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Post-Feminist Rom-Coms and the Existing Female in ‘Trainwreck’ and ‘Legally Blonde’

In the post-feminist romantic comedy, female characters transition from being non-existent objects, into existing, as subjects, in the course of love. … In ‘Trainwreck,’ Amy begins the film as a subject, but ends as an object. Amy’s opposition becomes submission to male desires, for a man, which erases her. In ‘Legally Blonde,’ Elle begins as object, but ends the film as subject. Initially, the gaze of the camera and the characters objectify Elle’s body. But eventually, Elle demonstrates her worth and success outside of male desires and ultimately finds love.

This guest post is written by Claire White.

In cinema, female characters do not exist (as subjects), especially in the course of finding love. Looking at the origins of feminist film theory, it is easy to establish why the idea of the non-existent female in cinema is present. However, when female heroines are the main protagonist, the female oscillates between existing and being erased. I will convey this oscillation of existence through the analysis of two post-feminist romantic comedies, Trainwreck and Legally Blonde, in which the female protagonist ultimately finds love.

In the case of Trainwreck (directed by Judd Apatow, 2015), the lead character, Amy (Amy Schumer), exists as love subject at the beginning of the film. However, by the film’s end, Amy erases herself by submitting to male desires, becoming the love object, in order to ultimately find love. On the other hand, in Legally Blonde (directed by Robert Luketic, 2001), Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) does not exist at the beginning of the film, due to her characterization as a typical dumb, rich, and spoiled blonde who is portrayed as object. Nonetheless, it is how her character develops and reacts to male criticism which legitimizes her, and in the end she finds, proving that in the post-feminist romantic comedy, the female can exist and find love.

The concept of the non-existent female character in cinema has been prevalent as far back as the 1970s, as highlighted in the works of key feminist film theorists Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey. In her 1974 essay “Myths of Women in the Cinema,” Johnston contends in cinema, “woman as woman is largely absent” (Johnston 1974, 410). Johnston examines the sexist ideology of the male-dominated cinema, and discusses the woman as a myth (1974, 410). Women in cinema exist under fixed iconography, only ever as erotic myth or stereotype, with no variety, whereas men play various different roles (Johnston 1974, 408). Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” discusses the “male gaze,” which remains a prominent concept in contemporary film criticism. The Male Gaze is understood as men in the cinema being the active holders of the gaze, which is imposed onto the women as passive bearers of “the look” (Mulvey 1975, 418). The Male Gaze “projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey 1975, 418). These critiques arise out of the recognition of the cinema being male-dominated, meaning male directors were the ones portraying women as object, and inflicting their gaze.

Claire Mortimer recognizes, while the romantic comedy is thought of as a woman’s genre, “the romantic comedy heroine is almost always the construct resulting from the work of men, due to the patriarchal nature of the film industry” (Mortimer 2010, 20). Applying Johnston and Mulvey’s theory in the cinematic love story, the woman does not exist outside of a sexualized and erotic or love object, not love subject. Over twenty years after Mulvey’s essay, Jane M. Ussher discusses the Male Gaze in film and art, and describes the woman appearing “as a creature to be worshiped or an object to be denigrated; her very essence is irrevocably linked to sexuality in all its myriad forms” (Ussher 1997, 84). This is a testament to the weight of Mulvey’s argument, and demonstrates over time that women as object in cinema endures.

I assert that Trainwreck and Legally Blonde fall under the term of “post-feminist.” Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, in the introduction of their edited book Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, describe post-feminism as an ideology which “broadly encompasses a set of assumptions, widely disseminated within popular media forms, having to do with the ‘pastness’ of feminism, whether that supposed pastness is merely noted, mourned, or celebrated” (Tasker & Negra 2007, 2). Post-feminism acknowledges the work of feminism as over, and exists through the idea of gender equality having been achieved, allowing young women to feel empowered through sexual acts and consumption.

The post-feminist romantic comedy presents what Negra and Tasker describe as “a limited vision of gender equality as both achieved and yet still unsatisfying” (Tasker & Negra 2007, 2). Trainwreck and Legally Blonde both portray empowered and successful women, living in post-feminist success, yet also highlight the gaps and unsatisfactory nature of the post-feminist society. The two concerns post-feminist culture emphasizes, which are most relevant to these films, are the “educational and professional opportunities for women” and “physical and particularly sexual empowerment” (Tasker & Negra 2007, 2).

In the contemporary romantic comedy, Mortimer describes the female heroines as those who “work hard and play hard, seemingly living the post-feminist dream” (Mortimer 2010, 30). This is the site of the female character’s existence, through empowerment and agency. However, as Mortimer further explains, in the romantic comedy love story, “at a decisive point in the narrative, [the female heroine’s] values are overturned and they can no longer find happiness in their former lifestyle” (Mortimer 2010, 30). The contemporary romantic comedy heroine will make “significant sacrifices for a traditional heterosexual partnership; she embraces the romantic dream and is whisked off her feet by the right guy, having realised that love conquers all” (Mortimer 2010, 30). This is what happens to Amy in Trainwreck, which ultimately erases her as a character of existence.

Trainwreck tells the story of party girl and journalist Amy Townsend (Amy Schumer, who also wrote the screenplay). She lives in New York City, and is assigned to write an article on sports surgeon Dr. Aaron Conners (Bill Hader). The two pursue a relationship, the main tensions of the relationship coming from Aaron’s eventual unacceptance of Amy’s wild, weed-smoking, excessive drinking, and emotionally distant ways.

In an introductory voice-over, Amy describes her life with her “great job,” “sick” apartment, and “awesome” friends and family, all while the audience are shown images of Amy sleeping with various men. Amy is a successful protagonist without being tied down to one monogamous relationship; she embodies Angela McRobbie’s description of the new, young post-feminist woman who “brazenly enjoy their sexuality without fear of the sexual double standards” (McRobbie 2007, 38). Even when Amy enters her relationship with Aaron, she remains existing while finding love by sticking to her own principles, regardless of male desire. This is seen predominantly in the scene where Amy first sees the Knicks City Dancers perform.

In the scene where Amy and Aaron attend a basketball event together, editing and framing positions Amy as a female character who exists. This is due to her obvious opposition to the male desire Aaron and the male characters around her exhibit during a performance by the cheerleading group, the Knicks City Dancers. After the camera reveals the scantily-clad dancers beginning their routine in a long shot, the film cuts to a medium shot of Amy and Aaron in the crowd, watching. The camera frames both of the characters into a two shot and positions them in the center of the frame. Due to the two shot, the difference in opinion on the dancers are given emphasis. Amy looks on with a disgusted expression on her face, while Aaron cheers in support and claps. In the background, male extras dance in enjoyment to the performance, while Amy remains stationary and opposed. She gives a slight shake of the head in disapproval, and the camera cuts back to the performance.

Amy’s refusal to accept the image of woman as erotic spectacle is what validates her as a female character which exists as subject. However, in a post-feminist culture, “whilst it is clear that women are active in resisting the narrow restrictions of the feminine masquerade,” women still do not have the “freedom to decide what being a ‘woman’ means to us” (Ussher 1997, 131). While Amy’s opposition to male desire may be the effect of Schumer’s writing, Apatow, as director, still maintains control over Amy’s character. In discussing how female desire is portrayed by male directors, Geetha Ramanathan stipulates “female desire … is underwritten by a male desire which conflates the image of woman with desire itself” (Ramanathan 2006, 141). This underwriting is apparent in the final sequence of the film.

In the final scene of the film, and in an effort to truly find love, Amy erases herself by performing as a cheerleader for Aaron. Trainwreck follows Roberta Garrett’s description of the new romantic comedy tradition, in which “the [female] central protagonists modify their behaviour in accordance with the desires of the [male] other” (Garrett 2007, 101). As Amy dances with the Knicks City Dancers, she is dressed in the same revealing costume as the dancers in a short skirt and plunging neckline, which is not unusual for Amy’s character. However, by wearing a cheerleader costume and not her usual clothes, and dancing in the center of the performance, Amy has shifted in character from flaunting her sexuality for her own empowerment, to submitting to male (Aaron’s) desires. A medium shot cut to Aaron as he watches the performance positions him in the center of the frame, surrounded by empty chairs. This performance is for him, and him alone, and his obvious enjoyment is indicated by the astonished expression and smile on his face. This performance is regressive from Amy’s earlier opposition to the dancers, and represents what Garrett describes as the “patriarchal desire to return to pre-feminist conceptions of sexual difference” (Garrett 2007, 99). In the course of finding love for the post-feminist, their “pursuit of ‘personal’ happiness [is] understood in relation to men,” as their professional success and financial stability is no longer enough (Garret 2007, 94). As shown in the diegesis, Amy has changed significantly since she last spoke to Aaron, while he has not changed at all. To finally achieve love, as cemented by the kiss which ends the film, Amy has had to completely change herself to fit male desire, and, as a result, erases herself into the love object.

In Legally Blonde, the shift from real to not real in the pursuit of love for the female protagonist works in reverse. The film tells the story of Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon), a Californian Sorority President who goes to study at Harvard Law School to chase her college boyfriend, Warner Huntington III (Matthew Davis) after what she thought would be a proposal resulted in Warner dumping her for being too “blond.”

In the first half of the film, Elle is a female character who does not exist, as she embodies ditzy blonde stereotypes and, as a result, most characters expect little of her outside of being a trophy wife. Where Trainwreck‘s Amy flaunts her sexuality for personal empowerment, Elle uses it specifically to appeal to men. Indeed, Carol M. Dole describes Elle’s Harvard admissions tape as her “employing her sexuality … featuring herself in a bikini” (2008, 62). Elle is a character who is “unashamed to employ the spectacle of her adorned body to gain her ends,” which is common for post-feminists (Dole 2008, 67). Legally Blonde begins in the classical romantic comedy tradition, “[exhibiting] a structural drive towards marriage and coupledom” (Garret, 2007, 96). For the first half of the film, Elle’s main character drive is to be proposed to. However, as a romantic comedy made in the post-feminist society, when Elle’s attitudes shift, the limits of post-feminism is critiqued.

