Representations of Female Sexuality

‘It Follows’: More Dread Than Bloody Red

It’s not the best horror movie I’ve seen, but it’s a decent flick that can be added to the pantheon of solid fares to check out this year. Many of my horror comrades hated it or were disappointed, but I encourage everyone to see it just for the masterful use of dread instead of the usual one-note slasher or gore-riddled bloodfests that are passed off as great horror cinema. The genre I love is more concerned with spectacle rather than genuine fear.

Written by Lisa Bolekaja.

It Follows answered the question I was curious to know in the first seven minutes.

“What happens to you after it follows and catches you?” Short answer: you get jacked up. I’ve said this on Twitter and I will say it again here. I sincerely apologize to my fellow viewing audience for laughing with great joy after the first victim is killed. I do have home training. But I was giddy.

We are introduced to an unknown young woman, visibly anxious as she runs out of her family home wearing flimsy underwear and heels in the middle of the night. It’s like we caught her in a state of undress after a long day at work, or maybe after a date, but we never know because there is a great 360-degree camera pan that sets the tone for the rest of the film. The writer/director David Robert Mitchell is forcing the audience to not trust anything or anyone that moves within eyesight. The 360 camera turns are used to great effect numerous times in this film which creates a relentless creeping dread. We never see what kills our first victim, but we do view the aftermath, and it ain’t pretty. While the audience I was with had a collective “Oh shit” moment after gazing upon the unnaturally twisted remains, I laughed with giddiness because I was now fully engaged. The discordant sound design and music score added to the atmosphere of this slow deliberate terror. Imagine if Portishead had made a horror soundtrack without any singing. It caught my attention, and held it for the first half of the film.

Disclosure: I am a horror connoisseur.

This is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because I’ve enjoyed horror from across the globe and from every era. (I even enjoy bad horror. Stinkers can be a lot of fun to hate watch. I relish it.) It’s also a terrible curse because as hardcore as I am, it’s hard to impress me. I radiate so much joy whenever a new horror film comes out, but then I am quickly disappointed when it doesn’t live up to the hype. Granted, It Follows has a lot of hype surrounding it (“The scariest movie to come out in 10 years!” is a recent example), but most of the overblown hyperbole is because horror, in particular American Horror, is in a sad state of affairs. Overused tropes, clichéd jump-scares, little to no character development, plus sequel after goddamned sequel has stifled the genre. (Don’t get me started on re-makes.) So anything that looks a wee bit fresh and tries to be serious is pounced on as the next great thing. And alas, many filmmakers don’t respect horror. There, I said it. A lack of respect has given rise to a collection of recent horror films that are mediocre at best and straight trash at its worst.

It Follows in those first seven minutes made me believe there is some hope for us jaded Horror Hounds. It’s not the best horror movie I’ve seen, but it’s a decent flick that can be added to the pantheon of solid fares to check out this year. Many of my horror comrades hated it or were disappointed, but I encourage everyone to see it just for the masterful use of dread instead of the usual one-note slasher or gore-riddled bloodfests that are passed off as great horror cinema. The genre I love is more concerned with spectacle rather than genuine fear. (Remember all the Saw sequels that just gave us diminishing returns each time out? Yawn.)

What makes It Follows click on all cylinders in the first half is the empathy we have for our protagonist Jay (Maika Monroe). She reminded me of the classic old school white female heroines in the mold of Sissy Spacek or Jamie Lee Curtis. The set designs, the cars, and even the hairstyles have a retro 70s feel. The color scheme looked slightly muted, a little drab, and this added a dark texture to the film that takes place in Detroit. The mentions of 8 Mile and the demarcation line separating white Detroit and Black Detroit are quite evident. One of the characters talked of her parents warning her about crossing over that implicit physical/racial line due to safety concerns. Just as there is a transgression of the division between the supernatural seeping into the natural world, there is a definite class transgression between rich and poor (and the inferred racial one between Black and white).

What draws us to Jay is her longing to be loved and to have a boyfriend. She’s pretty much a dreamy-eyed plain Jane, but she spruces up quite nicely when she goes on a date with Hugh who uses the alias Jeff (Jake Weary), and this is where her troubles begin. What Jay doesn’t know is that Hugh is slumming with her. Pretending to be interested in Jay for companionship, Hugh has transgressed class lines. He uses the lower class Jay to save himself from the unknown entity that stalks his upper class suburban landscape.

