Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Stephanie‘s Picks:
Does Lena Dunham’s “Casual Racism” Matter? by Samhita Mukhopadhyay via Feministing
This Is Perfect and That Is Not Sarcasm by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville
Megan‘s Picks:
The Glamorous Lure of Hollywood Violence by Madeleine Gyory via Women’s Media Center
Remembering Phyllis Diller by Kelsey Wallace via Bitch Magazine Blog
Brenda Chapman on Writing Brave by Susan J. Morris via Women and Hollywood 
What have you been reading this week?? Tell us in the comments!

‘Young Justice’ Grows Up

The Season 1 Team From Left to Right: Superboy, Zatanna, Kid Flash, Rocket, Robin, Miss Martian, Artemis, and Aqualad.
Written by Myrna Waldron.

SPOILER WARNING – No major plot twists are revealed, but there are minor spoilers.

It’s a sadly accepted fact that the superhero genre just isn’t women-friendly. The few times we have gotten a major motion picture centered around a female superhero (Supergirl, Catwoman, Elektra), the results have been abysmal to say the least…leading executives to conclude that superheroines aren’t cost-effective (of course). Films based in both the DC and the Marvel universes all star male superheroes, with heroines only appearing in ensemble groups like X-Men, Fantastic Four and The Avengers (curiously enough, all Marvel properties). It doesn’t look like this is going to change any time soon, since all of the upcoming superhero blockbusters are sequels and reboots to already established male-centric franchises. I fully expect Batman to be rebooted AGAIN before we get a Wonder Woman film.

So it was with trepidation that I started watching Young Justice, an animated TV series centered around the teenage protégées of the members of the Justice League. Produced by Greg Weisman, who created cult classic animated series Gargoyles, I was encouraged by Weisman’s involvement in the show, as Gargoyles’ heroine Elisa Maza is a rare animated lead character who is not only fully competent and well developed, but is also a POC, (Person of Colour) as she is half African-American, half Native American. The series is definitely aimed at a teenage audience, as it has an overarching storyline (rather than self-contained episodes), moral ambiguities, and romance (naturally). Over the course of the first season (Young Justice is now currently in its second season) the teenage team gradually forms, with a combination of well-known and obscure characters, male and female, human and non-human, and white and racial minority. The main cast is as follows:
Green Arrow, Aquaman, Flash and the four protégées, Speedy, Robin, Aqualad and Kid Flash
Robin/Dick Grayson, Batman’s very well known protégée, who is talented with acrobatics, explosives, and computer hacking.
Aqualad/Kaldur ‘Ahm, Aquaman’s protégée, who is Atlantean, so he has the powers of water breathing and manipulation of electricity and water “blades.” Although non-human, he has the appearance of a young black man with blonde hair.
Kid Flash/Wally West, The Flash’s nephew, who, while not as fast as his uncle, has the same super-speed abilities.
Superboy/Conner Kent, a weeks-old clone using Superman’s DNA. He has most, but not all, of Superman’s powers, including super-strength and invulnerability. He lacks the heat-vision, x-ray vision and flying abilities, but can still, as they say, leap tall buildings with a single bound.
Miss Martian/M’gann (Megan) M’orzz, a green-skinned Martian immigrant who is the first female character introduced. Initially pretends to be the niece of Martian Manhunter to conceal a secret about her true Martian identity. She has by far the most powerful and varied abilities, including telepathy, mind-reading, super-strength, flight, shapeshifting, and most importantly, pilots a biological ship that the team uses to travel to their assignments.
Artemis/Artemis Crock, Green Arrow’s protégée posing as his niece. Predictably, she has the same abilities as Green Arrow, including incredible accuracy in archery, use of arrowheads with varying effects (explosive, etc), and general martial arts abilities. Although blonde, she is eventually revealed to be half Vietnamese.
Zatanna, the daughter of Zatara. She has highly varied magical abilities, which require a spell to be spoken in reverse order. Although powerful, her father still outclasses her.
Speedy/Red Arrow/Roy Harper, Green Arrow’s previous protégée. Went solo and renamed himself Red Arrow after still being treated like a sidekick during his introduction to the Justice League. Has the same abilities as Artemis, and only assists the team occasionally.
Rocket/Raquel Ervin, the apprentice of Icon. Gets her powers from her inertia belt, alien technology that grants her the ability to manipulate kinetic energy for flight, super-strength and as a force field. Like Icon, she is (or at least appears to be) African-American.
As a general whole, the equality between the sexes on the team, and the inclusion of several characters of colour, is encouraging. However, the series takes far too long to get to this point. I was incredibly dismayed to notice that for the first episode and 95% of the second episode (which premiered together as a “movie”) no female characters speak at all. Other than Aqualad, the first two episodes are, well, a white sausage-fest. Miss Martian is introduced at the very end of the second episode, and remains a token female for several episodes more. Black Canary, a Justice League member, is assigned to train the team in hand-to-hand combat, (which is a good idea, as it establishes a female hero in a position of leadership and competence) but only appears in episodes occasionally. Artemis is not introduced until the 6th episode, with Zatanna and Rocket joining in the 15th and 25th episodes respectively. Considering that the first season is only 26 episodes, that’s pretty sad.
The series also takes a very long time to pass the Bechdel Test. For those who are unfamiliar with this term, the Bechdel Test is used to help determine female representation in film & television. In order to pass, the media must A) Have two or more named female characters, B) Who talk to each other, C) About something other than a man. Unfortunately, while Miss Martian and Artemis talk to each other, they only talked about the male members of the team (and especially about Superboy, as there is a very minor love triangle surrounding him). 

Artemis: You embarrassed Superboy!
Megan: Didn’t hear him say that. Must you challenge everyone?
Artemis: Where I come from, that’s how you survive.

Cheshire and Artemis
The series does not pass the test until the 12th episode during a flashback scene depicting a younger Artemis begging her sister (antagonist/anti-hero Cheshire) not to run away from home in order to escape their abusive father. 

Cheshire: You should get out, too. I’d let you come with me, but you’d slow me down.
Artemis: Someone has to be here when Mom gets out.
Cheshire: Haven’t you learned anything? In this family, it’s every girl for herself.

Fortunately, after this barrier is finally broken, conversations between the female characters become a regular occurrence, including sequences where Megan and Artemis team up, and an entire subplot in one episode centred around Artemis and Zatanna having a “girl’s night out” and fighting crime together after Artemis discovers that Megan and Conner have become a couple.

Artemis: (seeing a crime scene with police presence) Whatever happened here is over. I want some action.
Zatanna: Then maybe you need to talk…about Conner and Megan..or whatever.
Artemis: What I need is something to beat up.

