Rape – Bitch Flicks

Sisters in Catherine Breillat’s ‘Fat Girl’

The core of ‘Fat Girl’ is these two girls, who contrast each other in some very essential ways, but are inexorably bound together by shared experiences. Both are adolescents grappling with the early throes of sexuality, but their divergent appearances and ages leave them in different positions socially, affecting their worldviews.

This guest post written by Tessa Racked originally appeared at Consistent Panda Bear Shape and appears here as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. It is cross-posted with permission.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape]

Fat Girl is a coming-of-age story about two sisters on summer vacation with their family: chubby 13-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) and slender 15-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida). A scene in the middle of the film serves as a cypher for the central paradox of the sisters’ relationship. Elena and Anaïs stand cheek to cheek, regarding themselves in the mirror. “It’s funny. We really have nothing in common,” Elena says. “Look at you. You have small, hard eyes, while mine are hazy. But when I look deep into your eyes, it makes me feel like I belong, as if they were my eyes.” The core of Fat Girl is these two girls, who contrast each other in some very essential ways, but are inexorably bound together by shared experiences. Both are adolescents grappling with the early throes of sexuality, but their divergent appearances and ages leave them in different positions socially, affecting their worldviews. Their different experiences come up in the first conversation we hear between them: Anaïs claims that boys run from her sister once they see that she “[reeks] of loose morals,” while Elena counters that boys don’t come near Anaïs in the first place because she’s a “fat slob.”

The ways in which Anaïs and Elena deviate from cultural standards of conduct are notably different. The Criterion DVD of Fat Girl includes an interview with Breillat after the film’s debut at the 2001 Berlin International Film Festival, in which the director describes Anaïs’ fatness as her coping mechanism to deal with having her body and sexuality denied by those around her. It would be liberatory if Anaïs’ body could exist without rationalization, but by now, reader, I think you and I have become used to a fat body paying the admission of meaning in order to be present in a film. Anaïs is frequently shown eating in Fat Girl. When Elena meets her summer love Fernando (Libero de Rienzo) at a cafe, their flirtation and first kiss is paralleled with Anaïs ordering and eating a banana split, “[her] favorite.” The girls’ mother (Arsinée Khanjian) initially defends Anaïs when Elena criticizes her for eating “like a pig.” At the end of the film, however, fed up with her daughters’ adolescent shenanigans, Mother snaps at her for opening a snack after they have a meal. Anaïs’ transgression is explicitly evident on her body, making her an easy target of criticism by her family. Elena’s sexual activity, however, is also transgressively excessive by cultural standards, especially considering her age. She is waiting to have PiV sex with someone special, but has been sexually active with casual partners. Elena is able to have her metaphorical cake and eat it too, satisfying her desire for sex without the effects of those desires physically manifesting on her body that would open her up to criticism and judgment, the kind of which she lavishes on Anaïs. Breillat’s Berlin International Film Festival interview delves more directly into her philosophy of the two sisters:

“Since [Anaïs’] body makes her unlovable, since she isn’t looked at and desired, she’s more intelligent about the world. She can create herself and be herself, with a kind of rebellion, certainly, which is painful, but all the same, she exists. While her sister, to her internal devastation, isn’t able to exist.”

Her analysis reduces the characters to what they experience based on their looks, but it is certainly an applicable factor to understanding not only the girls of Fat Girl, but the majority of female film characters. Anaïs desires sex without romanticizing it, whereas Elena denies her desire for sex because she romanticizes it. Anaïs wants her own sexual debut to be with a casual partner who won’t have the ability to brag about deflowering her, whereas Elena seeks a partner whose love will validate her decision. Fernando is able to coax a reluctant Elena into sex acts through hollow declarations of love. Anaïs, on the other hand, playacts being a manipulative lover, pretending two ladders in their swimming pool are different sex partners of hers. She swims back and forth between each, whispering cliche lies and practicing kissing. “Women aren’t like bars of soap, you know,” she tells her pretend-partner, “they don’t wear away. On the contrary, each lover brings them more.”

Anaïs’ sexual frustration means she observes and contemplates the sex lives of others, namely Elena’s. Her observations are cynical, but more attuned to the film’s reality. The audience may be accustomed to thinking of shots of Anaïs eating as grotesque or pitiable, but would a similar reaction be expected to the very long scene during which Fernando hounds Elena until she consents to anal sex? Elena is too emotionally involved in the scene to see it for what it is, but Anaïs, who watches from across the room, is not. The sex scenes in the film are shot from far away, putting Elena and Fernando on a stage of sorts. We aren’t used to sex scenes looking like this; we usually see closeups of hands and faces – how Anaïs is shot as she tosses and turns in bed, awkwardly watching and trying to ignore the couple. The audience is invited to empathize with her over Elena and Fernando.

Despite all the talk between Anaïs and Elena about sex, the act causes a rift in their relationship. When Elena shows Anaïs the engagement ring that Fernando gave her as a proof of his love, Anais immediately smells a rat and begs Elena not to trust him. While Elena and Fernando “go all the way,” we see Anaïs in her bed in the foreground, quietly crying. Later, Fernando’s mother (Laura Betti) – a tacky woman who is the only other fat character – explains that Fernando stole her ring. The girls’ mother asks Anaïs where Elena is, to which the girl impertinently replies that she is “not her keeper.” Enraged, their mother ends the family vacation early. On the way home, Anaïs attempts to comfort her sister. “It’s sick that people think it’s their business. It’s sick, being a virgin,” she tells Elena, who is worried about their father’s reaction and can’t get over Fernando.

The film’s climax further parallels and separates the sisters. Asleep at a highway rest stop, a trucker murders Elena and their mother, chases Anaïs into the woods, and rapes her. Once again, the introduction of a male character demanding sex disrupts the relationships between the female characters. And, as with Elena’s experience with Fernando, the rape is a desecration of the sex that she wants to have. However, Anaïs’ reaction is to assert agency within the horrible situation. She puts her arms around her assailant. When the police find her in the morning, one tells another, “She says he didn’t rape her,” to which she defiantly adds, “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to.” It’s a troubling ending; what first sprang to my mind when I saw it was how fat rape survivors are often met with disbelief or derision. Breillat is a feminist, it would be difficult to believe that she would be dismissive of young girl being raped. The film doesn’t excuse the attacker’s actions, but it does disturb the notion of Anaïs as a passive victim. Elena’s experience was a subversion of her idealized notion of having sex (by her own definition) for the first time with someone she loved; once it became obvious that Fernando had duped her, she felt sadness and shame. But according to Anaïs, “the first time should be with nobody.” What happens to her at the end of the film should never happen to anyone, ever, but given that she refuses to describe it as a rape to the police, it seems she interpreted the trucker’s attack as a removal of the vulnerability she feared from a sexual debut with a future boyfriend. She certainly does not want to be seen as vulnerable by the uniformed men surrounding her and her dead mother and sister. Elena, whose appearance and ideas about sexuality conform to patriarchal values, has been destroyed by the events of the film. But the outsider, Anaïs, defiantly survives.

I do agree with Breillat that being an outsider allows a critical vantage point; my own adolescent experience of feeling ostracized due to my weight was a major catalyst of my journey to become the faux-academic, buzzword-dropping, far-left feminist you’ve all come to know and tolerate. On the other hand, Anaïs verges on being a didactic mouthpiece at times, and it’s undeniably problematic to suggest that her value system is so outside of the mainstream that she would be okay with being violently raped. Fat Girl provides an effective critique of patriarchal sexual values, but beyond that, only a bleak non-alternative.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

Recommended Reading: ‘Fat Girl’: About the Title by Catherine Breillat via Criterion

Tessa Racked blogs about fat characters in film at Consistent Panda Bear Shape. They have had “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life” stuck in their head for over a week now.

‘Artemisia’: The Romantic Roots of Rape Culture

The impulse to erase a woman’s testimony, to deny her agency and perception of the crime, while denying society’s victim blaming and bias against survivors of rape — this is the basis of what feminism describes as rape culture. Yet here it is practiced not by a misogynist man, nor by a loyal friend of the alleged rapist, but by a female director aiming to create “emphatically a feminist film.”

Written by Brigit McCone.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape]

Is it possible to admire a woman’s art while denying its meaning? Certainly, a feminist viewer wants to admire 1997’s Artemisia, a ravishingly beautiful film about a young girl seizing control of her talent and sexuality in the face of a sexist society, filmed by a female director, Agnès Merlet. It tells the story of the first woman to become an official member of Florence’s Academy of Art and Design, the most famous female artist of the Renaissance, Artemisia Gentileschi. Merlet’s Artemisia is a director before her time in the seventeenth century. She oversees the setting up of her studio with minute detail and assertive power, frames her paintings like movie shots, orders men to strip and model for her, and poses their naked bodies with intense interest. Even as a girl in the repressive environment of a convent school, Gentileschi is studying and sketching her naked body with a mirror, with a heroic immunity to social pressures. She has a lively sexual curiosity, spying on a couple having sex on the beach before fitting herself into the imprint their bodies have made in the sand, and watching the older painter Agostino Tassi’s orgies with fascination. It is she who pursues Tassi to be her teacher, who strips and poses him as a model, who dictates the terms of their relationship. The film begins with a close-up of Artemisia’s rolling eyeball and it is shaped by her gaze. To see the beautiful, youthful Valentina Cervi cast as the artist instead of the muse, stripping and studying men for her own pleasure rather than being stripped, should mark Artemisia as a refreshing feminist delight. If only Artemisia herself were a fictional character.

But Artemisia is a historical figure, and transcripts from her grueling, seven-month-long rape trial have survived and are the major source for the film. It is a historical fact that Artemisia Gentileschi accused Agostino Tassi of breaking into her bedchamber and raping her. Merlet’s film follows the rough outline of what the real Gentileschi described, but reimagines it as clumsy seduction. Artemisia’s refusals are a murmured reluctance, not strong or fearful denials. She returns kisses and submits, before gasping in pain and pushing Tassi away, as he mumbles in apologetic confusion at the misunderstanding over her virginity. Not that virginity is a particularly great concern for the unbelievably socially immune Artemisia. The whole event is miscommunication more than violation. Later, the youthful Artemisia will take the controlling and guiding role in their love-making, posing the submissive and adoring Tassi for her signature portrait of “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” straddling him in seduction rather than attempted murder. For the masterful Tassi, who is accustomed to ordering around his naked female models like pieces of meat, to find himself awed and overcome by the strength of Artemisia’s personality is an interesting role reversal. When her father, the painter Orazio Gentileschi, discovers their affair, he tries to force Tassi to marry Artemisia and initiates the rape trial, despite Artemisia telling him that Tassi didn’t rape her but “gave me pleasure.”

Again, one can see a feminist message here, criticizing a society that refuses to acknowledge a woman’s sexual agency or pleasure, yet Merlet is not only twisting the facts but ignoring them, in her need to reinterpret rape testimony as romance. Her Artemisia never accuses Tassi of rape. The fingers of her artist’s hands are bound with chords and torturously squeezed, to force her to confess that she was raped, while Tassi watches in loving agony and confesses himself, merely to spare her pain. In the harsh world of historical fact, Gentileschi was indeed tortured, but it was to force her to withdraw her detailed accusations. Her society pressured women, not to make false accusations but to deny rape. Tassi, meanwhile, defended himself by alleging that Gentileschi was promiscuous and “an insatiable whore.” Whatever their relationship was, it was hardly an epic romance. Why, then, does Merlet, or her intended audience, feel such a need to reimagine it as one? Art historian Mary Garrard and feminist journalist/activist Gloria Steinem protested the film’s inaccuracies at the time of its release. But watching the film, I was struck by more than historical untruth.

