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Conservative Political Cartoons II: The Jerkassening

Conservative Political Cartoons II: The Jerkassening
By Myrna Waldron

I had an absolute ball skewering misogynistic political cartoons last year, so I’ve decided to make this, er, “showcase” a semi-regular feature. It gets a little dull doing feminist analyses of only film and television – feminism is both a political position and a philosophy, so you can apply it to anything. And one thing I have always had an interest in is political cartoons. Particularly, I like ranting about the shitty ones. It’s probably intellectual masochism.

My thanks goes once again to the Something Awful Political Cartoon Thread, whose contributors scour the many political cartoon syndicates and godawful blogs to find these polished turds…mostly so people can yell at them. They have saved me a lot of time and possible loss of sanity. (Not that I had much in the first place)

Last time I limited the focus to the most misogynistic cartoons I could find – this time, it’s just recent cartoons that pissed me off. Variety is the spice of life, donchaknow. Plug your noses, kiddies, cause we’re diving into the dung heap.

A.F. Branco:

Liberal Media Goliath vs. Poor tiny little FOX News David

Why won’t someone think of poor little FOX News! Why, it’s just a plucky lil’ guy standing up to the big bad liberal media! The…liberal media almost exclusively owned by giant conglomerates. The liberal media whose ratings can’t even begin to match FOX News’. The liberal media that is only considered liberal in comparison to FOX News, which is so far right wing they’ve shot off into the goddamn stratosphere. Also, check out the reagan.com e-mail address. I love it when they’re unabashed stereotypes.

Bob Gorrell:

A “child’s” letter to Obama is spelled bad and therefore they are wrong.

Aww, look at the stupid little kid. They can’t spell, therefore they are stupid, and the real letters children sent to Obama pleading for gun control are also stupid. How dare those kids become frightened of being murdered when only 20 or so of them were shot to death recently! Guns are far more important than stupid children with pathetically exaggerated spelling errors. Look at that stupid kid equating guns to broccoli. Stupid kid.

Chuck Asay:

A teenager decides against a mass killing because assault rifles are banned. Good?

Well, he sure got us there! You’re right, Mr. Asay. We should instead ban guns altogether, because simply banning the massively overpowered assault rifles isn’t enough. And while we’re at it, let’s pour some more funding into mental health services so we can help kids like this! Wait, was that what you were arguing? I’m not sure anymore.

It used to be idyllic 1950s bullshit! Now women are all divorced and working and stuff.

Hoo boy look at those gender roles. “Mommy is cooking and wears a skirt! Daddy is fixing a car and wears a hat! And we live in beautiful idealized suburbia that is not at all a figment of an old man mixing his own memories with Leave It To Beaver! …Oh no! Mommy and Daddy got divorced! How awful! Divorce should never happen ever! And Mommy’s working instead of cooking! She’s supposed to be in the kitchen! Waaaa! Okay give me welfare check now please no that isn’t a non-sequitur what are you talking about.”

Pinocchio has a dilemma. He wants to deny his employees contraceptive coverage because he’s an idiot.

Isn’t it cute that Asay has completely misunderstood how Plan B/Emergency Contraception works, calling it an Abortion Pill when all it does is prevent a conception that hasn’t happened yet? How appropriate that he has used Pinocchio as his mouthpiece for saying something that is a lie.

Conservative Brony:

Women are now allowed to serve in combat! Now let’s be misogynistic pricks!

I don’t remember what this guy’s name is. He’s printed in a bunch of college newspapers, but actually published THIS, so he’s Conservative Brony to me forever. The comic strip is called Ralph and Chuck if you care. So, check out this tired and cliched Men’s Rights argument. The draft hasn’t been used in the US since the Vietnam War – a generation ago – and I’m going to go out on a limb here and posit that an almost exclusively left-wing/liberal political movement like feminism is against the draft. And that the main reason why women were exempted from the draft is because of the patriarchal belief that we should be home taking care of the children, and that we’re physically weak or something. And looky here, one of the female characters says “I can’t even kill a spider.” Proving that this concept of weak women is pretty pervasive. Go back to watching ponies, Conservative Brony. You suck at arguments.

Day By Day:

Lance Armstrong is a “pussy,” therefore he is a cheater. Or…something.

A daily webcomic written by Chris Muir. I talked about this comic a bit in the last Political Cartoon rant, but I’ll summarize it again. The grey haired dude is Muir’s self-insert. The redhead is Sam, who is half-Irish, half-Japanese and all T&A. He uses this fictional woman as a mouthpiece for MRA bullshit. He also has a black male character named Damon who he also uses as a mouthpiece on racial issues. It’s about as pathetic and offensive as you can imagine. So check this shit out. Male values are honour, truth and logic. Female values are feelings-over-fact, group-think and consumerism. He says this crap to his wife. And she somehow gets a “Lance Armstrong has been emasculated and that’s why he cheated” inference from this, and uses a misogynistic insult? Is this also making fun of his testicular cancer? I…don’t get it…what?…okay, moving on.

HILLARY CLINTON IS UGLY AND I DON’T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PUPPETS AND MARIONETTES!

HILLARY CLINTON IS 65 YEAR OLD WOMAN WHO NEEDS GLASSES MUST INSULT LOOKS FIRST HELL YEAH I GOT ONE OVER ON THAT BITCH. I’m not going to even read the rest of this shit. His arguments and talking points are unreadable and his metaphors make no sense. (You don’t put your hands up marionettes you moron) Also, fun fact, Muir’s single. I wonder why.

Eric Allie:

Liberals are dumb and they don’t know how guns work.

Allie is one of the great tragedies of political cartooning. Such a good artist with a distinctive style, and occasionally very funny…but manages to take the worst possible position about everything. But I suppose I’m just as partisan in my left-wing views as he is in his right-wing ones. I included this cartoon not because it’s particularly offensive (it’s mostly vacuous) but because the labels on that gun are actually pretty funny. Mourn that we have lost this talent to the “enemy.”

Gary Varvel:

You should feel bad about abortion because of Dead Baby Heaven!

It’s depressing how little pro-lifers actually understand about the abortion process. Varvel either thinks that all aborted babies are practically full-term, or that they magically stop being blobs of cells once they go to heaven. I have to wonder if miscarriages, stillbirths, etc are also included in this charming Dead Baby Heaven. So tell me, Mr. Varvel, if all 55 million of those babies were born, would you have been willing to give up more taxes so that the mothers could receive prenatal care and compensation for missed work, and so that these kids could be housed, clothed, and fed? Would you endorse comprehensive sex-ed that discussed contraception? Judging from your pro-life peers, I wouldn’t think so. (Also thanks for drawing the Asian babies with slanted slit eyes. Very inclusive of you.)

Glenn McCoy:

HOLLYWOOD IS TO BLAME FOR EVERYTHING GOD BLESS AMERICA

What a tired, boring, flawed and cliched argument. It astounds me how many people will point their fingers at violent media and claim it is the cause of gun violence. Canada gets the exact same media that the US does. A lot of people don’t seem to get just how similar our countries are when it comes to our culture. Want proof? I’m a Canadian ranting about American politics. Now, I’m going to throw a few statistics at you guys. In 2011, there were a total of 598 homicides in Canada, 27% of which were firearm related. Now get ready for this one. In the US, there were 12,664 homicides in 2011, and 8,583 of those were firearm related. The US has approximately 10 times the population of Canada, but I’m pretty sure those statistics aren’t proportional with that. There is a systematic problem with violence in the United States. You guys are absolutely infatuated with firearms and militaristic jingoism. Canada has the same media. Canada has a large hunting population. But we don’t have the gun violence problems that you do. The cause of gun deaths is not Hollywood violence, which is merely a symptom of gun culture, it’s YOU, America. And it’s time to admit it.

Soldiers who died in combat are equivalent to aborted fetuses. Okay then.

Is it 55 million abortions or 54 million? Come on guys, if you’re going to make this a talking point at least be consistent about it. What happened to the extra million fetuses? Did Obama eat them? Also, that must be an enormous dumpster if it can hold all those fetuses. I don’t even have a real argument or any sarcasm for this one. It’s just exasperating.

Lisa Benson:

Women in the military don’t want to be on the front lines, don’t be silly!

Isn’t it nice of Ms. Benson to speak for all women? She personally does not want to go on the front lines, therefore no women will, I guess? Even though they’ve basically been in combat (or at least very dangerous) situations all along? And since she’s wearing the same football uniform, she volunteered for this? And hey, notice how tiny she drew the woman in comparison to the big hulking man on the bench there. Teeny tiny women have to be protected from big bad Muslims!

Me And Folly:

WOMAN = BABY. DEAD BABY BAD. NO BABY IN COMBAT. WHO CARES ABOUT WOMAN.

I think this is just some small time blogger rather than a published cartoonist. But, uh, wow. Let’s dissect this one. The caption literally associates women solely with babies. The captured woman is drawn with a cute little blonde ponytail and ribbon, needlessly re-identifying her as female (we can see the pregnant stomach, buddy) while infantilizing her at the same time. Her being blonde is also subtextually significant – blonde women are usually white, and in the media, it is almost always white women in peril who make the news, not anyone else. This cartoon colludes with the media’s implication that white women are of more value than women of colour. So how about that baby? The baby is apparently very close to full-term. And I guess it’s making a lame draft joke? So…is the argument seriously that the US Military would be sending heavily pregnant women to the front lines, and that women are basically assumed to be constantly pregnant? Also, once again, teeny tiny white woman captured by the big bad Muslim.

Mike Ramirez:

Hillary Clinton desecrates the Benghazi victims’ graves because she is a Democrat.

Fffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. The first time I saw this cartoon, I had a verbal nuclear explosion on Twitter. If you’re unfamiliar with the names on those tombstones, they were the victims of the attack which took place at the Libyan embassy in Benghazi. This incident will always be a very sensitive issue for Something Awful forum members, as Sean Smith, aka Vilerat, was a well-respected moderator of the Debate & Discussion subforum where the Political Cartoons thread is located. Regardless of my personal feelings, there are two BIG problems with this cartoon.

First, laying the blame for these attacks at Hillary Clinton’s feet is both unfair and pointless. He has also used her “What difference does it make?” quotation out of context in a pathetic attempt to discredit her. She was not shrugging off the Benghazi deaths – she was arguing that wasting time trying to place blame for the deaths is pointless and counterproductive. Regardless of how this could have been prevented, 4 Americans are still dead, the past cannot be changed, and what is more important now is to find their killers, bring them to justice, and prevent this from happening again. His answer, “The difference between life and death,” makes no sense in reference to the context of her rhetorical question – proving that he’s just regurgitating talking points without actually researching them.

The second major problem is Ramirez’s use of the Benghazi victims as political mouthpieces. These men were murdered while doing their jobs. It’s a terrible tragedy, and whether it could have been prevented or not is irrelevant now. These men are dead. They cannot speak for themselves anymore. But Ramirez is using murdered men to speak for him. He’s depicting Hillary Clinton desecrating their graves, while hypocritically desecrating their memory by using them to promote complete bullshit. Using those who cannot speak to speak for you is the utmost of cowardice. Ramirez is a liar, a coward, and a hypocrite. I hope his God forgives him, cause I sure as hell won’t.

