaim to have arrived at a feminist utopia, and run off into the sunset with our best female friend, Frances Ha makes plain the difficulties and complications faced by these friendships. The film continually presents a dissonance between the Frances and Sophie’s fantasy of the future and the expectations of conventional heteronormativity. These expectations continually impose themselves on Frances and Sophie’s friendship, threatening to destroy this queer alternative of female fulfilment. Near the beginning of the film, as the two women sit in bed together, Frances asks Sophie to “tell me the story of us,” which, within cinema, is the kind of pillow talk that’s reserved for heterosexual couples. Frances says Sophie will be “this awesomely bitchy publishing mogul,” and Sophie says Frances will be “this famous modern dancer.” They will have lovers, no children, and honorary degrees – “so many honorary degrees.” Their fantasy subverts heteronormativity’s conventional trajectory of a woman’s life, with Frances and Sophie privileging economic independence, career and academic success, sexual satisfaction, and, most importantly, their friendship above husbands and children. However, Sophie is also in a conventional, heterosexual, monogamous relationship with Patch (Patrick Heusinger), which continually attempts to destroy Frances and Sophie’s queer friendship. In one poignant moment, Frances says to Sophie, “it’s just, if something funny happens on the way to the deli, you’ll only tell one person and that’ll be Patch, and I’ll never hear about it.” Frances’ anxieties make clear the realities of the heteronormative construction of relationships, which privileges the monogamous and heterosexual couple, causing Frances and Sophie’s relationship to wither in comparison.
Sophie most explicitly represents the conflict between alternative forms of female fulfilment through queer friendships and heteronormativity’s imposed expectations of success and satisfaction. In the end, she does not follow the fantasy that she shares with Frances. More concerned with the outward appearance of success than her own happiness, she gives up her job in a publishing house and, possibly, her financial independence, to move to Tokyo with Patch. Although she writes a travel blog in which, as Frances says, she “looks so happy,” she later reveals to Frances that she wants to leave Patch and Japan. In this confessional scene, Frances hopes to repair their relationship and renew their fantasy claiming, “maybe we’ll move back to New York at the same time and be like women who rediscover themselves after a divorce… We should get apartments close to each other in Brooklyn.” However, this idyllic moment is temporal, and the fantasy never becomes realised in the film as Sophie leaves the next morning to return to her boyfriend. Despite acknowledging her unhappiness, Sophie ends up marrying Patch at the end of the film. Frances Ha, it seems, is deeply pessimistic towards women finding fulfilment and satisfaction within their female friendships so long as heteronormativity continues as the dominant social order.
Sophie and Patch’s conventional romantic relationship poses a continual challenge to Frances and Sophie’s friendship.
Sophie and Patch stand together
Nevertheless, Frances Ha offers the possibility of women finding happiness and fulfilment both within their own terms and within their female friendships. Frances’ success at the end of the film is not in finding a man and getting married, but in choreographing her own show and finding her own place to live. In addition, the film suggests that the friendship between Frances and Sophie may not only continue to exist but to flourish. During a disastrous dinner party, in a moment of disarming honesty, Frances explains what she wants from a relationship:
“It’s that thing when you’re with someone and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it. But it’s a party, and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining, and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes, but not because you’re possessive or it’s precisely sexual, but because that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don’t have the ability to perceive them. That’s what I want out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess. Love.”
In the final scene between Frances and Sophie, they look over to each other in a crowded room, catch each other’s eye and flash a goofy smile. In that moment, they both exist within their own alternative dimension. In that fleeting and temporal instant, they exist outside of the heteronormative construction of what constitutes a meaningful and satisfying relationship. In that look, they confirm to each other and to the audience that their relationship, so difficult, complex, challenging, powerful, passionate, and meaningful is one of support, fulfilment, and, ultimately love.
Greta Gerwig’s interview appears in the August 2013 issue of Sight and Sound.
Sarah Smyth recently finished a Master’s Degree in Critical Theory with an emphasis on gender and film at the University of Sussex, UK. Her dissertation examined the abject male body in cinema, particularly focusing on the spatiality of the anus (yes, really). She’s based now in London, UK and you can follow her on Twitter at @sarahsmyth91.
Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.
How many distinctive, acclaimed films about queer women can be released in American theaters at the same time? If we extrapolate from the actions of film distributors in the past few months, the answer is apparently: only one. Concussion was named one of the top 20 films of the year by Slate’sDana Stevens and was also named one of the top films of 2013 in Salon. Shortly after its premiere, at last year’s Sundance, The Weinstein Company acquired it for distribution. For most films that acquisition (and the later support from reviews in traditional media) would mean a national release, but the film had a very limited run in theaters this fall and never played a theater in my art-house-friendly city. The film is on Video On Demand, iTunes, and Google Play, but deserves much more attention than most films that never have a national theatrical run.
This film about a queer woman is, unlike Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed and written by a queer woman (Stacie Passon who is nominated for “Best First Feature” in the Independent Spirit Awards ), and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed Blue as a product of the male gaze. Instead of a teenage protagonist, the main character in Concussion, Abby (played by Robin Weigert: Andrew O’Hehir in Salonsummed up her performance as “OMFG”), is a 40-something, stay-at-home Mom, married to another woman and living in the suburbs.