I thought about the transformations Merlet had performed on the historical sources: she silenced Artemisia’s testimony, by denying it was ever given; she painstakingly reimagined the circumstances described in the rape transcripts, in such a way that they could have been romantic misunderstanding or clumsy seduction; finally, she reversed an entire society’s values, to imagine a woman pressured by law enforcement to make false accusations, rather than punished for daring to allege rape. The impulse to erase a woman’s testimony, to deny her agency and perception of the crime, while denying society’s victim blaming and bias against survivors of rape — this is the basis of what feminism describes as rape culture. Yet here it is practiced not by a misogynist man, nor by a loyal friend of the alleged rapist, but by a female director aiming to create “emphatically a feminist film.” Why does Merlet feel such a strong compulsion to defend a man who has been dead for over 400 years? Or, is it the image of a vulnerable and exploited Artemisia that she cannot tolerate? What do her rewrites tell us about the mental roots of rape culture?

In an interview by Merlet with the UK’s Independent, two possible reasons are given for Artemisia‘s portrayal. Merlet wanted Artemisia to represent “a more modern kind of feminism, fighting alongside men, not against them,” and she claims that the evidence of the trial can be read in many ways, because there is a “mass of contradictory evidence.” These suggestions need to be considered in more detail. Firstly, what is the contradictory evidence? Perhaps Merlet refers to Artemisia’s testimony that, following her painful rape, she continued to have sex with, and even love, Tassi because he promised her marriage. Regarding this as “contradictory evidence” shows an immaturity in our culture’s understanding of rape, that it must always be the isolated act of a monster, rather than a violation that can take place within a complex relationship. More than that, though, it is a denial of historical context. Deuteronomy 22:28, which claims that a man who rapes a virgin “must marry the girl, for he has violated her,” would have been generally accepted in Gentileschi’s time. To admit that Artemisia could be terrified by the thought of becoming a “fallen” or ruined woman, and could rely on Tassi’s promise to marry her as her only salvation, is to see her as an uncomfortably vulnerable human rather than Merlet’s dominant superheroine. It was during this period, before the trial (not afterwards, as Merlet’s film suggests), that Gentileschi painted her famous portrait of “Susanna and the Elders,” depicting Susanna’s naked body contorted in horror and writhing away from the staring, whispering judgments of the elders looming over her. It is a powerful portrait of female vulnerability under patriarchal scrutiny, but that is precisely the vulnerability that Merlet does not allow Artemisia to feel. So, we return to the question that opened this post: is it possible to admire a woman’s art while denying its meaning?

Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” which she painted directly after her humiliating rape trial, is one of the most violent expressions of female rage in art. In contrast to the timid Judith that Caravaggio portrayed, Gentileschi’s women are filled with strength, solidarity and resolution, dominating Holofernes (whose face resembles Agostino Tassi’s) as the male elders had dominated Susanna. Merlet actually cites the power of this painting, and her shock at its female authorship, as the trigger that began her fascination with Gentileschi. Yet she strives to tame the image, presenting it as a loving collaboration between Artemisia and Tassi. By such painstaking reimagining, Merlet reveals the key feature of the 1990s’ “more modern kind of feminism” (or “girl power”): not its willingness to “fight alongside men” (and why should one rapist be representative of “men”?), but its discomfort with female anger and vulnerability. Like Merlet’s film, “girl power” celebrates the positive sexual freedom of women to desire and seduce, but not their negative sexual freedom to refuse and define boundaries; their positive freedom to take charge, not their negative freedom to protest poor treatment. In that, it resembles the freedoms promised to women by the “free love” culture of the 1960s, whose abuses and exploitations prompted second-wave feminism.

Artemisia’s art is certainly celebrated by Merlet’s film through luscious costumes and Caravaggesque lighting, but without its meaning, the art seems hollow and disconnected from the painter herself. When we see Tassi’s image in the real Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings, as the sleeping man whose head is about to be chiseled open by a smiling woman in “Jael and Sisera,” as the leering satyr in “Corisca and the Satyr,” and in numerous variations on the Judith theme, are we to ignore the repeated violence, to allow it to communicate nothing about the feelings and intentions of the woman behind the brush? Women threatened by voyeurs, like Corisca, Susanna and Bathsheba; women escaping male clutches through heroic suicide, like Cleopatra and Lucretia; women murdering men, like Judith and Sisera — these are the figures that populate the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi. To deny her rage and vulnerability is to deny the passion and power of her art. Agnès Merlet’s film Artemisia is a beautiful celebration of the positive freedoms of women, that forms a kind of feminist ideal. But without the willingness to explore suffering, or to express anger, it is only half-alive, and a disservice to the full-blooded achievement of Artemisia Gentileschi.

Brigit McCone is still mad she wasn’t taught more about Artemisia in art class. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and getting lost in Vieira da Silva paintings.

‘The Neon Demon’: Objectification and Rape Culture

‘The Neon Demon’ brings to light the dual narcissism of our culture: the simultaneous, reciprocal reality created when consumers come into contact with images. The images exist so long as we look at them, and all Refn has done is reify our culture’s unhealthy obsession… I’m glad for ‘The Neon Demon,’ because it solidifies something that was already there: a hundred ornate mirrors reflecting back a society complicit in rape culture.

This guest post is written by Holly Thicknes.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and rape culture]

The Neon Demon threw up a lot of questions when it regurgitated Elle Fanning’s eyeball.

Yes, Nicolas Winding Refn made a surrealistic film about a 16 year old It-Girl model who gets slowly engulfed by the horrific monster that is the fashion industry via a bunch of envious flesh-eating model competitors. It’s the Donald Trump card of controversy at cinemas right now. But it also – pretty neatly, despite its gory appearance – epitomizes a society that is at once compelled and revolted by its need to consume.

Refn is obviously obsessed with women. He’s in awe of them. He thinks they’re intangibly beautiful. His entire filmic career can be seen as an expression of his distraction with how the female body differs from the male, and how that inspires violence. Jealousy, protectiveness, impotency: it’s all there in the scopophilic text of his films, skirting around the ankles of his uber-masculine figurines that dance perfect executions of violent, sexual acts.

It’s no wonder his latest film, a departure from the likes of Drive and Only God Forgives in that its central character is a woman, but in which his obsession shines through stronger than ever, has been deemed by many a gross, misogynistic ululation, or else pure unashamed spectacle. I can’t help but wonder if, had a heterosexual woman made a neo-porn movie detailing all of her perverse, beautiful desires, anyone would be eager to finance it. But I don’t begrudge Refn for making it, just as I don’t begrudge Hitchcock’s unapologetic spunking of his inner most fantasies on cinema’s walls. It’s not about limiting human creativity, censoring what could be deemed a negative influence or pointing the finger at what someone truly feels.

The Neon Demon brings to light the dual narcissism of our culture: the simultaneous, reciprocal reality created when consumers come into contact with images. The images exist so long as we look at them, and all Refn has done is reify our culture’s unhealthy obsession – what he himself is unhealthily obsessed with.

I’m glad for The Neon Demon, because it solidifies something that was already there: a hundred ornate mirrors reflecting back a society complicit in rape culture.

Reducing someone to an object makes it easier to harm them. More than this — it incites violence. Rape culture is a culture that dehumanizes. It normalizes rape and abuse while simultaneously blaming rape and sexual assault victims/survivors for their actions and behaviors.

This is embedded in the fabric of The Neon Demon. It sets up a gorgeously glowing, electronically scored, Americana world in which beauty “isn’t everything – it’s the only thing,” and women strive to mold themselves into non-human visions. The predatory danger of this nightmarish place, which young Jesse (Elle Fanning) is so keen to be part of, is crucial to the first part of the film, in which Keanu Reeves plays a rapist motel owner by the name of Hank, preying on young disenfranchised girls who are forced to live there. As Jesse presses her ear to the wall of her room and listens to the 13-year-old girls being raped next door with tears streaming down her face, the margins of her power close tightly around her. She is reduced to nothing but a porcelain doll – her beauty and youth her only bargaining tools of worth.

But, alas, every effort the first half of the film makes to incredulously depict moments of degradation and objectification – so promisingly linked directly to rape in the above scene — melts into nothing. It is disappointingly superseded by what it sees, like a magpie destined to be drawn from one shiny artifact to the next. Refn gets entirely distracted by the surface of the movie, pushing the mesmerizing spectacle to its all-consuming limit and in doing so, dissolving all of its efforts towards saying something interesting, memorable and, crucially, progressive.

Perhaps it is enough to address the link between objectification and rape at all, and Refn’s second-act descent into style obsession — there are some painfully drawn-out shots of pure fantasy indulgence — only reiterates his pointing out how far our image illness has gone. But somehow, I don’t think so. I feel it has the effect of switching off swaths of audiences who find themselves in the middle of one of Refn’s wet dreams. The film negates its previous commentary by becoming hypnotized by its own evil.

We cannot blame Refn for articulating an ugly truth. We are all complicit in our culture. If the eyeball-eating scene is the only one that survives The Neon Demon, let it be not for its shock factor, but because it fills us with as much disgust as do rape culture and our own mass consumption of women’s bodies.

Holly Thicknes is a freelance film critic and editor of female-focused film blog Girls On Film. She lives and works in London, studies printmaking, and helps organize themed short film events for Shorts On Tap. She is particularly interested in the ways in which films help people carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly lonely society. You can follow Girls On Film on Twitter @girlsonfilmLDN.

‘Hooligan Sparrow’ Touches on Topics of Fame and Notoriety in Activism

The documentary, from director Nanfu Wang, follows Chinese activist Ye Haiyan (aka Hooligan Sparrow) as she protests the lack of prosecution in a child sexual abuse case and suffers retaliatory harassment, surveillance, and imprisonment. … ‘Hooligan Sparrow’ is, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the legends that activists build for themselves.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Hooligan Sparrow is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

There’s a lot going on in Hooligan Sparrow. The documentary, from director Nanfu Wang, follows Chinese activist Ye Haiyan (aka Hooligan Sparrow) as she protests the lack of prosecution in a child sexual abuse case and suffers retaliatory harassment, surveillance, and imprisonment. The film is full of scenes where strangers who may be plain-clothes police officers threaten to break Wang’s camera, or where the footage shows her running feet, the ground, or the stairs while people shout threatening things in the background. She breathlessly explains to us that she’s had to go into hiding, that she can’t use any form of travel requiring an ID or credit card and that her friends have warned her that the police are asking questions about her.

The issues that Sparrow and her associates (including lawyer Wang Yu, who has been indefinitely detained as of the film’s release), protest are important and well-explained. Sparrow first came to prominence when she began protesting the criminalization of sex work through a stunt where she publically declared that she would prostitute herself for free. In the film, she protests a high-profile sexual abuse case, in which a school principal allegedly abducted several of his female students and forced them to have sex with government officials. After first denying that any sex took place, the defence begins to argue that the girls accepted money in exchange for sex, which would reduce the charge to child prostitution rather than rape, and carry a much lighter sentence. Sparrow and Yu explain that this is a common tactic in Chinese courts – to cover up rape by claiming it was prostitution instead.