Obama is a far-left liberal because American conservatives have no goddamn idea what “far-left” means.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No.

Randy Bish:

Mental Health in America will kill stupid monkey Obama because he’s making stupid gun laws.

I was initially annoyed and insulted at the insensitive depiction of mental health problems as a giant murderous gorilla, but I’m going to instead digress a little and talk about that Obama caricature. Lots of Obama caricatures are terrible (Ramirez’s being one of the worst ones) and a lot of them are subtly racist. But none can match the sheer racism of Bish’s Obama. Here’s a second example of his Obama caricature from last year. Giant flappy ears, giant eyebrows, giant lips. He has not drawn an African-American human being. He’s drawn a monkey.

Terry Wise:

Parents should beat their kids to discipline them and then something about abortion?

So what’s your point, Wise? People say stupid things? You haven’t somehow discredited the entire liberal/progressive movement by depicting a conversation in which a dumbass blurted out a poorly reasoned non-sequitur. Also, stop trying to justify beating your kids you psycho. Jesus.

NOOOOOO MY ROSE-COLOURED 1950S CHILDHOOD IS DEAD BECAUSE A MAN IS GAY

You heard it here first, folks. A loving same-sex couple trying to open an orphanage is exactly as evil and offensive as a meth addict and a murdered prostitute. If this was inspired by Jim Nabors’ coming out (and it probably was), Wise is an astoundingly hateful old man. Nabors married the man he’s been with for almost 40 years. What is so wrong with an elderly man finally getting to legalize his relationship with the love of his life? What prompted these ridiculous comparisons? What harm has Nabors done? Why won’t Baby Boomers give up their fucking delusional idyllic memories of the 1950s?

Mallard Fillmore:

Her name is Purge Daley. Bulimia. Ha ha.

Purge Daley is a rich snob. Ha ha.

Purge Daley hates fat people. Ha ha.

Everyone in Hollywood is liberal including Purge Daley. Ha ha.

Purge Daley doesn’t get how guns work. Ha ha.

Purge Daley watches films not made in America, the traitor. Ha ha.

Finally, I present a series of strips from the conservative comic strip Mallard Fillmore, drawn by Bruce Tinsley. It’s billed as the conservative Doonesbury, but it isn’t even 1/8th as clever. The premise is just…a talking duck that is a conservative news reporter. He’s also an incredibly petty asshole – every Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he goes out of his way to not acknowledge it, and instead depicts a strawman telling him off for not acknowledging “Squirrel Appreciation Day.” So what we’ve got here is basically the same joke repeated 6 times. El oh el, the supermodel’s name is Purge Daley. Bulimia, geddit? Eating disorders are high-larious! And this is the strawmanniest strawman that ever strawed. I don’t even know where to begin with this. He criticizes fat-shaming, and yet hypocritically insults people with eating disorders at the same time. I don’t think I should have to bother engaging with deliberately nonsensical arguments. But I will say that people who refuse to watch movies with subtitles DO suck, so go to hell Tinsley, you xenophobic sexist fuck.

…I think I need a stiff drink.

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.

Goodbye Forever, ’30 Rock’

Written by Max Thornton.

If you care at all about popular culture and feminism, you may have noticed that last Thursday seven years of television history came to an end.

30 Rock had a complicated relationship with feminism. Linda Holmes of NPR’s Monkey See wrote an excellent article on the difference between what 30 Rock wasand what it did:

I have never considered Liz Lemon a feminist icon of any kind, nor have I ever considered 30 Rock especially strong when it comes to gender politics.

I don’t care for the obsessive joke-making about how Liz is ugly/mannish/old/awkward, and I haven’t always been comfortable with the way some of the “she’s baby-crazy!” or “she’s relationship-crazy!” comedy has played. …

And yet, I think it’s been one of the most important, helpful, meaningful, landscape-altering shows for women in the history of television.

No assessment of 30 Rock can escape the unfortunate but inevitable tendency to scrutinize every aspect of a female-led show to an unreasonable degree – most of all its creator. Exhibit A is, of course, poor Lena Dunham. The misogynists are looking for any excuse to hate a successful woman, while we feminists are dreaming of intersectional perfection that the mainstream media is never going to provide. As a result, conversations about 30 Rock are inseparable from conversations about Tina Fey. Which at least is an excuse to link to this.

Luckily, 30 Rock was (it feels so weird to be using the past tense) a show with a strong sense of the meta, and as such it pretty much demands contextualization.

A few years ago, Overthinking It pointed out that 30 Rock looked like a staunchly liberal show – “from far away, if you squint.” Once you start paying attention, though, neocon Jack Donaghy tends to be in the right, and the joke is almost always at the expense of Liz Lemon, the leftist comedy writer and (to at least some extent) Tina Fey self-insert characer.

There’s a kind of self-parody you do around friends which you might avoid more publicly, because you know your friends know you’re kidding. My friends and I tend to Godwineach other with wild abandon, because we spend so much time on the internet that we enjoy its utter absurdity. In a discussion with a stranger, though, I probably wouldn’t throw around the wanton Hitler analogies, since there’s a risk they wouldn’t get the joke.

One of the things that was simultaneously endearing and frustrating about30 Rock was its frequent usage of that friends-only self-parody material. When it worked, it made you feel like a good friend of the show and of Tina Fey, sharing in a self-critical but ultimately loving humor. When it didn’t work, it was awful. (Remember the season-five sleep-rape controversy?) A lot of the time, though, it was hard to tell which side of the line the show was on.

This A.V. Club review of a December 2012 episode asserts that “30 Rock is one of the few shows that can cleverly get way with joking about stereotypical female behaviors, such as everyone rushing to the bathroom at the same time or being unable to work the projector, without getting offensive.” I’m not entirely sure I agree with that. Andrew Ti of Yo, Is This Racist? illustrates the problem with the example he sometimes uses, of the season six episode that features Jon Hamm in blackface. In the context of the episode, the brief skit is parodying TV’s history of blackface. That might potentially be a reasonably clever joke, but, as Ti has pointed out on his site and in his podcast, we live in a media culture where things get taken out of context all the time and people have short attention spans, and what that means is that there’s just a gif floating around the internet of Jon Hamm in blackface. I’m inclined to think it’s just hopelessly irresponsible to make jokes like that when you know how widely your material is circulating.

Having said that, 30 Rock had a tough job to do: trying to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, while still maintaining its distinctive voice and viewpoint. And did it ever have a distinctive voice. If, before I saw the episode, I had come across the finale’s line “Hogcock. Which is a combination of hogwash and poppycock,” I couldn’t have mistaken it for a joke from any other show. It’s a style of humor and a general set-up that simply won’t appeal to everyone, and it never translated to particularly high ratings. To avoid alienating uncommitted viewers further, I think the show sometimes had to pull back from fully supporting specific ideals – I seem to recall a number of feminist blogs complaining that the end of the infamous Jezebel-parodying season five episode “TGS Hates Women” was a cop-out, forcing in some unlikely circumstances to avoid actually engaging with the issues it had raised.

Ultimately, I agree with Linda Holmes, that 30 Rock was willing to sacrifice pretty much anything for the sake of a joke. In the end, its effects on the TV landscape are more feminist than its content ever was; but it was a damn funny show, written by and starring a damn funny woman, and I miss it already.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Let’s All Take a Deep Breath and Calm the Fuck Down About Lena Dunham

Lena Dunham and the cast of Girls

Written by Stephanie Rogers.

Dear Lena Dunham Haters,

I’m sick of the Lena Dunham hate.

I’m not referring to the criticisms of Dunham, which are—in most cases—valid and necessary critiques of her privilege, especially how that privilege translates into her work. The first season of Girls in particular either ignored people of color entirely, which is problematic enough since the show takes place in Brooklyn (a predominantly Black neighborhood), but when it did include people of color, they tended to appear as stereotypes (nannies, homeless, etc), and Dunham absolutely deserves to be called out for that.

But I’m sick of the Lena Dunham hate.

Just take a moment and Google the phrase “I hate Lena Dunham.” Feel free to spend some time browsing through the more than a million results. Searches related to “I hate Lena Dunham” include such gems as “Lena Dunham annoying,” “how much does Lena Dunham weigh,” and “what size is Lena Dunham.”

We live in a society that constantly undervalues and devalues the work of women while simultaneously expecting that the work we do—from mothering to directing movies—is performed fucking flawlessly. That said, we can’t sit back and pretend the vitriol directed at Dunham isn’t largely about a young woman breaking barriers in an industry that doesn’t like women (especially women who aren’t conventionally attractive and who aren’t gasp! spending all their waking hours apologizing for it). We shouldn’t pretend either that we, as a culture—and that includes women and feminists—haven’t internalized a little bit of this uneasiness surrounding successful women. It makes sense, then, that the undercurrent bubbling beneath all this Dunham hate is the very sexist notion that somehow Dunham doesn’t deserve her success.

Lena Dunham, looking all ungrateful for her unearned success

Elissa Schappel wrote an interesting piece for Salon two weeks ago, right after the Golden Globes ceremony, called “Stop Dumping on Lena Dunham!,” in which she puts forth some excellent counterarguments that a hater might want to consider.

On how Dunham doesn’t deserve the gigantic advance she got for her book deal:

I have yet to hear anyone react to the news of an advance with, “Yep, that seems about right.” It would be great if the writers and books that deserved the most money got it—ditto the same amount of attention and praise. And all the gripe-storming about how slight her book proposal was, and how she’ll never make back her advance—when did we start reviewing book proposals? When did writers start caring so passionately about publishers recouping their losses?

On how Dunham doesn’t deserve her success because she has inside Hollywood connections:

The entertainment industry is not a meritocracy. From before the days of Barrymore to our present age of Bacons and Bridges, Sheen-Estevezes and Zappas family has, for better and worse, equaled opportunity. The Coppola family’s connections and influence are so vast they’d make the mob envious.

On how Dunham doesn’t deserve her success because her show lacks diversity:

I hear the diversity criticism. However, to suggest that “Girls”—a show whose charm lies in part in its documentary-like feel—presents the universe these young women inhabit, working in publishing and the arts, as rich in racial diversity, would be, sadly, to lie. Besides, did anyone ever kvetch about Jerry Seinfeld’s lack of Asian friends?

To take the conversation surrounding non-progressiveness of television in general a bit further, Carly Lewis wrote last April about the sexism behind the Dunham/Girls backlash, and I agree with her:

It’s cute (read: pretty hypocritical, actually) to see this sudden spike in concern over television’s portrayal of women, but this fixation is propelled by the same sense of threatened dudeness that makes a show written by and about women so “controversial” in the first place. If television were an even playing field, Dunham would not be on the cover of New York magazine atop the subheading “Girls is the ballsiest show on TV,” nor would the debut of this series be such a massive deal. (Where are the cultural dissections of CSI: Miami?) The critics calling Girls disingenuous because it stars four white women should redirect their frustration toward misogyny itself, not at the one show trying to fight it.