The scene where Elle is misled into believing a Harvard party is a costume party by Vivian (Selma Blair), pinpoints the moment in which the character of Elle switches from non-existent to existing. The scene begins with a close-up on Elle’s high-heeled shoes which pans slowly up her body, revealing her tight, pink bunny costume. The camera remains behind Elle as she walks up to the door of the party, allowing the emphasis to remain on her body and behind, which is situated in the center of the frame. As Elle walks into the party and realizes Vivian lied to her about the costumes, the camera remains in a medium shot. This use of camera ensures Elle’s body and tight, sexualized costume of silky corset and tights is always in frame. Elle is positioned as another ditzy, sexualized blonde, evident in her easily being manipulated and her choice of costume. However, when she talks to Warner, who suddenly pays attention to her and reaches out to grab her hips, despite having ignored her up until now within the diegesis, a shift in framing and camera angles occur. When Warner insult’s Elle’s intelligence, she steps back and the camera cuts to a close-up, which zooms slowly towards her face. This camera movement removes the objectifying gaze, and emphasizes her outraged expression as she realizes Warner and her fellow classmates will never take her seriously, despite being smart enough to get accepted into Harvard Law School, just like anyone else.

It is in this way Legally Blonde points out the limits of post-feminism. Post-feminism purports feminism’s work is done, and espouses empowerment through sexualization. However, what Legally Blonde does here is “[warn] women viewers that extremes of femininity” that is, flaunting her sexualized body, “can be socially unacceptable” and damaging (Dole 2008, 68). Elle realizes she is more than the beauty she has been conditioned to believe is the most important part about her. It is from this point onward that Elle’s character is validated and becomes a real person, and becomes subject, outside of erotic spectacle.

The final scene of Legally Blonde proves female characters can exist and find love in the cinema, as Elle does. This scene is set “two years later” after Elle wins her first big murder trial, indicated by a title card at the bottom of the screen. Elle has been announced as class speaker at her graduation from law school, having earned the love and respect from her fellow students. Eleanor Hersey pays particular attention to the role the public speech plays in contemporary romantic comedies. She argues a public speech “reminds women that they are not going to find all their fulfilment in men” (Hersey 2007, 152). Elle’s anger from Warner is channeled into her studying, and upon graduation, she has succeeded. Legally Blonde shifts post-feminist empowerment from sexuality to education (Hersey 2007, 156).

During Elle’s speech, the camera cuts to high angle shots of the ensemble characters in the audience, watching her. As the camera views Vivian, who was originally Elle’s opposition due to being Warner’s fiancée, she now smiles up at Elle and a caption along the bottom of the screen reveals Vivian “dumped” Warner and is now best friends with Elle. Similarly, when the camera cuts to the character Emmett (Luke Wilson), captions reveal he and Elle have been dating for two years, and he is going to propose to Elle that night. Elle has been able to find and attain love, not only in the form of a proposal but also in friendship. Elle’s love story has come full circle from the proposal-that-never-was with Warner, to Emmett, who loves Elle for her mind (Hersey 2007, 156). She was able to prove herself outside of stereotypes, and ultimately find love, despite her existence as subject.

In the post-feminist romantic comedy, female characters transition from being non-existent objects, into existing, as subjects, in the course of love. However, as argued, this transition can go either way. In Trainwreck, Amy begins the film as a subject, but ends as an object. Amy’s opposition becomes submission to male desires, for a man, which erases her. Legally Blonde, however, works opposite: Elle begins as object, but ends the film as subject. Initially, the gaze of the camera and the characters objectify Elle’s body. But eventually, Elle demonstrates her worth and success outside of male desires and ultimately finds love.

Bibliography:

Dole, C M 2008, ‘The Return of Pink: Legally Blonde, third-wave feminism, and having it all’, in Ferris, S, Young, M (eds.), Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies, Routledge, London and New York, pp 58-78

Garret, R 2007, ‘Romantic Comedy and Female Spectatorship’, Postmodern Chick Flicks: the return of the women’s film’, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp 92-125

Hersey, E 2007, ‘Love and Microphones: Romantic Comedy Heroines as Public Speakers’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 34, no. 4, pp 149-158

Johnston, C 1974, ‘Myths of Women in the Cinema’ as printed in Kay, K and Peary, G (eds.) 1977, Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology, E. P Dutton, New York, pp 407-411

McRobbie, A 2007, ‘Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime’ in Negra, D, Tasker, Y (eds.) Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, Duke University Press, USA, pp 27-39

Mortimer, C 2010, ‘The Heroine of the Romantic Comedy’, Romantic Comedy, Taylor and Francis, Hoboken, pp 20-44

Mulvey, L 1975, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ as printed in Kay, K and Peary, G (eds.), 1977, Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology, E. P Dutton, New York, pp 412-428

Negra, D, Tasker, Y 2007, ‘Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture’ in Negra, D, Tasker, Y (eds.), Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, Duke University Press, USA, pp 1-26

Ramanathan, G 2006, ‘Desire and Female Subjectivity’, Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films, Wallflower Press, London, pp 141-167

Ussher, J M 1997, ‘The Masculine Gaze: Framing ‘Woman’ in Art and Film,’ Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex’, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, pp 84-142

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Trainwreck‘s Unexpected Dose of the Feels

Raunchy and Unfiltered, Amy Schumer Talks about Trainwreck at the Apple Store

The Feminist’s Box Office Call of Duty

Watch Me Shine: Legally Blonde and My Path to Girl Power

Claire White is a Screen & Cultural Studies and Media & Communications graduate, bookseller, and production intern based in Melbourne, Australia. She is founder and writer of the all-female stage and screen blog Cause a Cine. You can follow her on Twitter @clairencew.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week – and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

Aziz Ansari’s Hilarious New Show Tells Stories Rarely Seen on TV by Amy Lam at Bitch Media

10 Awesome Feminist Films From the ’90s by Gisselli Rodriguez at Ms. blog

Documenting Women’s Stories: November 2015’s Crowdfunding Picks by Laura Nicholson at Women and Hollywood

For A Year, Shonda Rhimes Said ‘Yes’ To All The Things That Scared Her at NPR

Shonda Rhimes On Running 3 Hit Shows And The Limits Of Network TV at NPR

Watch 25-Minute Conversation with Gina Prince-Bythewood on ‘Love & Basketball’ & Indie Filmmaking Challenges by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

10 Female-Directed Movies on Netflix That You Need to Watch Now by Allyson Johnson at The Mary Sue

Reese Witherspoon Gives Glamour Awards Speech: Female-Driven Films “Are Not a Public Service Project” by Ashley Lee at The Hollywood Reporter

Why Catherine Hardwicke Started to Fight Back Against Hollywood Sexism by Ramin Setoodeh at Variety

The ‘Ishtar’ effect: When a film flops and its female director never works again by Rebecca Keegan at LA Times

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

The Internal Monologue of ‘Wild’: Lone Woman Walking, Lone Woman Writing

In a film, as in real life, with no language to defend herself, the lone woman is a suspect. She gets stared at and scowled at and catcalled and often told that she’s making herself vulnerable, or taking unnecessary risks. In short, our culture says she’s asking for what she gets. A woman alone is unloved, uncared for and written off. In ‘Wild,’ the film based on Strayed’s memoir of her months solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she has several uncomfortable and frankly terrifying encounters.

Most of the film follows Cheryl as she walks alone.

This post by Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.

Right off the bat, I’m going to say that this essay might be more about me and my neuroses than the actual film, Wild. So I’m sorry for that.

I read Cheryl Strayed’s book, Wild: From Lost to Found of the Pacific Crest Trail a few years ago in a time in my life when I was feeling really lost and messed up. It helped me to the degree it could, reminding me of my own writerly quirks, my tendency to sentimentality and (for good or bad) feeding my desire to go off somewhere, somehow and find myself. There were lines I loved, but Strayed’s writing didn’t really get under my skin until I read Tiny Beautiful Things, her collected advice columns written for The Rumpus as Dear Sugar. That, I devoured in one night and cried and cried.

Being a woman and being a writer is a weird and fraught thing. Add to that a certain shyness and a lone wolf tendency and I’m a difficult person to get to know, even harder to like. I see endless versions of myself represented in fiction, in memoirs, as writers tend to write about writing and writing is inherantly isolating, but rarely in films or TV. In a book, we can sink into the central figure’s head and see her as a nuanced figure in multiple relationships and entanglements but in a film, as in real life, with no language to defend herself, the lone woman is a suspect. She gets stared at and scowled at and catcalled and often told that she’s making herself vulnerable, or taking unnecessary risks.

In short, our culture says she’s asking for what she gets. A woman alone is unloved, uncared for and written off. In the graphic memoir, Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life , for example, Ulli Lust writes about her experiences backpacking alone through Italy, where she is told that a woman traveling alone is considered to be a prostitute. In Wild, the film based on Strayed’s memoir of her months solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she has several uncomfortable and frankly terrifying encounters, particularly with two scary looking hunters who assess her body and make her feel unsafe. She is also frightened hitchhiking as she, like most of us, has been raised to believe that anyone who picks you up while hitchhiking is planning to murder and rape you. I particularly identified with the conflicted guilt she feels when she has to lie to the first man who picks her up, telling him she has a strong, loving husband waiting for her just a few miles up the trail. Though he is very kind to her, this lie is necessary for her to feel safe. She shouldn’t feel guilty for taking these precautions, but she does. She shouldn’t have to take these precautions, but part of being a woman in this culture is being afraid. As well as guilty and stupid for being afraid.

I work in a restaurant where I infrequently work night shifts that end at 4:30 a.m.; I don’t mind the work, but I hate having to pay for a taxi home multiple nights. Recently I was talking to a male coworker, kind of idly complaining about this fact. He said, “Well you could always just walk home.” I was stunned at the display of his privilege, that he was so completely unaware that a young woman might feel unsafe walking home, weary, through deserted city streets in the wee hours of the morning. Encounters like this tempt me to avoid precautions, to say, nothing could actually happen to me, that I’m being kind of vain to think I’m a target, but it’s against my programming.

Sometimes she is joined by other hikers along the way but is always alone again sooner or later — Sometimes she is joined by other hikers along the way, but is always alone again sooner or later.

I have met and interviewed Jean Béliveau , a man who left his home and spent 11 years walking around the world and read about Mike Spencer Brown, the Calgarian who become the world’s most travelled man after visiting nearly every country in the world. These stories fill me with anger and jealousy. When I decided to attend journalism school, my grandmother made me promise that I would not go to one of “dangerous countries” where we were always hearing about terrible things that happened to journalists. In school, I attended a lecture given by Amanda Lindhout, a woman who was kidnapped and tortured in Somalia after going there as a war correspondent. Some of my female relatives even sat me down to watch Taken, framing it as an educational film about what might happen to a woman if she is not careful traveling.