Although their cause is just, Sparrow and Wang, who becomes increasingly involved in the action even as she documents it, also carry a certain cloud of ego and drama into their work. It’s the same cloud of ego and drama that follows many full-time activists all over the world, and there have been very few explorations of what it means. It’s entirely possible to both try to make the world a better place and like being the center of attention, but there’s definitely a tension that plays out between those two things.

For example, there’s a scene late in the film where Wang is finally able to interview the father of one of the sexual abuse victims. He reveals that he avoided engaging with them earlier because the only thing he knew about Sparrow was that she’d done a stunt where she said she’d have sex for free. It seems like he doesn’t know or understand what she was trying protest – the protest didn’t draw his attention to the dangers faced by sex workers due to criminalization; it just drew attention to Sparrow. And it actually made him less interested in seeing her as a potential ally, even though they were on the same side.

As Wang narrates the film, after the fact, she also seems to take a certain amount of pleasure in how people were always trying to shut down her film. I don’t doubt at all that she was scared when she was running from violent mobs, or thought she was about to be arrested and detained by the police. But it’s telling that the story, which is supposedly about the persecution that Sparrow is facing, is framed by an incident where someone wrestled Wang’s camera away from her. Definitely scary. Definitely uncool. Kind of throwing the attention on herself rather than either the sexual abuse trial or the activist she’s been profiling.

Hooligan Sparrow is, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the legends that activists build for themselves. It’s about the notoriety that Sparrow receives, the unfair persecution, the harassment, the shunning – being left on the side of the road with her daughter and all their belongings – an incident that later becomes the subject of an art exhibit from Ai Weiwei. But it’s also about why she’s called Hooligan Sparrow. It’s about fame. It’s about glory. It’s about yelling really loud in front of a bunch of other people, and then congratulating yourself and kind of forgetting about it.

It’s not clear from the film whether Sparrow’s protest actually had much impact on the outcome of the trial – it’s not clear whether it made the victims feel supported; it’s not clear whether it changed anyone’s mind. I think it’s important for activists to publicly demonstrate that there are people who don’t agree with what’s going on, even if it doesn’t change anyone’s mind, but the film isn’t focused on whether Sparrow’s work has any impact on anyone else. It also doesn’t delve into the kind of investigative journalism that would uncover what’s happening in China’s rape and sexual assault trials, how systemic government corruption has become, or how the government (allegedly) tries to silence protesters.

On the flip side, the film also doesn’t fully commit to a narrative about Nanfu Wang’s journey as documentarian, even though she becomes a more and more active participant as the story goes on. There’s no strong sense of how this experience changed her, or what the role of gonzo journalism is in helping to bring freedom of speech and expression to China. There’s an interesting subplot in the film, where one of Sparrow’s followers seems to become interested in journalism after meeting Wang and takes up the mantle of “documenting the atrocities” on camera after she’s gone – it’s a subplot I would have like to have seen explored more.

I also wish the film had delved deeper into the subplot about how technology has made it harder for the government to make people disappear. The protesters in Hooligan Sparrow tape messages whenever they fear they’re about to be arrested, explaining that, if they die in custody it will not be because they killed themselves, imploring people to look for them if they go missing, and explaining how their disappearance may be linked to participation in political protests. It’s the same principle that led Ai Weiwei to tweet a photo of himself being arrested, and a form of action that may hold real promise for political change.

Wang’s adrenaline-fueled attempt to get through the summer without losing her camera makes for an engaging story, but it isn’t always clear that what she’s captured on the camera exposes new information or reveals the path to increased human rights in China.

Sparrow’s fellow activist, Wang Yu was arrested along with several other human rights lawyers in 2015 and, as of the film’s release, had been held without trial since. The filmmakers have set up a page with information on Wang Yu’s detention by Chinese authorities as well as suggestions for how to take action. Yu is also one of the women identified in the US government’s #freethe20 campaign.

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

Everything That’s Wrong (And a Few Things That Are Right) with ‘The Magicians’

Watching ‘The Magicians’ can be a lot like watching a real magician. One who’s not very good and keeps using such obvious distraction techniques that you want to rebel by looking at exactly what you’re not supposed to notice. And what we’re not supposed to notice here is an almost total lack of character development, followed by the thought that sperm is magic.

Written by Katherine Murray.

[Trigger warning: Discussion of rape and sexual violence]

Watching The Magicians can be a lot like watching a real magician. One who’s not very good and keeps using such obvious distraction techniques that you want to rebel by looking at exactly what you’re not supposed to notice. And what we’re not supposed to notice here is an almost total lack of character development, followed by the thought that sperm is magic.

The Magicians just wrapped up its first season on the SyFy network (Showcase, in Canada) and it was, overall, pretty disappointing. A TV show is not the same thing as a book series and, even though I was a fan of the books The Magicians is based on, I wasn’t expecting – or even wanting – it to be a faithful recreation of the source material. I did want it to tell a good story, though, and that’s where some of the narrative changes let me down.

Don’t get me wrong – I understand why the writers did most of what they did. In adapting the books for a TV series, they faced some difficult challenges:

The first book in the Magicians trilogy, which follows the adventures of Quentin Coldwater and his group of friends, is initially set at a magic school called Brakebills, but the action later moves to the magical land of Narnia Fillory and Brakebills becomes a footnote in the overall story. Because the first few episodes of a new TV show teach the audience how to watch it, there was a danger of setting up the false expectation that The Magicians was going to be about a bunch of students at a magic school.
The second book in the Magicians trilogy backtracks and spends about half its text explaining what Quentin’s friend, Julia, was doing while he was at Brakebills. This is vitally important to the story in book two, but Julia isn’t around that much in book one, and readers could be forgiven for forgetting she existed after she failed her Brakebills entrance exam. On TV, it’s hard to tell a long story in flashback and have it seem compelling.
Let’s be real – it would cost a lot of money to depict things exactly as they happened in the books.

For the most part, the solutions the writers came up with are good. They’ve accelerated the timeline of the original story so that the series hits its major turning points faster; they include action that takes place in Fillory and otherwise outside Brakebills right from the start; they place a lot less emphasis on classes, studying, and other especially school-like activities that take place at Brakebills which stops school from structuring the show; they cut back and forth between Quentin and Julia so that we can see their separate narratives unfold in real time; and they invent a character called Kady who moves between both stories and helps things feel connected.

All of this makes sense in theory – the problem is that, in practice, everything happens too fast.

The Magicians tries to cram all of book one, half of book two, and select revelations from book three into 13 episodes – that’s not even including the brand new plot points, story lines and characters it’s introduced. Some of the narrative choices kill two birds with one stone by collapsing multiple plot points into each other – Quentin needs a reason to be friends with Alice, Penny, and Kady and he also needs to accidentally summon a beast to the school; what if they all accidentally summon the beast together? But things start to fall apart when it comes to character development.

Repeatedly, season one of The Magicians expects us to believe that people undergo major changes in their feelings, perceptions, and relationships with lightning speed. Repeatedly, we’re asked to buy into emotionally-heavy plot developments with barely any time to explore what they mean. Quentin’s friend, Elliot, is torn apart by having to kill his evil, body-snatched boyfriend… whom we’ve known for about forty minutes. Elliot, later has to make a major, life-changing decision about whether to enter into a magical contract that would force him to stay in Fillory forever and never have sex again and he literally has 90 seconds to go on an entire emotional journey that leaves him okay with that idea. Quentin and his sometime-girlfriend Alice seem to be together for about five days before they break up and, in the season finale, she gives him a speech about his character that seems hollow because they barely know each other. The show rushes through a major plot point about how Alice’s older brother turned into a fire monster when he was at Brakebills and then doesn’t deliver the pay-off for that story in the season finale, leaving it as a random thing that everyone got super upset about for exactly one episode.

The most annoying example I remember, though, is a new plot line about how Quentin’s father is dying of cancer and believes that Quentin has wasted his life by being a weirdo. In the space of one episode, we are introduced to Father Quentin and his cancer, and the story of how, when Quentin was a kid, he ruined his father’s favorite model airplane and his father tried to glue it back together and just made it worse. At the end of the episode, Quentin goes back to his father’s house and uses magic to put the airplane back together, proving that he’s not just a weirdo and he’s finally done something with his life. And all of that is great, except that I’m supposed to believe Quentin’s dad just happens to keep that broken airplane from ten years ago in his living room at all times so that he can drag it out to hold a grudge against his son thereby providing an opportunity for metaphorical redemption. The writers know that they need to establish the backstory behind this airplane before the payoff where Quentin fixes it with magic, but the journey between establishing the conflict and resolving it remains too short, direct, and convenient. The same thing could be said for almost every major conflict in the first season.

The characters are also drawn in a pretty shallow way, likely because there isn’t time to develop them more. They always do and feel and say exactly what they need to do and feel and say to lurch from one plot point to another, but there’s no organic sense that these are real people, changing over time.

And that’s not even getting into the stuff with Julia.

Straight up – one of the things that impressed me about the second book in the Magicians trilogy is the way that Lev Grossman deftly, subtly, sensitively handled Julia’s back story, which involves a traumatic assault. Julia is Quentin’s childhood friend, but she fails the exam to get into Brakebills and then he’s kind of a dick to her. She goes off on her own and tries to learn magic on the streets – something that he’s kind of snobby about later on – and she has to do a lot of things that she’s not proud of and face a lot of choices that people like Quentin never have to deal with. Eventually, she makes some friends who become her whole world, and, just as everything looks like it’s finally coming together for her, it all gets blown to pieces.

Spoilers for the books and the TV show, but Julia and her friends try to summon a benevolent god to help them, and instead they get tricked by an evil god who kills most of Julia’s friends and rapes her when she tries to save another woman in her group. The book really conveys how horrible this is, and how it was more than just a physical assault – how it took everything Julia had, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and made her a different person. The book is all about how she keeps trying to deny that anything changed, but how it’s only when she accepts this (horrible, traumatic) experience as part of who she is that she becomes stronger. Learning what happened to Julia and watching how she changes also teaches Quentin that he’s not the center of the universe – he learns to have empathy for others, and appreciate that they’re the heroes of their own stories, taking their own journeys, facing their own challenges along the way.

In the TV show, we don’t have enough time to appreciate all the layers of Julia’s emotional journey. She’s angry for a couple of episodes, hangs out with some ne’er-do-wells, makes friends with some people we don’t get to know very well, and then all of a sudden, she’s like, “I know I haven’t always been a great person, but this is my redemption and I want to help everyone.” Again, only for a couple of episodes before the whole thing goes sideways.

Because Julia is still in contact with Quentin in the TV show, and because it needs to make sense that she would help him move the plot line forward when she should be in emotional turmoil, the writers (pretty cleverly) invent a twist where, initially, it seems like Julia successfully summoned the benevolent god, and the benevolent god gave everyone exactly what they wanted, and they all went away somewhere to be happy, which explains why they suddenly vanished. The flashbacks we see of this beautiful moment all have cold lighting and zero sound, which makes them seem creepy. In the next episode, we learn that this is a false memory that a fellow street magician put in Julia’s mind to protect her from remembering the truth. When the false memory is removed, Julia loses her composure, and we see a terrifying (but simplified) scene of how she was attacked by the evil god.

That’s all okay, up until the part where Julia’s complicated quest to reconcile her memories of trauma and become a stronger person is replaced by a plot point where god spunk gives you powers.