Lena Dunham, probably getting ready to annoy people with her incessant whining

Admittedly, I have a soft spot for Dunham, having written about her wonderful film Tiny Furniture way back in 2011, before she’d manage to offend the entire nation with her giant thighs and sloppy backside. I think she comes across as genuinely funny and interesting, and I hope that her success—and the hard hits she’s taking because of it—will make the next woman who dares to step out of line (where “line” means “the patriarchal framework”) do so with just as much fearlessness.

Girls continues to evolve in season two, although I haven’t seen the new episodes yet, and it seems that Dunham has taken the criticisms of racism and lack of diversity seriously. In response to the question from the New York Times Magazine, “Should we expect to see an episode in which the girls get a black friend in Season 2?” she said:

I mean, it’s not going to be like, “Hey guys, we’ve been out looking for a black friend or a friend in a wheelchair or a friend with a hat.” The tough thing is you kind of can’t win on that one. I have to write people who feel honest but also push our cultural ball forward.

And people already have lots of opinions about Dunham’s attempt to accurately represent Brooklyn’s diversity in the second season with the casting of Donald Glover as Sandy, Hannah’s love interest, so I’ll treat you to a few.

Joe Lamour at Racialicious said this:

Here’s what I think, after watching the first half hour of the season: I admire that Dunham took the criticism she got last year to heart. There are so many examples of how Hollywood ignores this type of thing. In fact, there are whole websites devoted to it. It really seems like she listened; I can’t tell from thirty minutes that everything has been solved, but it seems to be off to a good start? Lena Dunham isn’t so bad? Maybe? I say that with reservation but enthusiasm. Before I go, a couple thoughts on the good and the bad:

Good: I’ll start with positive reinforcement: Girls is definitely more diverse this season!

Bad: That definitely wasn’t the hardest thing to do.

Good: Donald Glover as Sandy! Hannah’s new, fleshed-out, not at all T-Doggy boyfriend.

Bad: I’m just hoping Donald Glover won’t simply be this show’s Charlie Wheeler.

Good: About the extras: A marked improvement in the representation of Brooklyn’s racial mix. So, Lena Dunham created a popular show, a critically acclaimed show, and instead of being, like, “Whatever. They’re all going to watch me anyway!” she actually made an effort to improve her show. That’s good. Very good. And to be honest, she probably realizes that a more realistic mix equals a more realistic world for her characters to live in.

Bad: Again, this is about the extras: There are definitely more black people on the show, but … I mean … I’ll put it this way. Realistic diversity is definitely not in your first season, girl. But it also not this. It’s definitely realistic here. But—it’s not this either, so don’t go overboard.

White Women

Laura Bennett at The New Republic said this:

Dunham uses the Sandy plot line as an opportunity to skewer both the complaints of her critics—Hannah herself echoes them with the misguided assumption that her essays are “for everyone”—and her characters’ blinkered worldview. Glover’s arc on the show is brief, but he is key to illustrating the limited scope of Hannah’s experience. “This always happens,” Sandy tells Hannah during their fight. “I’m a white girl and I moved to New York and I’m having a great time and oh I’ve got a fixed gear bike and I’m gonna date a black guy and we’re gonna go to a dangerous part of town. All that bullshit. I’ve seen it happen. And then they can’t deal with who I am.” Hannah responds with an explosion of goofy knee-jerk progressivism: “You know what, honestly maybe you should think about the fact that you could be fetishizing me. Because how many white women have you dated? Maybe you think of us as one big white blobby mass with stupid ideas. So why don’t you lay this thing down, flip it, and reverse it.” “You just said a Missy Elliot lyric,” Sandy says wearily.

It is wholly unsubtle, but it is still “Girls” at its best, at once affectionate and credible and lightly parodic. There is Hannah: impulsive, oblivious, tangled up in her own sloppy self-justifications. And then there is Lena Dunham, the wary third eye hovering above the action. “The joke’s on you because you know what? I never thought about the fact that you were black once,” Hannah tells Sandy. “I don’t live in a world where there are divisions like this,” she says. His simple reply: “You do.”

Feministing, of course, has been talking about the show since its inception, and Sesali Bowen had this to say about “Dunham’s attempt to introduce racial discourse into her show”:

And I find myself back at the same place I was when Maya and I talked about Beyonce. No, Dunham’s attempt to introduce racial discourse into her show doesn’t suddenly make it diverse, but I think she still deserves some credit. If it sounds like I’m saying: the white girl gets a pass for not painting an accurate portrait of Blackness because she doesn’t have lived context/experience, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Why do we expect “all or nothing” from anyone who dares to align themselves with a few feminist values, even if they don’t call themselves feminists? When will we begin the process of meeting people where they are?

And, as Samhita wrote on this topic, maybe we should spend less time “scrutinizing [Dunham’s] personal behavior instead of looking at the real problem—the lack of diverse representations of women in popular culture.” Do we need to see realistic representations of Black girlhood on television? Yes, that’s why we need more Black girls writing shows. *raises hand* Do we need examples of diversity in film? Yes, that’s why we need more people from diverse backgrounds writing them. Truthfully, I’d rather not leave that task up to a white girl with “no Black friends.”

I love these important conversations! Please, let’s keep having them!

But how about we leave the I HATE LENA DUNHAM BECAUSE SHE SEEMS ENTITLED AND KINDA HORRIBLE AND WHINY AND ISN’T DOING THINGS THE WAY I WOULD DO THEM IF I WERE LENA DUNHAM grossness off the table for five seconds.

Lena Dunham, being all entitled and shit

When I was 26, I was spending my fifth year failing undergrad, drowning in student loan debt (that’s still happening), smoking pot incessantly, binge-eating pepperoni rolls, sleeping through most of my classes on a broken futon, and shoving dryer sheets in my heating vents because my shitty always-drunk neighbors wouldn’t stop chain smoking. Occasionally, out of nowhere, a giant fly would swoop down from some unseen cesspool where flies live and attack me. Those are my memories of being 26. Maybe your memories of being 26 suck way less, and if so, congratulations! But you’re allowed to make mistakes at 26. You’re allowed to learn from those mistakes and evolve into a person who looks back and thinks, “Wow, 26 was rough, and I sucked at it.” That’s a general goddamn life rule, and we aren’t taking it away from Lena Dunham just because she’s a young woman who dares to make her mistakes in public. (Read Jodie Foster’s thought-provoking essay on society’s ~~disgusting~~ unsurprisingly misogynist reactions toward young women acting like young women in public.)

I mean, just to double check, we’re all still cool with Louis C.K., right? I haven’t yet seen season three of Louie, that award-winning show that C.K. writes, directs, produces, edits, and stars in (sound familiar?), but I remember the first few episodes or so of this New York City-set critics’ darling being fairly fucking White, except for a few peripheral characters outside of Louie’s inner circle. And the Black people who do exist (at least in the first season) pretty much serve as vehicles to illustrate Louie’s uncoolness by comparison. (Has anyone given a name to that trope yet?) So, did I miss the accompanying INTERNET FREAKOUT, or does this bro maybe represent—I dunno—society’s favorite quintessential middle-aged, balding white dude who can’t get laid, that we all find so endearing and impossible not to love?

Did I also miss the 100% JUSTIFIED NOT REALLY BECAUSE IT NEVER HAPPENED OUTRAGE over C.K. exposing his huge gut and sloppy backside to the masses—whether he’s climbing on top of hot women (duh) or getting a totally unnecessary (because assault is funny!) rectal exam from doctor-character Ricky Gervais? And we’re all still cool with his awkward and embarrassing sex scenes, right? Because they’re just … so … what’s that word people keep railing against when it’s used to describe the sex scenes in Girls … oh yeah … “REAL” … ?

“Eh, what are you gonna do?” –privileged White dudes everywhere, in response to rarely getting called out for their bullshit

My bad. I’m probably missing something, since Chuck Bowen called Louie “possibly the most racially integrated television show ever made,” (I’ll admit “Dentist/Tarese” is an interesting episode toward the end of season one) and there isn’t at all an inkling of a double standard at play here regarding what we consider “acceptable” bodies to display onscreen. (Sidenote: I love, not really, how groundbreaking it is that C.K. cast a Black woman to play his ex-wife in season three of Louie, yet we’re still treated to that “schlubby dude landing a hot lady” trope. I can’t keep suspending my disbelief forever, boys.)

Sorry, tangent. But seriously.

If I sound like a Lena Dunham apologist aka “a fucking pig who can go to hell,” let me clarify (again): Lena Dunham should be—and certainly has been, I mean fuck—criticized for her show’s failings. Most television shows and films for that matter would benefit even from a miniscule amount of the kind of intense anger flung at Girls over its racism and lack of diversity. But I’m angry that people—including women and feminists—can’t seem to criticize Lena Dunham’s show without launching into sexist attacks against Lena Dunham, in the same way I was angry when people couldn’t (and still can’t) separate their criticisms of Sarah Palin’s conservative policies from their sexist attacks against Sarah Palin.

So, if nothing else, I give you these few words and phrases to move away from when talking about Lena Dunham: “whiny” … “annoying” … “ugly” … “gross” … “frumpy” … “hot mess” … “neurotic” … “slutty” … you get the idea.

NEPOTISM NARCISSISM LENA’S BODY UGH

The truth is, ultimately, it doesn’t matter to me who likes Girls and who doesn’t. For what it’s worth, I liked the first season, mainly because I’ve been writing about representations of women in film and television for five years, and it was nice for once to know I wouldn’t have to analyze every scene to figure out whether this show passed The Bechdel Test. It sort of blew my mind to hear women talk to one another about abortion, HPV, colposcopies, virginity, and menopause, like, repeatedly—and with no unnecessary mansplainy perspective involved. I think the show actually makes a pretty serious case against living like an entitled, culturally insulated hipster, while still managing to love its characters. But I understand, even excluding the criticisms regarding lack of diversity, that people still legitimately dislike the show for other reasons. That’s allowed. I hate Two and a Half Men and Family Guy and The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother and every other White-dominated show on television that keeps pretending women exist merely as fucktoys and mommies to their manchildren, and that’s allowed too.

But if you’re having an epic conniption over HOW HORRIBLE GIRLS IS OMG WHY DOES ANYONE LIKE IT LENA DUNHAM IS THE WORST, maybe it’s time to evaluate the hate—not dislike of, or boredom with, or ambivalence toward—but the actual hatred of ~~Girls~~ Lena Dunham, and why it’s really there.

2013 Golden Globes Week: From a Bride with a Hanzo Sword to a Damsel in Distress: Did Quentin Tarantino’s Feminism Take a Step Backwards in ‘Django Unchained’?

This is a guest review by Tracy Bealer and is cross-posted with permission from Gender Focus.

Movie poster for Django Unchained

One of the pleasures of being a Quentin Tarantino fan for the last (gulp) twenty years has been enjoying his development as a writer-director, especially in terms of his ever more complicated representations of women. To move from Reservoir Dogs, the female characters of which are limited to “shocked woman” and “shot woman,” to Kill Bill volumes 1 & 2, a film (Tarantino insists they be considered a single work) that masterfully investigates the multiplicity of feminine identity, is a dizzying and exhilarating evolution.