The female characters in the show are generally well developed, with Miss Martian getting the most attention and development. It’s a little unfortunate that a lot of the character development surrounding Megan and Artemis is about their romantic entanglements with Superboy and Kid Flash respectively, but that is not unusual for a teenage audience show. One thing I appreciated was that Megan and Conner become a couple fairly early on (the 11th episode) rather than spending an entire season with endless sexual tension (which, unfortunately, is what happens with Artemis and Wally). 
Speaking of which, I also have to say how much Kid Flash annoys me. His treatment of women is pretty deplorable; he constantly flirts with Megan despite her total lack of interest, and butts heads with Artemis due to his resentment at her replacing Speedy/Red Arrow. 
Red Arrow and Artemis argue while Green Arrow looks on

Artemis: (teasing Wally, who was preparing to go to the beach) Wall-man! Love the uniform. What exactly are your powers?
Wally: Uh, who’s this?
Artemis: Artemis. Your new teammate.
Wally: Kid Flash. Never heard of you.
Green Arrow: Um, she’s my new protegee.
Wally: W-what happened to your old one?
Roy: Well, for starters, he doesn’t go by “Speedy” anymore. Call me Red Arrow.
Green Arrow: Roy! You look —
Roy: Replaceable.
Green Arrow: It’s not like that, you told me you were going solo.
Roy: So why waste time finding a sub? Can she even USE that bow?
Artemis: Yes. She can.
Wally: WHO ARE YOU?
Artemis & Green Arrow: I’m/She’s his/my niece.
Dick: Another niece?
Kaldur: But she is not your replacement. We have always wanted you on the team. And we have no quota on archers.
Wally: And if we did, you KNOW who we’d pick.
Artemis: Whatever, Baywatch. I’m here to stay.

Miss Martian and Artemis in general are not treated as equals until later; Megan makes an honest mistake in one battle (she assumes that an antagonistic android with wind powers is their “den mother” Red Tornado, who has similar powers and implied he would be testing them) and is made to feel foolish for it, and Artemis is treated like an outsider due to the team’s loyalty to Roy. Both are distrusted for their general lack of practical battle experience, despite Superboy being theoretically just as inexperienced. He may be invulnerable, but he is literally months old and is extremely rash and sullen. His impulsive actions during the 5th episode, where he abandoned the team’s mission to fight an enemy on his own, jeopardized the team’s safety far more than Miss Martian’s mistake did earlier, and yet he does not have to endure nearly as much blame and condescension as she did.

Superboy: You tricked us into thinking Mr. Twister was Red Tornado!
Aqualad: She didn’t do it on purpose.
Robin: It was a rookie mistake. We shouldn’t listen.
Kid Flash: You are pretty inexperienced. Hit the showers. We’ll take it from here.
Superboy: Stay out of our way.
Miss Martian: I was just trying to be part of the team.
Aqualad: To be honest, I’m not sure we really have a team.

In terms of racial representation, although the Young Justice team is still primarily comprised of white heroes, having three major characters that are racial minorities is better representation than usual. The alien heroes, Miss Martian and Superboy, also serve as metaphorical representations of racial minorities through their, well, alienation from the team members native to Earth. Although it is tricky to show inclusiveness and diversity without looking like a cheesefest from the 90s, there is definite room for improvement – ideally, the ratio between white and minority characters should be at least 50-50. In addition to this, I was somewhat uncomfortable by Kaldur’s character arc; as the most mature member of the team he is a natural leader, but makes it clear he eventually plans to step down once Robin comes of age. It has been previously established that Robin is usually the leader of these teen teams, and he is by far the most well-known character, but it seemed problematic that the racial minority is acquiescing his position of leadership to a white male. 
Another area of representation that needs to be improved is inclusion of LGBTQ characters. So far, all of the romantic relationships depicted in the show have been heterosexual. While not every character has had their romantic interests explored, none have been established as LGBTQ either. If the formerly staid, heterocentric and whitewashed Archie Comics can reinvent itself to include permanent minority and gay characters, there’s no reason that a TV show that skews towards an older audience cannot do so. It would be even more exceptional and encouraging, albeit unlikely, if there was a trans* character introduced in the series, as it is unfortunately very uncommon to see trans* characters represented in the media.
The Season 2 Team, Clockwise From Left: Robin II, Wonder Girl, Lagoon Boy, Bumblebee, Batgirl, Miss Martian, Beast Boy, Superboy and Blue Beetle.
On the bright side, the writers and producers of Young Justice are definitely improving on some of the criticisms I have detailed here. As I mentioned, although the series starts off with far too much emphasis on white male characters, more female characters and more minorities are gradually added to the cast. The second season improves on this even further by introducing even more minority and female characters, including Batgirl, Beast Boy (who, although originally a white male, is technically no longer human), Blue Beetle (who is Hispanic), Bumblebee (who was DC’s first black female superhero), Lagoon Boy (another Atlantean like Aqualad, but less human in appearance), and Wonder Girl. Other additions to the cast in the second season include Tim Drake, who assumes the Robin title after Dick Grayson becomes Nightwing, and Impulse, The Flash’s grandson from the future.
The series also is notable for having a very mature storyline. As I mentioned earlier, the episodes are not self-contained, but all form one continuous plotline. Themes such as sacrifice, wanting to prove oneself, child abuse, and living in someone else’s shadow are prevalent, as well as moral ambiguities such as the implications of being a clone, accepting a parent who is a former convict, and whether antagonists have (human) rights and if the ends justify the means. There are also subtle representations of sexuality, as in the second season some characters are depicted cohabiting, and others having shown to have married and had a child. Previous animated series based on DC comics such as Justice League, Team Titans and Batman: The Animated Series, which all had mature, morally ambiguous stories, are an obvious influence here.
As a general whole, I was very pleasantly surprised with Young Justice once it got over its initial speed bumps. It’s still got a long way to go, but I can say fairly confidently that the representations of women and POC are head-and-shoulders above many other contemporary animated series. The second season indicates that the writers and producers have learned from their mistakes, and are becoming more inclusive as the series goes on.  In fact, one popular scene in the fifth episode of the second season points out how absurd it is that an all-female team is considered unusual.

Nightwing: …but Biyalia’s dictator, Queen Bee, is another story. Her ability to control the minds of men is why Alpha is an all-female squad for this mission.
Batgirl: Oh REALLY? And would you have felt the need to justify an all male squad for this mission?
Nightwing: Uh…ahem. There’s no right answer for that, is there? Uh…Nightwing out.
Batgirl: Queen Bee isn’t the only one who can mess with a man’s mind.

The series will be resuming the second season this fall. I look forward to seeing just how much better the series can get in terms of equal representation. Like its teenage protagonists, Young Justice itself is growing up.
All images gratefully borrowed from the Young Justice Wiki

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.

Women in Science Fiction Week: 21st Century Mammy: Older Black Women Are the Lowest Rung on the Visibility Ladder of Science Fiction

Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) in Star Trek: The Next Generation

 Guest post written by Joanne Bardsley.

At some point in the near future, a mass genocide, coupled with a widespread sterilisation programme, occurs. This results in an overwhelmingly white population (genetic preservation orders are been enacted for redheads and natural blondes). Compulsory euthanasia exists for the elderly, although four people at a time are excepted because of their great leadership skills. Babies are raised Brave New World style in farms far away from the public eye but girl children often succumb to a mysterious illness which kills them before they reach adulthood. The women who do survive this mysterious illness suffer changes to their metabolism so that they never need to eat and never put on weight.

The two older black women who have survived the depredations enacted on non-whites, females and the elderly are so relieved to be alive that they devote their whole lives to the service of others.

The Oracle (Gloria Foster) in The Matrix and The Matrix Revolutions

The lack of representation of older black women in science fiction is coupled with a complete lack of interest in developing any kind of independent agenda for their characters. Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Oracle in The Matrix, the only two named older black women that I (or anybody else that I asked) could think of,  are recycled wholesale from the stereotypical mammy of the slave era.

Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) in Gone with the Wind

The main features of the stereotypical mammy are grounded in a white fantasy; often these women were wet nurses, bringing up their white charges in a far more intimate relationship than either have with their biological families. It is not Scarlett O’Hara’s mother who fusses about her eating habits, does up her dress, or worries about her relationships. It is Mammy. Scarlett, and the viewers of Gone With the Wind, never consider what Mammy might think of their relationship, or worry that she might have children of her own whom she cannot raise. We are content to construct a fantasy in which Mammy wants nothing more than to feed, clothe and care for her white charge.

Neither Guinan nor the Oracle appear to have any other desire than to help others. Guinan does have hidden talents; she can outwit Captain Picard and outshoot Lieutenant Worf, she is even prepared to take on the omnipotent Q. However, her main preoccupation is serving food, drink and advice to the crew of the Starship Enterprise. The Oracle literally only exists to guide others, she is the matrix’s help programme. Her help comes with a side of cookies and is served in a dingy kitchen.

The preoccupation with food seems to be a particular feature of the mammy and possibly explains her continued presence in our fantasies. She exists to feed us. She alone of all women in the future is allowed to be plump and to wear less than skin tight clothing. Her presence is symbolically and physically maternal, yet her slave status denies her the independent desires of a mother, and removes the rival demands of a father; she exists for us alone.


Joanne Bardsley teaches English and Media Studies in North West London. She is currentlystudying for a Masters in Education.

Guest Writer Wednesday: In Which ‘A Dangerous Method’ Forces Me to Change My Mind About Keira Knightley

Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein in A Dangerous Method
Cross-post by Didion originally published at Feminéma.
I totally get it now.
I’ve never quite understood why Keira Knightley is an A-list star, nor why she gets such good roles (like Atonement, Pride & Prejudice, and Never Let Me Go) – until I saw her in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2011). It always seemed to me she was being cast against type. Whereas those earlier films insisted she was a quintessential English rose, as Lizzie Bennet in P&P she appeared to me more likely to bite one of her co-stars than to to impress anyone with her fine eyes.
What Cronenberg gets (and I didn’t, till now) is that Knightley’s angular, toothy, twitchy affect shouldn’t be suppressed but mined instead.
Keira Knightley
Now that I’ve finally seen A Dangerous Method, I can’t imagine another actor taking on the role of the hysteric Sabina Spielrein to such effect. Jewish, Russian, fiercely intelligent and tortured by her inner demons, Sabina is the perfect dark mirror sister of Jung’s blonde and blue-eyed wife (Sarah Gadon), who always appears placid, wide-eyed and proper, and sometimes apologizes for errors such as giving birth to a daughter rather than a son. Now that’s a rose of a girl.
Sarah Gadon as Emma Jung

Maybe she seems exaggerated, but Jung’s wife embodies the self-control and physical containment of their elite class as well as their whiteness. No wonder Jung (Michael Fassbender) is so thrown by Sabina. For all her physical contortions, Sabina is also open to change, open to the darkest of insights. She opens up her mind and her memories to him with stunning willingness, revealing black thoughts associated with dark sexual urges. The more she ceases repressing those memories and associations, the more she reconciles them and begins to heal — and begins to use her quicksilver smarts in a way that shows her full embrace of the “talking cure”. No wonder she captivates Jung’s imagination, which is only the beginning of his growing disloyalty to his wife.
Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung and Keira Knightley

Knightley’s impossible skinniness only enhances her performance here. Whereas in most other films her body gets presented to us as yet another ridiculous size-00 slap in the face to the rest of us fat pigs (and don’t you forget it, Ashley Judd), in A Dangerous Method her body exemplifies a lifetime of self-punishing neurosis. There’s nothing more improbable than seeing her heavy dark eyebrows and her olive skin — and hearing about her sexual arousal via humiliation — all the while bound up in those cruel corsets and lacy, white, high-necked dresses that on any other woman would be persuasive signifiers of her chastity.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that what I found most impressive about Knightley’s performance was the way she showed how the later, “healed” Spielrein – the one who no longer screams and juts out her chin — was a recognizable incarnation of the earlier hysteric. Her clenched and slightly hunched shoulders, her black looks, her tight mouth. She’s a whirlwind of intellect and energy, and the performance is brilliant. As the excellent JB writes over at The Fantom Country, “Even in relatively calmer moments, she seems trapped inside a state of ceaseless panic, caught, gasping for air, in the dragnet of some trawler that never sleeps.”

Keira Knightley
This is especially important for the contrast between her corporeal presence versus that of Jung and Freud, who exert an absurd degree of self-control and containment, like disembodied brains. When she kisses Jung for the first time, his weak response is to note, “It’s generally thought that the man should be the one to take the initiative.” When someone refers to the “darker differences” between the two, we know those differences are both racial and sexual — and that Spielrein is the dark one, the one whose vagina has needs and rages, and smells like a real woman’s vagina (thanks to Kartina Richardson’s terrific piece, “Keira Knightley’s Vagina”). It makes me wish that Knightley rather than Natalie Portman had appeared as the lead in Black Swan — again, a statement I never thought I’d make.

Keira Knightley
Spielrein and Jung’s other patient, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), both profess to a startling optimism about analysis: “Our job is to make our patients capable of freedom,” Gross pronounces, a sentiment Spielrein shares but cannot realize. Her own ecstasy peaks as Jung gives her erotic spankings; clearly, humiliation still retains its primary charge. The film doesn’t explore the gendered nature of hysteria, which brought so many women low during those decades a hundred years ago, but it does highlight how one’s freedom was limited by other cultural boundaries — most notably race. Spielrein looks genuinely crushed when her new interlocutor, Freud, pushes her down with the observation, “We’re Jews, Miss Spielrein — and Jews we will always be.”

Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud
We don’t very often call it hysteria anymore, but we still see manifestations of inexplicable corporeal neurosis in girls and women that defy explanation, as in the strangely infectious case in upstate New York this year. How amazing it would be to find a filmmaker to address the subject. I’ve always thought that someone could take the 1690s Salem witch hysteria as a case study, Arthur Miller-style, to try to explore some of the contributing factors behind such mass outbursts of tics, twitches, and personal misery. And I’d love to have Knightley involved again, honestly.
People love to talk about the synergy between Cronenberg and his frequent male lead, Mortensen, as being one of the great director-actor combinations of the last decade. But now that I’ve seen what Cronenberg got out of Knightley, I want him to unearth new roles for her instead so we can see more of what she can really do once she lets go of the English rose routine. I totally get it now: Knightley can act. And I’m genuinely looking forward to more of it.

Feminéma is a blog about feminism, cinéma, and popular culture kept by Didion, a university professor in Texas, who celebrates those rare moments when movies display unstereotyped characters and feature female directors and screenwriters behind the scenes. Most of all she just loves film. Take a look at feminema.wordpress.com.

Oscar Best Picture Nominee: ‘The Help’: Same Script, Different Cast

The Help is nominated for four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actress (Viola Davis), and Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain & Octavia Spencer), and has garnered numerous other nominations and awards.
This piece, by guest writer elle, first appeared at Bitch Flicks on October 5, 2011. 