After some hot sweaty sex in the backseat of Hugh/Jeff’s car (which she initiated), Jay eventually finds herself tied to a wheelchair still in her underwear from the afterglow of lovemaking. Hugh/Jeff quickly runs down what her fate will now be. Apparently fucking the wrong person in this world will give you something worse than an STD or AIDS. You now get the unwanted attentions of an “It” that will literally follow you around. And this It can be anyone you know or don’t know. It takes on the embodiment of anyone in order to get close to its intended next victim. Hugh/Jeff tells Jay that the only way to get rid of It is to have sex with someone else, passing on the creeping dread to them. This all smells of the influence of The Ringu Virus films and all the superior J-Horror/K-Horror that the U.S. has ripped off and repackaged. However, I respect David Robert Mitchell’s attempt to spin an oldie but a goodie into something new. The catch is, if you pass It onto someone else, and they get killed before they have sex with a new partner–Surprise!—It will come back after you. Ain’t that a bitch? This menace is truly relentless and inescapable.

Our emotionally bamboozled protagonist enlists the help of her younger sister and a rag tag bunch of friends to survive. This is what made the film work for me overall. Her friends are just regular teens, no snarky, overly beautiful, or unrealistic characterizations. Just awkward young people yearning to help her. They know something has gone horribly wrong in Jay’s life. They presumed a date rape, but when Jay tells them her new reality, they don’t shine her on or call her crazy, they support her even when they don’t fully believe in the supernatural weirdness. All of this works well, especially when Jay is the only one who can see It –random strangers of all ages, with pale flaccid faces (sometimes naked) , making slow and eerie movements towards her no matter where she goes. Much like many Asian horror flicks, the beauty of It Follows is that nothing is explained and we don’t waste time trying to figure out the mystery of how it all started. Jay either has to have sex knowing she’s dooming another life or forever be haunted until her own death. She eventually gives in to a form of protective weaponized sex that isn’t degrading. The teens-having- sex-and-then-dying trope (Ahem, Halloween and Friday the 13^th) is subverted into something new and dilemma-inducing.

Unfortunately, all promising starts often fizzle out, and halfway through the film the plot lost steam for me. There is some elaborate scheme to try and stop It, but the execution of said scheme doesn’t quite make sense. I also felt that some of the rules of the world got jettisoned, which led to a lackluster ending. There’s nothing wrong with open-ended finales, but I was bored the last 20 minutes, mainly due to the loss of character/plot momentum.

Love it or hate it, It Follows is a thoughtful addition to the horror genre. Hopefully David Robert Mitchell has more dread-inducing gems up his sleeve. But please, no sequels.

See also at Bitch Flicks: An interview with David Robert Mitchell and Maika Monroe

Staff Writer Lisa Bolekaja enoys watching classic Horror Films when they play at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in the summer. Co-Host of Hilliard’s Guess’ Screenwriting Rant Room Podcast, and a story editor for Apex Magazine, Lisa’s newest short story “Three Voices” comes out next month in Uncanny Magazine.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.

Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

“… a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed.”

– Catherine Breillat

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has spent her career exploring female sexuality. She hasn’t done so in a comfortable, easy way. When The Woman says to The Man, “Watch me where I’m unwatchable” in Anatomy of Hell, this could very well be Breillat’s message to her audiences as she presents female desire in harsh, jarring narratives that completely subvert the male gaze.

Normally, if we talk about subverting the male gaze and focusing on the female gaze in film, it’s cause for celebration. Finally! We scream. We’re coming!

Breillat’s female gaze is different, though. It pushes us to places of complete discomfort and sometimes disgust, and forces and challenges us to think about the deeply twisted cultural expectations surrounding women and sex.

Sometimes a shock is what it takes to bring us to places of transfiguration. We can’t smoothly transition to the female gaze after centuries of being surrounded and objectified by the male gaze. Breillat delivers shock after shock that serve to transfigure how we see ourselves and our culture. This isn’t comfortable, but it’s powerful.

Breillat’s first film, based off her novel, Le Soupirail, was A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille). Produced in 1976, it was quickly banned and wasn’t released in France until 1999. The film centers around 14-year-old Alice, who is discovering and attempting to navigate her sexual awakening. A Real Young Girl is avant-garde puberty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FXxS9VevE”]

There are moments in the film that are confusing and grotesque (most notably one of her fantasies that involves barbed wire and a ripped-up earthworm). While I found some of these scenes disturbing, I like being disturbed. The worm scene horrified me at first, but then I realized that when I was in high school, the hit teen comedy involved a dude literally fucking a pie. Teenage sexuality is weird and when we are faced with a teen girl’s sexuality–something we are not used to seeing (unless she is a sexual object)–in all of its confusion and vacillation between intense desire and disgust, we are uncomfortable. Breillat wants us to be uncomfortable; she wants to push us to the edge to that visceral experience that will challenge how we see both female sexuality and film depictions of female sexuality.