However, Django Unchained, Tarantino’s eighth feature, seems to further expand his interest in exploring the intersection of cinema, history and violence, but is rather regressive in terms of female characterization.

Samuel L. Jackson and Kerry Washington in Django Unchained

-Spoilers follow-

Django Unchained is a powerful statement on the absurdity and cruelty that underpinned and perpetuated American slavery. The film follows Django, a freed slave played by Jamie Foxx, and his German partner, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) as they attempt to liberate Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from the plantation run by Leonardo DiCaprio’s odious Calvin Candie. It includes the kind of Tarantino-esque irreverence and visual wit that are familiar from his earlier films, but also manages to treat the suffering visited on enslaved African American bodies, minds, and families with respect and horror.

Django unquestionably riffs on the same sort of cinematic revenge fantasies for historical injustice that led to the explosive conclusion of Inglourious Basterds, as well as the spaghetti westerns from which Django borrows its title and main character’s name. However, the film also cites captivity narratives, which is a progressive move racially, but not in terms of gender.

Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained

Django Unchained inverts the traditional captivity narrative structure, in which “civilized” white women are captured by an “uncivilized” enemy (in American versions, typically Native Americans). By making Django the avenger and Broomhilda the damsel in distress, the story upends and thereby exposes the fictionality of such racialized categories, but it also places Broomhilda in a character trope that does not allow for the sort of self-actualization and power that typify earlier Tarantino women like Jackie Brown (of the film of the same title), Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill, or even the pack of female avengers in Death Proof. Instead, Broomhilda seems to exist in the narrative only to be rescued by Django, and the resulting film becomes nearly as phallocentric in form and content as Reservoir Dogs. (Kerry Washington is joined by four other female actresses, three playing other enslaved women, and the other one the simpering Southern belle sister of Calvin Candie.)

Broomhilda does not have such an unusual name by accident. As Schultz informs Django, and the audience, Broomhilda is a figure from Norse folklore, imprisoned on a mountaintop by her father Odin, and destined to remain trapped until her true love slays a dragon and walks through hellfire to save her. By applying this mythology to Django’s quest to free his own Broomhilda from her hellish captivity, Tarantino universalizes, and thereby de-racializes, the legend. But in so doing, he also by necessity equates the enslaved Broomhilda with the Valkyrie princess. And though both Broomhildas are, as the etymology of their name suggests, “ready for battle,” Kerry Washington is given little fighting to do onscreen in Tarantino’s script.

Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington in Django Unchained

It seems almost crudely obvious to state that being imprisoned on a mountaintop in no way approximates the suffering endemic to slavery. And if we write beyond the script, Broomhilda undoubtedly endured, and survived, and thrived in spite of, unspeakable torment during her time away from Django, as well as before and during their relationship, leaving no doubt as to her strength. However, when we see her on screen, her character is more often than not marked by vulnerability, passivity, and girlishness.

The first glimpse the audience gets of Broomhilda (outside of Django’s idealized hallucinations of her bathing with him and walking beside his horse in a beautiful gown) is her naked, shaking body being exhumed from “the hot box”—an outside coffin in which she was chained for running away. During a dinner party, after she has learned of Django and Schultz’s plan to trick Candie into selling her, she is stripped to the waist in the dining room to reveal her whipping scars. Broomhilda’s obvious unease during this dinner party tips off Stephen, the head house slave chillingly played by Samuel L. Jackson, to her previous relationship with Django, thereby torpedoing the surreptitious plan. During the ensuing shoot-out she is passed from male hand to male hand, and ultimately thrown onto a bed in a shack, presumably awaiting sexual violation. After Django rescues his wife and destroys Candie’s “big house,” she claps in girlish glee. A warrior queen this Broomhilda is not allowed to be, at least not during the action of the film.

Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained

I admire (and appreciate) Django Unchained for what it aims to be—a cinematic expose of the institution that has been called “America’s original sin.” There are too few films that seek to do this. However, as someone who has argued elsewhere that Tarantino’s evolution as a filmmaker is coextensive with a developing feminist consciousness, Django has forced me to rethink my assumptions.

———-

Tracy Bealer has a PhD from the University of South Carolina and currently teaches writing at Metro State University of Denver, where she regularly lets her students watch movies in class. She has published on Quentin Tarantino, the Harry Potter series, and sparkly vampires.

The Power of Narrative in ‘Django Unchained’

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner

Written by Leigh Kolb

Spoilers ahead

In 2011, two presidential hopefuls signed a pledge that, in its original form, insinuated that African-American children had families that were more cohesive and better off during slavery.

Texas and Tennessee both in the last two years have seen school boards and political activist groups push K-12 curriculum that “softens” slavery references, explores the “positive aspects of American slavery” and downplays minority struggles throughout American history.

A southern governor issued a proclamation for Confederate History Month with no references to slavery in 2010.

Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, an anti-slavery revenge fantasy (based more in fact than fiction) was released just a few days before the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was passed on Jan. 1, 1863 (however, it would be almost three more years until slavery was outlawed in the United States with the Thirteenth Amendment).

If you find the above information upsetting–that many are trying to whitewash a history so fresh and raw (after all, 150 years is not that long ago)–then Django Unchained is for you. If you don’t find the above information jarring, then perhaps the film is especially for you.

Tarantino has been candid in many interviews about his desire to showcase this time in American history (the film is set in 1858, two years before the start of the Civil War). His 2009 film Inglourious Basterds was a Holocaust revenge fantasy–not historically accurate, but emotionally fulfilling. Django Unchained‘s fiction isn’t as factually inaccurate, but the cathartic nature of looking at a historical horror through the lens of revenge is still there.

Tarantino recently explained this catharsis on NPR:

“… to actually take an action story and put it in that kind of backdrop where slavery or the pain of World War II is the backdrop of an exciting adventure story — that can be something else. And then in my adventure story, I can have the people who are historically portrayed as the victims be the victors and the avengers.”

He goes on:

“You know, there’s not this big demand for, you know, movies that deal with the darkest part of America’s history, and the part that we’re still paying for to this day. They’re scared of how white audiences are going to feel about it; they’re scared about how black audiences are going to feel about it.”

This fear is certainly understandable, since America’s history of slavery, racism and subjugation is still, in many ways, a taboo topic (or a topic rife with revisionism). Django Unchained, however, does everything right.

The opening scene of the film is a line of raw, whipped black backs. This image is not foreign to audiences–people are generally well-versed in that aspect of violence against slaves. The image is awful and uncomfortable, but eases the audience in to this time period with something familiar. As the film progresses, layers of violence and misery are peeled back until audiences are squirming and uncomfortable. As they should be.

For the first part of the film, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and Django (Jamie Foxx) are portrayed as partners. Both have stories, and basically split the role of protagonist. Schultz frees Django to aid in his bounty hunting. In their time together, Schultz teaches Django to read, shoot and “act” however he needed to in order to accomplish his goals.

Schultz teaches Django how to shoot and read, granting him access to the free world.

The poignant scenes where Schultz and Django are eating together in their camp highlight the importance of authentic voices. They ask one other questions and learn one another’s stories. Schultz acts shocked when he learns that Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), speaks German. He was intrigued by their story, and asked Django about her and their life together.

The importance of the authentic voice and hearing people tell their own stories is essential. How, then, can Tarantino, a white man in 2012, effectively bring the injustice of slavery to mass audiences?

The answer can really be found in the film itself.

Schultz tells Django the legend of Brünnhilda (which mirrors Django’s own journey for his wife). Django asks Schultz why he is helping him, and why he cares whether he finds his wife, and Schultz answers, “I’ve never given anybody their freedom before. I feel responsible for you.”

This responsibility to give Django access to the free world is similar to Tarantino’s responsibility to bring this black empowerment film to mass audiences. It’s about access, not help or hand outs. Access is what white Americans (especially white American males) still have at this point, and they should be responsible for sharing that access with others and telling important stories. Tarantino’s popularity and neutrality (as a white man with no other “agenda”) gave access to this story.

Could a black man have made a film with a celebrated hero who says, “Kill white people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?” I can’t imagine that would have had the same mass appeal. While I’m not suggesting that this is a fair or good scenario, that’s where we are in our history. And if we’re going to continue to have people downplaying our nation’s history of oppression and “softening” slavery, we need these stories more than ever.

As this access is granted to Django, the story becomes more and more his own. He changes after the first bounty kill. Two men are getting ready to whip an enslaved woman; Django shoots the one who is quoting Bible passages and holding the Bible (he shoots him through a Bible page that is stapled to his shirt) and whips the other. He has claimed his place, and his journey begins to be more wholly his own. (The shot to the Bible page is also important considering pro-slavery factions would use the Bible as a defense for owning slaves.)

Django turns the whip on the oppressor.

By the time the two reach Candyland, Django has truly come into his own. As they travel across the horizon, rapper Rick Ross’s “100 Black Coffins” plays as Django struts on his horse (Foxx was instrumental in helping choose this music). The rap works, and indicates a shift in whose story we’re really starting to see. When Schultz warns Django to stop “antagonizing” plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), Django asserts that he’s just “getting dirty,” and acting like he knows he needs to. This dialogue upends the “know your place” rhetoric that even well-meaning, slavery-hating Schultz falls into.

The use of mandingo fighting as a plot point (both to get Schultz and Django to Candyland, and also to horrify the audience) is important. While forcing slaves to fight or entertain for sport and profit was not uncommon, this kind of fighting until death didn’t appear to happen. And before you take a big sigh of relief (it wasn’t that bad, then), the main reason this kind of fighting would not have happened is because it was economically unwise to kill someone who would be a strong worker. It’s all business.

Candie’s continued references to phrenology remind us that in addition to the perceived Biblical support of slavery, pseudoscience of the time also supported racist (and sexist) ideas about people’s capabilities.

When he breaks apart old Ben’s skull at the dining room table, one can’t help but think about poor Yorick in Hamlet. As Hamlet cradles the skull of his father’s jester who he knew well as a child (much like Ben’s role as Candie’s father’s slave), he considers life and death and reflects upon how we all end up the same. Ben’s skull, however, launches Candie into a tirade about phrenology, as he breaks a piece off to show the indentions that prove black people are biologically subservient.

House slave Stephen, left, Broomhilda and Candie.

Behind Candie always in these dining room scenes is a marble statue of two Roman gladiators fighting (his hobby is nothing new), and is Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), his house slave. Stephen embodies the Stockholm Syndrome kind of subservience that Candie sees as inherent. He plays the ultimate “Uncle Tom” character to foil Django’s free and increasingly independent and violent nature. Of course, in keeping with the Ben/Yorick parallel, Stephen also is much more clever than Candie is, and has wisdom and knowledge (Shakespeare often gave the jesters/fools much more wisdom than their masters).

Stephen.