I’m just gonna say that again – in the TV show, having the semen of a god inside your body gives you magical powers. That is why Julia has more power in the final episode. That is why Alice has more power in the final episode, too – Julia was raped and Alice drinks a mason jar of semen.

Also, spoilers for the books again, and spoilers for the TV show if this ends up happening later, but – in the books, Alice is the strongest magician and Quentin’s group of friends, and, when they finally face their nemesis the branch-faced beast (in the show, he is a moth-faced beast) she turns into a fire monster like her brother did. It’s horrible but kind of awesome and heroic at the same time, because she tries to do something good and she’s the only one strong enough to do it. In the TV show, Quentin realizes before they fight the beast that Alice is the strong one and gives her a mason jar full of semen to drink. Then, when they reach the actual fight, Alice doesn’t get to do anything before she (apparently) gets killed. Odds are that this is so she can survive somehow and stick around next season, but it’s still a weak ending.

Look, the TV show does a lot of things right. Casting Arjun Gupta as Quentin’s frenemy, Penny (which makes Penny a lot more likeable and charismatic), creating the Kady character to bridge the two stories, getting out of Brakebills faster, inventing a time loop that sort of explains why the TV show is different from the books, letting Quentin have his awkward bisexual three-way without having some kind of panic attack in the process, trying to misdirect the audience about who the beast is, trying to mislead us into thinking Quentin is the most important character so that he learns a lesson when he’s not, following Julia right from the start, simplifying some of the story elements to work with a limited budget – there are lots of good choices.

But, amidst all of those good choices, there’s also a sense of anxiety in the first season. There’s a sense that this might not be interesting enough, or people won’t get it, or they won’t think it’s exciting, so we need to pad the story out with sex and violence and rely on shocking plot twists to keep everybody invested rather than building a complex set of characters and relationships that earn their payoffs over time. It’s as if the show fears that, if it takes the time to build something solid, everyone will get bored and leave before it’s done. In that sense, its a lot like How to Get Away with Murder, Orphan Black, and Mr. Robot, in that it just keeps changing direction to throw us off balance. That kind of thing isn’t sustainable over the long term, and it makes me worried that the series won’t ever find its feet.

The Magicians has already been renewed for a second season, and I’ll watch it. But I hope that now that they burned their way through half the source material, they will stop jumping between huge plot points and give the characters more room to breathe. My other hope is that they retcon it somehow so that drinking semen doesn’t give you powers. WTF.

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

‘Spotlight’ on the Wrong People

‘Spotlight’ isn’t the kind of film that just changes some facts (though I never understand “based-on-a-true-story” films that do so: if you’re going to fictionalize their lives why not fictionalize their names too?), it’s one where the most basic plot summary contradicts what happened.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual abuse]

We’re winding down to the Oscar ceremony no thinking person is looking forward to. The Black director who should have been nominated last year, Ava DuVernay, and the Black director who should have been nominated this year, Ryan Coogler, will be in Flint, Michigan with other Black celebrities on Oscar night, raising funds for and drawing attention to the majority-Black community whose water was poisoned as a result of government misdeeds. I see some outlets still trying to pretend this ceremony is like all the others. Among the fluff articles about white nominees are ones that focus on the “real” people behind the film Spotlight, which is nominated as it has been at other galas (it swept last night’s Spirit Awards) for multiple awards, even Best Supporting Actress. (One writer posited that Rachel McAdams got a nomination for a performance that consists of her mostly listening, nodding and taking notes because she “dared” to wear unflattering chinos, just like a real reporter would).

Spotlight centers around the intrepid editors and reporters (the vast majority of whom are male) of The Boston Globe, claiming they are the only reason we know the extent of child sexual abuse perpetrated by Boston archdiocese priests and the cover-up by the archdiocese itself. For those of us who know the facts around this basic premise, the film plays as a long, elaborate, tedious lie. Spotlight isn’t the kind of film that just changes some facts (though I never understand based-on-a-true-story films that do so: if you’re going to fictionalize their lives why not fictionalize their names too?); it’s one where the most general plot summary contradicts what happened.

Instead of the investigation beginning, as it does in the film, with a powerful man looking solemnly into the middle distance and declaring “I know there’s a story here,” it began with a young woman reporter, Kristen Lombardi at the alternative weekly The Boston Phoenix, with the encouragement and guidance of her out, queer, news editor (previously a longtime reporter at Boston’s LGBT paper) Susan Ryan-Vollmar.

As has been reported elsewhere, Lombardi’s story was published nearly a year before the first “Spotlight” story and shares with it a number of “discoveries”. One of these “discoveries” is a turning point we see in the film: Mark Ruffalo’s Woodward-and-Bernstein-esque Mike Rezendes (in one of the few performances that has made me dislike the actor) interrogating an expert on sex-offender priests and inferring from his data that a far greater number of the offenders existed than anyone had previously thought. Not only did Lombardi do the interview with the same expert first, she also literally did the math to come up with the number of probable offenders.

Lombardi has been gracious in interviews, explaining, “I was aware that there was a bigger story that I couldn’t tell because I didn’t have the resources,” and that the ability to stick with the story week after week was something only The Globe could do. But she also wishes she had gotten some credit. Although repeatedly given the chance to acknowledge her contribution, editor Baron, (played by Liev Shreiber in the film: the real-life Baron has moved on to another, larger newspaper as one character in the film “predicts”) has steadfastly refused to do so. With at least one of his colleagues admitting that Lombardi broke the story, Baron’s continued silence seems like a tacit admission of guilt. In the film, Rezendes says that no one in town saw Lombardi’s cover story in The Phoenix, which is laughable considering the very streets we see the film’s reporters endlessly walking up and down would have had, at that time, on every corner big, bright, red boxes full of free copies of The Phoenix. Its cover story, including the one about Law and the cover-up, would be facing anyone on the sidewalk, through the box windows at each intersection.

Tom McCarthy, the co-writer and director, did interview Lombardi as research for the script, but he decided her role wasn’t important enough to include in the final cut of the film. Instead McCarthy decided to focus on white-guy, mainstream newspaper mythology, and that focus not only makes the film untrue, it renders it dramatically inert.

Nearly every scene of this film involves two (or more!) men of a certain age glowering at each other: over a conference table, a golf game or a shadowy bar like in some Saturday Night Live parody while spouting dialogue that could have come from a comic book.

“You’re going to give me their names and the names of their victims!”

“Are you threatening me?”

“They knew, and they let it happen!”

The film suggests, nonsensically, that Rezendes, Baron, and the lawyer who represented many of the victims, Mitchell Garabedian (played by Stanley Tucci) were willing to go against the Catholic Church because they were respectively, a Jewish bachelor who didn’t like baseball, someone from a Portuguese family and someone from an Armenian family: all so-called “outsiders”.

But the real outsiders were those who realized, before the scandal hit, that the Catholic Church was far from the benevolent institution each of the male characters in Spotlight seem to think it is at the beginning of the film. The people with ties to the Catholic Church were (and are) the same ones who shout at women as they enter Planned Parenthood and other clinics that perform abortions in Boston. Six years before the scandal broke, John Salvi had shot and killed people in two of these clinics in Brookline, the town next to Boston, and pointed to his Catholic beliefs as the reason.

Ryan-Vollmar would have seen firsthand, as a reporter for a queer paper, that the Catholic church had tried to block every state law (including, eventually, the one for marriage) that gave queer people the same rights as everyone else. And The Phoenix, like many alternative newspapers with roots in the 1960s was founded because mainstream papers like The Globe did not cover events or politics in ways that confronted the existing power structure.

Women, especially in the past, were much more likely to listen to and believe allegations of rape and sexual abuse perpetrated by men in power than… men in power were. One of the many omissions the film makes is that women, usually relatives of the victims, were among the very first whistle-blowers on the church’s cover-up of sexual abuse–and were ignored for years.

Spotlight goes so far out of its way to make its story all about white guys it should have all of us questioning every “based on a true story” film from now on. Let’s not let another smarmy white-guy writer-director shrug his shoulders, smile, and say he would have loved for women to play the leads in his film, but the “facts” got in his way.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg5zSVxx9JM” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘Suffragette’: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same

In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace. … I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period ‘Suffragette’ is set. …It made me realize we need [feminism] more than ever.

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris. | Spoilers ahead.

I went to see Suffragette at the culmination of a day spent feeling utterly depressed at the state of women in the workplace and the world at large. As you can imagine, Suffragette did nothing to assuage my feelings. In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace.

The day in question saw my Twitter timeline full of defenses of cricketer Chris Gayle, who hit on a female reporter as she was trying to interview him after a game; Jamie Briggs, the minister for cities and built environments, who sexually harassed a young female staffer on an international trip; Peter Dutton, the minister for immigration and border protection, who called reporter Samantha Maiden, who stood up for the staffer in question, a “mad fucking witch” in a text message clearly not meant for her but somehow sent to her anyway (and this is the guy in charge of Australia’s borders!); and the two men who murdered their families as “good guys” suffering from mental health problems (an important issue in its own right but not at the expense of the safety of women and children).

So, heading into Suffragette I shrunk into myself as a form of protection from all the microaggressions I’d faced that day but I raged internally at the depictions of workplace inequality, sexual harassment and assault and the general placement of women as second-class citizens and, behold, this piece was born.

Workplace Rights.
In the laundry that protagonist Maud (Carey Mulligan), her husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) and friend and fellow suffragette Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) work, women toil away over steam and hot fumes. Maud herself was born at the laundry to a mother who was killed when a vat tipped on her only four years later. When Maud gets home, she washes her family’s own laundry and fixes her husband and son dinner. She endures sexual harassment and, it is implied, survived rape by the manager of the laundry, Mr. Taylor (Geoff Bell). All of this is viewed as inconvenient at best, a workplace hazard at worst.

After a day spent reading about the above-mentioned modern day examples of workplace harassment I couldn’t help but see the similarities. While the Gayle and Dutton incidents came to light because they happened in full view of the media, Briggs’ sexual harassment accusations are the exception to the rule: how many other countless examples of sexual harassment and assault have occurred but are swept under the carpet in an effort not to jeopardize positions or be looked on unfavorably by colleagues?

You Don’t Get a Cookie.
When Maud reveals these labor conditions (her standing up to her rapist happens later) in a votes for women hearing, the men on the board seem genuinely shocked. Prominent British politician and statesman David Lloyd George (Adrian Schiller) seems sympathetic to Maud’s plight however her testimony doesn’t convince him of her right to vote.

Maud’s husband, too, seems initially merely inconvenienced by her newfound interest in suffrage but, as the movie progresses, Maud’s feminism gets stronger and she spends more time in prison for demonstrating, he kicks her out of the house and adopts their son out to a rich family. He says he can’t be expected to work, run a household and look after their son — what Maud’s been doing this whole time — in a stark example of male privilege.

These are some of Suffragette’s more sympathetic male characters compared to anti-suffrage policeman Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) and Mr. Taylor but, like men today who express astonishment when women reveal they’ve been harassed and assaulted and the belief that women do, in fact, deserve basic human rights, they don’t get a cookie for it.