Fat_Girl_poster — *Fat Girl* (*À ma sœur!*)

Fat Girl (À ma sœur!), released in 2001, follows two sisters–Elena, 15, and Anaïs, 12–as they vacation with their parents. Elena is conventionally beautiful, and while she likes boys and has experimented sexually, she wants to remain a virgin until she’s with someone who “loves” her. She quickly develops a relationship with a young man who is frustrated with her desire to not have sex. He pressures her into anal sex (which hurts her), tries to force her to have oral sex, and finally convinces her he loves her and she has sex with him. In all of these instances, Anaïs is in the room–feigning sleep, asking them to stop, or, when they finally have sex, crying.

Anaïs’s views on sex are very different than Elena’s. She is starting to feel sexual–she’s not a teenager yet, but she’s not a child. Her desires range from banana splits to having sex just to get it over with. She has sexual desires, and her responses to Elena’s sexual experiences show both naiveté and jealousy. Their ages, their exterior looks, their sexual experiences (or lack thereof) all inform Breillat’s treatment of the sisters’ relationship with one another, with their own burgeoning sexuality, and with a culture that insists on sexualizing Elena and ignoring Anaïs. Their desires–Elena as internalized (and then disappointed) object, Anaïs as frustrated subject–are common categories for adolescent girls to fall into.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHRJRbM2EAg”]

Fat Girl (read Breillat’s commentary on the title here) is disturbing in its depictions of some of Elena and Anaïs’s experiences. However, the end of the film is shocking and violent. After Elena and her mother are brutally killed at a rest stop, the murderer rapes Anaïs in the woods. The next morning, she tells the police she wasn’t raped, and she looks at the camera, in an ending that clearly reflects The 400 Blows. Like the Truffaut classic, we are saddened and disturbed at the life trajectory of our young protagonists, and have no idea where their lives will go from here. We just have a frozen young face staring at us, implicating us in their fate.

Anaïs, at the end, seems to embrace her rape (as her meaningless loss of virginity that she wanted) and deny its violence. This is made even more traumatic since her rapist murdered her mother and sister (her sister who had just become sexually active, and her mother who wanted to punish her for it).

The message here is that girls cannot win. A patriarchal culture–full of boys who think they’re entitled to sex and men who violently rape and kill women–cares little for female desire and agency. This world is a dangerous place for girls. This world treats pretty girls like objects, and unpretty girls like nothing. Their desires are complicated and real, but are eclipsed by toxic masculinity.

Released in 2004, Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie De L’Enfer) is a film that pulls together pornography, misogyny, and female sexuality in a way that shocks and disgusts (male reviewers in particular wrote scathing, condescending reviews of the film). The Woman visits a gay bar and attempts suicide in the bathroom–she is tired of being a woman and being hated by men, and surmises that gay men hate women the most. The Man, however, saves her and she offers to pay him to stay in her home for four days to “watch her where she is unwatchable.” What follows is, for some viewers, unwatchable.

The Woman is naked for most of the film (a body double is used for vaginal shots), and The Man is played by an Italian porn star. His homosexuality serves to completely upend the typical male gaze. He’s disgusted by much of what he’s seeing and experiencing, and the understanding that this primal, visceral, shocking female desire is at the focus of the film (and has absolutely nothing to do with male desire) reflects a culture that typically focuses only on the male gaze and male pleasure. In this culture, female sexuality isn’t a consideration.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbFSZiT2-a4″]

When The Man drinks a glass of water with a used-tampon teabag, certainly the audience is meant to feel disgust. Perhaps some audience members actually gagged at the sight. How many scenes, however, in porn (explicitly) or mainstream film (suggested), feature women swallowing male excretions? Do we blink? Or is it just part of what we expect it means to be a heterosexual woman?

Jamie Russell astutely observes at the BBC, “For all the shocks, though, this is a stoically serious movie: it’s anti-porn, a transgressive sex movie that’s not against pornography but against the (male-dominated) objectification of women’s bodies.”

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

In an interview with The Guardian, Breillat articulated that her female gaze should directly threaten the male gaze, and that men should examine their own sexuality in the face of female desire:

“It’s a joke – if men can’t desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?”

The reporter points out that Breillat had said “that censorship was a male pre-occupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome,” and Breillat goes on to discuss the religious and patriarchal reasons to censor female desire, which is directly connected to keeping power away from women.

Breillat’s 1999 Romance was originally given an X rating (or banned in some countries). At Senses of Cinema, Brian Price notes that “Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.”

And that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Breillat’s work pushes boundaries and forces us to live in the intense intimacy and discomfort of a female gaze that we are unused to due to social oppression of women and women’s sexuality (at the hands of patriarchal religious and government systems). The literal and figurative red X over Breillat’s work–and female sexuality–needs to be stripped away to reveal what’s underneath–which isn’t always pretty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpH-V6kkOwI”]

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

‘The To Do List’: The Movie I’ve Been Waiting For

And then I saw it–a film that extols the importance of female agency and sexuality with a healthy dose of raunch, a film that includes a sexually experienced and supportive mother, a film that celebrates female friendship and quotes Gloria Steinem, a film that features Green Apple Pucker and multiple references to Pearl Jam and Hillary Clinton.
Yes. This is it.