I wasn’t planning on war correspondence, but the idea that it was something denied to me as a woman, made it seem interesting to me. Just like hearing that women were not allowed to be priests the Catholic church made the priesthood seem tantalizing.

So on one hand, I want to see what Cheryl did as a super feminist act, rejecting this idea of special circumstances and extra vulnerability for women but on the other it seems like a deliberate denial of reality. Just because nothing horrible really happened to her, it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have. It doesn’t mean that any other woman, inexperienced in hiking and all alone on the trail, who is inspired by her, could not meet a horrible fate.

Men walk around the world and women are told it is not safe for us to do. We are cowed by these warnings and unsure if by listening we are being smart or letting ourselves be subdued, just as we are uncertain what to do when we are told to dress in modest ways to avoid rape. This should not be our responsibility, and yet isn’t it smart to do all we can to keep ourselves safe, to be realistic?

With these ideas, Wild is very much a woman’s story, taking us deep into Cheryl’s head and her attempts to become a complete person. Though I enjoyed the direction by Jean-Marc Vallée (and as a Canadian, there’s always a tendency to cheer when one of us does a thing) and I’m fond of Nick Hornby, it’s a bit sad that this story of all stories was not given to a female screenwriter or director. That being said, I think the filmmakers did an adequate job addressing this conflict.

On top of this they achieved the near impossible, taking a book about a writer and a writer’s process, a young woman’s tortured internal life being perhaps the least cinematic thing in existence, and making it enjoyable to watch.

Cheryl considers her mother Bobbi, the love of her life — Cheryl considers her mother, Bobbi, the love of her life.

The majority of the film follows Cheryl’s hike through the PCT but it is frequently interrupted by flashbacks related to her relationship with her mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern), who she considered the great love of her life. We see her as a towheaded child (played by Strayed’s real life daughter) as her mother becomes her sole protector, whisking her and her brother away from their violent father, as a young woman whose embarrassment over attending college with Bobbi turns into horror over her mother’s sudden sickness and death, and finally as a self destructive grieving daughter, seeking solace in anonymous sex and heroin, both of which contribute to the destruction of her marriage. The idea to hike the PCT comes to her at what framed as her rock bottom, she sees the guidebook with the stunning vista she later visits on its cover, while waiting in line to buy a pregnancy test, sure that if it turns out to be positive, she will have to get an abortion.

In a low point in her life, Cheryl finds the PCT guide book.

In Wild, the use of flashbacks its accomplished with rare skill. They are not popped in arbitrarily, teasing the audience with tidbits of information parceled out through her story, as in many films with parallel timelines. Instead, we see these things as Cheryl is recalling them and become part of her attempts to process what has happened. There is no one single thing that set her on the path careening towards disaster, walking a thousand miles with no real plan for her life post-trail and no money to live on, but a mosaic of things that are revealed to us in and out of sequential order.

Moreover, the line between past and present is blurred by double exposure, images that will later have significance flashing briefly across the screen and the use of music. Diegetic music, music that is actually playing within the world of the film is rare, limited to flashbacks, trail stops and the Grateful Dead tribute she attends, but Wild is saturated with music, most of it, playing through Cheryl’s memory. The music that makes up the soundtrack becomes a hybrid of diegetic and non-diegetic as it is accompanied by Cheryl’s own singing, humming, and voiceover. She also engages with the music she imagines hearing, mentioning in voiceover a song she’d like to hear, that quickly becomes the soundtrack to the scene.

Witherspoon makes college age Cheryl seem real and familiar.

This effect, Cheryl’s coming of age and self discovery is dimmed by Witherspoon’s age. Though she appropriately inhabits the character and her struggles, seeing a 40-something woman go through these things is not as harrowing as seeing a 20-something woman go through them. If Witherspoon’s Cheryl is struggling with the loss of her mother and her loss of self, we’re tempted to see her as a privileged whiner, not a girl suddenly on the brink of life without any life lines. In flashbacks, Witherspoon, aided by unfortunate bangs, also plays college-aged Cheryl. Though we never believe she is actually 22, she skillfully apes the mannerisms and posture of a haughty college kid. She never fully disappears into the character, but we get what she’s trying to do, just like we get that the cast member on Saturday Night Live aren’t able to pass a children but are able to remind us of children. For me, this is aided by her wardrobe, which is full of the sorts of pea coats, boots and denim shirts I wore as a millennial college student and see as signifiers of the breed.

The exploration of privileged is also an important aspect of the film. Though the extremes of Cheryl’s working class background mentioned in the book, that the house she grew up in did not have running water for example, make it into the film, it is still clear that she is not comfortably middle class. In one scene, she and Bobbi discuss their work as waitresses and how hard Bobbi had to work to support Cheryl and her brother on her salary. During her hike, Cheryl is approached by a man writing for The Hobo Times, who declares her the rare example of a female hobo. She argues, sure she has no money, no home, no family, but she is not a hobo, she is not homeless. Hobos are other people, she is just between homes.

As Cheryl becomes an educated woman, we see her begin to look down on her mother and her lack of sophistication, her poverty and her flakiness. As a college student, the first in generations of her family, Cheryl is posed to cross class lines. Her desire to be a writer, in some ways, a frivolous career choice, often seen as only accessible for the leisure classes, recalls this. Her education, which she takes for granted, is contrasted with Bobbi’s late in life decision to attend college alongside her, taking advantage of a program that offers free classes for parents of students. For Bobbi, it is a rush of pure freedom to finally get to read and write and engage with texts in literary theory and Women’s Studies courses.

Cheryl’s break-up tattoo: another writerly trait.

To the extent that Wild can be looked at as a coming of age film, it is about Cheryl’s writing and the slow agonizing birth of her literary voice. The books she reads on the trail become important landmarks for her, such as the James Michener, an author her mother liked who is looked down on by literary types, and the Flannery O’Connor and Adrienne Rich that she sees as glimpses of how she would like to write. When she is told to burn the books she is finished reading, Cheryl recoils in horror; only truly evil people burn books. Though she ultimately begins burning what she had finished reading, Rich’s Dream of a Common Language stays with her the whole way as a talisman. In the book Wild, She keeps a tally of books read and books burnt along the way.

Her decision to get a matching tattoo with her ex-husband, Paul to keep themselves tied together when they get divorced also strikes me as such a writerly thing to do. Getting a break-up tattoo seems bizarre to most people but as writer, I didn’t question it until someone told me it sounded weird. These tattoos make a good story, a symbol of Strayed which she references in various of her writings. They put a cap on her marriage and give it a narrative arc that makes her life seem more like a story, something comfortable and easy to enjoy, easier to gain distance from, than real life.

Cheryl also practicing becoming a writer in the literary quotes she loves in the trail guestbooks, which are set at intervals along the trail, which she attributes to herself as well as the author of the quotes. In this practice she enters into a long tradition of young writers copying out influential texts like The Great Gatsby to the rhythm of the words. In this way, Wild is about Cheryl’s growth and maturation as a writer as well as a woman.

This might be why so many uninformed critiques of the film compare it to Eat, Pray, Love ; if you ignore the grit of Cheryl’s desperation, youth and poverty, her trip would seem like a laughably naive attempt to “find herself.” This might be the only way our mainstream culture knows how to categories women’s stories, ghettoizing them as as non-fiction chick-lit.

But Wild is without the scenes of romance or consumerism, or even an assurance that Cheryl will be alright at its end. We see her leave the trail (and symbolically her trials) behind as she reaches The Bridge of the Gods in Portland, and hear her in voiceover reference her future husband and children, but we never see them. The story is not carefully wrapped up in a bow and Cheryl is not perfected. Though she “grows up” to give advice as Dear Sugar and become a celebrated writer, we’re able to like her, to identify with her because she isn’t living this perfect new life of food and love and prayer with nary a nagging worry. As Wild ends with a reprise of Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa,” the film’s haunting “Que Sera Sera” theme, and a montage of photos of the young wild Strayed, her grit is the lasting image of the film.

Also on Bitch Flicks: A Wild Woman Alone by Ren Jender.

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

A ‘Wild’ Woman Alone

The reviews of Wild, the new film based on the bestselling memoir by Cheryl Strayed, make me think most men shouldn’t be allowed to review films based on women’s memoirs. Because more than one male critic has likened Cheryl Strayed and her grief-stricken, hardscrabble book about making her way up the Pacific Crest Trail to Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s account of living a life of luxury in various spots around the globe and indulging in a little cultural appropriation along the way. I’m sure these same critics would never dream of arguing that Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, and Michael Palin are basically the same person because they’re all men who also wrote about travel.

I went into the screening of Wild prepared to love it. I’m a big fan of Strayed, whose work I was first exposed to when she had an online advice column (which she started writing anonymously) “Dear Sugar,” in which she gave answers to readers’ questions that read more like selections from Best American Essays than “Dear Abby,” while still managing to offer solid guidance and empathy. The book that collected the columns, Tiny Beautiful Things, like Wild, was a bestseller. Strayed has done a lot of good with the fame and money Wild and “Sugar” have brought her, including using her name to publicize and raise funds for VIDA, the group that lobbies for more women to be published (and their books to be reviewed) in literary publications. I also wanted to be able to champion the film because of the male critics who have dismissed it; one of whom (thankfully now retired) took time in his review to comment on the real-life Strayed’s body, a supreme irony when, elsewhere Strayed has described men who disparage women’s bodies as not “worth fucking.”

Films don’t have to necessarily be very much like the books they’re based on to be good, even when those books have received a lot of critical acclaim and have sold a lot of copies. But the film version of Wild often leaves out or glosses over precisely the things that make Strayed’s story–and writing–so striking. A comparison of the film’s scenes to those that make up the original essay Strayed expanded into Wild or any of her writing in Tiny Beautiful Things (Strayed returns many times to her mother’s death and its aftermath, always detailing different, but still vivid memories), shows that Strayed’s version of events are not only more compelling on the page, but also leave us with more lasting visual images than the same or similar scenes in the film do.