Reproductive Rights.
As attacks on reproductive rights threaten to return to pre-Roe V. Wade levels, which is to say non-existent, in the U.S. and pap tests and STI blood tests will come at a price in Australia, they are mirrored in Suffragette. Abused spouse Violet steps down from the suffrage movement when she discovers she’s pregnant again, citing exhaustion at not being able to “take care of the [kids] I’ve got.” Maud is force fed in prison in a harrowingly triggering scene echoing rape, mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking to terminate their pregnancies, forced sterilization and any manner of other violations against women’s bodies. She asks Steed, when he expresses disdain over her disobedience of the law, “Why should I obey a law I had no hand in making?”

Check out Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan on the cover of @TimeOutLondon this week! More info http://t.co/nZxRwvNFdo pic.twitter.com/y6KWGLDOK4

— SUFFRAGETTE (@SuffragetteFilm) September 29, 2015

Black Lives Matter.
Much has been made about Suffragette’s whitewashing and rightfully so. There were literally no women of color in the film, despite the real-life involvement of Indian suffragettes, for example. And, in perhaps the most offensive portion of the film that was parlayed into a tone-deaf marketing campaign, suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep in a two-minute cameo) says in her famous speech:

“We do not want to be law breakers; we want to be law makers. Be militant, each of you in your own way. Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can further attack the sacred idol of property, do so. We have been left with no alternative but to defy this government. If we must go to prison to obtain the vote let it be the windows of government not the bodies of women which shall be broken.”

First of all, slavery is not a choice. Secondly, the above-mentioned use of this 1913 speech for a Time Out cover featuring the all-white cast illustrates just how far white feminism has to go in the inclusion of women of color.

14 officers show up at an Oregon #BlackLivesMatters protest

150 armed protestors: *crickets* #OregonUnderAttack pic.twitter.com/Jrgmc7KS2Q

— Yukio Strachan (@boldandworthy) January 4, 2016

Three queer Black women formed the #BlackLivesMatter movement after the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of police as “a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society.” Meanwhile, white ranchers are allowed to demonstrate “peacefully” — albeit armed — on seized government land (which let’s not forget was originally stolen from Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago). Much like the attempts to bar people of color from demonstrating peacefully without militarized police forces (see above tweet) threatening them or mowing them down, Suffragette excludes women of color from its depiction of the suffrage movement by denying them a voice. But on the other hand, consider Pankhurst’s words above and some of the film’s early scenes in which demonstrators are attacked by policemen in the streets: Suffragette could also be viewed as an allegory for racist police brutality.

[NEW POST] My #Feminist Awakening & the Influence of #Beyonce's Pop Culture Declaration http://t.co/j5FqMvhPtu pic.twitter.com/ZmBE71DvAu

— Janet Mock (@janetmock) September 3, 2014

I’m Not a Feminist, But…
Upon Maud’s first arrest, she insists she’s “not a suffragette.” Where have we heard that before? Modern women’s baffling insistence that they, too, are not feminists seems to be in the news every other day. The online campaigns about why women don’t need feminism and celebrities being asked whether they are feminists have dominated the discussion in recent years reminded me of Maud’s colleagues at the laundry turning their backs on her when she’s outed for demonstrating and when she finally takes her revenge on her abuser. Internalized misogyny is as hard at work today as it was 100 years ago.

White women who do call themselves feminists, such as Emma Watson and Lena Dunham, are seldom met with much push-back, whereas Black women’s (those who do identify with a movement that has often ignored the contributions of feminists who are women of color and not with another movement such as “womanist”) feminism comes with a whole host of caveats. Despite Beyoncé’s spectacular embrace of feminism at the MTV Video Music Awards flanked by an emblazoned erection of the word, she’s still asked to qualify it. Black feminists such as Janet Mock, Roxane Gay and Amandla Stenberg are increasingly having their voices heard by the mainstream media while Kate Winslet refuses to talk about “vulgar” pay inequities in Hollywood and Patricia Arquette urges other marginalized groups to support women — and, let’s be clear here, she was talking about white women in the über privileged world of Hollywood. That’s not to say that Jennifer Lawrence, a fellow champion of closing the pay gap, doesn’t deserve to get paid as much as Bradley Cooper, but it partially ignores the struggles of women like Viola Davis and men like John Boyega to get paid as much as their white counterparts. And to intersect the two, all we have to do is look at this week’s Oscar nominations which resulted in no actors of color being recognized in the four main acting categories. Oscar noms = $$.

I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period Suffragette is set. Sure, sexism and misogyny may not be as violent and blatant and we’re more likely to get up in arms when it is, but just because a few high profile women enjoy privileges far removed from what Maud and Violet in Suffragette and countless other women around the world face, doesn’t mean that we don’t need feminism. In fact, it made me realize we need it more than ever.

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Let’s All Calm Down for a Minute About ‘The Hateful Eight’: Analyzing the Leading Lady of a Modern Western

In an action movie, violence is due to befall all characters. Is violence against any female character inherently woman-hating, inherently misogynist? … It’s possible that subconscious sexism makes people quick to see her as a victim, and then criticism of the trope of women as victims may be getting in the way of seeing the agency and complexity of a character like Daisy Domergue.

This guest post is written by Sophie Besl.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape, sexual assault and graphic violence] | Spoilers ahead.

When the only female character in Quentin Tarantino’s new film, The Hateful Eight, appeared on promotional materials, and eventually onscreen, with a black eye and chained to a male character, the hair on everyone’s backs was already up. A Tarantino fan and writer I admire went so far as to post on Facebook, “…What I saw tonight in 70 millimeter was a woman-hating piece of trash.”

In this analysis, I ask viewers and readers to take a new perspective. In an action movie, violence is due to befall all characters. Is violence against any female character inherently woman-hating, inherently misogynist?

The Hateful Eight Is a Western.
This male-centric genre, like many others, is guilty of shackling a limited number of women into stereotypical roles such as: a) emotional, submissive frontier wives completely at the mercy of men’s decisions, b) hyper-sexualized sex workers, or c) exoticized depictions of Native and Indigenous women. Of course, there are still standout roles for women (Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles, Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the role of Mattie in True Grit), but these roles are difficult to etch out. I would like to submit that Daisy Domergue, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, is one of these strong roles. Tarantino gets as close as he can to putting a woman in a leading role (which he has shown is his preference in Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Death Proof, and Inglourious Basterds).

The primary message of The Hateful Eight is about the Civil War and what it meant for America and the men, white and Black, who fought it. Thus, the main characters fought in the war. While a small number of women disguised themselves as men and fought, the overwhelming majority of veterans were men. So since the main characters had to be veterans, these were male, but Tarantino made the “next available” lead character female. Domergue is essentially the third lead, the highest level available that is historically accurate for a woman, given Tarantino’s primary goal exploring race relations (her Golden Globe nomination is for supporting actor, but it’s okay, those decisions are not a science!).

Play the Movie in Your Mind with a Male Actor in the Role.
In my opinion, one test of whether a character is feminist or not is if you ask, “Does this character’s gender play any part in the character’s actions, fate, or treatment?” If the answer is “no” or “not really, not essentially,” then that is a very feminist character. Insert a male actor in place of Jennifer Jason Leigh. Think about it — the plot would play out exactly the same. Not only that, but almost no lines of dialogue would need to be changed. “This woman” would be replaced with “this man,” “sister” with “brother,” etc. The only outlier is the dreaded “b” word, but Tarantino has plenty of colorful insults for all manner of characters.

Domergue Is Never Viewed in a Sexual or Objectifying Way.
This is rooted one of my favorite things about Tarantino as a filmmaker. In a world riddled with rape, the last thing we need is gratuitous, titillating visuals, filmed from a male point of view, of sexual violence against women.¹ The closest Tarantino ever comes to this is with the Bride² — but the sexual violence is implied not shown³ — and Death Proof, where the revenge equally or far outweighs the initial gender-based homicide. On the flip side, Tarantino has no problem showing rape and sexual assault against men onscreen, such as in Pulp Fiction and The Hateful Eight.

Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds is one of the best examples of Tarantino writing for women as if they do not live in danger of sexual violence from men. This suspension of disbelief onscreen is refreshing and empowering for viewers, such as me as a woman who does somewhat live in daily fear of sexual violence. Shosanna repeatedly, assertively turns down advances from Zoller quite at her own peril throughout the entire film. Her fearlessness is astounding, and respected. Here are the ways that Domergue is written in similarly feminist ways:

[Spoilers follow.]
• She is walked into a log cabin in the middle-of-nowhere Wyoming to spend the night with 9 or 10 men, one of whom she is chained to, and it never seems to the viewer that she might be in danger, of sexual violence or even significant other harm.
• There is no implication that her captor has raped or sexually assaulted her.
• Her looks are never commented upon, neither that she is pretty nor looking haggard. The comment-ability of her appearance intensifies over time based on the chaos that occurs inside the cabin, yet no one comments. This is impossibly refreshing and almost unheard of for women in film. Even the looks of the strongest women characters in other Westerns are usually remarked upon or up for discussion among the men.
• Domergue is not a love interest of any of the characters.*
• Men are willing to risk their lives to save Domergue due to familial or gang ties, not out of love, affection, or sexually driven motives.*
• The camera never rests on her in an objectifying or gazing way that is different than the other characters or unique to her as a woman.

*Note: Major Marquis Warren does imply this in one line of dialogue, but it is quickly dismissed. Compared to most films where men only act out of love for women and sex is a major motivator, this is still a major step in terms of feminist film.

Okay Yes, We’ll Talk about the Violence.
I’m no fool — I’m not going to pretend that it’s all butterflies and rainbows for Domergue in The Hateful Eight. As Leigh told The Daily Beast, she took a photo of herself and sent it to her mom when her only makeup was a black eye and a few scratches and bruises and said, “This is as good as it’s going to get. This is the beauty shot from the movie. … Then it just got more and more insane as it goes on.”

My initial question was: Is any violence against a woman inherently misogynist? Leigh said in an interview:

“I think it’s actually more of a sexist response [to say that]… I think it’s easy to have a sexist response. ‘Hitting a woman? Sexist.’ It’s a natural go-to place for people. But [Tarantino]’s actually taking the sexism out of it.”

Another argument about the violence is that Domergue has almost full agency over it. She has been arrested by an officer of the court, and he has made it clear what the consequences are for what actions. She purposely violates his rules, knowing what the consequences will be, and chooses the risks of receiving an elbow to the face for getting in some fantastic jabs at Kurt Russell’s character John Ruth, such as that his intelligence may have suffered from taking a high dive into a low well.

Also, while many would argue that Domergue gets the worst of the violence, mostly marked by her lack of wiping blood off of her face, it should be noted that part of the lead protagonist Major Warren’s genitals are separated from his body by a gunshot wound, an injury he viscerally suffers from until the end of the movie, so it’s not like Tarantino spares his lead male actors.

She Kills Her Captor.
While: a) being chained to Ruth, b) Ruth is poisoned and thus vomiting on her, and c) Ruth is still managing to beat her up, Domergue manages to grab his gun and blow him away. Any one of the “hateful eight” could have easily killed Ruth plot-wise, but Tarantino gives this murder to Domergue, who deserves it and has truly earned it. (Note: She also deftly and matter-of-factly saws his arm — which she’s still handcuffed to — off of his corpse to facilitate her mobility later that night.)