The way Candie and Stephen treat Broomhilda is abhorrent, and Django predicted correctly that she was used as a “comfort girl” (sex slave). While her part is the damsel in distress, she’s clearly as fierce and independent as she can be (when they arrive at Candyland, she’s being brutally punished for trying to escape).

As business is being settled toward the end, Schultz cannot stop the images of a dog killing a runaway slave they’d encountered earlier. He’s not angered by losing a much larger amount of money than he’d anticipated, or being “caught” in a scheme. He’s haunted by the brutality he’s seen at Candyland. He starts discussing The Three Musketeers with Candie, and tells him that Alexandre Dumas was black (again reinforcing the idea that it is important to have the whole story to avoid reducing people to stereotypes). A demand for a handshake becomes too much for Schultz, and he shoots Candie, setting off a bloodbath. He knows he’s sacrificing himself with that gesture, but it’s worth it to him.

Few remain alive after the resulting gunfight, but Django and Broomhilda are both caught and punished. Django, in the throes of torture and seconds away from castration, is visited by Stephen, who rattles off all the ways they could have punished him, but Candie’s sister ordered that he be shipped to a quarry, where he’d be enslaved again.

“This will be the story of you, Django,” says Stephen.

While Django’s story began by being freed by Schultz and partnering with him, thus receiving access to the free world, he long ago became the author of his own story. And Stephen’s wrong–Django wins. Django frees himself this time.

As Django kills Stephen, Stephen screams, “You can’t destroy Candyland–there’ll always be a Candyland!”

And while Django does effectively end Candyland, Stephen isn’t incorrect. Candylands will exist for years after Django leaves, and we are still feeling what Candyland was in America today.

In an interview with VIBE, DiCaprio, Washington and Foxx discussed their reactions to the screenplay. DiCaprio said,

“For me, the initial thing obviously was playing someone so disreputable and horrible whose ideas I obviously couldn’t connect with on any level. I remember our first read through, and some of my questions were about the amount of violence, the amount of racism, the explicit use of certain language. It was hard for me to wrap my head around it. My initial response was, ‘Do we need to go this far?'”

Foxx and Washington said,

Foxx: “When President Obama became president in 2008, a blemish on my hometown was the fact that it wasn’t on the front page of the newspaper. When they went down to talk to them, they went [country accent] ‘Hey listen, we run a newspaper, not a scrap book.’ I’m paraphrasing. So I had both of my daughters come down to the plantation, and I walked them through and I said, ‘This is where your people come from. This is your background.’ And I said, ‘this is more than just a movie for your father.’ My little daughter, I took her into the shack, and I said, ‘these are where the slaves stayed.’ Every two, three years there is a movie about the holocaust because they want you to remember and they want you to be reminded of what it was. When was the last time you seen a movie about slavery?”
Washington: “When is the last time you saw a movie about slavery where a black man frees himself?”
Foxx: “We read back in the day about Nat Turner and other guys who were not taking it. That’s why, when I read the script and we went back to the plantation, there were certain things inside me bubbling up.”

These responses are indicative of the conversations about our own history. White people frequently echo variations on a theme of “I didn’t have anything to do with that.” It’s easy to denigrate and forget a past that we keep ourselves disconnected from. For black Americans, however, there is a sense of connectivity, of history, to that time and place. As there should be–for everyone, no matter how painful it is.

Django leaves a pile of bodies in his trail to freedom.

Django Unchained is an excellent film. The writing, direction, acting and soundtrack are powerful. And while it’s poised to be at the receiving end of many accolades this awards season, the best, most lasting impression it can leave is to change conversations and common narratives (even fictional ones) so that whitewashing our history becomes impossible.

—

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

Women in Politics Week: Seeing My Reflection In Film: ‘Night Catches Us’ Struck a Chord With Me

This guest post by Arielle Loren was previously published at Bitch Flicks on December 22, 2010. It originally appeared at Arielle Loren, daily musings for ladies and curious men.

It is rare that a film invades my imagination to the point of insomnia. After seeing Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us starring Kerry Washington and Anthony Mackie, I felt a sense of deep pride wash over my body and nudge my mind into continuous thoughts about the potential for independent productions to rebalance diversity in black film.

Based in Philadelphia, Night Catches Us tells the story of two former black panthers trying to re-establish life after leaving The Party and the death of a fellow panther years ago. While the central plot revolves around these two characters’ lives, Hamilton integrates into the film historic footage of the Black Panther Party. As this era of black history often is pigeonholed to radicalism, Hamilton truly humanizes The Party through several scenes of police brutality, corruption, and community gatherings. For instance, Washington’s character, Patricia, would raise money to pay the legal fees for her less fortunate clients and feed every child on the block even when she couldn’t pay her light bill.

This sentiment of “community first” is the history with which I identify and the one that I wish we could spread to more mainstream screens. While watching this film, I saw my reflection. From Washington’s afro to her desire to serve her community, I felt hope again for the half-baked images rummaging through mainstream black film. Night Catches Us only is playing in select theaters, BUT you can rent it on iTunes and On Demand via Comcast. Thus, there’s no excuse not to support this film; we’ve got to support the films that we want to see in the mainstream.

I hope Night Catches Us will be nominated for an Oscar and brought to larger screens. As a first time director, Hamilton has left me quite impressed and I can’t wait to see what other stories she will bring to life during her career. Additionally, I am truly proud to see my reflection in her too.

Check out the trailer for Night Catches Us below and if you haven’t seen the film, view it on iTunes. Tell me, how can we get more films like this onto the big screen?

——

Arielle Loren is a gender and sexuality writer, filmmaker, and web personality. Recently, she directed and produced The Bi-deology Project, a media-acclaimed, online documentary series that chronicles the experiences of straight women dating bisexual men.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Stephanie‘s Picks:

Women in the Media: Female TV and Film Characters Still Sidelined and Sexualized, Study Finds by Nina Bahadur via Huffington Post

Hollywood’s New Feminists, Why the Old One Went Away and What’s Coming Next? by Sasha Stone via Awards Daily

Fighting, Flirting, Feminism: The Bond Girl Evolution by Lily Rothman via Time

V Magazine Attempts “Girl Power” Issue by Melanie via The Feminist Guide to Hollywood

A Crowdfunding Primer: Feminist Media Producers Engage a Community of Backers by Ariel Dougherty via On the Issues

Sing It, Sister [on Keira Knightley] by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville

Sexism Watch: Popular Media Is Dominated by Men by Melissa Silverstein via Women and Hollywood

Amber‘s Picks:

How Mean Girls Explains the Petraeus Scandal by Ann Friedman via New York Magazine

Infographic: How White Is the New Fall 2012 TV Season? by Jorge Rivas via Colorlines

Heroines of Cinema: Ten $100 Million Hits Starring Women over 50 by Matthew Hammet Knott via Indiewire

Five Abolition Movies I’d Like to See by Aphra Behn via Shakesville

In the Works: ‘Bridget Jones’ to Return with Baby in Third Book and Movie by Beth Hanna via Thompson on Hollywood

Skyfall: A Post-Election Conservative Wet Dream by Soraya Chemaly via Women and Hollywood

Megan‘s Picks:

Girls Impact the World Film Festival — A Forum for Social Change by Amanda Quraishi via Women’s Media Center

Who’s Getting Heard — The New TV Season via Women, Action & the Media (WAM)

Nothing Says Native American Heritage Month Like White Girls in Headdresses by Sasha Houston Brown via Racialicious

Lady Liquor: Gendering Codependency in When a Man Loves a Woman by Christen McCurdy via Bitch Media

How Skyfall Reasserted the Patriarchy in Bond by Alex Cranz via FemPop

Geena Davis on Gender by Jenny Peters via Variety

Backlot Bitch: In Defense of Wreck-It Ralph by Monica Castillo via Bitch Media

Justice Sotomayor Gives Sesame Street Some Career Advice via Feministing

What have you been reading this week? Tell us in the comments!

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Amber‘s Picks:

The Science of Racism: Radiolab’s Treatment of the Hmong Experience by Kao Kalia Yang via Hypen Magazine

Oscar 2012: Best Actress, Old and Young by Jackrabbit Slim via Gone Elsewhere

Parody piece is more feminist than Rolling Stone‘s actual women’s issue via About-Face

Lana Wachowski Wins Visibility Award From HRC by Monica Castillo via Bitch

Feminism Friday: Sexism, Misogyny and Dictionaries by tigtog via Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog

On the production of heterotopia, and other spaces, in and around lesbian and gay film festivals by Ger Zielinski via Jump Cut

Megan‘s Picks:

Election Coverage Falls Short on “Women’s Issues” by Kristal Brent Zook via Women’s Media Center

Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, Part 1: Daddy Knows Best; Part 2: It’s Not Just About Vampires; Part 3: Worlds Without Patriarchy by Holly L. Derr via Ms. Magazine Blog

Beyond Clarice: Underrated Horror Heroines by Sarah Marshall via The Hairpin

Is Skyfall a Less Sexist Bond Film? by Jane Martinston via The Guardian

A Personal Take on the Nina Simone Biopic’s Casting Troubles by Akiba Solomon via Colorlines

The manicured mercenaries with Sly in their sights: Move over, macho men. Here come the ExpendaBelles by Francesca Steele via The Independent

Book Excerpt We Killed: The Rise of Women in Comedy: A Very Oral History by Yael Kohen via Women and Hollywood

TV’s Disappointing Gay Dads by Alysia Abbott via The Atlantic

Beth Ditto: “I Feel Sorry for People Who’ve Had Skinny Privilege and Then Have It Taken Away from Them” via Jezebel

Women in Film Expands Outreach with Speed Mentoring; Top Ten Pieces of Advice by Sophia Savage via Thompson on Hollywood

How Rap Can Help End Rape Culture by Michael P. Jeffries The Atlantic

Call the Midwife: What Nuns Know About Reproductive Justice by Jill Moffett via Bitch Magazine Blog

Quote of the Day: I Wanted to Show People That Pregnancy is Not a Disability, And a Pregnant Lady Can Be in a Position of Power and Crazy Shit Won’t Happen – Diablo Cody by Melissa Silverstein via Women and Hollywood

Kerry Washington, Star of ABC’s ‘Scandal,’ on Why She’s Voting for Barack Obama by Kerry Washington via The Daily Beast

Bond Girls, Action Heroes, Sexuality and Power by Alyssa Rosenberg via ThinkProgress

What have you been reading this week?? Tell us in the comments!

The Neeson Identity: What the Release of ‘The Grey’ Got Wrong About Men

This is a guest post by Margaret Howie.

With the release of Taken 2, Liam Neeson impersonations are all over the internet again. You’d think that we had all been starved of Neeson material, but it was only back in January that his Man vs. the Wild movie, The Grey was released. Along with it we got a PR campaign based largely around his qualities as a leading man, and some revealing media coverage about gender roles in cinema.