The filmmakers (director Jean-Marc Vallée and screenwriter Nick Hornby) profess to be fans of Strayed’s work, but they were apparently so busy patting themselves on the back for not making this story of a woman alone into some kind of boy-meets-girl rom-com that they forgot to include everything else that makes the book distinctive. The mother’s death (Strayed tells a therapist in the film, “My mother was the love of my life”), the hook-up sex, the family violence that Strayed (played by Reese Witherspoon, who also produced the film) thinks back on as she hikes up the West Coast could have been cut and pasted from any other film. The staging for these scenes isn’t incompetent, but generic enough to leave us unmoved.

Hornby and Vallée also omit that some of Strayed’s hook-ups were with women (which makes Vallée two for two in erasing the queerness of his main characters: his previous film, Dallas Buyers Club, made its protagonist a straight homophobe, when in real-life he was an out bisexual). They cut out the sexual abuse Strayed endured as a very young child from her father’s father–as if this abuse had a minimal effect on her or her life.

Wild-LauraDern — Laura Dern plays Strayed’s mother, Bobbi

Witherspoon is significantly older than Strayed was when the events of the book take place, but physically embodies the role in a believable way. Though Laura Dern, who plays Strayed’s mother (she’s excellent–in her brief scenes we can see why her loss would affect her daughter so deeply) is less than a decade older than Witherspoon, their scenes together work, though again, Strayed in her book and other writing depicts their relationship much more compellingly.

In Wild, Witherspoon as Strayed can’t seem to summon the youthful energy that she had in movies like Freeway, when she was closer to the age she is supposed to be in Wild. This story is definitely a 20-something’s–thinking a three-month hike in the wilderness alone, thousands of miles away from home, will turn one’s life around is the sort of half-assed hypothesis a 30-something would never come up with–though in Strayed’s case, the miracle was this “cure” for her broken life worked.

Witherspoon’s Strayed also doesn’t have the recklessness or the inevitable shame that follows that recklessness the Strayed of the book had. When, in the film, a fellow hiker tells her that she seems like someone who beats herself up a lot, the observation comes as a complete surprise to the audience.

I skipped Dallas Buyers Club, in spite of its many awards, because of its straight-washing–the buyers clubs that the film depicts were a movement of queer people with AIDS, not the work of one “straight” homophobe– as well as its transphobia and general cluelessness about the issues the film is supposed to address (the makeup team when accepting their Oscar referred to “AIDS victims” when the preferred term, coined by those who have the disease more than 30 years ago, is “people with AIDS“). But in spite of my wariness, I didn’t expect Vallée to be the hack director he is here. Not just the flashback scenes but also the wilderness scenes in this film are nothing special–panoramas that should take our breath away look like faded, crappy postcards. Both Boyhood (a film I thought was otherwise vastly overrated) and Under The Skin (which I also had major qualms about) capture the beauty of nature (and in Skin the danger for a woman alone in it) on a level that Vallée seems incapable of–and those two films are in the “wild” for a relatively brief period of their runtimes.

I should probably add that Strayed herself has said that she is satisfied with the film and was allowed a lot of access to the film’s set; her daughter, Bobbi Strayed Lindstrom, even plays her as a young girl in flashback scenes. But Wild being better than most of the films in the multiplex doesn’t mean it’s nearly good enough. Maybe only when we have women writing the screenplays that adapt great books by women and women directing those films will we get the movies we deserve.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn2-GSqPyl0″]

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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

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

Global film industry perpetuates discrimination against women at UN Women

Finally! A TV Show That Handles Transgender Issues With Grace. by Leela Ginelle at Bitch Media

How to Get Away with Dynamic Black Women Leads by Corinne Gaston at Ms. blog

Jill Soloway on Transparent and How Lena Dunham’s Success Convinced Her to Stop Pretending by John Horn at Vulture

How Bring It! is changing our perception of Black girls and performance by Sesali Bowen at Feministing

Here’s Some History Behind That ‘Angry Black Woman’ Riff the NY Times Tossed Around by Blair L.M. Kelley at The Root

Viola Davis Responds to Being Called ‘Less Classically Beautiful’: ‘You Define You’ by Yesha Callahan at The Root

The Power of Doc McStuffins by Katti Gray at Women’s Media Center

Why I Left by Jana Monji at RogerEbert.com

People Magazine Deletes Offensive Tweets About Viola Davis and Scandal by Rebecca Rose at Jezebel

Powerhouse Female Producers Join Forces to Launch New Company by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

20 Facts Everyone Should Know About Gender Bias in Movies by Soraya Chemaly at The Huffington Post

Reese Witherspoon Was Inspired by Tina Fey, Wants to Help Women in Hollywood by Corinne Heller at E!

Interview: ‘Black-Ish’ Creator Kenya Barris Talks Blackness in the Age of Obama and in the Shadow of Cosby by Jai Tiggett at Shadow and Act

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

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

Anita Sarkeesian shares the most radical thing you can do to support women online by Casey Newton at The Verge

A Reminder: Net Neutrality by Ali at Autstraddle

Girls on Film: Why the Toronto International Film Festival is the best platform for female filmmakers by Monika Bartyzel at The Week

TIFF 2014 Review: Few Movies Have Given Female Characters Such Prominence & Agency as in ‘The Keeping Room’ by Zeba Blay at Shadow and Act

The Renaissance Of Reese Witherspoon by Melissa Silverstein at Forbes

Afghanistan’s Teen Girls Turn The Camera On Kabul by Jackie Leahy at Bust

BitchTapes: Grrrlhood (Songs From Films With Female Directors) by James Anthofer at Bitch Media

The Most Radical Films About Young Women’s Lives by Alison Nastasi at Flavorwire

How Should We Remember Joan Rivers? by Gabrielle Moss at Bitch Media

‘Orange is the New Black’ Adds Another Black Corrections Officer by Jamilah King at Colorlines

Barrel Chests, Brawn, and Buffoonery: Controlling Images of Masculinity in Pixar Movies by Tristan Bridges at Feminist Reflections

“Strong Women Characters” Who Made Mistakes (And Learned From Them) by Diana Biller, Chaleece N. Johnson, Vesna Cemas and Kyra Baker at io9

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

Women As Perpetrators of Violence in ‘Freeway’

In films, as in life, women aren’t supposed to be violent. Women make up the majority of violent crime victims (domestic violence, assault, rape, and murder) but they don’t usually retaliate in kind. Even in the relatively rare film where a woman seriously injures or kills a rapist, like ‘Thelma and Louise’, she does so with lots of tears and anguish–in that film from both from the woman pulling the trigger and the one whom the man attempted to rape. The unwritten rule in movies seems to be that in order to justify a woman killing or even assaulting someone, we need to see her or some other woman suffer, a lot, beforehand. Contrast that rule with the male heroes of action films who leave dozens of corpses in their wake, and not one of the dead has raped or otherwise tortured the hero beforehand–though the hero may be avenging some great wrong the dead guy (or guys) did to his wife or daughter.

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

In films, as in life, women aren’t supposed to be violent. Women make up the majority of violent crime victims (domestic violence, assault, rape, and murder) but they don’t usually retaliate in kind. Even in the relatively rare film where a woman seriously injures or kills a rapist, like Thelma and Louise, she does so with lots of tears and anguish–in that film from both from the woman pulling the trigger and the one whom the man attempted to rape. The unwritten rule in movies seems to be that in order to justify a woman killing or even assaulting someone, we need to see her or some other woman suffer, a lot, beforehand. Contrast that rule with the male heroes of action films who leave dozens of corpses in their wake, and not one of the dead has raped or otherwise tortured the hero beforehand–though the hero may be avenging some great wrong the dead guy (or guys) did to his wife or daughter.

Any experienced moviegoer will see all the signs in the beginning of Freeway pointing to the eventual degradation of its protagonist Vanessa (played by a pre-stardom Reese Witherspoon). She’s an “illiterate” (a script this uneven should be careful about throwing that word around) high school student in a midriff-baring halter top (the film is a runway of 90s fashion that would best be forgotten) who fights off her meth-head stepfather’s advances while her mother does sex work to support her own meth habit. After both her parents are arrested the movie takes off (and finds its comic horror tone) when Vanessa is left alone with her social worker, who doesn’t see any other option but foster care. While addressing the woman in the most respectful manner (“I’ll leave the keys on the TV”), Vanessa chains her to the bed and escapes.

As she sets off, Vanessa wears a red leather jacket and carries her things (including cans of beer) in a wicker basket, evoking Little Red Riding Hood (as do the tacky, sexist illustrations under the opening credits). She makes her way along the freeway to where her grandmother lives.

The family shitbox car breaks down, and Bob (a pre-24 Kiefer Sutherland), who is driving by, sees her ass bent over the open hood and stops to help. When he can’t fix the car, he offers her a ride, which she accepts. Bob, in his shiny SUV, pleated khakis, and glasses, talks like Mr. Rogers and works as a therapist. He gets Vanessa to speak at length with him about her troubled background, including her stepfather’s sexual abuse. But when (while still driving) he initiates a “powerful new” therapy in which he asks Vanessa to detail her feelings using explicit language and humiliating details she figures out that, like many men who pretend to help women, he’s a creep. When she tries to get out of the car, she finds the door handle is missing, which Bob dangles in front of her and then uses to hit her. We find out Bob is the freeway rapist and killer Vanessa has seen reports about on TV.

Bob holds a razor to her throat and tells her to take off her pants. She stalls him by telling him she will have to unlace her boots first, but kicks him in the head, rolls into the backseat and holds a loaded gun to his head while shrieking at him to drop the razor out of the window. She hits the back of his head with the gun more than once while he drives, then instructs him to pull over into a middle-of-nowhere exit. When he tries to talk her out of it, she shrieks, “You want to get shot a bunch of times?” Vanessa’s rage in this and later scenes is like an altered state from her usual manner, but she’s not hysterical. When they stop, Bob plays the role usually played by a woman in a movie, crying and pleading for his life while Vanessa decides what she should do with him. “The time for talk is over now,” she tells him, adopting his therapist demeanor. She asks if he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and when he says he has, she says in a thoughtful way, “That’s good. That’s really good.” At this point I thought she would let him go, because of the unwritten rule: we hadn’t seen her subjugated, and she could probably get away without further violence. Instead she shoots him in the neck and leaves him for dead.