The Fates of Four Men Rest on Her in the End.
Speaking of her being a total badass, after Jody’s murder, she goes from being the #2 to the #1 leader of one of the most dangerous gangs in the land. In the final act of the film, she just about single-handedly negotiates the lives (and deaths) of the two protagonists and her two remaining gang members. She is unarmed, and yet commands full power over the four men’s actions and decisions until the very last moment. Her brilliance —“She’s very, very smart,” Leigh tells The Daily Beast — causes her to outshine all of the other characters and almost “win.” “…She’s a leader. And she’s tough. And she’s hateful and a survivor and scrappy,” says Leigh in an interview with Variety, all traits that give Domergue power in the frenetic, desperate situation in which all the characters find themselves.

The Death Scene.
This is arguably the most problematic scene of all. Let’s present what I’m up against before I present my counterpoint. Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com writes:

“The film’s relentless and often comical violence against Daisy never feels truly earned. Saying, ‘Well, they’re all outlaws, including her, and that’s just how women were treated back then’ feels like an awfully thin defense when you hear audiences whooping it up each time Russell punches Leigh in the face, and it dissipates during the final scene, which lingers on Daisy’s death with near-pornographic fascination. In a movie filled with selfish, deceptive and murderous characters, hers is the only demise that is not just observed, but celebrated.”

Well this is where I’m going to go way out on a limb and repeat what Leigh herself (the woman who had to sit around in 30 degrees in the fake blood and brains, and pretend to be hung) said, “I think it’s actually more of a sexist response [to say that].” Why is watching a villain get what’s coming to her “near-pornographic fascination?” There’s nothing sexual about the act of killing her, or its filming/gaze. Also, after her death, her body is sometimes held in the same shot with the two protagonists, as if her character still lives on in a way.

• Did this reviewer feel the same way when Tarantino’s three protagonists were kicking the living bejesus out of Russell’s character in Death Proof?
• What about when Elle is sitting over Bud’s snake-poison-filled body in Kill Bill Vol. 2 and calmly reading to him? If anything, that is more tortuous and sick, plus the camera is looking up at Elle (murderer) and down at Bud (victim). These camera angles are reversed in Domergue’s murder, with an upward shot on her and downward at the murderers.
• If I recall correctly, the audience also “whooped it up” each time significant discomfort befell almost any of the characters: O.B. getting really cold, Ruth and O.B. throwing up from poison, Mannix getting shot and passing out, etc.
• If I recall correctly, the audience pretty clearly celebrated or enjoyed the shorter-in-duration but also gristly murders of Bob and Jody. This violence was also slated as comical.
• Maybe I was the only sick person in the theater, but I also found it pretty enjoyable and hilarious that Tim Roth’s character didn’t die right away, and he was crawling around in the background while a bunch of other stuff was going on, with no one paying him any mind.
• May I take a moment to reiterate the violence to Major Warren’s genitals? This was extremely comical to the audience — why is his violence earned but hers is not?
• There are only a few murders in the film that are decidedly not celebrated and those are of three women (and two men, one of whom is an older man in his 70s).

I see the temptation to look at what happens to Daisy Domergue on-screen and denounce, “You sexist, you’re destroying a woman, how misogynist!” I even did it for moments myself. However, I encourage everyone to move past this knee-jerk reaction. It’s possible that subconscious sexism makes people quick to see her as a victim, and then criticism of the trope of women as victims may be getting in the way of seeing the agency and complexity of a character like Domergue. I’d rather we not take this as an opportunity to put down Tarantino, but as an opportunity to celebrate Leigh’s nuanced and powerful performance – she even took time to learn to play guitar to perform a song in the film — as film critics are doing this awards season.

I’ll close with a quote from Tarantino:

“Violence is hanging over every one of those characters like a cloak of night. So I’m not going to go, ‘OK, that’s the case for seven of the characters, but because one is a woman, I have to treat her differently.’ I’m not going to do that.”

Notes:

[1] See my view on the only acceptable treatment of sexual violence in film in “I’ll Make You Feel Like You’ve Never Felt Before”: Jennifer’s Power in I Spit on Your Grave

[2] See a thoughtful exploration of the Bride’s rape revenge in Revenge Is a Dish Best Served… Not at All?. I agree with Rodriguez’s interpretation that Buck is “at the bottom of the barrel” as the first to die, but I disagree that Tarantino sees this is a means of empowerment that enables her to find liberation. I see it as another brutalization by Bill (indirectly) that further justifies her revenge. The Bride’s revenge against Bill feels very “tit for tat” in the way historically all-male cast movies are written, yet by working in the rape and the losing of her baby, he makes them more true to the realities of what a female character would face (again without showing sexual violence). Writing a female character with completely equal respect as a male character, yet with these realistic modifications based on gender, is the most feminist thing I can imagine.

[3] This argument of “implied not shown” was used to justify a reason why Mad Max: Fury Road is a feminist film.

Sophie Besl is an exploitation film fanatic with a day job in nonprofit marketing. She has a Bachelor’s from Harvard and lives in Boston with three small dogs. She tweets at @rockyc5.

‘Jessica Jones’: A Discomforting Yet Real Portrayal of Abuse

If ever there was a personification of this psychological abuse that goes along with physical abuse, it’s in Kilgrave. … He gaslights Jessica, telling her it’s her fault he uses his powers to make people do things they don’t want to do, namely kill others and themselves.

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris.

[Trigger warning: discussion of intimate partner abuse] | Spoilers ahead.

There’s TV that, when you watch, makes you feel all warm and fuzzy and can be likened to a hug. For me, it’s Grey’s Anatomy. And then there’s TV that doesn’t necessarily fall within this category that I still love, such as Orange Is the New Black, with its focus on crime, drug addiction, broken families and poverty, and that upon marathoning makes you ache to get back to the trials and tribulations of Sophia, Taystee, Poussey, and Red.

Despite binging Jessica Jones over my Christmas and New Year’s break, I almost dreaded sitting down for a few hours every afternoon to check into Jessica’s world. I guess that’s what a series directed so heavily at abuse is wont to do.

https://twitter.com/mojorojo/status/670495742503489537
https://twitter.com/2k16sebastian/status/676787210411208704

In the six weeks or so since Jessica Jones was released in full on Netflix, the internet has been abuzz with its brilliance. Many feminists asserted that this is what it feels like to watch content created for women, by women, while others marveled (pun intended) at the show’s gritty portrayal of New York City and an actually villainous villain, a departure from some of Marvel’s other offerings.

Jessica Jones’ emphasis on abuse was also heavily discussed. Kia Groom at The Mary Sue wrote about her experience in a similarly abusive relationship as the one central to the TV series. Stassa Edwards at Jezebel wrote:

“If Jessica Jones is a feminist show, as many critics have said that it is, it’s not simply because it presents a complicated woman, but rather because it understands how strength and control play out in the lives of women.”

To return to OITNB, for example, the fellow Netflix offering isn’t necessarily littered with likable characters (*cough* Piper *cough*), but there are enough peripheral characters whose backstories come ‘round every now and then to tide you over while the story pivots back to Piper, Alex and the more boring inmates. Despite a couple of likable characters in Jessica Jones (I can only think of Malcolm and Trish), they weren’t enough to get me excited to come back to the rollercoaster of emotions. This is understandable: pretty much all of the characters are victims of some kind of abuse, whether it be villain Kilgrave’s mind control or otherwise, so if anyone has an excuse to be pissy, it’s them.

Edwards writes:

“…[Jessica Jones’] expression of anger — her inability to contain it — is what makes Jones deeply unlikable. But then, being unlikeable is part and parcel of being a woman on the edge. The emotional expression of anger has always been coded as an indelible marker of trauma and of difference.”

But what even are “likable” characters? Roxane Gay, a couple of years ago almost to the day, wrote about this phenomenon at Buzzfeed, touching on points from unlikable female characters being perceived to be suffering from mental illness, being inconveniences and coming across as having more humanity than likable ones. (Gay, as a survivor of sexual assault herself, has also written about the futility of trigger warnings, however this piece makes the case for them in Jessica Jones.) Jessica Jones works so well because most of its characters reek of humanity, however unflattering.

What’s more important than likable characters, though, are relatable ones and Jessica Jones has that in spades. We get impressions of this when Jessica tells Trish she can’t comfort her when she’s tased in an attempt to capture Kilgrave and when Jessica pushes those close to her away.

Perhaps the most human character, despite his villainy, is Kilgrave. We are first introduced to him through Jessica’s perspective as a cold and calculating abuser, which he is. But as the season progresses, we see glimpses of Kilgrave’s humanity and that he himself was embroiled in the cycle of abuse perpetrated by his parents who performed experiments on him as a child in an attempt to understand his mind control powers. While Jessica Jones seems to want us to believe that Kilgrave’s parents were trying to protect him and others from his “gift,” to me it was unclear as to who was abusing whom.

As I started to fathom Kilgrave’s past, I was reminded of an article written in 2014 for White Ribbon, an Australian campaign for the prevention of violence against women (which has its own problems), by Tom Meagher whose wife Jill Meagher was raped and murdered in Melbourne in 2012. He asserted that, despite the attack perpetrated against Jill by a known criminal, rapists, murderers and abusers of women aren’t “monsters” lurking in dark alleyways and behind bushes in the dead of night: they’re most often known to, trusted and/or loved by those they choose to abuse. Meagher wrote:

“By insulating myself with the intellectually evasive dismissal of violent men as psychotic or sociopathic aberrations, I self-comforted by avoiding the more terrifying concept that violent men are socialised by the ingrained sexism and entrenched masculinity that permeates everything from our daily interactions all the way up to our highest institutions…

“The only thing more disturbing than that paradigm is the fact that most rapists are normal guys, guys we might work beside or socialize with, our neighbors or even members of our family.”

Groom echoes this at The Mary Sue:

“Yes, Kilgrave is a rapist, but his sexual abuse is not of the kind we often see represented on television; he abuses in the context of relationships that seem, to the outside observer, consensual, and it is this — his psychological abuse of his victims, his absolute and total control and manipulation of them, his dominance over their agency and their free will — that make[s] him so utterly terrifying.”

Edwards further expands on this at Jezebel, asserting that Kilgrave is a different kind of villain — and a more terrifying one — from your typical Marvel fare in that:

“…The mundanity of control he exercises over Jones, over nearly every woman who crosses his path, is what makes him so evil, even more menacing than the typical villain. Kilgrave is every woman’s worst nightmare: he is a rapist, an unrepentant stalker, a man who, at any moment, can exercise his power and does.”

This “monster myth” and the cycle of abuse can also be seen in Officer Will Simpson, who begins a relationship with Trish after he tries to kill her whilst brainwashed by Kilgrave. Cate Young at Batty Mamzelle (cross-posted here at Bitch Flicks) explores this in depth. The fact that the actress who plays Trish Walker, Rachael Taylor, also survived abuse by her high profile ex-partner in 2010 adds yet another layer to the series.

As these examples attest, what Jessica Jones arguably has more of than relatable characters is relatable situations.

Not everyone can relate to being in an abusive relationship, and thank god. I haven’t personally been abused by a partner, but I grew up in a violent home as well as abuse being a big part of my life in recent years in reading about it, watching it take place on screen and in the news, and working towards changing attitudes about it through my writing and in everyday conversations (though I could be doing more; we all could). One of the more pervasive attitudes surrounding intimate partner violence is asking why the survivor “doesn’t just leave” without paying mind to the isolation from loved ones and external support systems by the abuser; the abuser’s reinforcement of worthlessness in the survivor; the depletion of their resources, such as money and their ability to make a living; and the threatening of children, pets and other loved ones. If ever there was a personification of this psychological abuse that goes along with physical abuse, it’s in Kilgrave.