Let’s get to work, vagina. – Brandy Klark, The To Do List

The To Do List

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

I remember leaving the theater after seeing Superbad and asking my friends if any of us could imagine a film like that being made about young women–quirky best friend teenage girls who were on a quest for those things that so many teenagers are on a quest for.

We agreed that we couldn’t imagine it (and then I probably delivered a lecture on the great harm of stifling female sexuality).

That notion–that those teenage “cumming-of-age” stories are reserved for boys only–has been deeply ingrained in us through pop culture. When American Pie came out while I was in high school, the message was clear: there’s a myriad of ways that teenage boys get to claim and act out their sexuality, but if you’re a woman who does the same, you will be singled out and considered an oddity, a freak or simply a prize.

Even before that, I remember always noticing that young adult novels or films about teenage girls that I enjoyed often de-sexed the female protagonist. Teenage female sexuality was either nonexistent or an anathema, set apart to frighten girls or teach lessons. I never saw myself and my feelings truly and fully reflected back to me.

“Sisters before misters”–best friends Fiona (Alia Shawkat), Brandy (Aubrey Plaza) and Wendy (Sarah Steele).

When I saw the trailer for The To Do List, I started to get excited. Maybe this is it–what I’ve been waiting for all of these years.

It’s set in the early 90s. My heart rate quickens.

I see the soundtrack‘s track list. I just can’t even.

Yes. This is it.

It was everything I wanted.

I especially love how the “To Do List” itself wasn’t borne out of peer pressure. Brandy (Aubrey Plaza) is mildly affected when her peers shout “Virgin!” at her, but what makes her want to explore and understand her own sexuality is twofold: she wants to be able to be comfortable knowing what to do with hot guys (she’s the one who is attracted and drawn to the college guy), and it’s explained to her that college is like a sexual pop quiz, and she needs to study to ace it.

Brandy takes notes as her older, experienced sister (played by Rachel Bilson) talks about sex.

She understands studying. She understands her own blossoming sexual desires. So she opens up her Trapper Keeper, lines her paper into a grid, and makes a list of sexual acts she must complete before the end of summer, with the ultimate goal being “Intercourse.” (The fact that the film was set in 1993 is important not only for nostalgia’s sake but also for the fact that Brandy didn’t have the Internet and couldn’t easily look up the definitions of the “jobs” she was writing on her list.)

Brandy’s “To Do List” replaces buying shower shoes for the dorm with sexual exploits.

Early on in her journey, Brandy reads statistics about how few women achieve orgasm, and she’s incensed. She writes “Masturbation” on her list (and does so wearing a “Pro-Choice Pro-Clinton” T-shirt, which writer-director Maggie Carey said she wore frequently in high school). The masturbation scene is important because, as Carey says, “When you do see women masturbating, it’s usually a male fantasy about a woman masturbating, it’s not what actually happens.”

Brandy voices anger over the virgin/whore dichotomy, referencing Gloria Steinem. And yet as much as this film empowers female sexuality and independence, it does not do so at the expense of the men in the film. (Remarkable, how completely possible it is to have fully sympathetic male and female characters in a raunchy comedy.) Even Brandy’s father, a Rush Limbaugh-reading, overprotective man who is uncomfortable talking about sex, is portrayed in a sympathetic light.

The teenage boys have stereotypical sexual desires, but Brandy’s desire is always paramount. For the first time while watching a teen comedy, I got to reminisce and laugh from my own perspective–and oh, how I could taste that Pucker when I saw it on screen and feel those goosebumps when “Fade Into You” started playing–instead of imagining what life must have been like for boys I knew in high school.

The film also really has a “radical” message about virginity–not panicked, not preachy, but reasonable and realistic. Maybe most importantly, Brandy never has any regrets (“Teenagers don’t have regrets,” she says. “That’s for your 30s”). The To Do List is “nonchalantly” feminist from start to finish.

After she read the script for the first time, Aubrey Plaza said,

“When I read the script, I just thought it was funny, be it female or male, but I love that it was from a female perspective, and I’d honestly never seen anything that had explored the specifics of that time in a girl’s life when they’re experiencing all their firsts.”

This film is a first full of firsts.

And unlike most first-time sexual exploits, writer-director Maggie Carey knew what she was doing and made it really pleasurable for the audience.

“It’s a skort!”
(And who doesn’t want to make out to Mazzy Star?)

A teenage sex comedy that subverts what’s usually “reserved for the boys” and shows female sexuality and agency as, you know, an actual thing (while celebrating 90s pop culture)? Check.

And just as Brandy will want more and more of the final exploit she checks off, I want movies like this to keep coming and coming.

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