She makes her way to a truck stop diner, covered in blood (again part of the Red Riding Hood motif). She’s arrested as she leaves. We see her entering the juvenile detention facility, her face scrubbed of her heavy eye-makeup, so she looks young, vulnerable, and angelic. When one “chola,” Mesquita (Alanna Ubach), and her companions start to threaten her (as, we learn later, a first step in getting Vanessa to “put out”) we think the movie will turn into Born Innocent (this film even has, as Born Innocent did, a weird young lesbian inmate, but this one is a character, not a predator, and is played by an excellent Brittany Murphy) or any of the other women-in-prison films in which the new inmate is assaulted–except Vanessa’s the one who attacks first–and keeps on punching. She yells at Mesquita all the while, beating her into unconsciousness and turning her face into a bloody mess until the staff grab Vanessa and throw her into solitary–where she uses her time alone to make a shiv.

In her preliminary hearing Vanessa sees that Bob isn’t dead, but is left with permanent disfiguring injuries. He, of course, is posing as an innocent victim of a robbery, and just as he predicted–before she shot him–the authorities believe his word, not hers. “Holy shit,” she says, her eyes opening wide as she sees him across the courtroom and we steel ourselves for her inevitable tears, anguish and suffering, but we don’t get them. Instead, Vanessa taunts him in her thick Southern accent, “Look who got hit with the ugly stick!” When he and his wife later appear on television (to lobby for juveniles like Vanessa to be tried as adults) she watches with the other girls at the facility and taunts him further, imitating his electronically aided voice and alluding to his grotesquely distorted mouth, “My dick may not function, but I haven’t lost my smile.”

Women in films and in life are sorry for so many things, all the time, even those things that aren’t their fault; a film heroine (or antiheroine) like Vanessa, so hilariously unrepentant about her acts of violence, is a triumph. Also refreshing for the audience is being in the position of cheering on a woman threatening and assaulting men (Mesquita is Vanessa’s only female victim, and they become feminist allies by the end) when so much film and television continues to offer up men’s abuse of women–sexual and otherwise–as entertainment.

The writer-director Matthew Bright doesn’t exactly have a magic touch with all the actors (Michael T. Weiss as the stepfather and Brooke Shields as Bob’s wife are particularly execrable), and some of what passes as “satire” in the script, especially before Vanessa gets on the freeway, falls as flat as the worst Saturday Night Live skits. But Witherspoon’s Vanessa shows off the expert comic timing she would later become famous for. She also gets all the best lines. Her scenes with Sutherland (who is great at projecting both creepiness and “normalcy”) when she has her gun on him are a stellar parody of the therapist-patient relationship, with the roles reversed. Her Vanessa also uses her voice to make up for her small stature when she intimidates her victims, the way Ben Kingsley’s character did in Sexy Beast. With Dan Hedaya as one of the police detectives on her case it’s easy to see Vanessa as the violent, class-conscious, NC-17 (the film was censored to finally receive an R rating) version of the main character, Cher, in Clueless (Hedaya played Cher’s father in the film, which was released one year before Freeway). Both of them are headstrong Southern California blondes whom audiences at first underestimate, but by the end come to respect. Freeway is far from a perfect film but well worth seeing, even for those who don’t count themselves as fans of Witherspoon.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eQbglH0FJ4″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Choose Your Own Sexist Adventure: Victim Blaming, Domestic Violence, and the Glorification of the Nice Guy™ in ‘Mud’

Matthew McConaughey all over the movie poster for Mud

Written by Stephanie Rogers, who spoils the entire movie.

I wanted to see Mud because it looked like an interesting film about the cult of masculinity. It is, in fact, a film about masculinity and father-son relationships, but it goes out of its way to avoid offering an actual critique of masculinity. If anything, Mud celebrates the masculine by demonizing the feminine. The women in this film carry the sole responsibility of ruining every dude character’s life, and Mud screams through a megaphone its Women Are Awful message from the first scene all the way to “Help Me, Rhonda” playing over the closing credits. And I thought Side Effects was bad.

I hated that I had to hate Mud; the young boy who plays Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his best friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) blew my mind, and Matthew McConaughey as Mud gave his best performance since Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (ha). Reese Witherspoon somehow even managed to garner sympathy for a second with her ten minutes on screen, a serious feat given the fact that the character she plays (Juniper) gets blamed by everyone for Mud’s predicament as a fugitive in hiding. Ellis’s parents, too, particularly Sarah Paulson (as Mary Lee) of recent American Horror Story: Asylum fame, gave moving performances, and I especially liked Michael Shannon’s three brief scenes as Galen—not because anything other than sexism and man-childness occur—but because he always commands the screen (see Take Shelter and Revolutionary Road). The actors, specifically the two young boys, save this film from entirely shitting all over itself.

Jacob Lofland (Neckbone) and Tye Sheridan (Ellis) in Mud

Matthew McConaughey plays Mud, the title character, and I keep reading everywhere that Mud is a retelling of Huck Finn, so okay. Two 14-year-old boys, Ellis and Neckbone (best. name. ever.), live in a poor yet quaint and lovely town on the Mississippi River. In conventional boys-as-adventurous-explorers fashion, they sneak their small boat off to an island down the river where they find an abandoned boat stuck in a tree. After climbing up there and sifting through a treasure trove of Penthouse magazines (because that’s necessary) and finding a bag of canned beans, they realize someone lives on the boat. Mud! The rest of the film shows men bonding with one another by objectifying women, beating up men to defend the honor of women, and blaming women both for the abuse inflicted upon them by men and for the problems they “cause” for the men around them. It’s a real win-win for the ladies of Mud.

Ellis goes to find Mud on the island

Brian Moylan of Hollywood.com describes the film as follows:

There is not a woman in this movie who doesn’t betray her man, cheat on him, use him, steal his home, rob him of his authenticity, make him move to a boring condo complex in the suburbs, or otherwise force him [out] of his natural and driving male essence … This thing might as well be a river fort with a giant “No Girlz Allowed” sign out front.

Hard to argue with that. Here’s why.

I guess I knew in pretty much the first scene (and in the first lines of dialogue), when Ellis told Neckbone he had a crush on a girl and Neckbone responded with, “She’s got nice titties,” that Mud might walk a fine line between either existing as a coming-of-age tale or offering up a sexist piece of shit under the guise of a coming-of-age tale. It’s a little bit of both.

The freakshow Ellis and Neckbone see when they first meet Mud

The neatly tied up plot goes like this: “Two teenage boys encounter a fugitive and form a pact to help him evade the bounty hunters on his trail and reunite him with his true love.”

Sounds romantic, right? See, I definitely teared up during its most manipulative moments, and I definitely came to care about the characters, and I definitely wanted to leave the theater feeling okay about that rather than feeling guilty for liking a movie that portrayed my gender (and even men), with such simplicity and disrespect. I psychically begged Mud to reverse all its misogyny in the end, to somehow invalidate the sexist ideology it spent nearly two hours enforcing, so that I could write about its complexity and nuance and be all, “Wow, what a smart deconstruction of Southern masculinity!” No dice.

Instead, I get to write about typical Hollywood gender-trope drivel, except it exists in a fucking semi-indie film, and, according to me—a genius—indie films ain’t supposed to rely on Hollywood gender-trope drivel anymore. Let’s begin.

Best Fucking Friends Ever

Every man in this movie tells a story about a woman who wronged him. Every. Single. One. The opening scene (juxtaposed with the “nice titties” comment and the Penthouse porn) shows Galen, Neckbone’s uncle and sole caretaker, getting reamed by his girlfriend. She bolts from his home, whips around to find the two boys sitting on the porch, and says something like, “You make sure you always treat girls like princesses!” We quickly learn that Galen tried something in bed that his girlfriend didn’t like, so when she throws a handful of gravel at him and yells, “I’m a princess!” Galen and the boys (and the audience) laugh at her “irrational” reaction and prudishness. Boys will be boys, honey.

Michael Shannon as Galen, aka Misogynist of the Year

Ellis and Neckbone then leave the house carrying Galen’s book on how to understand the opposite sex (because that’s necessary), and the film officially begins its Women Are Awful message with not even a hint of fucking subtlety or irony: welcome to prudes, princesses, titties, Mars/Venus, hysteria, virgin/whore nonsense, and porn, all within the first five minutes of screen time.

Not surprisingly, we learn that Mud finds himself stuck on an island and running from the law because of Juniper, a woman he fell in love with as a young teenager. The film pulls no punches in its insistence on blaming Juniper for Mud’s situation; she involved herself with an abusive man—a pattern for her—and since Mud lurves her so much, he obviously needed to murder the man responsible for beating her and causing her to miscarry. Juniper’s beating also destroyed her reproductive system (why not?), and that factors strongly into Mud’s decision to kill. The message here, and Mud all but says it, is that robbing a woman of her God-given responsibility to bare children is unforgivable and punishable by death.

I wish that were the only instance of blaming a woman’s reproductive capacity for another man’s misery, but, alas, Tom (a possible former CIA assassin, played creepily by Sam Shepard) can barely stand to interact with anyone ever since his wife and son died during childbirth. He raised Mud as his own son (only Ellis knows his biological father, played by Ray McKinnon), and sits on the river shooting his gun every now and then like a hater. Basically, women are misery-inducing killjoys who suck at performing their duties of procreation.

Sam Shepard waiting to … kill … something?

When women deign to momentarily stop holding hostage the broken hearts of men everywhere, they fall into the coveted category of Desired Object, going from active life ruiners to passive beauty queens.

Reese Witherspoon as Juniper with Smeared Mascara

We first meet Ellis’s girl crush (presumably the one with the nice titties) when Ellis sees an older boy put his hands all over her in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. May Pearl (the next best character name after Neckbone and Mud) pushes away the sexual harasser, but do you think that stops Ellis from charging through the parking lot with reptilian stealth and jacking a high school senior in the jaw? No way. That would mean not employing the Damsel in Distress trope, and, in turn, allowing women to wield their own authority and agency. But Mud gives no fucks about women other than how they push the male-focused plot forward. As Megan Kearns notes in her review of Iron Man 3:

The problem with the Damsel in Distress trope is that it strips women of their power and insinuates that women need men to rescue or save them. And yet again it places the focus on men, reinforcing the notion that society revolves around men, not women.

That’s Mud in a nutshell, although many reviewers—and most people in the history of everywhere—still manage to confuse misogyny with Nice Guy™ acts of “chivalry.”