Kilgrave preyed on a once vibrant and happy young Jessica Jones, glimpses of whom we see in a bar scene with Trish in episode five, “AKA The Sandwich Saved Me,” trauma which caused her to suffer from paranoia and alcoholism. Even after she manages to escape him, her life in tatters and suffering from PTSD, Kilgrave infiltrates himself back into her life, turning even the most tenuously connected people to her into his pawns, such as Malcolm, her — again — once vibrant and now drug-addicted neighbor. In a metaphor for the disbelief domestic violence survivors often face, Kilgrave manipulates Jessica’s allies into helping him, as seen with Jeri Hogarth assisting him in his escape, partly of her own free will but also under his mind control. He gaslights Jessica, telling her it’s her fault he uses his powers to make people do things they don’t want to do, namely kill others and themselves. He tries to win back her affections by buying her childhood home and restoring it to its former glory, another allegory for entrapment and, frankly, is just plain creepy. He tells her he can’t live without her and how much better she makes him, exemplified in their short-lived foray into tandem superheroism in episode eight (“AKA WWJD?”) when they save a family from another, perhaps more archetypal domestic abuser. This is also a pitch perfect portrayal of the hope an intimate partner violence survivor might face in seeing the “good” side of their partner and is transferred onto the audience: maybe Kilgrave can be good, I wondered.

Hope is a guiding force in Jessica’s pursuit of Kilgrave, embodied by the character of the same name. Jessica resists the easy way out — killing Kilgrave — for much of the thirteen episode arc as she needs him alive as proof of Hope’s innocence in her parenticide charges, committed under Kilgrave’s control. Proof is also something intimate partner abuse survivors are perpetually demanded to demonstrate — by law enforcement, the criminal justice system, society, even friends and family — even when it’s on their bodies in the form of blood and bruises and, in Hope’s case, in her uterus. Also, as previously stated, not all abuse is physical and society should believe, rather than disregard or dismiss, intimate partner violence survivors.

Despite Kilgrave’s rape of both Jessica and Hope, and his intention to do the same to Trish (and who knows how many others), showrunner Melissa Rosenberg was very conscious of depicting rape and abuse differently from a lot of other media that uses it as a “titillating” plot device, telling The Los Angeles Times:

“With rape, I think we all know what that looks like. We’ve seen plenty of it on television and I didn’t have any need to see it, but I wanted to experience the damage that it does. I wanted the audience to really viscerally feel the scars that it leaves. It was not important to me, on any level, to actually see it. TV has plenty of that, way too often, used as titillation, which is horrifying.”

Despite the influx of shows dealing with abuse, such as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Game of Thrones and mainstay Law & Order: SVU (which Emily Nussbaum and Lindy West discuss on The New Yorker Radio Hour), how often do we actually hear the confident pronouncement of the word “rape” that Jessica spits at Kilgrave in other media? Jessica Jones succeeds in depicting sexual abuse in a more harrowing and real way than shows that throw it around willy-nilly for shock value and not much else.

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Pollution, Energy Crisis and… Sexism? A Feminist Look at the ‘Soylent Green’ Dystopia

The film’s female characters seem to have accepted their fates and although they may not be okay with it, they don’t do much to fight against it. Today, women’s voices are constantly silenced, even (and especially) when conversations and arguments are about our own bodies.

This is a guest post by Maria Ramos.

Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault

Soylent Green, Richard Fleischer‘s 1973 classic sci-fi film, makes huge statements about class division, overpopulation, and global warming. Many have drawn parallels between the future depicted in the movie — where the greenhouse effect has taken its toll and much of the world’s wildlife is extinct — to the course of environmental destruction that humanity is currently on in the real world. While the movie’s message about the environment is much needed, its treatment of women makes an even bigger statement.

The dystopian future shown in Soylent Green is downright miserable for everyone but a handful of people — the lucky few aren’t actually seen in the film, but are noted as living away from the chaos of the city in heavily guarded country estates. The movie’s opener lists the population of New York City in the year 2022 at 40 million. Charlton Heston‘s character, Detective Frank Thorn, can’t go to or from his dilapidated apartment without seeing throngs of homeless people in the streets while law enforcement disperses crowds with a garbage truck that literally scoops people out of the way. Food is so scarce that folks take to primarily eating soy and lentil blocks — Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow — while the more popular Soylent Green is in short supply. It’s clear that poverty and overpopulation are major themes in Soylent Green, but the biggest victims of this are the women seen in the film.

Soylent Green stays true to the handling of women in the book on which it is based, Harry Harrison‘s Make Room! Make Room!. Several key details, some names, and the ending change, but one thing stays the same: women are screwed from beginning to end, literally and figuratively. Few women in the film get a break, not the poor or the ones who are “lucky” enough to have access to real food and a place to stay. The latter are actually referred to as “furniture,” and they’re basically attractive women who come as a package deal with the upscale apartments being rented out. A Craigslist ad for such an apartment might read, “Condo comes with a refrigerator, dishwasher, 23-year-old, slim, blonde furniture, and access to a concierge.”

Just like a chair or a hat rack, the women who are considered “furniture” don’t get to choose who uses them and must obey men’s commands, including visitors off the street. They’re routinely subjected to rape, violence and abuse from their renters and any men with whom they come in contact. Leigh Taylor-Young plays the film’s female lead, Shirl, who is at the mercy of the men who rent out the apartment where she lives. She sees her fellow “furniture” friends being beaten up by the building’s owner. Shirl is told, rather than asked, to have sex with Detective Thorn, and has very little control over her own destiny. She displays no anger at her condition and has clearly accepted her lot in life, as have the other women in the movie.

Aside from the sexist treatment experienced by the “furniture,” other women in Soylent Green are treated as disposable. Homeless women are shown being shot in the streets and in a homeless shelter while simply trying to survive. They are picked up by the scooper trucks while struggling to get food and are left to fend for themselves on the streets as they hover over their children.

While overpopulation is the big problem presented in this film, the solutions are rather absurd. No one in the movie thinks to punish the men who rape women and have stripped them of their reproductive rights, as women have no control over their own fertility and bodies in this world. The society depicted in Soylent Green is an extreme patriarchy, and an incompetent one at that. No women have positions of power and none are depicted as heroes who display courage. The men have all the employment opportunities and men make all of the social, political, and economic decisions.

As the film was released in 1973, a time when more women than ever were claiming their own destinies and demanding equal treatment, Soylent Green didn’t depict women’s place in the real world. However, it makes sense in a dystopian setting where political corruption and social chaos run rampant — history shows that women and children typically get the worst treatment in such situations.

One thing that made Soylent Green such an influential movie is that is seems to depict the possibilities if people continue on at their worst. The political system would become a nightmare, police would become defenders of corporations rather than people, and advocating for the rights of women and protecting nature would become afterthoughts. These are all things that have happened in one way or another, especially when it comes to the environment. As the EPA has reported, human fossil fuel consumption in the U.S. alone is adding between 5,000 to 6,000 million metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year, which is thought to be driving temperatures upward. Global warming and climate change are real, and we’re spurring it on.

But would the country’s young women be forced into accepting rape and degradation if our society slips into mayhem in the future? The film’s female characters seem to have accepted their fates and although they may not be okay with it, they don’t do much to fight against it. Today, women’s voices are constantly silenced, even (and especially) when conversations and arguments are about our own bodies. Although definitely not ideal, a future where patriarchal ideas and control over women’s bodies and rights could be a frightening possibility, as seen in the debates around abortion in current political headlines. As for the homeless women being trampled and shot in the streets, that could definitely happen to a significant portion of the female population, especially as violence like this does happen now, particularly to Black women. If we ever see social unrest like that in Soylent Green, women’s rights and social justice would deteriorate as people struggle to survive and men fight to keep their power.

Instead of being outraged at how dreadfully Soylent Green treats women, let’s take it as a forewarning and a lesson. We should think of what we can do to secure the future of women in our society if we ever get to a point where our civil liberties and legal protections are gone. We can either be proactive now, or resign to a life of furniture-like serfdom later.

Maria Ramos is a writer interested in comic books, cycling, and horror films. Her hobbies include cooking, doodling, and finding local shops around the city. She currently lives in Chicago with her two pet turtles, Franklin and Roy. You can follow her on Twitter @MariaRamos1889.

‘The Red Card’: A Short Film that Treats Young Adults with Respect

Trigger warning: rape and sexual assault | Watching a young adult have to navigate the social stigmas of rape and sexual assault in a small high school community is what pushes this film past the danger of falling into a trope that some filmmakers use as an easy way to tell women’s stories.

Trigger warning: rape and sexual assault

When I took fiction writing as an undergrad, the male grad student teaching the course complained that all girls ever wrote about was rape, that he was tired of it. “Wasn’t there anything else to write about?” he asked as he looked at the women in the room. As he ranted, I curled the page edges of my story I loved — which was about rape. I remember the power of writing a sentence about grass between my toes, the first time my imagery sang in my own head. My story was a young writer’s story as she tried to make sense of power dynamics and gender restrictions.

When I watched Dana Brawer’s short film The Red Card, I had two responses. First, I thought to myself, ANOTHER film that relies on the trope of rape? And then I checked myself. Why on earth would I think that? As if the world doesn’t need to hear another story about rape? My second response was to remember that blustering idiot teaching my class and shutting down my voice as I started to dip my toes into an art, much as Brawer is doing now with her thesis film. So I am grateful there’s a new film about rape. Let’s keep making them and ensuring the stories of rape survivors aren’t silenced.

Sam is a semi-geeky, comic-book-reading girl on the periphery of the highly charged sexual popular clique at a private school. She speaks to the young adult for whom this film was intended, and I certainly would have connected with her as teen. Brawer writes:

“Too often, stories about high school fall into cliché. They’re campy, corny, romantic, perhaps inspiring, but few of these films touch upon the deeper and secretive pains felt by high school students. These formulaic scripts about both boys and girls chasing an unrealistic ideal of love don’t begin to show the truth about the confusion and exploration of self that signifies such an important developmental time, and I’ve grown tired of coming of age stories that can be misleading to teens and young adults.”

And she’s right. The saccharine crap fed to young adults in the theaters is demeaning to the experiences of that population, and a film that speaks to them on a mature level is greatly needed.

Sam gets ~~invited~~ lured to a party in the woods where girls are hunted. If they are caught, they belong to the group of drunk teenage boys hoping to get laid, with or without consent. The party scene in the woods is an eerie red, making me wonder if there was going to be some kind of horror element.

When Michael begins to kiss Sam, she likes it. Then when he pushes further, she doesn’t and expressly says so. I wondered if there was going to be an element of Teeth, a vagina dentata or some other kind of intercession. But there isn’t. Her knee does the work to get him off of her.

The most interesting part of the movie is the set of scenes after the assault scene. Sam has to return to school where Michael attempts to apologize — perhaps — by giving her the sweater she left in the woods. All of the other students are looking at her. She has to figure out how to live in this new world where everyone is talking about her — after living a quiet teenage life of library work and comic books. Watching a young adult have to navigate the social stigmas of rape and sexual assault in a small high school community is what pushes this film past the danger of falling into a trope that some filmmakers use as an easy way to tell women’s stories. By complicating Sam’s response, Brawer offers something new, which is what we should be asking our younger filmmakers to do.

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Colleen Lutz Clemens is a Bitch Flicks staff writer and assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.