The Help (2011)
A caveat: I have not seen The Help. I do not plan to see The Help, yet I feel pretty confident that I have The Help all figured out. If you don’t know about this film, please see this post. I’m going to ground my thoughts about The Help in two other documents I will link: Valerie Boyd’s review entitled, “‘The Help,’ a feel-good movie for white people” and “An Open Statement to the Fans of ‘The Help’” from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH). A brief description from Boyd:

“The Help”—the film adaptation of the best-selling novel by Atlanta author Kathryn Stockett—is a feel-good movie for a cowardly [wrt to the ways we deal (or don’t deal) with issues of race] nation. 

Despite its title, the film is not so much about the help—the black maids who kept many white Southern homes running before the civil rights movement gave them broader opportunities—as it is about the white women who employed and sometimes terrorized them. 

And there you have it, the problem at the heart of works like The Help that blossoms into myriad other problems—the centering of white women in a story that is supposed to be about women of color, the positioning of white women as saviors who give WoC voice. As my colleagues in the ABWH note:

Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers.

I want to meld these critiques of The Help with my own critique of phenomena that make movies like this possible. My critique is rooted in who I am: My name is elle, and I am a granddaughter of The Help. And while I can never begin (and would never want) to imagine myself as the voice of black domestic workers, I can at least share some of their own words with you and tell you some places you can find more of their words and thoughts.

Top 10 of 2011: Seriously? These Are the 100 Greatest Female Characters?

Total Film raised our ire twice in 2011, and both posts proved very popular. One of the facts we fight against is that there is a lack of great female characters in film. However, Total Film‘s list of the 100 greatest female characters illustrates so clearly the kinds of roles available to women and rewarded by male audiences. Here is our #3 post of 2011.
__________
This past Monday, Total Film published its list of the 100 Greatest Female Characters. As everyone knows, these Best Ever lists tend to have the pretty obvious problem of not being able to include everyone and, therefore, not being able to please everyone. But we here at Bitch Flicks found this particular list more problematic than usual. For a variety of reasons. Before we discuss the WTF-FAIL of this, check out the list below and/or scroll through the photo-list at Total Film (especially if you’re interested in their use of sexist language and images).
[…]
Basically, compiling a slew of antifeminist characters from antifeminist films and putting them on a list called The 100 Greatest Female Characters–while ironic–is kind of unacceptable. I’ve only barely grazed the surface of this nonsense. If you want to see some really messed up statistics surrounding this list, check out The Double R Diner for a much more in-depth analysis, including a look at the many characters who are victims of violence and sexual assault. 
So, readers, what female characters would you include on a list of the 100 Greatest?

See also: #10 in 2011, #9 in 2011, #8 in 2011, #7 in 2011, #6 in 2011, #5 in 2011, and #4 in 2011.

Animated Children’s Films: The Princess and the Frog

The Princess and the Frog (2009)
The Princess and the Frog is a Disney milestone for two reasons: it is the first hand-drawn animated motion picture from the company since 2004’s Home on The Range and features an African-American female heroine.
Also keep in mind that the last film co-starring a human princess was 1992’s Aladdin.
But hold that applause.
For these accomplishments mean little once the viewer realizes what is in store.
The poster of a pouting girl holding a frog amongst bugs, an alligator, and a snake amongst a dark, swampy background says it all. No cute fuzzy bunnies, kittens, or deer friends here.
Our characters: Tiana (originally to be Mamie–uh oh!), a two job hustling sassy twang lady with a lifelong dream of becoming a chef/owner of a fine restaurant. The leading man: disinherited, shallow, but very good looking, Prince Naveen. Tiana’s best friend since birth, Charlotte: a rich, apple-cheeked blond with ample curves to die for and a strange obsession with calling her sole parent “Big Daddy.” The villain: a top hat wearing, African mask collecting, voodoo havocking witch doctor with a smooth, seductive albeit evil voice, Dr. Facilier.
A bopping 1920’s New Orleans is where the story takes place.
The opening to the film was irking. After story time, little Charlotte demands a new dress and daddy begs Tiana’s mother to make her a new one. As the camera pans to several versions of the same pink dress, the kind black, very tired seamstress obediently obliges. Sadly, while she and Tiana leave, daddy spoils Charlotte’s silhouette with a puppy.
How cute!
Eye roll.
Tiana and her mom ride the bus back home- nice part of town disappears rather quickly. One does not need to mention where they have a home. Remember these are black people here.
Five minutes later, Tiana and Charlotte grow up. 
(I must also state that I found Charlotte’s treatment of Tiana infuriating.)
At the café, Charlotte just throws all of her daddy’s money at Tiana and demands that she make a boatload of beignets for her Mardi Gras soiree–on that very night! 
Inferiority complex is at play.
Charlotte and her daddy make Tiana’s family work like slaves even though they are paying for them. Much too docile and meek, Tiana and her mother take this dominating behavior and its sickening, even for an animated cartoon.
The plot thickens.
Tiana and Prince Naveen-turned-frog
Thinking her to be a real princess due to the tiara on her head, Prince Naveen-turned-frog begs for Tiana’s kiss. Unfortunately, she isn’t a princess at all. So after a slimy short make out session, she too becomes a frog.
Ah, how wonderful!
Arguing and swapping flies together, these two frogs embark on a journey in the wet, scary marshlands. The quest to finding their lost humanity is supposed to be funny, sweet, and somewhat romantic. Let’s not forget to mention there is a scene in which their long tongues get twisted in a style reminiscent of Lady and the Tramp’s infamous innocent spaghetti smooch. But that connection was due to a bug, not good old-fashioned Italian fare.
As Tiana and Prince Naveen search for the person who could make them “normal” by following a goofy alligator and a bug that is more friend than delicacy, the viewer quickly becomes annoyed and a tad bit infuriated.
By the near end, they are in love and willing to accept each other forever … as frogs!
When compared to the other Disney princesses, Tiana’s story is a bunch of BS. She didn’t have an evil stepfamily, eat a poisoned apple, have graceful legs instead of fins, receive many hours of beauty rest, or become a madmen’s “love” slave.
Does that make her luckier? I think not.
None of those women would wish to be a frog with long, batty eyelashes.
Nope. Not one.
After the green, jumpy lily pad life and having a grand night’s adventure in the bayou, our humanized heroine finally becomes a princess and a restaurateur. The end.
Feeling robbed? 
Yes.
We all know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but this is a distasteful metaphor. It kind of makes one feel that all brown-skinned women are frogs and that in order to love them, one would have to be a frog too.
Other notable lowlights: blacks are put in their “respective” places–living in close-knit, modest shacks and taking overcrowded public transportation. As previously mentioned, submissive Tiana and her mother both work diligently for white people and Prince Naveen’s right hand white man transforms into Prince Naveen via Dr. Facilier’s powers. It would almost be a cry for demeaning blackface politics, except Prince Naveen is not a black man.
Loved that an upstanding, loving, appreciative father shared Tiana’s passion for cooking and inspired her ethic. So glad Disney didn’t go with that stereotype about black men being absent from their children’s lives…
Now, Tiana’s mother: only commendable when not complaining about Tiana needing to find a “prince charming” so that she could have grandbabies. Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Jasmine, Ariel, and Belle lacked motherly parenting, which added to their naïveté about men. Little fairies and godmothers are sweet and all, but the genuine love from a mother is a special, sacred bond often missing in Disney films.