The Piggly Wiggly: after-school hangout

Interestingly Upsettingly Predictably, the moment that moves Ellis away from rescuing May Pearl—after she rewards him with a kiss and tells him to call her, in typical Damsel in Distress trope fashion—relies on even more misogyny. The congregation of boys in the lot stops their commotion cold when Juniper suddenly appears—in all her blonde-haired glory and cut-off daisy dukes—and saunters into the Piggly Wiggly. The boys gape at her. The teenage girls squirm all jealous. And my brain jerks from all this Sexist Whiplash.

To rewind and parse: a boy street harasses a girl; another boy saves her from said harassment (Damsel in Distress); she publically rewards him for saving her; Juniper shows up as Desired Object; women become jealous of one another over male attention; and Ellis and Neckbone begin their inevitable lightweight stalking of Desired Object. In the span of three minutes.

Okay.

Juniper as Desired Object with Black Eye

It gets worse, though, way way worse. Later, Ellis and Neckbone find one of Mud’s bounty hunters, who was hired by the father of the man Mud murdered (hi, alliteration!), beating the crap out of Juniper in a motel room off the highway like, “Bitch, tell me where Mud’s hiding OR ELSE.” (Stalking women comes in handy sometimes, for both bounty hunters and young boys.) Naturally, the boys save our resident Damsel in Distress by bursting through the motel room door at just the right moment and pretending to sell a cooler full of fish (ha). The mob thug smacks Ellis down too, though, and that’s when the film finally turns into the Southern gothic crime thriller I’d been hoping for—but not before Juniper rewards Ellis with a kiss for saving her.

LIKE, ARE WE IN FUCKING SUPER MARIO BROTHERS?!?!?!

May Pearl smiles at her knight in shining armor

The abuse of women in Mud, which serves no purpose other than to normalize domestic violence for the viewer, is horrifying in its own right, but I ultimately found the Blame the Victim ideology the most disturbing aspect of Mud. Not only does the film voyeuristically depict the harassment and physical abuse of women at the hands of men with no critique or analysis, but it also shows the male characters verbally blaming women for the abuse inflicted upon them. Tom, who acts as a father figure to Mud, delivers a lengthy monologue to young Ellis all but calling Juniper a no-good whore for getting involved with so many abusive jerks and ruining Mud’s entire Nice Guy™ life. (You know, because Women Are Awful and consequently at fault for all the choices men make, including their choices to beat the shit out of women.)

Sarah Paulson as Mary Lee in Mud

The film’s message devolves even further to insinuate that—because Mud hasn’t been physically abusive toward Juniper and has even heroically punished the men who have been—he has both earned and deserves her love. And so, the audience can’t help but dislike Juniper when the boys catch her slutting it up at a bar with a billiards-playing bro instead of sailing off to Mexico with Nice Guy™ Mud in his fixed up former tree boat. A small part of me waited for the film to pause on Juniper’s face for a moment and toss up an UNGRATEFUL BITCH title card, just to make sure the audience got the point.

Juniper, aka UNGRATEFUL BITCH

Moylan of Hollywood.com also talks about the harmful messages Mud sends:

The takeaway to the story seems to be that the only people you can count on in this world are your male friends and your father figure. At the end of the movie, after all hell breaks loose as Ellis and Neckbone’s entanglement with Mud gets crazy and deadly, we see each male character have a touching moment with his father figure. None of them are any good—Ellis’ father can’t make money, Mud’s adopted father is a deadly “assassin,” and Neck’s uncle treats women possibly the worst of any of them—but, heck, in a man’s world it’s the man who teaches you how to man like a man that man man man. And some of the man manning that men masculine you with is hatred of women. Ellis’ father … tells him at one point, “Women are tough. They set you up for some.” Eventually, when Ellis confronts Mud about how much girls suck, Mud replies, “If you find a girl half as good as you, you’ll be all set.” See, a woman can never be as good as a man.

Ellis and Mud talk about Being a Man probably

I can already hear the arguments. Mud exposes the hyper-masculinity present in Southern culture! The boys don’t know any better! That’s just how it is down there! Maybe. But, an intelligent film might consider taking that harmful social construct to task rather than rewarding the male characters for their sexist behavior. Mud presents misogyny as endearing for fuck’s sake, and art—in my opinion—possesses a responsibility to challenge those constructs because it also possesses the power to change them. The dudes in Mud experience no consequences for their bullshit; the film, in fact, revels in their Women Are Awful blues and invites the audience to participate. I’m less interested in whether the depiction of Southern masculinity is authentic. Why not make a statement about how that authentic Southern masculinity hurts women and men?

It never comes close to saying that. But it does manage to deliver a much more cynical message.

Ellis and Neckbone, rightly looking a little terrified of Mud

Halfway through the film, Galen says to Ellis, “This river brings a lot of trash down. You gotta know what’s worth keeping and what’s worth letting go.” Sure, he’s referring to literal trash (as he points to a newly repaired chandelier he found in the river), and he’s referring to Mud, a known fugitive (because he’s seen Ellis and Neckbone hanging out in the river with Mud), but—make no mistake—he’s also referring to women. The film never stops telling us that Women Are Awful, worthless, disposable.

In the end, Ellis’s dad comes to terms with his wife leaving him; Mud finally moves past Juniper; Ellis ogles a new girl (in slow motion!) after May Pearl breaks his heart in public; even Tom learns to leave the death of his wife behind. The men’s collective triumph becomes the fact that they finally learn to let go of The Trash in their lives and hold onto what’s most important—their relationships with other men. So while Mud is a coming-of-age tale in the traditional sense, and coming-of-age tales deliver all kinds of important messages for their young protagonists to absorb, the film mostly wants Ellis to learn that sometimes you just need to fucking drop a bitch.

How sweet.


How sweet, indeed

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Slut-Shaming in the 1700s: ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ and ‘Cruel Intentions’

Period dress

This is a guest post by Jessica Freeman-Slade.

Name more than five novels in which sex, and all its consequences, takes center stage. OK, you’ve got The Story of O, Justine (the infamous novel written by the Marquis de Sade), Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and of course, the juggernaut 50 Shades of Gray trilogy… but no matter what your previous reading list, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses is in a class by itself when it comes to stories about sex. Better known by its 1985 English stage adaptation by Christopher Hampton, Laclos’s original tale is written in epistolary form, consisting of a series of letters sent between the Marquise de Merteuil and her friend the Vicomte de Valmont, as they scheme to seduce and ruin the virtuous Madame de Tourvel and the virginal schoolgirl Cécile de Volanges. Merteuil and Valmont’s wicked plots turn on the consequences of unbridled lust in a society where reputations are valued above all else—and, as Merteuil uses Valmont’s sexual escapades to her own advantage, it can be read as a Rococo master class on the consequences of gossip and “slut-shaming.”

Valmont and Merteuil

Sebastian and Kathryn

Dangerous Liaisons has had a number of film iterations (including a surprisingly steamy 2012 Chinese adaptation), but the most famous of these are as different and yet equally decadent as petit fours and dry martinis. In the Stephen Frears 1988 production of Dangerous Liaisons, Merteuil (Glenn Close) and Valmont (John Malkovich) strut in gilded costumes and powdered faces, their elegant trappings masking their cruel plots to destroy Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Cécile (a barely legal Uma Thurman). In the second, the 1999 Roger Kumble adaptation, Cruel Intentions, drops us into modern-day New York, in which the wealthy stepsiblings Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Phillippe) plot to destroy the naïve Cecile (Selma Blair) and the proud Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon). The stakes in each of these dramas are not only sexual, but obsessed with honor, power, and who gets to claim it. And in both adaptations, the performances by Close and Gellar show that it’s Merteuil’s grudges (and not Valmont’s impulses) that lay the groundwork for the sexual manipulation. It’s less than ideal to have women as such villains, but Laclos left us one of the strongest and most complex female characters in all of literature—for better or for worse—and these ladies sink their teeth into all of Merteuil’s depravity.

The opening sequence, as Merteuil and Valmont dress for the day, is enough to draw anyone into this period piece, but it also gives you an appreciation of how much artifice one might have carried about as a member of the aristocracy. The presentation of the aristocracy’s trappings serve as a visual parallel to Merteuil’s hypocrisy: because society considers her intelligent and full of social graces, she is able to advise (and manipulate) the just-out-of-the-convent Cécile, who is promised in marriage to Merteuil’s former lover (a man obsessed with Cécile’s purity).

Cecile and Merteuil

Merteuil entices Valmont, widely known for his many love affairs with women across Paris, to seduce Cécile because she knows just how much harm such a scandal will do to Cécile’s future. She delivers a great treatise on how she performs in society, how she practices deception and conceals her true desires, and it serves not just as a frightening defense of her own actions, but as a monologue on the required falsehoods that women must perform to be considered “good.”

The other women in the original tale, as Merteuil would explain it, have far less control over their own desires than she does—and so they must suffer for it. Cécile is, by any definition, raped by Valmont, yet she is persuaded that his seduction is all in the service of making her a better lover to her future husband and to her secret crush, her music teacher Danceny (a woefully outclassed Keanu Reeves.)

Cecile writes on Valmont

Meanwhile Tourvel rebuffs Valmont’s advances on her, pleading that instead of tempting her desires (a wickedness that supercedes any innate goodness he might pretend to have), he leave her alone to mourn their unrequited romance in peace.

Valmont and Tourvel

As Valmont, Malkovich does a wonderful job of preening and crafting his seductions to fit each victim, wooing Cécile with tutelage and Tourvel with overtures of passionate, virtuous love. He only persuades her to sleep with him once he declares that, if he cannot have her, he must kill himself instead. As Tourvel, Pfeiffer swoons prettily, and cries even better when Valmont abandons her. By the time he ultimately seduces her, Valmont has fallen utterly in love with Tourvel—what seems a promise to a happier ending. And yet, Merteuil had promised Valmont that he would get the chance to sleep with her after seducing Tourvel. Furious with his transferred affections, Merteuil whips Valmont into a frenzy by denying him his victory sex—and the allure of remaining forever entangled with him, in negotiations rather than in the sheets, leaves her with the upper hand. The downfall, it seems, is being ruled by your desires once more—and thus, Valmont abandons Tourvel with only one line of explanation: “It’s beyond my control.” This is the ultimate threat to his manhood, the ultimate assertion that he is, in fact, more than just sexual impulses.