When her son accidentally hits her in the face with a baseball, we see the confusion and blood in the family car ride to the hospital, as she moans to no one in particular, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.”
In the ER Abby says she is going back to work in the city (and that she really means it this time). Abby doesn’t need to work for money: her spouse, Kate, is a divorce attorney, kept busy by the dissatisfied wives in their social circle. We see the wives’ well-maintained bodies in slow motion, at the beginning of the film, in spin and yoga classes as David Bowie sings on the soundtrack, “Oh you pretty things…”
Passon knows this world well She lives in the town (Montclair) Abby does. She is married to a woman and has children, one of whom accidentally hit her in the face with a baseball. The parallels between her life and Abby’s may be why the character and setting seem so fully realized.
Abby for the most part blends in with her straight women friends but we see she’s different from them–and not just in her orientation. She reads books while she vacuums. When a friend is circulating a “new motherhood” survey for an article in a parenting magazine, Abby writes of dreams in which she sticks her then newborn son in the microwave–and other dreams in which she and her son are married. She writes, “My poor baby, I didn’t know whether to kill him, fuck him, or eat him.”
At times Abby’s queerness does separate her from the other women. When Abby mentions to her friend that one of the group of women they work out with is “cute,” the friend (played by Janel Maloney) reproaches Abby, “She’s not a lesbian!”
Abby and the contractor in the loft
Abby starts work with a contractor to refurbish a city loft. As they transform the apartment, she transforms too, first hiring women to have sex with her and then working out of the loft as a high-priced escort, “Eleanor,” whose clients are all women.
A woman character turning to sex work for reasons other than money is usually a male artist’s conceit, as in Luis Buñuel’s great Belle de Jour, which features stunning, beautifully dressed, doctor’s wife, Catherine Deneuve, working in a brothel while her handsome, attentive (but clueless) husband sees his patients.In women’s memoirs of sex work (like Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl) the money is the point of the work (as it is with most work).
A sex worker character whose clients are all women (when the vast majority of sex work clients are men) is also usually the creation of a straight male artist–and is usually a male character so the work avoids any explicit same-sex scenes.
Abby’s second encounter with an escort
Perhaps because Concussion turns that last trope on its head (or perhaps because New York is a big city that can cater to many kinds of tastes) we accept the conceit of a woman over 40 seeing women clients (for $800 a session) every day. The queer women we see in sexual situations in Concussion are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in Blue: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.
Robin Weigert doesn’t have a Barbie Doll face or a porn model’s body, but does have a passing resemblance to the young Ellen Barkin. Weigert exudes the same confidence and sexiness–reminding us those two qualities are often one and the same.
Concussion has a scene similar to one in Blue in which a straight man interrogates a queer woman about her sexuality. But because Abby is in her 40s, the mocking tone she takes with him is completely different from what we hear from the 20-something main character in Blue, Adele.
The female gaze?
In Concussion are we seeing the female gaze? Well, we’re definitely seeing one woman’s gaze, that of Passon. The sex scenes in Concussion, unlike Blue, don’t seem like outtakes from an amateur porn video, but flow from the other nonsexual encounters in the film. (Concussion’s expert cinematographer is David Kruta.) We also don’t see full frontal nudity from any of the actresses, and although we see the bare breasts of some of Eleanor’s clients, we never see hers. Eleanor/ Abby is both a psychological and corporeal enigma to us.
Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.
Abby and her spouse
In the city we see Abby in punk rock t-shirts (vintage Blondie and the now-defunct C.B.G.B) and boyshort underwear and in the suburbs we see her fitting in with her friends in yoga pants and an expensive down-filled jacket. At a suburban dinner party the guests talk about their days hanging out in pre-gentrified downtown New York clubs, Squeezebox and The Limelight, and we realize yes, many of the club kids of the 90s have become comfortable, suburban Moms and Dads.
The loft is decorated with posters for Louise Bourgeois and The Guerrilla Girls and has Diet For a New America on the bookshelf, distinct touches some of us in the audience recognize from our own living spaces. In the dialogue we hear echoes of conversations we too have had (or overheard) at parties: “I finally took the Myers-Briggs.” Writers of satire often seem to want their audience to hate the people, especially the women, they create (the Annette Bening character in American Beautyis just one example). Passon’s satire is much trickier–and kinder. She wants us to recognize these people. She wants us to recognize ourselves in them.
The film Passon says inspired Concussion is from the 1970s: Jeanne Dielman.., (and is also written and directed by a queer woman, Chantal Akerman).In Concussion, asin Dielman, we see the first signs of the housewife/sex-worker protagonist starting to unravel when she fails to stick to her usual daily routine: Abby misses picking up the kids after school for the first time in six years.Unlike Dielman, Passon’s film captures the monotony of domestic tasks, but doesn’t ask the audience to endure that boredom themselves.
Although Concussion was made before queer marriage became legal in New Jersey, the film brings up some interesting questions about the queer community’s quest for “equality.” What if we become just as disenchanted with being soccer Moms as straight women sometimes do? What then? At the end Abby throws herself into a home renovation project, the way so many of our married friends, straight and queer do, and we marvel at the mystery of other people’s marriages, not just in the film, but all around us.