As a strong, independent woman, Tiana knew that one does not sit on her butt talking to baby animals and making wishes on stars.
Oh wait, she did wish on a star! Damn.
Still, she dreamed big and worked from the ground up.
Now that is a character for little girls to be inspired by. Too bad Tiana was a frog for so long in the movie.
Overall, The Princess and the Frog is enjoyable for a few laughs, infectious moments, and the trademark watery eye sap. But it takes many steps–backwards, forwards, sideways. One wonders what this film is truly trying to accomplish.
Janyce Denise Glasper is a writer/artist running a silly blog of creative adventures called Sugarygingersnap. She enjoys good female centric film, cute rubber duckies, chocolate covered everything (except bugs!), Days of Our Lives, and slaying nightly demons Buffy style in Dayton, Ohio.

Animated Children’s Films: The Lion King: Just Good, or Feminist Good?

Nala to Simba: “Pinned you again.”

This is a cross-post from Feminist Disney.
Overall FeministDisney Rating: **, 2/4 stars  (see below for specific categories that feed into this)
The Lion King is an interesting movie to pick apart. I think when it comes to anthropomorphized casts, it’s almost more difficult, at first, to examine it critically in terms of how it portrays humans. After all, when you think “Feminism” + “Disney,” who thinks to critique The Lion King? I didn’t, at first.
But truth be told: there is much to critique here.

I should say first, let’s throw the whole “But this is how lions act” argument out the window. Lions are not actually “kings” of all animals; they do not actually get along with prey when they’re feeling like singing a song, or learn to eat bugs from them; when (male) lions become subadults, they have to leave their pride, and no, they can never come back. Etc., etc., etc.

So none of this “Disney just portrayed it that way because it’s that way in real life” ish.  This isn’t the National Geographic Channel.

One big, happy family?
So anyhow. It’s very noticeable in this movie that male characters take the center stage, and female characters take a backseat to the action. Simba, Mufasa, Scar, Rafiki, Zazu, Timon, Pumbaa (these are all characters that take up a significant amount of screen time) versus … Nala. Sarabi was there but existed as little more than a supportive nurturing background character who took a backsteat to Simba’s relationship with his father. The male story and the male perspective clearly dominate. As a simple Bechdel test or more in-depth examination will tell us, this is not a single occurrence but rather a troubling reflection of movie character diversity in general.

When it comes to Nala, her role has always frustrated me a lot. Ignoring that it might not work with the plot already in place, it was quite disappointing that Nala did not take over partially or fully in Simba’s absence. She is always shown, especially early on in the film, to be Simba’s equal, and she is perhaps even more intelligent, or at least a more naturally sound leader throughout the film, while Simba tends to be comparatively a bit more immature and in need of multiple characters propelling him into responsible/rightful action. This isn’t a critique of Simba’s likeability or abilities, but merely to say that in all aspects, Nala would have made at least a decent fill-in.  

Simba and the more cunning Nala

Another feminist critique of this movie (on Nala):
She comes up with better ideas then he does. She is the one who starts Simba thinking about his past and his future. Yet, despite the fact that she left the pride lands to find help, she also does not challenge Scar’s right to rule. She does little more than Sarabi to work toward getting a better life for herself and the other lionesses, only leaving the pride lands to seek help (read: a different male lion). Only when Simba returns to the lionesses stand up to Scar. This is because a new male has been found to lead them. The lionesses are very much kept in the shadow of the male lions.
Neither Sarabi nor Nala challenge the male lion’s leadership even though there is no clear reason for why they should allow him to run and ruin their entire kingdom, other than that he is male. Not even when they are starving do they speak up and act for themselves and for their people. Simba has to do it for them.

I think this is really one of the main and most problematic aspects of the film: it basically boils down to the fact that an entire group of strong female characters are unable to confront a single male oppressor; to do so, they need to be led by a dominant male. It almost sucks more that Nala is such a strong, independent, intelligent, savvy female character and still ends up constrained by this plot device. It doesn’t say a lot of positive things about the role of women or about the importance of female characters in this film.

Scar: Simba’s evil gay uncle?

When it comes to androgyny and non-binary characters in this film, it is worth noting that they all “happen” to be the evil characters: the 3 hyenas and Scar. Scar is clearly a male lion, but as has been noted previously and in many blog posts apart from mine, he is portrayed as basically the “gay evil uncle” owing to his effeminate gestures/speech/appearance that are stereotypically known to be gay markers. Shenzi is presumably female but is never actually referred to as one in the movie–it is something we can only assume from the general tone of the voice. All the hyenas look very similar/are difficult to distinguish other than by voice inflection (it isn’t bad to have androgynous characters: it’s bad that they’re always cast as villains in childrens’ movies).
The characters are animals, but their voices show racist stereotypes. Even though The Lion King takes place in Africa, two white American actors are used for the voice of Simba, the hero. However, the hyenas who are bad characters in the film, speak non-standard English and are played by actors like Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin. The villain, Scar, suggests homosexuality.

While I do agree with some of the observations, many readers have pointed out that the cast is pretty diverse and both good and evil characters have “black” and “white” voices so neither one is necessarily villainized. I don’t think it’s accidental though that Simba/Mufasa/everyone are very bright and light colored, while the Hyenas and Scar are a lot darker. While this has been a traditional coding for good/evil in film, I think it’s pretty obvious for children watching who the good and bad guy is, rendering this device unnecessary. But since it’s still there in the movie it could, rather than being a helpful cue, actually helping to instill subconscious notions of morality relating to the color of your skin.   
Many critics saw a racial subtext to the villainous outsiders, noting that the racialized voices of the hyenas hewed to hackneyed stereotypes of African American and Hispanic threats to nice kids from the suburbs who stray too far from home.

Racialized hyenas?
Don’t get me wrong here: I loved The Lion King when it came out in 1994. I was 5 years old and I wanted that movie on VHS sooo badly that I created this “moving train” of paper characters to show my mom in hopes that she would realize that we had to have it since I loved it enough to create a paper train (so started my life of unnecessarily complicated scheming!). We got it as a gift when my brother was born, and I had a Zazu stuffed toy that I carried everywhere like a doll for a year or two.
So yeah, it’s a great film, but that doesn’t make it a great feminist film.
______________________________________________________________________
 
Promotion/Equal Voice given to women: *
Representation of Women present (are they more than typecasts of female stereotypes etc): ***
Racism/Classism: **
LGBTQ representation: *~ (1.5)
Gender Binary adherence: *~

FeministDisney runs a tumblr blog of the same name that seeks to deconstruct and examine Disney through a feminist lens.  FD is a Disney fan, which is why she finds it necessary to discuss how Disney narratives can be both groundbreaking and problematic.  She identifies as a feminist, an artist and a cat lover.

Who’s the "Hero" of the 2012 Oscar Awards?