In the modern-day adaptation, meanwhile, the wicked ways of the Merteuil-Valmont household get to be a little more openly declared, and the sexual escapades a little more explicit—more petty, perhaps, but just as fun to watch.

Sebastian and Kathryn

Kathryn and Sebastian now live in a townhouse and attend an elite boarding school—Kathryn’s desire to ruin Cecile comes when Cecile begins dating her former boyfriend, and Sebastian’s aims on Annette (aka the Tourvel figure) come when he spots her manifesto, “Why I Plan to Wait” in Seventeen. “Can you imagine, diddling the new headmaster’s daughter?… She’ll be my greatest victory,” Sebastian crows, and Kathryn ups the ante by turning it into a bet: if he fails to seduce Annette, Kathryn gets his vintage car, but if he succeeds, she’ll give him sex, a.k.a. “something you’ve been obsessing about ever since our parents got married.” In the modern version, Kathryn openly flirts with Sebastian, laying out the sexual terms as explicitly as she needs to entice him. But her explanation of her reputation is far less self-satisfied than Close’s period piece—Kathryn is openly resentful, in part because she’s entitled to her full self-expression and sexual knowledge. The modernity allows a more open Merteuil figure, but it makes it harder to feel sympathy and admiration for her. (Also tough to admire, the crucifix she fondles while espousing her Christian faith, later opening to serve as a coke spoon.)

Setting the film in modern dress changes the strict sexual mores, and thus makes their transgressions far less shocking or threatening than the period adaptation. Throughout the film, Kathryn makes several advances on Sebastian as she quizzes him about the progress of his various seductions.

Cecile

In addition, the shifting of all the characters to the same age group makes Cecile’s seduction a little less about the violation of a child, and more about sexual sophistication. Thus Cecile’s purity becomes more about her naivety, and Blair plays her for laughs, both in Kathryn’s kissing tutorial in the park and during Sebastian’s manipulations. It’s coerced, certainly, but it doesn’t have quite the same evil punch as that of the period film.

But, on the upside, the modern setting makes Witherspoon’s Annette more nuanced than that of Pfeiffer’s Tourvel. Sebastian’s vows of love to her sound false from the very start, and she’s much more self-aware and skeptical than he initially suspects. “What have you heard?” he asks. “That you promise girls the world in order to get them in bed with you,” she responds calmly. Instead of following Laclos’s template, Sebastian and Annette’s romance only develops once she believes that he is letting down his guard with her, that she sees the real him instead of his playboy alter-ego. He makes goofy faces with her, he laughs with her, and when they ultimately do have sex, it is shot in tight, tender close-up, an extremely different framing than that of his scenes with Kathryn. As a result of the sincerity of their romance, it becomes even more devastating when Sebastian flounders in trying to break up with Annette. “I’m completely fucked up,” he says. “I agree, you’re completely fucked up!” she yells back, slapping him and sending him out of the room.

But Laclos’s novel does not leave Merteuil consequence-free, and both films find a way to ultimately tie her fate back to that asset she prizes most highly: her reputation. In Frears’ adaptation, a guilt-ridden Valmont, despondent over having to abandon his beloved, dying Tourvel, allows himself to be killed in a duel with Danceny, but not before handing over his many letters of correspondence with Merteuil documenting all her plots and wicked devices. Merteuil is rendered senseless by grief at the loss of Valmont, and then finds her the outcast of Parisian society, booed at the opera after the revelation of her role in countless scandals. And so ultimately the scandal falls back on her—her reputation destroyed not by a few careless words, but by her own documented hand. Close’s exquisite performance ends as Merteuil wipes the powder and rouge from her face, showing her true colors at last.

The modern adaptation has a little more fun as well—and it may be ripe for an even more modern update, one that would take advantage of social media to ruin Merteuil’s reputation once and for all. Sebastian is hit by a car and dies, avowing his love, in Annette’s forgiving arms. At his memorial service, a grieving Kathryn finds the stairs of the school chapel plastered with Xeroxed pages from Sebastian’s diary, documenting all her lies and misdeeds. In a surprising restoral of agency, it is Annette who recovered the diary, and gets to drive off into the sunset unscathed (in Sebastian’s gorgeous car, no less.)

It seems, for both interpretations, that the cruelest punishment for a villain is to have a public face on their private crimes. As Kathryn and Merteuil no doubt discover, the scorn of society is enough to make any private victories feel insignificant, and in the end, the final reputation ruined is that of the first person to spread the wicked rumor. Les Liaisons Dangereuses was the source of the phrase, “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” and even reading from a modern perspective, you can relish this dish only as much as you can enjoy seeing women tear each other down over sexual escapades. A huge step forward for what female characters get to do in fiction, perhaps, but a mixed message in terms of women’s sexual expression.

———-

Jessica Freeman-Slade is a cookbook editor at Random House, and has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She lives in Morningside Heights, NY.

Women in Politics Week: ‘Election’: Female Power and the Failure of Desperate Masculinity

“I just think people are made uncomfortable by ambitious women.”

– Tom Perrotta, author of Election, the book that inspired the film

The 1999 film Election features Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), a power-hungry young woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants and Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), an emasculated male high school teacher who loses everything trying to keep Flick out of power.

She wins. He loses. But he doesn’t realize it.

Election–which was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe and won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film–is a film that has been immortalized for its depiction of Tracy Flick, a high school junior who, after building a flourishing “career” in academics and extra-curricular activities, is running for Student Government President of George Washington Carver High School.

Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) running for Student Government President

At the beginning of the film, Flick and McAllister are narrating their own stories with pride. She is well-aware of her accomplishments, and he believes his position as a history and civics teacher is fulfilling and that he serves as an inspiration to his students. He thinks his is a position of power.

Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), Teacher of the Year

As their stories intertwine, McAllister pauses to let this audience in on some information about Flick.

“Her pussy gets so wet you can’t believe it.” McAllister flashes back to his best friend, Dave Novotny, sharing this detail about Flick. Novotny, who was a math teacher at the high school, had been having an affair with Flick (who at the time was a sophomore).

Almost immediately, Flick begins telling her side of the story. “Our relationship was built on mutual respect and admiration,” she says in her confident, chipper and stern voice. He talked to her like she was an adult, and she reciprocated. She points out that she didn’t have a father growing up, and “you might assume I was psychologically looking for a father figure, but I wasn’t.” She goes on to say that he was strong and made her feel protected, which clearly shows that perhaps her self-analysis wasn’t fully realized.

That said, she is the one who ends the relationship. Novotny sends her a homemade love-letter booklet, and she and her mother turn it in to the principal. (He’d “gotten mushy” and acted like a baby, she later tells McAllister.)

“We’re in love,” pleads Novotny, sobbing to the principal. He is fired, his wife kicks him out and he’s forced to move home and live with his parents. Typically, this type of story line ends with the young woman feeling victimized and being ostracized at school; however, Flick’s involvement with him is kept secret, and she never acts like a victim.

These plots sound problematic, obviously, but it’s important to note that in this dark comedy, none of the characters is wholly likable or sympathetic.

These themes of threatened masculinity that permeate the film are not, as it might seem, criticisms of feminism. Instead, the emasculation of McAllister (and Novotny) is portrayed as their own failing, which makes them incapable of fully functioning and succeeding. Their desperate plight for masculinity and power–at work and in the bedroom–ultimately undoes them.

Flick knows the answers, although McAllister doesn’t want to hear them

Flick and McAllister’s stories continue, as the tension between their narratives grows. “Now that I have more life experience,” Flick says, “the more I feel sorry for McAllister.” He’s in the “same little room, in the same stupid clothes… and year after year after his students go to big colleges, big cities… make loads of money. He’s got to be jealous.”

“Like my mom says,” adds Flick, “the weak are always trying to sabotage the strong.”

She then mentions that she’s an only child of a single mother, and that her mom is really devoted to her and wants her to do all the things she couldn’t. She constantly writes to famous women to ask how they got where they are, and for advice for her daughter.

(While this sounds perfectly lovely and like an exception to the constant portrayal of strong women/female protagonists with absent mothers, Flick’s mother is imperfect, and is obviously pushing her daughter into the life she wishes she had had.)

McAllister becomes more and more obsessed with keeping Flick away from the presidency (he’s the advisor who she’d most closely work with) as he sees her thirst and push for the leadership position. While one may be tempted to think his obsession is tied to some kind of revenge for Novotny’s life being ruined, that doesn’t appear to be the case. McAllister asserts that Novotny was in the wrong. Instead, McAllister’s disdain for Flick is rooted in something deeper, something irrational.

Her power–sexual, academic and political–is threatening to him.

He begins a downward spiral of trying to take her down. He recruits a popular young man to run against Flick. In his personal life, he and his wife are having trouble conceiving (most reviews note that he is unable to impregnate his wife, which is an interesting conclusion, considering his infertility is never deemed the culprit, but this assumption is part of the emasculation), and he becomes enamored with Novotny’s ex wife, Linda (McAllister only seems to be stereotypically masculine in her home–mowing the lawn, doing household projects, fixing the drain, etc.). They have sex once, and instead of meeting him at a hotel after work like they plan, she tells Diane McAllister (her friend and his wife) that they’d had sex. He’s kicked out of the house, and continues down the spiral, waiting all night in his car at Linda’s house, where he urinates in the yard (sadly attempting to mark his territory?) the next morning. His right eye, which had been stung by a bee, is swollen shut and he’s an absolute mess.

McAllister falls apart

His desperate grabs for power–sexually, politically and masculinity–are failures.

McAllister’s small beat-up car, his failed sexual exploits (even watching porn he is inactive and submissive), his dual attempts at control of and utter intimidation by Flick and his desire for affirmation are all indicative of some kind of masculine failure. His discomfort with female power sends his desperate need for control and some kind of stereotypical masculinity that is out of his reach and outdated.

Other symbols that point to McAllister’s failure are his swollen eye (which can be symbolic of the antichrist in Christian and Islamic scripture), his choice of Pepsi (after Flick points out that Coca-Cola is always the no. 1 cola brand), his continued association with garbage from the beginning of the film to the end and his tiny basement apartment where he ends up after trying–and failing–to rig the election in Paul’s favor.

McAllister doesn’t see himself as a failure, though. His upbeat narration at the end of the film (after he has been fired from his teaching job and goes to New York City, where he’s working as a docent at the American Museum of Natural History) shows that he didn’t quite accept or understand the gravity of his actions.