The trailer for The Grey ticked all the familiar wilderness survival story clichés, right up until one of the last shots. That was the sight of Neeson taping broken bottles to his fists for a head-on confrontation with a pack of wolves. Accompanying this enticing promise of Neeson taking on predators fist-first, the surrounding promotion promised even more from the movie. The Grey was going to be more than an action flick. It would be a profound examination of the state of modern man. Much of this argument centred on the casting of the Northern Irish actor, and the director’s insistence that his star represented something lacking from modern film: authentic masculinity. Eventually much of the discussion of The Grey turned into rants about maleness. It shows how depressingly quickly gender stereotypes can be recycled and reinforced in something as innocuous as movie promotion.

Liam Neeson in The Grey (2012). Beard. Check. Snow. Check. Y Chromosome. Check.

Post-Star Wars, Neeson has become best known for his display of clenched-jaw determination in the face of cinematic adversary. Almost twenty years since Schindler’s List, the audience has faith in his capabilities to release the Kraken, defeat terrorists, get his daughter back and punch out a wolf. Parodies of his line deliveries in 2008’s Taken and 2010’s Clash of the Titans continue to get uploaded to YouTube. With the release of The Grey there was another opportunity to salute his hard-boiled, reluctant-action-hero persona and reflect on how it fits in a survival film.

Directed by Joe Carnahan and co-starring Frank Grillo and Dermot Mulroney, The Grey is described by Open Road Films as the story of “an unruly group of oil-rig roughnecks when their plane crashes into the remote Alaskan wilderness. Battling mortal injuries and merciless weather, the survivors have only a few days to escape the icy elements – and a vicious pack of rogue wolves on the hunt.”

What goes without saying is that the group is all-male. What did go on to get said, across film blogs and in news reports, was that the men of this film were delivering something supposedly missing from the cultural diet. Gender quickly became one of the most-discussed themes of The Grey’s pre-release coverage. Both movie reporters and their interviewees worked lines about masculinity into the discussions. Soon an idea of Liam Neeson’s ‘maleness’ being some sort of scarce resource emerged. The subject was set up by Neeson’s particular popular culture position, the mostly male cast, the genre and the writer/director Carnahan’s strident views of the state of casting in Hollywood. Is there really a dearth of manliness in cinema? Or does Dermot Mulroney get it right when he complained that “all the f–king movies are about the girls”?

The wilderness survival movie tends to be a generically male construction. In December 2011, Collider reviewed the trailer and Matt Goldberg added, “I can’t remember the last time we saw a solid men-vs-wild movie [since The Edge].” But perhaps the title should have reminded him. Men vs. wild films have been coming out solidly, even if you only count ones with ‘The’ in the title. Since The Edge was released in 1997, The Hunted, The Missing, The Way Back, and The Donner Party have all provided stories of steely-eyed male protagonists facing down both the wilderness and the worst of human nature.

Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in The Edge. Beards. Snow. Wilderness. Etc.

In a ‘close read’ of the film, posted on the day of the film’s release, Movieline’s Jen Yamato asked whether The Grey was a “welcome return to masculine cinema.” This was explored through quotes from the cast and director. Actor Dermot Mulroney said, “I’ve made a lot of movies that had both men and women in them, a lot of movies that were dominated by the woman’s storyline. And in this case it was a very different experience making the movie and enjoying the movie, when it was completed, because of the fact that there are no women in it… It was like thank God, I get to do a movie with just guys.”

Cast member Frank Grillo said that “It’s tough being a man. It really is tough being a man.” His co-star Dallas Roberts was quoted as saying, “But that’s the problem with discussing modern masculinity, isn’t it, because you’re a moron as soon as you open your mouth and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Mulroney expanded on the subject of cinematic testosterone in another interview with Movieline. It went on to be posted under the headline “The Sweet Relief of Being in a Manly Movie Like The Grey.” His response to a question about representing ‘what it means to be a man’ in the film was:

“So you say this movie has some throwback qualities, or some old school manly-man qualities; that’s intentional… So, guilty as charged on that; if that’s something that needs to be brought back, then let’s bring it back. It seems like people are responding to that about this movie and to my mind there haven’t been enough of them. The pendulum swung the other way since I started in this business and there were men’s movies like whatever those Tom Cruise movies [were]”

He continues “…then all of a sudden Sigourney Weaver comes in the Alien and we have strong women, we have Working Girl, we have all this, we have Best Friend’s Wedding, and before you know it, all the f–king movies are about the girls!”

Movieline’s headline presents The Grey as a ‘sweet relief’ to this abundance of girls, uncritically accepting Mulroney’s point and working it in to the appeal of the movie for audiences. This theme of the ‘masculine’ film continued to crop up in the promotional work surrounding the film’s release. Carnahan went on to frame his casting decisions around an idea of endangered manliness. The HuffPo blog Tribeca Film highlighted it in their interview with him, using the headline “Call of the Wild: Masculinity and Mother Nature in The Grey.” In the article, Carnahan talks about his cast, saying “They are unmistakably masculine as opposed to these vacuous kids in Hollywood right now…For The Grey, I was interested in a very specific kind of masculinity.”

He goes on to summon up this ‘very specific kind’ as embodied by Neeson through comparing him with Justin Bieber. Carnahan positions manliness in terms of dismissal and revulsion with the kind of ‘vacuous kids’ teenage Bieber apparently represents, and links credibility with age. The casting issue comes up again in The Daily Blam, where the writer Pietro Filipponi paraphrases his interview with Carnahan by saying “Casting…wasn’t as easy as you’d think” and quoting the director holding forth again on the seeming epidemic of “shirtless boys…with blank stares.” Filipponi suggests that “movie goers may scratch their collective heads wondering why other well known (and younger) actors weren’t selected for this film.”

In the Film School Rejects interview with Carnahan they discusses the “surprise” fact that younger actor Bradley Cooper (who is 37) was “almost” cast, and the interviewer Jack Giroux also brings up the idea that Carnahan’s “characters are usually very manly.”

The connection between Neeson’s casting (the director calls it the film’s “trump card”) and the “manly” aspect of his character is presented as a given. The contrast between younger Cooper and Neeson, who is 59, isn’t pressed, but in another interview with Moviehole the director continues to strongly connect his leading man with idealised masculinity. He says that “Liam embodied that much more easily than a younger actor would have” and commented on Neeson’s “strength and profundity as a man and as an actor.”

Discussions about The Grey and its portrayal of endangered masculinity originated in the movie blogosphere, but proved to be popular beyond it. When Joe Carnahan told film site Collider that Hollywood “premium on boys instead of men” and that films were “sorely lacking” in Neeson’s “ilk,” his quote was picked up by an entertainment news agency. The line came from a video interview with the director, who had been asked about the decision to cast his leading man. Talking about how “shirtless seventeen-year-olds” are being “passed off as a masculine form,” he goes on to say: “The reason that a guy like Liam, who’s nearly 60 years old, is having this resurgent kind of career swing is because we are sorely lacking in his ilk in this business right now.”

It garnered a decent amount of coverage, certainly more than most non-Tarantino director’s interviews are likely to, even in Oscar season. The quote was picked up by entertainment news agency Cover Media and was recycled on entertainment sites like ONTD and the UK’s Daily Express. Along with the jokes made about Neeson’s wolf-punching virility it became one of the underpinnings of The Grey’s online media coverage.

Magazine website Crushable reposted Carnahan’s quote under the headline “Liam Neeson Is Having a Career Resurgence Because He’s the Most Masculine Actor in Hollywood,” with writer Natalie Zutter concluding: “There are no men in Hollywood.” The same site emphasises Neeson’s skill set by creating a very manly paper doll of him in full action hero pose. He’s pictured surrounded by everyday items he can recycle into “the perfect weapons.” Same as, the writer points out, Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity – an actor and role not mentioned in her other article, probably because it dismantles the point that Zutter (and Carnahan himself) is making.

Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity. Non-existent leading man.

Yahoo’s Shine blog used the line as a springboard to ask “Where Are Hollywood’s Manly Men?” Author Piper Weiss reiterates Carnahan’s idea of a “lack,” referring to Neeson as the “last of the man-hicans” and calling them “a dying breed if ever there was one.” Weiss goes on to list ten other prominent movie stars who fit this particular “breed.” It harks back to Carnahan’s stated desire for a “very different kind of masculinity,” a call for an essentialist gender role of some type that’s now, apparently, unfashionable and endangered. Ironically, eight of them are white, unintentionally reflecting one of the true shortages in Hollywood casting.

Writer Christian Toto, writing for the conservative Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog, used Neeson’s profile to write about “Why Masculinity Matters.” Comparing the profit of The Grey with Taylor Lautner-starring action film Abduction, Toto concludes that “the soon to be 60-year-old Neeson matters because he’s bringing something fresh to theatres, the sense of a fully capable alpha male who doesn’t regret taking decisive action.” How rare this ‘fully capable alpha male’ quality is, and how unique it makes Neeson’s appearance on screen, may appear inarguable when contrasted with the twenty-year-old Lautner’s box office disappointment.

However, Abduction opened up against two arguably manly films, Killer Elite and Moneyball, and only a couple of weeks away from several other testosterone-heavy storylines, Warrior, Drive, Courageous, and Real Steel. All of them featured flawed male leads, many of them (including Jason Statham, Clive Owen, Brad Pitt, and Hugh Jackman) old enough to be Lautner’s father. It also doesn’t take into account that Lautner’s film was beaten at the box office by a movie with negligible alpha-male qualities called Dolphin Tale.

Masculinity definitely does still matter, as the Women’s Media Centre study of gender representation [pdf] in U.S. media shows. It reported the distressing results of a 2012 report by Smith, Choueti & Gall on female representation in mainstream movies. The authors found that female characters made up just a third of the speaking roles in the top hundred grossing films of 2007, 2008, and 2009. Looking at ‘gender balance’ in these movies, where “the girls” contributed to around half of the characters, only one in six films qualified. In films, female leads are still the exception, never the rule, no matter how overwhelmed Dermot Mulroney feels.

Given this, it feels like an overstatement to hear all these announcements that cinema audiences will be shocked at seeing a cast of legal male adults, or even a star – Neeson – old enough to have fathered Bradley Cooper. Particularly considering that a writer who asked where the manly men are in Hollywood could then come up with ten prominent actors, like Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, who fit her misty-eyed description of manliness.

The popularity of Carnahan’s quote shows off the attraction of discussing a non-event like ‘disappearing masculinity.’ This argument makes out that The Grey is a special event, a chance for grown-ups – particularly men – to have a rare opportunity to see themselves onscreen. As well as being savvy PR, there’s almost an ideological challenge in this. The lurking subtextual suggestion is that if the audience does not front up, there will be less and less of the kind of gender ideal that Neeson has come to embody, with his daughter-rescuing, wolf-punching cragged good looks and air of tragic fortitude. Man vs. wolf is also man vs. box office, man vs. the empty calories of what Carnahan dismisses as “shirtless boys with…blank stares,” and by extension a dearth of movies with ‘male’ stories.