Rape, Consent and Race in Marvel’s ‘Jessica Jones’

Marvel’s ‘Jessica Jones’ is the latest, best example of white feminist fiction: excellent on sexism, terrible on racism.

This guest post is written by Cate Young and originally appeared at her site BattyMamzelle. It is cross-posted with permission.

Trigger warning for discussion of rape and rape culture.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones is the latest, best example of white feminist fiction: excellent on sexism, terrible on racism. There are a lot of great things about this series that speak directly to the ills that women face on a daily basis. Kilgrave, the central villain, is chillingly terrifying, specifically because the only difference between him and your garden variety abuser is his total power to enact his will. The examination of male entitlement in ways both large and small (by contrasting Kilgrave and Simpson for example) are excellent and poignant. But as I watched the 13 episode first season, I was struck by how callously black people’s lives were treated on the show, rendered into convenient plot devices in service of the white female protagonist’s character development. As a black woman viewing the show, it was easy to see that the active pursuit of liberation from abuse was not a struggle that this show believes includes me (an ongoing struggle for Marvel). Ironically, the best parts of the show are its treatment with its villain, while the worst are its treatments with its female anti-heroine.

While I do have several critiques of the show, there were a number of things that I thought were handled exceptionally well. Firstly, this is a show driven by women about the fears and terrors that women must navigate in the world shrunk down to a micro-level, enabling us an intimate look at the various levels of abuse women routinely endure. The contrast between Kilgrave and Simpson is genius, as it helps demonstrate the full scale of abuse that men knowingly and unknowingly enact on the women around them. The two men are flip-sides of the same coin. While Kilgrave simply takes what he feels he is entitled to by means of his powers of enhanced persuasion, Simpson initially takes a less forceful but no less sinister approach, exemplified in his treatment of Trish after he realizes that Kilgrave has compelled him to murder her. As Stephanie Yang writes in a Bitch Magazine review:

The warning signs are there early on. Under Kilgrave’s control, Simpson assaults Trish inside her own apartment. Once Kilgrave’s control wears off, he’s wracked with guilt and comes back to apologize. The problem is that Trish doesn’t want Simpson’s apology; she wants him to just leave. Trish doesn’t want to be reminded that she was attacked in her own home, or feel trapped by her own high-end security system while her attacker lingers outside. But Simpson is insistent, sitting in her hallway and talking to her through the intercom. Simpson makes his apology about his needs and his absolution, not about Trish’s needs, safety or mental health. It’s entirely understandable, but it’s still wrong.

Simpson and Kilgrave certainly have different motivation for their destructive actions. But as Jessica points out, intent doesn’t matter. Their actions and consequences are what matter. That’s an important distinction that needs to be made at a time when courts and media alike dismiss many real-life cases of abuse because the abuser “couldn’t know” what they were doing was wrong. Violence is a symptom of a culture that indulges bad behavior as being inherently and unavoidably part of masculinity, or even a romantic expression of desire and protectiveness.

I would go a step further and name Simpson’s insistent apologies to Trish as outright abusive on their face, specifically because they prioritize his need for absolution over her need to heal. Trish is the victim in the situation, and yet Simpson manages to find a way to center himself in the story of this trauma. As with Kilgrave and Jessica, Simpson’s abuse is rooted not in a cartoonish hatred of women as we are often led to believe, but rather in prioritizing his own will and desires over Trish’s.

The show’s exploration of rape and consent is also spot-on. Through interaction with Kilgrave’s superhuman abilities, Jessica Jones is able to make plain text of the subtext of rape culture. In one episode, Jessica makes plain that what Kilgrave did to her was rape. She says the word and invokes it over and over, explaining to him that by revoking her ability to consent, he violated her in a profound way that he can never make up for, nullifying any “kind treatment” during that time. For Jessica (and many other victims of sexual abuse) she was raped not only when Kilgrave forced sexual consent by rendering her suggestible, but also by forcing her to display trust and affection for him against her will. We see this idea replicated when Hope demands that she be allowed to abort Kilgrave’s fetus, because “every moment it’s in me is like he’s raping me all over again.”

The other great thing about Jessica Jones is that it is a show ostensibly about rape, that never depicts a rape. It can be argued that the entire engine of the show is powered by the actions of a serial rapist with many, many victims in his wake, and yet the show never feels the need to indulge in crude depictions of trauma to demonstrate how horrifying rape is. Instead, we spend extensive time examining the fallout; following Jessica and Hope as they try to cope with being violated on such a profound level, grapple with their own feelings of guilt and culpability and make it to the other side with their faculties intact. One of the things that made Kilgrave so scary in the initial episodes was the way the memory of him haunted Jessica, always lingering at the edge of her thoughts, out of sight, but never out of mind. It masterfully depicted the way that rape trauma is a burden that doesn’t go away once the act itself is over. In a year that’s been replete with depictions of rape in television, it was refreshing to see a show tackle the true emotional weight of sexual assault without using the violation itself to titillate.

On the other hand, the treatment of people of colour in Jessica Jones is often anti-intersectional and openly anti-black. Vulture‘s year end “Best of Television” list cites the show as demonstrating “a racially diverse cast, heavy on women,” a construction that belies that for many people, diversity means “add black men and stir.” To me, it is borderline disrespectful to call the show racially diverse when the only significant, named woman of colour character is dead before the narrative begins and never speaks a word, while the black male characters are all subjected to incredible violence in service of the white female protagonist. This force frames feminist representation as the representation of white women and yet again, erases women of colour from our popular narratives.

With Reva’s character, this is especially glaring. Her death at Jessica’s hands is essentially the inciting incident of the story; the act that allows Jessica to free herself from Kilgrave’s control. Reva is fridged to motivate Jessica’s escape and eventual confrontation with Kilgrave. As Shaadi Devereaux writes in Model View Culture:

[…] One has to wonder what metaphor is offered, that she has to kill a Black woman in order to finally obtain that freedom. She must literally stop Reva Connors’ heart with a single blow in order to experience her moment of awakening, enabling her to walk away from a cis-heterosexual white male abuser. It brings to mind how white women liberate themselves from unpaid domestic labor by exploiting Black/Latina/Indigenous women, often heal their own sexual trauma by performing activism that harms WoC, and how the white women’s dollar still compares to that of WoC. Like Jessica’s liberation is only possible through the violence against Reva, we see sharp parallels with how liberatory white womanhood often interplays with the lives of WoC. Were the writers consciously aware of these parallels, or was it just the same script playing out in their heads?

It’s disappointing that the show, knowingly or not, replicates the same cycles of abuse that routinely play out within the feminist movement, by positioning violence against black women as the justified cost of white women’s liberation. Jessica eventually enacts the same cycle of abuse against Luke Cage, her main love interest. Shaadi notes:

After killing Reva, Jessica goes on to stalk Reva’s husband, Luke Cage, in a compulsive and boundary-violating cycle of guilt. She finally sleeps with him…without disclosing how she was implicated in Reva’s death. She both withholds and actively obstructs him from finding out information about his own life, so that she can continue to get what she needs intimately from him. In dealing with her own demons, Jessica violates an invulnerable Black man and lays him a blow that no other character in their universe has the power to. Was this another nod to a complex understanding of gender, race and power, or another trope surfacing in insidious ways?

The issue here is that the show does not give any indication as to whether this is commentary or trope, so we are forced to assume the latter, interpreting the text as presented to us. Jessica makes a habit of using the black men around her, in service to her own ends treating them as interchangeable and disposable, a glaring and problematic oversight given the current political climate, and the historical context of black men being subjected to undue violence for the protection of white women. Jessica’s pursuit of Luke despite her knowledge of her involvement in what we are led to believe in the most painful event of his life replicates the same disregard for his feelings that we saw Simpson demonstrate with Trish. To Jessica, her own need to be in Luke’s orbit because of her overwhelming guilt and self-loathing, supersede his right to be fully informed about the circumstances of his wife’s death, and as Tom and Lorenzo astutely write in their review:

[…] Like it or not, she has the capacity to be a bit hypocritical about Kilgrave’s abilities choosing to think that there’s actually a right way to take people’s control away from them.

And Jessica very literally takes Luke’s control away by not disclosing her involvement in Reva’s death. She takes away his ability to choose not to be with the person who murdered his wife. Later, his choice to forgive is later revoked by Kilgrave, as he is forced to reconcile with her under Kilgrave’s control. Again, the invulnerable black man’s pain is not respected, but rather toyed with and manipulated by the narrative to serve the needs of white characters. As Shaadi again points out, the pattern becomes more uncomfortable and glaring as the series continues:

When her neighbor shares how Black people are more vulnerable to others’ perceptions, it invokes not sympathy but an idea of how she can use it for her own ends. The result is several scenes where she pushes Black men into people to create a scene of chaos, using the opportunity to go unseen as she breaks the law. Instead of challenging oppressive systems directly, she uses them to get what she wants and to center her own survival. We see that she has some guilt about it, but sis willing to do it for her survival and the survival of other white characters.

These scenes demonstrate that as people marginalized along a spectrum, we often leverage violence against others for our own survival, sometimes with full awareness. But is awareness enough? Or as long as power remains unchallenged, will we always be lured by self-priority, the hierarchy of own safety and access? Our hero is willing to take on the mindcontrol of Kilgrave, but not those dangers most affecting the two most important men in her life – both Black. She intimately understands that no one will believe her, but capitalizes on the hierarchy of who has enough humanity to be believed – against other marginalized identities. She can finally walk away from the mind of her abuser, but the gravitational pull of racism is still too much.

As a black woman, I’m left to wonder, is Jessica worse than your garden variety racist for acknowledging systems of oppression only to exploit them? And on a real world level, why is this behaviour heralded by viewers as feminist when it actively takes advantage of people that the feminist movement is meant to protect?

My last issue is less a problem with this show specifically and more a general trope in fiction. I expect that very little can be done about this considering the source material, but truly abhor narratives in which a black person’s “power” is that they cannot feel pain or be hurt. It is a direct callback to very pervasive superhumanization bias and stereotypes that still exist and are perpetuated today. As I have written before about this characterization, it feeds into the idea that violence against black people is not traumatic or dangerous as they can withstand the pain, and that this ability positions them as protectors of white characters who often also do them harm. It explains why young black boys are coded by white people as much older than they are, or why they think black people feel less pain. With Luke, we see this reflected in Luke’s fight scenes as person after person escalates the violence against him to no effect. He is easily able to trounce several men at once. Earlier, we also see him take a circle saw to his abdomen in order to demonstrate his power to Jessica. Later still, we see doctors poke and prod him with needles and other penetrating devices ostensibly to save him, but the scenes only reinforce what we have already been told; nothing can hurt him, and so violence against him is justified.

In the end, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the show. The way Jessica Jones deals with consent resonated with me on a deep level, but it also made me question why the show didn’t identify with me as a black woman, when I so easily identified with it. Hopefully in the next season we will see a more intersectional approach to the struggles that women face that treats its black characters with the same care that it affords the white women in the cast.

Cate Young is a Trinidadian freelance writer and photographer, and author of BattyMamzelle, a feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music, and critical commentary on media representation. Cate has a BA in Photojournalism from Boston University and is currently pursuing her MA in Mass Communications so that she can more effectively examine the symbolic annihilation of women of colour in the media and deliver the critical feminist smack down. Follow her on twitter at @BattyMamzelle.