As the film cuts to his narration at the end, the image is a neanderthal penis, which pans out to a display at the museum where he works. When he’s introducing his new girlfriend, they are looking at a mirror image of two nude neanderthal figures. This image is indicative of his primal urges of masculinity that have served him so poorly and are so out of date.

Flick wins at the end. While the audience sees her disappointment at Georgetown University (she is still lonely, and has a hard time finding others like her), she’s successful. McAllister sees her in Washington D.C. getting in a limo with a Nebraska senator. While he seems to assume she’s sleeping her way to the top (even though her affair with Novotny didn’t help or hurt her), she appears to be in a professional capacity and secure in her career. She looks fulfilled.

So while we don’t have warm feelings about Flick (her tirades and poster-ripping aren’t character strengths, but they’re realistic), her dedicated hard work–lonely and alienating as it might be–takes her where she wants to be. Her mother and the years of letters of advice from powerful women helped pave her way.

When McAllister sees her, he thinks about her “getting up early to pursue her stupid dreams–I feel sorry for her.” His anger rises, and he thinks, “Who the fuck does she think she is?” before throwing his fast food drink at the limo.

She’s Tracy Flick, that’s who the fuck she thinks she is. And she won.

More than ten years after the film was released, “Tracy Flick” is still a pejorative name for “overly” ambitious women and young women in college classrooms are indicating they don’t want to be involved in politics because they don’t want to appear “catty.”

In a 2009 interview with Tom Perrotta (the author of Election, which was the basis for the screenplay) about the “evolution” of Tracy Flick, he says:

“What I was responding to with Tracy was new: a generation of hard-charging women, the daughters of first-generation feminists and unapologetic achievers. This was the late 80s and early 90s, and they were different than the girls I had grown up with, more willing to compete. The only other cultural reference points for women like that then were movie stars and entertainers. People like Madonna. Who was it going to be in politics? Golda? Indira? Thatcher? By default, there are few female political touchstones.”

The 2012 election ushered in a record number of women in both the Senate and House of Representatives. There is movement, but the McAllister-like “traditional America” (as pundits mourning the loss of white male America call it) is holding strong. The House GOP recently released its list of committee chairs, all of whom are white men.

This desperate masculinity can still keep pushing, and like McAllister, sadly try to mark its territory, but the Tracy Flicks will win.

The very last scene of the film is McAllister giving a museum tour to a group of small schoolchildren. He asks a question, and the only hand raised is a young girl–she shoots her arm up in the air with pride and confidence, and he’s caught off guard, wanting anyone else to answer (just like he does with Flick at the beginning of the film). He may try to keep denying strong females and trying to reduce their power, but as Flick proved, that just won’t work.

Face of determination

Meanwhile, Flick “hardly ever thought about Mr. McAllister… it’s almost like he never existed in the first place.”

While Tracy Flick perhaps isn’t the best role model for young women (see: Leslie Knope), she is not the villain. McAllister, instead, in his desperate grab for control over these powerful young women, is. He just can’t see that through his privilege.

—

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

Women in Politics Week: A Lady Lonely at the Top: High School Politics Take an Ugly Turn in ‘Election’

Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) in Election

Guest post written by Carleen Tibbets. Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Election, the 1999 film directed by Alexander Payne and based on the novel by Tom Perotta, chronicles type A personality Tracy Flick’s (Reese Witherspoon) quest to become student body president and the unraveling of her social sciences teacher, Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick) as he attempts to thwart her campaign. Released on the heels of the Clinton-Lewinsky sex-scandal, Election explores power, corruption, and moral gray area in the “wholesome” Midwest — seemingly representative of all that is safe, suburban, and pure.

Although he admits to taking pride in guiding his students and receiving “teacher of the year” honors several times over, McAllister has relatively little control over his personal life. He’s unable to impregnate his wife, Diane (Molly Hagan), commits adultery, and is ultimately done in by a student wound just as tight as her blonde curls. Tracy Flick makes her first appearance preparing for her campaign dressed in preppy sweater vest and loafers, yet despite the twinkle in her blue eyes, we soon learn that she’s much more calculating than she lets on. In her narration over the various clips of her high school curriculum vitae thus far, Tracy admits, “I volunteered for every committee as long as I could lead it.” We gain some insight into Tracy’s unwavering work ethic: she was raised by a single mother who taught her that being a woman meant that she would have to work twice as hard to actualize her dreams.

In McAllister’s civics class, Tracy obnoxiously and confidently thrusts her hand in the air when he asks the class to differentiate between morals and ethics, and McAllister is put off by her self-assuredness. The root of McAllister’s disdain for Tracy stems from the fact that she had an affair with his friend and colleague, Mr. Novotny (Mark Harelik). Novotny begins genuinely mentoring Flick, admiring her as a human being, and telling her, “Sometimes people like you have to pay a price or their greatness, and that price is loneliness.” However, this soon led to Novotny (seemingly) taking advantage of Tracy, as he puts “Three Times a Lady” on his stereo and leads her into the bedroom he shares with his wife, Linda (Delaney Driscoll). He confides in McAllister that their relationship has turned sexual. This is quickly discovered by her mother and the school administration, leading to Novotny’s forced resignation, divorce from Linda, and relocation to a different state. Sure, Tracy can accurately define and differentiate between ethics and morals, but she fails to exemplify them.

Determined to throw a monkey wrench into Tracy’s presidential win, which he refers to as a possible dictatorship, McAllister convinces naïve quarterback hero with a heart of gold Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to oppose Tracy in the race. Despite Paul’s protestation to taking any votes away from Tracy, McAllister assures Paul of his being a “natural born leader.” Tracy accosts McAllister at his car after school with her list of signatures required to run, he drives off and throws it in a dumpster, certain Paul stands a fighting chance. Tracy’s chipper personality quickly falls away when she notices that Paul is now her opponent and she demands to know who put Paul up to challenging her.

We are then introduced to Tammy Metzler (Jessica Campbell), Paul’s adopted lesbian sister, a sophomore who decides to join the race for student body president after her girlfriend throws her over for Paul. In the assembly where each candidate pitches their platform to their peers, Tracy gives anecdotal accounts, Paul struggles to read his promises off an index card in a labored monotone, and Tammy gives an anarchy-fueled speech, capturing the “who cares?” mentality of most high schoolers, which results in the overwhelming support of the teen constituents.

Tammy’s unorthodox speech doesn’t bode well with the principal, who refers to her as a “little bitch” he wants out of the election. Fed up with Paul and Tammy detracting from the election she feels she deserves to win, Tracy has a meltdown and destroys her running mates’ posters. McAllister rightly suspects Tracy’s culpability, bringing up her near-destruction of Novotny in his interrogation. Tracy retorts with underhanded comments about McAllister’s infertility and Novotny getting mushy and attached to her. Yet, Tammy confesses to McAllister that she defaced the posters in hopes of getting sent to an all-girls school, is expelled, and taken off the ballot.

The night before the big vote, Paul prays for others, including his sister, while Tracy insists that she win, and truly believes she will. She even hand-frosts dozens of cupcakes with “Pick Flick” to hand her constituents. When it comes time to vote, Paul selflessly votes for Tracy, and she votes for herself. Meanwhile, McAllister’s personal life is completely in shambles, having spent the night in his car outside the home of his Novotny’s ex-wife and being thrown out by his own wife upon her learning of their affair. He must count the votes after two members of student government complete their tally, but mid-count he notices Tracy snooping around the classroom, jumping around giddily when one of the vote-counters gestures to her that she is the victor. Tracy wins by a single vote (presumably the vote she cast for herself), yet disgusted by her glee, McAllister wonders just how many people Tracy will step on in her ascent to the top. But why shouldn’t she rejoice in her victory? Is she not deserving?

He decides she must be stopped and throws two of her votes in the trash, declaring Paul the next president. That night, surrounded by all her trophies, medals, and inspirational posters, Tracy sobs uncontrollably. Her mother’s attempt to comfort her only comes out as criticism when she suggests Tracy might have won had she had better posters and slips her an anti-anxiety pill. Tracy’s misery is short-lived, however, when her missing votes are discovered. McAllister is called on the carpet for his attempt to take Tracy down, and resigns.

Tracy gets her wish to be president, topping her extensive list of extracurriculars, and earns a scholarship to Georgetown, where she expects to be surrounded with diligent worker bees such as herself. However, her expectations of finding those on her wavelength come crashing down when she realizes most students coast through on their parents’ dollar and with minimal effort.

McAllister encounters Tracy sometime later as she chats with a Republican representative and gets into his limo.

The film closes with McAllister, now a museum tour guide, being confronted with a miniature Flick-in-the-making on a school field trip shooting her arm up to answer a trivia question he poses to the group.

Election depicts several types of women from overachiever alpha-female Tracy to slacker Tammy to long-suffering, passive Diane and desperate Linda. Yet, what does it really tell us about how a woman should conduct herself? Are men afraid of driven women? Is society? Does being an ambitious woman who knows what she wants mean that she will indeed be lonely at the top?

Election also brings up the fact that in American society, qualified and talented women are perceived as a threat to the male status quo. Thirteen years after this film’s release, although Secretary Hillary Clinton’s displayed poise during the Lewinsky scandal and her own strides and accomplishments apart from Bill were quite remarkable, she did not earn the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. Instead, she is ridiculed for her haircut and wardrobe choices. Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin’s beauty pageant days and “hockey mom” persona worked against her. Despite First Lady Michelle Obama’s humanitarian efforts, her every outfit is scrutinized by the media and her defined forearms are just as relevant as her Ivy-League credentials. Does it have to be one or the other? Must women be “frumpy” or asexual to be taken seriously in the political arena? Are attractive women less-qualified leaders? Why do we care whether the First Lady wears Manolo Blahniks or J. Crew pumps?

The saying “Behind a great man is an even greater woman” is thrown around regarding women in the political spotlight, but why are they lauded as pillars for their male counterparts to lean on instead of leaders in their own right? Can a woman wield clout regardless of with whom she’s linked romantically? I suppose what it all boils down to is what and whom a woman is willing to sacrifice and what labels she can live with in order to carve out a place for herself in a world still uncertain how to handle her success.

——

Carleen Tibbetts is a writer living in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in various publications including Word Riot, , and other journals.