Billy Crystal: He’s gilded and swooping in to save the 2012 Oscars

I’m one of those old-fashioned people who enjoys watching the Academy Awards every year. Movies, spectacle, the opportunity to throw a party complete with Oscar Bingo and a contest to see who can best predict the winners — I love it for all of these reasons. Even knowing that the awards are essentially a political campaign, in which the studios/production companies/actors with the most money (and thus the most visibility and power) typically win, and even though the films/performances that I’m rooting for are often not even nominated, there’s still something important about the show (I’ve previously talked about why here): it reminds us of the film industry’s power structure and what kinds of films are supposed to be culturally important.
Let me be more specific. The New York Times ran a piece titled “Billy Crystal Is Gilded as Hero of Oscar Night” which discusses the Governors Awards ceremony, held on Saturday, November 12th, honoring the  Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award winner and honorary Oscar winners (which were previously part of the televised ceremony, but removed this year to “to speed up the telecast and give more personal attention to their winners). Because we wouldn’t want to take televised time to honor people who have made a significant contribution to film, or anything, am I right?
But what dominated the piece — and the ceremony, if we can trust what Michael Cieply wrote — is the fact that Billy Crystal is now hosting the Oscar Ceremony. Or, as the article states, he “swooped in to save the Academy Awards.” Um, okay. I imagine it was just like that. 
See, you might have missed it (if you don’t closely follow these things), but the person producing the show this year, Brett Ratner, said some pretty awful things, and when he resigned, the person he’d picked to host — Eddie Murphy — decided he would follow suit and pulled out of the gig. A new producer was selected, and he chose Billy Crystal, who has hosted the show eight previous times. 
Am I old-fashioned, or is that simply how I’m made to feel by the Academy?
Now, I have nothing against Billy Crystal. He seems like an overall pretty good guy, and I enjoyed When Harry Met Sally back in 1989, and thought City Slickers was pretty good back when I was eleven years old. I know he’s been in movies since then, but he’s not really on my personal radar as a Current Film Star. (Neither is Eddie Murphy for that matter, though I think he would’ve proven at least an interesting host, and would have improved on the Academy’s abysmal track record of including African Americans — at any capacity — in the program.) 
Back to that “old fashioned” idea. This year, the Academy at least showed its awareness that younger people were often alienated by the show when they shrewdly hired James Franco and Anne Hathaway as hosts, a move that backfired, mostly due to Franco phoning it in (I can’t be the only one sure he was stoned) and Hathaway trying her best to make up for her near-comatose co-host. According to the NYT article,

That it should be Mr. Crystal who saved the day met little disapproval from those who gathered on Saturday night, even if it means that the Academy’s quest for youth and a more diverse audience will yield once more to a neo-vaudevillian who is often compared here to Bob Hope, who holds the record as the 19-time host of the show.

Maybe I’m not old-fashioned; maybe I’m stupid for continuing to tune in to programming that doesn’t give a damn whether I watch or not. Or, even worse, maybe they’re just assuming they have “female viewers” (because we’re a silly monolith) because, you know, OMG Pretty Dresses
Oprah Winfrey wins the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award
There’s something else, though, that I can’t not notice about the NYT article: In the entire 1,187-word article, only about 200 words (3 paragraphs) were devoted to one of  the highest honors and most controversial moments of the night: Oprah Winfrey winning the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. She’s the first Black woman to win the award (Quincy Jones won in 1995, the only Black man to win it), yet her win has been called “boneheaded” and “a shameless bid for a ratings boost,” largely because her contributions to the film industry are seen by insiders as lacking. Further, according to NWFCC chair Armond White,

Is the Academy kowtowing to the silly complaints that no black actors were nominated this year?” says White. “The Oscars are supposed to be about the works Hollywood admires, not a score-keeping mechanism for ethnic and racial equality. By that standard the Oscars fail Native Americans, Asians, Africans, Scandinavians, and Latin Americans every year. I’m afraid those complaints were just media hype, an attempt by some to hold the Oscars hostage to political correctness.

Yes, the Oscars do fail African Americans, Native Americans, Latin Americans, and many more marginalized groups every year. But it isn’t “political correctness” at work in pointing out these gross injustices. It’s a privileged group of people (members of The Academy) who willfully ignore contributions in film by people of color–especially women of color–and an industry operating with a severe case of institutionalized racism.
The night’s other two winners, James Earl Jones and Dick Smith, got two paragraphs and one paragraph, respectively, in the NYT piece. Jones has appeared in over 50 films, yet is even more of an afterthought than Winfrey.
So, what does this single article tell us about the Academy, the Oscar Awards, and the New York Times?
Do I really need to spell it out?

Quote of the Day: Molly Haskell on "The Woman’s Film"

This past weekend, The Help (in its second week in wide release) moved to the top of the U.S. box office. While much of the discussion about the film has focused on its race problems, I’ve been bothered by it’s characterization in many reviews as a “woman’s film.” (Note: I haven’t seen The Help.) Because its main characters are women, and it seems to be about empowering women (though I suspect it’s more about empowering white women than black women), it must be a film about and, thus, for women.
Isn’t that the problem? I don’t want to get too far into using The Help as an example (I repeat, I haven’t seen it), but branding a film about women and civil rights in the South (however problematic its depiction) as a “woman’s film” just seems absurd. Have we gone at all beyond Molly Haskell’s 1974 discussion of “The Woman’s Film?”
What more damning comment on the relations between men and women in America than the very notion of something called the ‘woman’s film’? And what more telling sign of critical and sexual priorities than the low caste it has among the highbrows. Held at arm’s length, it is, indeed, the untouchable of film genres […]

Among the Anglo-American critical brotherhood (and a few of their sisters as well), the term ‘woman’s film’ is used disparagingly to conjure up the image of the pinched-virgin or little-old-lady writer, spilling out her secret longings in wish fulfillment or glorious martyrdom, and transmitting these fantasies to the frustrated housewife. The final image is one of wet, wasted afternoons. And if strong men have also cried their share of tears over the weepies, that is all the more reason (goes the argument) we should be suspicious, be on our guard against the flood of ‘unearned’ feelings released by these assaults, unerringly accurate, on our emotional soft spots.

As a term of critical opprobrium, ‘woman’s film’ carries the implication that women, and therefore women’s emotional problems, are of minor significance. A film that focuses on male relationships is not pejoratively dubbed a ‘man’s film’ (indeed, this term, when it is used, confers–like ‘a man’s man’–an image of brute strength), but a ‘psychological drama.’ 

Here’s a thought experiment. If The Help were about a plucky young white man who wanted to interview black male workers, how would we be talking about the film?

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This is a guest post from Jesseca Cornelson.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button occupies a curious space in my imagination. I asked to review it because I have long wanted to view the film—it’s been pretty high on my Netflix streaming queue for more than a year—and yet, every time I sit down to watch something on Netflix, I pass it over. Even though TCCOBB was one of those must-see movies when it came out in December 2008, and as much as it seemed a neat little imaginative tale in reviews and commercials, I just found it really hard to get terribly excited about anything Brad Pitt is in. I’m not an anti-Brad Pitt snob, it’s just that I get enough Brad Pitt coverage in my favorite gossip blogs that I really don’t feel like seeing him any more than I have to.

Once I settled into the movie, however, I was able to enjoy it like the popcorn fare that it is—pleasant, but not terribly complex and with little nutritional value. My very first impression of the film was that it is one of those movies whose story is designed simply to make the viewer cry, and for me, it succeeded quite effectively in that regard. I’m a sucker for stories shaped like sadness. My second impression was to wonder why on earth I was being made to cry about the tragic love story of two imaginary white people against the back drop of Hurricane Katrina, which was a very real and epic tragedy for the city this story is set in (as well as for areas well outside New Orleans). To this second point I will return shortly.