Comparing like-with-like, North American January cinema releases have in fact offered audiences plenty of films with central adult male leads facing difficult odds. The Grey was being released on the same weekend as the expanded release of 50-year-old George Clooney in The Descendents, and in a month with new films starring Dennis Quaid, Mark Wahlberg, Ralph Fiennes, and Ewan McGregor, all actors over forty. In January 2011, The Way Back was released, about seven men and one young woman walking 4000 miles to escape the Soviet gulags. In 2010 came the general American release of the Alp-climbing adventure film North Face. In 2009, instead of a survival epic there was Taken, the terrorist thriller that marked the beginning of the recreated Liam Neeson as action hero. In 2008 the most recent Rambo film came out, bringing back the renegade army vet to fight the Burmese military junta in the jungle. In 2007 Joe Carnahan’s mostly-male action film, Smokin’ Aces, was released – as was kidnapping thriller Alpha Dog, a suitable name for a movie where six of the seven top-billed actors were male. The year before that, January audiences were given the option of going to see Eight Below, another survival tale set in the Antarctic, starring two men and their pack of dogs.

Men dominate the blockbuster field, and the cult of youth is not as entrenched as Carnahan makes out. Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., Vin Diesel, Matt Damon, Nicholas Cage, and Will Smith all opened films among the top-grossing of 2011, and are all also on the far side of forty. Harrison Ford is over sixty, as is Sylvester Stallone, and soon movie theatres will see the return of Arnold Schwarzengger, born in 1947.

Willem Defoe in The Hunter. Beard. Snow. Raw masculinity. Rinse and repeat.

In 2012, while The Grey opened in theatres, a trailer for the new film The Hunter was released online. Instead of Man vs. wolf, this ‘The’ movie (starring 56-year-old Willem Defoe) is about Man vs. tiger. Linda Ge, writing for the comic book website Bleeding Cool, compared it to The Grey, adding that the Neeson film may be “paving the way for moviegoers to find their way to this similarly themed movie in their further search of more “bad ass with a beard takes on all predators’ stories.”

Movieline acknowledged this bad ass/beard/predator trope by looking back at The Edge. A few weeks after The Grey opened Nathan Pensky’s essay noted that “this genre is certainly well-trod territory” and comparing the protagonists of both films to Cast Away and Into the Wild. There’s no mention in the short article of how all these films are about men. For his part, Carnahan made a joke during the promotional cycle about what an all-female version of his film would consist of: “The movie would be 15 minutes long. They’d all agree on what to do, they’d walk out and live.”

Pensky, Ge, and Carnahan all made different statements that overlap at the same points of genre and gender. The Grey is part of a film release schedule that is heavily weighted to stories about men, and a popular trope that has become a representative for stories about the male condition. The presence of women would be so improbable that it becomes humorous, detracting from the key narrative tension – Man vs. [some predatory element of nature]. It doesn’t take much Hollywood savvy to guess how few actresses will be considered to play a ‘bad ass with a beard.’

Statistics and the deluge of similar films contradict this idea that we’re losing a masculine identity from cinema. Although the space from Justin Bieber to Liam Neeson via Bradley Cooper seems like a fairly narrow distance to cover, movies focussing on (white) adult men fit in very comfortably with the current cinematic landscape. Grizzled masculinity is so secure in popular culture it’s become a reliable punchline. With the release of The Grey’s trailer, there was a mini-meme phenomenon of lists like ‘What Should Liam Neeson Punch Next?,’ ‘10 Badass Adversaries Worthy of Fighting Liam Neeson’ and ‘10 Crazy Things Liam Neeson Should Fight Onscreen.’ Simon Pegg tweeted that: “If you do get into a fight, just say “Liam Neeson” as you throw a punch, your mittens will catch fire and your enemy’s life will fall off” and that after exposure to the actor’s presence “I was 78% better at fighting swarthy goons.”

Being able to talk about manliness had obvious appeal when it came to selling The Grey to audiences. The ‘toughness’ of being a man was exploited as the theme of the film, then toughness of casting a ‘man’s man’ sparked a ripple of discussion. It was a discussion with a hollow centre. No matter how few sensible adversaries would be willing to take on Liam Neeson, there is no upcoming shortage in films being made about him and his kind. Bad asses with beards are not going to make cinema’s endangered species list anytime soon.

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Margaret Howie cheerfully lives with her love of Robert Mitchum and her feminist sensibility in South London, watching and thinking about as many movies she can see.

Quote of the Day: Nico Lang On Gaycism

A month ago, Lauren Bans coined the term gaycism, defined as “the wrongheaded idea that having gay characters gives you carte blanche to cut PC corners elsewhere.” Bans fingered the sitcoms Modern Family, The New Normal, Partners, and Two Broke Girls as major offenders.

The case of Two Broke Girls is especially frustrating. I want to see a show centering on two women who have ambitions beyond the romantic. I want to see an awesome show about female friendship which tackles class and economic issues and has characters of color. I want to watch and like that show; Two Broke Girls is not that show.

Nico Lang of In Our Words writes:

Two Broke Girls is like your white gay friend who thinks he’s entitled to say whatever he pleases because he’s been oppressed, so he’s allowed to oppress other people and call it being an “equal opportunity offender.” He’s earned the right to be a racist, insensitive asshole, because I guess he asked Audre Lorde and she said it was okay?

Lang also criticizes The New Normal, which comes to us from the mind of Glee‘s Ryan Murphy:

Remember hipster racism? This is that turned up to 11, like Murphy throwing a big blackface party on TV. However, the biggest issue with pointing it out is that people often don’t realize that such “ironic racism” is still just racism. And what actually makes the show’s gaycism so doubly troubling is that the act of being systemically oppressed should make people more aware of the ways in which they have the ability to marginalize others, because they have experienced the same thing themselves.

Read the whole piece; it’s great, and full of links to other great pieces.

Television right now is a bitter disappointment. It gives with one hand while taking away with the other. You can have a show about female friendship, but only if it’s full of racist stereotypes. You can have a show about gay parents, but only if it’s crammed with racist jokes. You can have one nice thing, but only if it’s garnished with horribleness.

My television will be intersectional or it will be bullshit. This year, the networks seem to have picked bullshit.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: ‘Phantom of the Opera’: Great Music, Terrible Feminism

This review by Myrna Waldron previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on September 6, 2012.

Phantom of the Opera Movie Poster (Source: Wikipedia.org)

The Phantom of the Opera was my first musical; I saw it for the first time when I was 4 years old during its now legendary decade-long run in Toronto. I remember very little from that event (though the shaking chandelier during the Overture stayed with me), but I’ve been a huge fan of the soundtrack ever since. Premiering in 1986, the musical adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s Gothic Romance novel was written specifically for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s then-wife Sarah Brightman. It’s easily one of the most popular stage musicals ever; after the early 2000s revival of the musical film genre, it was a natural choice for a feature film adaptation in 2004 (though it had languished in development hell since the 80s), directed by Joel Schumacher.

Superhero film fans know Schumacher’s name simply by reputation; it is no exaggeration that he is known for cheesy, schlocky and silly films. The fourth Batman film, Batman and Robin, was so poorly received it single-handedly killed the Batman franchise for a decade and still carries a tremendous amount of infamy. So is it any surprise that his adaptation of Phantom is astoundingly cheesy, even for musical standards? We have a cast of mostly inexperienced singers talking in implausibly varied accents. Some of the actors attempt fake accents (Minnie Driver and Miranda Richardson put on exaggerated Italian and French accents, respectively) and others don’t even try (I have a hard time believing that someone whose title is Vicomte de Chagny would have a modern American accent in Victorian Paris). Some of the directing choices are bizarre, too; The Phantom conjures a horse out of nowhere when leading Christine to his lair, and several scenes have honest-to-god “dramatic” slow motion in them.

But the really big problem with Phantom of the Opera isn’t its cheesiness, but its total lack of feminism. Honestly, if the music wasn’t so good I’d never watch Phantom again, but I don’t know if I should blame its film adaptation, Broadway version, or original novel, since I haven’t seen the stage version in 20+ years, nor have I read Leroux’s novel. Emmy Rossum’s Christine Daae is a lovely young woman with a pretty (if not exactly operatic) voice, and possibly the most spineless personality I’ve ever seen from a female protagonist. The love triangle between herself, the Phantom and Raoul is the central conflict of the story. Her preference for Raoul, her childhood sweetheart, is one of only two personal choices she makes throughout the entire story. Neither The Phantom nor Raoul ever seem to take Christine’s wants into account. I know I’m supposed to root for her to end up with at least one of the suitors, (the 26-year shipping wars notwithstanding) but honestly? Run away, Christine. RUN AWAY.

Gerard Butler as The Phantom (Source: Fanpop.com)

The Phantom is a fairly archetypal Byronic hero; brooding, moody, dangerous, and artistically talented. Whether it’s because he grew up in isolation or because he’s a dangerous lunatic, he is incredibly controlling over Christine. He exploits her grief over her father’s death to pretend that he is the Angel of Music that her dying father said he would send to her; he has been giving Christine vocal lessons at least since she was a child. He then expects total submission and romantic affection from her for his helping her launch her professional career. Hmm, now, where have I heard “Guy volunteers favors for girl he is attracted to, then flies into a rage when she doesn’t return his romantic attention” before? Can we say Nice Guy Syndrome?

The extent of The Phantom’s control over Christine is very disturbing and often hypocritical. He explodes with anger when she takes off his mask and exposes his facial deformity; apparently he can violate Christine’s privacy all he wants by following and watching her everywhere around the Opera House, but he damns and curses her for violating his privacy. He repeatedly attempts to force Christine into marriage, (to the point where he builds a dummy of her and dresses it up in a bridal gown) and it is even implied near the end of the film that he intends to force her into sex. His power over Christine is such that he can hypnotize her; he may be shown seducing Christine during the “Music of the Night” sequence, but I have to seriously question the amount of consent Christine is offering. It’s kind of abhorrent that so many fans seem to prefer the Phantom to Raoul, even to the point that the sequel musical, Love Never Dies, invents some ridiculous contrivances to have Christine end up with the Phantom (and let us never speak of the sequel again). It’s like they’ve forgotten that the Phantom has committed at least three murders, two kidnappings, arson, and has threatened physical and sexual violence against Christine. There’s sympathizing for the isolation and discrimination the Phantom faced throughout his life, and then there’s excusing him entirely.

Unfortunately, the winning suitor, Raoul, is only preferable in that he isn’t violent like The Phantom is. He controls Christine in a much less forceful but still very paternalistic way. When they reunite, he does not ask her to come to dinner with him, he says, “And now, we go to supper.” How much of this is “I’m the rich guy so I get to decide what you do” and how much of this is “I’m the man so I get to tell you what to do?” He also dismisses Christine’s very real fears of the Phantom, saying that there is no Phantom despite the fact that he knows she has already been kidnapped once, he has received letters from the Phantom, he has heard the Phantom’s voice, and has even seen a stagehand murdered (though perhaps he assumes the murder was an accident). He later tries to force Christine to show affection for him publicly by questioning why she is hiding their engagement, while still dismissing her fears. After finally seeing the Phantom, Raoul becomes so overly protective of her that Christine must sneak by him while he’s asleep in order to visit her father’s mausoleum (the second personal choice she makes, and predictably, it’s one that lands her in danger). Really, one especially creepy thing about this “love” story is that there is an Electra Complex issue going on with both suitors; the Phantom pretends he is the spirit of Christine’s father, and Raoul acts like a father. Both are very possessive over Christine.

Raoul (Patrick Wilson) and Christine (Emmy Rossum) waltzing (Source: Fanpop.com)

Raoul is supposed to be the suitor whose love for Christine is pure, but it bothered me that at the end when he’s pleading for her freedom, it’s because he loves her, not because he wants her to be happy. When the Phantom overwhelms Raoul, he forces Christine to either choose to become his lover, or watch as he strangles Raoul. Christine wills herself to stay with the Phantom – a choice she must make that is really no choice at all. The Phantom then releases both of them after finally feeling guilt over her sacrifice, and Christine inexplicably gives the Phantom her engagement ring. Why is it supposed to be touching that she gave him a symbol of her choosing someone else? Why does a serial murderer get given a memento just because he taught her how to sing? At the end of the film, which takes place in the 1930s, an elderly Raoul purchases the Phantom’s music box and places it on Christine’s grave. A red rose with the engagement ring on it is already on the headstone. Even after death, Christine is still subject to her suitors’ whims, and is “gifted” with an eternal reminder of her kidnapping.

As for Christine herself, because there isn’t really much to her personality besides her spinelessness, I took notice that there’s a lot of symbolic and sexist meaning in the clothes she wears. Her rival, Carlotta (more about her in a minute) wears brightly and brashly coloured outfits, but Christine is always clad in whites, soft pinks, and the occasional red. Christine’s outfits are so unlike Carlotta’s that, when she becomes Carlotta’s understudy, it didn’t even look like they were playing the same part. When the Phantom kidnaps her for the first time, she’s wearing a lacy white nightgown that is both low cut and slit up to her thigh. Pretty sure that wasn’t the fashion in Victorian Paris! But after he returns her, she’s never in pure white again, leading to the unfortunate subtextual conclusion that she might not be so virginal anymore. The Phantom himself wears bright red in one scene, so I can only conclude that Christine’s switch from white to pink is a sign that the Phantom has “tainted” her.

Besides Christine, there are three other named female characters. Carlotta, the literal prima donna, Madame Giry, the ballet instructor, and Meg Giry, her daughter and Christine’s best friend. Unfortunately, the script does not get a full Bechdel Test pass; the few times that the female characters talk to each other, it is always about the Phantom. There is also some rather nasty pitting of the women against each other. Christine and Carlotta follow a pretty rigid virgin/whore dichotomy, though while Carlotta is not shown as being promiscuous, she is contrasted with Christine through her vanity, short temper, jealousy, supposed lack of talent (though she actually does sound like an opera vocalist, whereas Christine does not), and general brash demeanour. There is also a contrasting of a young woman versus an “old” woman; both the Opera House owners and the Phantom strongly want to emphasize Christine’s youth. The Phantom even says that Carlotta is “seasons past her prime” when she can’t be older than her late 30s. Christine is also pitted against her best friend, and this one I find particularly loathsome. Madame Giry was the one who brought the Phantom to the Opera House in the first place; as such, she knows not only about his deformity, but also about his artistic talents and his obsession with Christine. She excuses the Phantom’s crimes both out of pity and admiration for him, which is pretty sickening because Christine is supposed to be like an adoptive daughter to her. It’s quite obvious which young woman Madame Giry cares about and which one she doesn’t, as twice she goes out of her way to keep Meg away from the Phantom and never once does she try to protect Christine.

Unmasked Phantom (Gerard Butler) holding a struggling Christine (Emmy Rossum) (Source: Fanpop.com)

Lastly, though it is unfortunately not surprising for a film taking place in 1870 Paris, there are zero people of colour in the major cast. The only people of colour in the film at all are supposed to be Romani (and they’re, of course, called “gypsies” here). They are in a single flashback scene to the Phantom and Madame Giry’s childhoods, where she finds him cruelly caged and used as a sideshow freak act in a traveling caravan. The scene is incredibly racist, as the “Gypsies” are shown to be filthy, violent, strange and cruel. They are always photographed in the darkest lighting possible to emphasize their (what I’m guessing is supposed to be) “evil swarthiness.” The child Phantom’s subsequent strangulation of his keeper is presented as sympathetically as possible. I have never been able to keep a straight face through the sequence where the Phantom’s first murder is discovered, as it depicts another “Gypsy” coming across the keeper’s body and incredulously shouting “Murder!” in slow motion.

All in all, what a mess. It’s still better than Batman and Robin, but that’s not saying much. Awful acting, mediocre singing and cheesy directing choices are the least of the film’s problems. At its core, Phantom of the Opera is the supposedly romantic story of two controlling men fighting over a spineless and personality-devoid woman. Hmm…sounds like Twilight. Christine is given absolutely no agency throughout the entire story, and can’t seem to do anything without a man to tell her what to do. She’s symbolically valued solely for her virginity, and other women in the cast are considered inferior to her, except when Madame Giry values her own daughter’s safety vastly more than Christine’s. For a musical I love this much, it’s quite shocking how anti-feminist the story is. With all things considered, I think I’ll just stick to listening to the soundtrack.

———-

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 and Gender in Musicals Week: Female Friendship, Madonna/Whore Stereotypes and Rape Culture in ‘West Side Story’

[Trigger warning: for discussion of rape] | Spoilers ahead

West Side Story is one of my absolute favorite musicals. I adore the catchy lyrics, the breathtakingly exquisite choreography and cinematography, the heartbreaking love story. A modern Romeo and Juliet taking place in New York City amongst two rival gangs — one white, one Puerto Rican — it tackles racism, bigotry, murder and teen angst. But many audiences overlook the film’s portrayal of gender, female friendship and rape culture.

Anita and Maria are dear friends who confide in each other. Two strong women who know what they want and aren’t afraid to speak their minds. Rather than the film pitting the two women against each other, they support one another. But as awesome as this is, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re witnessing a Madonna/whore dichotomy in female archetypes.

Maria is sweet and naïve. When Tony first meets Maria, he asks her if she’s joking. She responds, “I have not yet learned how to joke that way.” Her brother Bernardo and Anita try to shield her from trouble as people view her as pure and virginal. Reinforcing this imagery, we see Maria pray in front of the Virgin Mary and in “Maria,” Tony sings “say it [her name] soft and it’s almost like praying.” But Maria tries to resist the label of purity as she tells her brother a white dress is for babies.

In stark contrast to Maria, Anita is opinionated, savvy, charismatic and flamboyant (and clearly my favorite character!). Outgoing and gregarious, she wears colorful frocks, as opposed to Maria’s white gowns. As much as I love her, Anita reinforces the feisty Latina harlot stereotype. Of course the depiction of race is problematic as the film employed brownface make-up for its Latino/a characters.

Anita proudly asserts her sexuality, eagerly singing about how she’s “gonna get her kicks” and “have a private little mix” with her boyfriend Bernardo in “Tonight.” The chemistry and banter between Anita and Bernardo reveal their tender feelings for one another. But their relationship is framed in sexuality. Even though Maria and Tony sleep together, their relationship is constantly surrounded by dreamy words of love, commitment and wedding imagery. While Anita sings about sex in “Tonight,” Maria croons about seeing her love and how the “stars will stop where they are.” It’s as if there’s a right and a wrong way to portray female sexuality.

Throughout the film, pragmatic cynic Anita tries to protect idealistic dreamer Maria. She expresses her worries about her dating Tony at the bridal shop. Later, in “A Boy Like That,” Anita warns Maria to stay away from him as he “wants one thing only” and “he’ll kill her love,” like he murdered hers. But Maria’s buoyant hope stave off Anita’s concerns.

It’s interesting how other characters treat women in the film. In “America,” the Sharks sing about the xenophobia and racism they experience while the women sing about their aspirations and the promise of a better life in NYC. One of the Jets exasperatedly wonders why they’re fooling around with “dumb broads.” To which Graziella retorts, “Velma and I ain’t dumb.” Anybodys is the tomboy who desperately longs to be in the Jets. She hangs around the guys, spits on the ground and insults women, and sees the male gender as far more desirable. But rather than depicting gender variance or even a trans character, the Jets view Anybodys as a defective female. Some of the Jets taunt her that no one would want to sleep with her. Because apparently to them (and patriarchal society at large), a woman’s status resides only in her beauty, sexuality and desirability.

While gender relations are far from perfect, the Sharks and their girlfriends debate equally. But the Jets seem to view women as nothing more than objects. This objectification continues in the assault and attempted rape of Anita.

Maria begs Anita to give a message to Tony at Doc’s drug store. Anita reluctantly does so. When she arrives, she encounters violence at the hands of the Jets. In Aphra Behn (of Guerilla Girls)’s Gender Across Borders article, she disparages the ’09 Broadway revival as it turns the assault and “mock rape” of Anita into a real rape with the unzipping of A-rab’s pants:

“Why does everyone from Broadway to High School stage this scene as a fully realized rape scene? Because rape culture does not allow us to see it as anything but such a scene.”

Behn may be right that this scene reinforces rape culture. But she’s completely wrong attempting to differentiate between a mock rape and a real rape. Rape is rape. Period.

I always interpreted the film version of West Side Story displaying assault and attempted rape. If Doc hadn’t stepped through the door and intervened, Anita would have been raped. Does it really make it better that the Jets were pretending to rape? Or that they were prevented from committing rape? No, no it doesn’t.

Behn states the original stage direction was to assault Anita and treat her like an object, not a sex object. But rape is not a sexual act. It’s an act of power. The Jets feel powerless over the death of Riff, their friend and leader. Being young, they’re tired of everyone telling them what to do, how to feel and behave. When Anita enters Doc’s drug store, she materializes into an outlet for their frustration and pain. As the Jets hold racist views, they see Anita, as a Latina, an other — an object to overpower

The Jets verbal and physical harassment and attempted rape disgust and disturb the audience. When Rita Moreno filmed that scene, she broke down and sobbed for 45 minutes for it reminded her of past pain, anger and trauma, including an attempted rape. This scene portrays the ramifications of patriarchy, racism and rape culture. It shows how society normalizes violence against women.

Anita’s anger, hatred and shame at the boys for what they’ve done to her ultimately causes the tragic ending. Her lie — that Chino murdered Maria — causes Tony to run around screaming for Chino to kill him too, which he does. Tony’s death causes hatred to fester inside Maria, corrupting the ingenue. Rather than evoking sympathy for an assault survivor, it seems we the audience are supposed to be angry at Anita for her treachery.

Anita is considered most people’s favorite character. And in my opinion, rightfully so. She’s a badass. While audiences continually embrace the role of Anita — awarding an Oscar to Rita Moreno, a Tony to Karen Olivo in the ’09 revival — it appears the film tries to vilify her, a cautionary warning to women. Women can be good and nice, like Maria, or sexually assertive and ultimately manipulative liars destroying lives, like Anita.

Women are supposed to choose the “right” kind of woman to emulate or suffer dire consequences.