But first, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on a short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, bears a family resemblance to another film adaption of a literary source, Forrest Gump, so I wasn’t terribly surprised to find out that screenwriter Eric Roth penned both films. In each film, we follow a quirky white boy in the south from his childhood through his adventures in adolescence and early adulthood and on into maturity. Covering such a large time span, the plots are largely episodic in nature but the feeling of an overarching structure is achieved through the protagonist’s varied and lifelong relationship with a woman he’s known since childhood. Both Benjamin’s Daisy and Forrest’s Jenny are remarkable, I think, only for their beauty and their rare understanding and appreciation of their respective misfit men. Both films also present what I think of as problematically unproblematic racial relationships. I don’t necessarily believe that every film, much less those that are comedic or fantastical in nature, needs to radically explore gender and racial relationships and stereotypes, but I suppose I don’t believe that we’re sufficiently post-racial to be able to gloss over historical struggles without such glossing over itself feeling like a distraction. And I think that’s part of what renders both TCCOBB and Forrest Gump ultimately conservative films.

Before I take on what I think is Benjamin Button’s most interesting relationship—that with Queenie, the African-American woman who adopts him, I want to talk about the film’s magical realism. While TCCOBB is clearly grounded in familiar historical periods and places—1918 New Orleans, Russia pre-World War II, a Pacific marine battle (if I recall correctly), not to mention the frame story set in a 2005 New Orleans on the brink of Hurricane Katrina—the world Benjamin Button lives in is also one of magic and wonder. In the frame story, Daisy’s daughter reads to her mother from Benjamin’s diary as Daisy prepares to die. The narrative in Benjamin’s diary is further framed by the story of Mr. Gateau’s backwards running clock, built out of Mr. Gateau’s desire for his son who died in World War I to return to him. Presumably, this backwards running clock had some kind of magical influence over Benjamin, who was born the size of a baby but with the features and ailments of an old man and, as anyone who is remotely familiar with the film’s concept knows, appears to grow younger as he in fact gets older. [I have to admit that I totally thought Benjamin was going to end up as a man-sized baby at the end, an idea I got from reading too much Dlisted where Michael K would go on and on about Cate Blanchett as an old lady having sex with Brad Pitt as a old man baby. Oh, Dlisted, I can’t believe I believed you! Also, try as I might, I cannot find the posts where Michael K says this, so maybe I imagined the whole thing.]

Other than these very important magical elements, the universe of TCCOBB is relatively realistic, save for its gliding over of both the women’s movement and the Civil Rights Movement. What are we to make of this? The way I see it, since TCCOBB works hard to incorporate historic events like World Wars I & II and Hurricane Katrina, (1) the filmmakers don’t think that race and gender figure very largely in 20th century and early 21st century American history; (2) they imagine that in the same magical world where a baby can be born with the features and ailments of an old man, issues of gender and race are magically non-issues; or (3) since this is Benjamin Button’s story, he just doesn’t give a crap about race and gender. Choice three is definitely the least plausible. Benjamin Button is one very nice guy who definitely gives a crap! (Maybe the point is “Here is a really nice white guy!”) He loves his black momma Queenie (as portrayed by Taraji P. Henson)! He loves Cate Blanchett’s Daisy, even when she’s an unlovable prick. I sympathize with filmmakers and writers of all kinds, for that matter, who want to tell stories set in the historic south about something other than race. Must every story set in the historic south be about race? No, certainly, I don’t think so. But when race comes up—as it most definitely does here since Benjamin is adopted by an African-American woman—it seems strangely unrealistic to neglect the complexity of historic race relationships.

Maybe the question I should be asking is what purpose does Queenie’s blackness serve? Does her blackness make her more accepting of Benjamin when even his own father abandoned him and others were repulsed by him? Does it make the film feel integrated and inclusive while still focusing mostly on white experience? Perhaps it’s better to ask what possibilities might Queenie’s blackness have presented in this magical version of historic New Orleans. If historical gender and racial issues are going to be ignored, I think it’s an exciting possibility to think of how they might have been re-imagined altogether. That’s one of the great possibilities of speculative fiction: it allows us an opportunity to imagine how else we might be—both in utopic and dystopic senses. But even as TCCOBB neglects historical oppression, it also fails to present an imaginative alternative, and that feels like a missed opportunity.

Essentially, Queenie, as a black woman, is limited in her employment as a servant to whites. And even though she fully accepts Benjamin as her son and Benjamin does seem to love and appreciate her, he seems to fail to see how the world treats her differently and, as he grows up, he surrounds himself with white people, almost forgetting about Queenie altogether. Ultimately, the stereotype of the nurturing black woman as a loving caretaker of whites is not greatly challenged or expanded upon. African Americans are presented largely as servants. And they are truly only “supporting” characters for the white characters. Benjamin doesn’t seem to see African-American women as potential lovers or mates—only as mother figures, or rather as his mother, since the only African-American woman presented in any kind of depth is Queenie. Most strikingly, he doesn’t use his inherited wealth to get Queenie her own place or otherwise take care of her, and the last time we see Queenie, she serves Benjamin and Cate cake before retiring to bed. My heart broke for Queenie that Benjamin didn’t see to her retirement in the same way that he looked after Daisy. Is TCCOBB saying that a black woman’s motherly love is expected for free but the romantic affections of a white woman are worth money? Certainly, I think the film suggests that while black women may make good enough mothers for white boys, those boys will grow up only to desire white women. Or perhaps the film simply suggests that black women are perfectly acceptable as caretakers, but they aren’t sexually desirable like white women are. If that last sentence seems far-fetched, think about how the black women who are seen as sex symbols in our culture have or affect features often associated with whiteness. At very least, it seems that the role of lover is elevated above that of mother. 

This could have been a more radical movie—and not just one in which a white character has a revelation about what it’s like to know and love black people but one whose very imaginings might show how our racial conceptions and constructions might be otherwise. Instead, we get the opposite: race relations are sanitized of all conflict, while the segregation of family and romantic relations is upheld, with the sole exception of Queenie and Benjamin.

Queenie’s preposterous explanation that Benjamin is her sister’s son “only he came out white”—possibly the film’s most hilarious moment—suggests a missed opportunity. What if in this imagined world black women commonly had white babies and vice versa? Even in our own world, racial designations aren’t as clear cut as we often assume them to be. (See “Black and White Twins”; “Parents Give Birth to Ebony and Ivory Twins”; “Black Parents  . . . White Baby”; and “My Affirmative Action Fail”.) What if TCCOBB totally upended everything we think we know about race and women’s roles in the south of the past? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Moreover, it’s one thing to neglect race and gender issues of the past, but what about in the frame story of the present? All of the nurses and caretakers in Daisy’s hospital are also black women. Daisy is kept company by her daughter, Caroline, and a black woman the same age as Caroline, who eventually leaves to check on her son and never returns to the movie. WTF? Why is she there? Is she Caroline’s girlfriend? A good friend? If we’re not going to see her again, why is she there in the first place? Okay, I looked up the script. For what it’s worth, it specifies that she’s “a young Black Woman, a ‘caregiver,’” though nurses in scrubs are also present and Dorothy dresses in civilian clothes and spends most of her screen time thumbing through a magazine. I so wish that Dorothy had been Caroline’s girlfriend or wife.

And what of Hurricane Katrina? In the end, all we see is water rising in a basement, flooding the old train station clock. There’s nothing about what happened in the hospitals, in the Ninth Ward, in the attics, in the streets, in the Superdome. I don’t even know what to say about that. That the preposterously tragic love of two imaginary white people trumps and erases all the suffering of real, mostly black people? Even through my great big ole sappy tears as Daisy dies, that just doesn’t feel right to me.
 
Finally, I am reminded that part of my reluctance to watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button lies with its format as a film. Over the past decade, I’ve grown to prefer serial dramas to just about everything—film, books, whatever (though I’ve recently become consumed with popular fantasy and horror novels). HBO led the way and remains at the top of the serious television game. Deadwood and The Sopranos developed true ensemble casts with richly developed morally-complicated characters shaped by their social, historic, and economic milieux, with deft dialogue that could be emotionally moving or belly-shaking hilarious. The mere invocation of Hurricane Katrina makes it impossible for me not to compare the long but ultimately light fare of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which aside from its technical and artistic wizardry is ultimately forgettable, with the robust, lifelike, brilliant work of art that is Treme. Where TCCOBB uses its historical setting like a painted backdrop to affect historic depth without actually engaging history, Treme is a masterpiece of the fictionalized drama of the everyday real life of one of America’s great cities. Where women and African Americans are given roles in TCCOBB that support white stars, every character in Treme’s diverse cast is treated as the star of his or her own life, and they are richly complicated people whose lives are never defined solely by their relationship to white main characters. So that’s my loopy recommendation about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: you’re better off watching Treme.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards in 2009. It won three Oscars for art direction, makeup, and visual effects. It was nominated for cinematography, costume design, directing, film editing, original score, sound mixing, best picture, best actor in a leading role, best actress in a supporting role, and best adapted screenplay. 

Jesseca Cornelson, who has finally finished her damn PhD already, is an assistant professor of English at Alabama State University. Every now and again, she updates her blog, Difficult History, where she writes about all manner of crap. She previously reviewed An Education for Bitch Flicks2010 Best Picture Nominee Review Series.

Guest Writer Wednesday: African American Romantic Comedies: Colorism

This guest post by Renee Martin also appears at her blog Women’s Eye on Media

I love a good romantic comedy, but I must admit I am especially partial to those that star Blacks. It is a rare thing to see a dominant Black presence in media, and romantic comedies happen to be the only genre that this consistently happens in. Unfortunately, these movies still fall into specific tropes that are a direct result of being produced in a White supremacist culture.

Many of the male stars like, Morris Chestnut and Taye Diggs are dark skinned Black men. In fact, you could reasonably argue that Morris Chestnut is the king of the African Romantic comedy. These dark skinned men are always described as fiiiine, hot, and a real catch. When it comes to colourism and Black men, it would be fair to say that it is not an issue in African American comedies, because the actors range from Morris Chestnut to the ever so lovely LL Cool J (and yes, I love him).

The same is not necessarily true when it comes to women. From Stacey Dash in VHI’s new series Single Ladies, to Paula Patton in 2011’s Jumping the Broom, to Sanaa Lathan in The Best Man, to Zoe Saldana in Guess Who, to Vivica Fox in Two Can Play That Game, and Queen Latifah in Just Wright, light skinned women have a tendency to dominate the genre. The darkest skinned women that you will find in the genre are Monique, who played the ghetto woman Two Can Play That Game, Kimberly Elise, who played Helen in Diary of a Mad Black Woman (the title says it all doesn’t it), and Gabrielle Union, who starred in Deliver Us From Eva.

What is perhaps most interesting, is that in Deliver Us From Eva, Union played the stereotypical angry Black woman who had been burned countless times. She was absolutely vicious to anyone that approached her, and her brother in laws absolutely detested her, that is until they paid LL. Cool J to date her, and suddenly she became soft, and loving. Here we go again with another Black woman being saved from her angry ways by the love of a good Black man. (Tyler Perry is somewhere dancing a little jig.) All the things that allowed her to support her sisters up to and including putting them through school, and saving money for the benefit of their family, were seen as negative character traits. When Union played opposite Vivica Fox in Two Can Play That Game, she played the role of Jezebel. That’s right, a dark Black woman out to steal away Morris Chestnut from the light skinned, smart, and in control Vivica Fox. Union was slut shamed throughout the movie, and yet when Vivica Fox chose to sleep with Chestnut in his office it was simply being freaky and keeping your man happy. Particularly telling, is that no reference was made to differentiate between the two women, except for the visually obvious difference in hue. Why one was necessarily deserving of being slut shamed, when she was essentially no different than the other, was left for the viewer to determine. Even in movies, the strong dark skinned Black woman can never get a break.

Colourism can be just as damaging to Black men as Dr. Michael Eric Dyson explained, when he examined the relationship between himself and his incarcerated dark skinned brother, yet in movies, the hue of Black men can range from LL. Cool J and Terrence Howard to Taye Diggs and Richard T Jones, without any real issue. In fact, the very range in hue of Black men suggests that Black men are all uniquely valuable and sexually attractive. This is why it is hard to comprehend why the same universal acceptance is not given to Black women.

In Jungle Fever, Wesley Snipes leaves his light skinned Black wife played by Lonette McKee, for an Italian woman. In a scene with McKee’s girlfriends, they discuss how the trend for a long time was for Black men to seek out light bright and damn near White women as partners, and how that changed as inter racial relationships became acceptable. You see, the White woman has always been held up as the epitome of beauty, and failing that, the WOC who was closest in appearance to Whiteness was then the chosen prize, thereby leaving dark skinned women completely out of the loop. A new documentary entitled Dark Skin being released this fall discusses this issue. If you doubt that this is an issue, a simple look at what L’Oreal Feria haircolor did to Beyonce, or what Elle Magazine did to Gabourey Sidibe is more than enough to settle this issue.

No woman of colour can ever be light skinned enough. What is particularly disgusting, is not only do these movies have all Black casts, in quite a few instances, they have Black directors to boot. What does it say about Black cinema, that we constantly reproduce our internalized racial hatred? Since we know that colorism is an issue for the entire community, why is it that, Black women are particularly targeted with erasure? Watching these movies really brought to mind the conversations in media about the lonely Black woman, who is destined to die a single woman. As much as African American romantic comedies constantly end with a Black woman and a Black men either in a committed relationship, or getting married, the near erasure of dark skinned women plays into the whole idea that unless you are light skinned you are not worthy of being loved. When we add in the fact that these movies are not aimed at White people, it seems to me that Blacks have come to find this idea acceptable, otherwise when given the opportunity to tell our stories, darker Black women would appear in this genre more regularly, rather than being restricted to films like The Color Purple and Precious.

Editors Note: This is an ongoing series. You can find part 1 here on class. Next week, we will be looking at the ubiquitous usage of the word nigger in these movies.



Renee Martin is a disabled mother of two, and a freelance writer who focuses on social justice. On her blog Womanist Musings she largely writes about social justice generally. She also is a contributor and co-creator of the blog Fangs for the Fantasy, where she writes critically using a social justice lens on the urban fantasy genre. Each week she also participates in the Fangs for the Fantasy podcast, where she discusses the latest in urban fantasy. At Women’s Eye on Media, where she is also a co-creator and shares editing and writing duties with fellow creator Holly Ord, she writes about social justice and the media. Her work has been published at The Guardian, Ms Blog and several small newspapers. She previously cross-posted her review of The Big C at Bitch Flicks