The revenge genre is fraught territory for feminist film fans, because it virtually always begins with violence (often sexualized violence) against women. ‘John Wick’ sidesteps this problem by replacing the victimized woman with a dog: Keanu Reeves’s title character, a mild-mannered retired assassin, gets back into the criminal underworld and goes on a brutal rampage to avenge his killed dog. What follows is an extremely well-executed but completely non-innovative revenge flick, which is nevertheless probably my favorite since ‘Kill Bill Vol 1.,’ in no small part because the revenge isn’t inspired by the victimization of a woman.
The revenge genre is fraught territory for feminist film fans, because it virtually always begins with violence (often sexualized violence) against women. John Wick sidesteps this problem by replacing the victimized woman with a dog. Keanu Reeves’s title character, a mild-mannered retired assassin, gets back into the life and goes on a brutal rampage to avenge his puppy the way countless action heroes have avenged murdered wives and girlfriends. What follows is an extremely well-executed but completely non-innovative revenge flick, which is nevertheless probably my favorite since Kill Bill Vol 1., in no small part because the revenge isn’t inspired by the victimization of a woman.
Now don’t get me wrong, violence against dogs isn’t something I like seeing in a movie, it is just a refreshing change of pace from the normal female sacrifice at the top of these films. Unfortunately, there is in fact a dead woman in John Wick’s backstory, because Hollywood screenwriters seem incapable of giving their male action leads depth without some dead family. But John Wick’s wife, in a shocking twist, died of natural causes! Wick’s manly grief would have been limited to recklessly stunt driving his classic Mustang around an airfield, but Dead Wife left him an absurdly cute puppy so he would “have something to love.” And only days later, this absurdly cute puppy is brutally killed by Russian mobsters stealing his car. Cue onslaught of ultraviolent revenge!
John Wick and an aggressively cute puppy.
It doesn’t take much of an armchair psychologist to realize that John is not just avenging his dog as his pet, but as a symbol of his wife’s enduring love. Or to speculate that he’s using this revenge mission as an outlet for his grief for his wife. So the usual issues of women in refrigerators persist if you think about it too hard. I think I’d like John Wick even more if Dead Wife had just been left out of it.
Does this mean I’m advocating for the erasure of female characters? Or the cinematic sacrifice of adorable puppies? I hope the obvious answer to those questions is no, but I’m writing this from the moral dead zone of “I sure enjoyed this movie about dozens of people being violently murdered!” so I can’t exactly seek a lane on the high road.
Adrianne Palicki as Ms. Perkins in John Wick
John Wick‘s only real female character alive at the start of the film is Adrianne Palicki’s Ms. Perkins, a fellow assassin. Ms. Perkins is clearly an outsider in the complex subculture of John Wick‘s criminal underworld, perhaps inevitably as a function of her sex. She’s the only character who doesn’t buy into the legend of John Wick as the Scariest Sumbitch in all of Criminaldom, and she breaks “Hotel Rules” by going after Wick in Ian McShane’s sanctuary for wary criminals. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t work out very well for her. Fortunately, the violence Ms. Perkins suffers isn’t fetishized. And she’s presented as a worthy opponent in her big brawl with Wick. I can’t take too much beef with her not surviving to the end credits, because almost no one else does.
Other than Ms. Perkins and brief mentions of Dead Wife, John Wick is wall-to-wall dudes. Even the faceless goons John Wick guns down in droves are universally male. Cutting out most of the violence against women let me indulge in the perhaps unsavory pleasures of a well-made violent action movie. I’m reminded of one of the reasons gay male porn is appealing to many women: the absence of women also means the absence of anti-woman tropes. (John Wick certainly doesn’t avoid the comparison to gay porn by setting one of its main action pieces in a bathhouse with a bunch of hyperbuff shirtless dudes.)
Lets hear it for ultraviolence!
And like porn, John Wick‘s abundant appeal to the lizard brain shouldn’t be examined too closely by the forebrain (lest we sound like we’re fans of puppy murder). John Wick isn’t great cinema and it is a far cry from a triumph for women, but it is an extremely enjoyable action movie that doesn’t require too much feminist compromise, and that is something of a rarity.
Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh who watches John Wick like her two-year-old niece watches The Little Mermaid.
Though very different, the two films based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, ‘Foxfire: Confessions of A Girl Gang,’ have a shared message: that rape culture is pervasive and the experiences of girls and women within it are sadly, universal. In both films, one set in the 90s, the other in the 50s, teenage girls inhabit dangerous territory, full of sexual assaults and near misses, all ignored by the authorities around them. Their experiences aren’t considered unusual or justified within their respective narratives, instead, they point out that women are given a lot of reasons to feel unsafe and afraid in our society. At the very least, we’ve all been told not to walk home at night or to be frightened by a man following too close on our heels.
Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.
Though very different, the two films based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Foxfire: Confessions of A Girl Gang, have a shared message: that rape culture is pervasive and the experiences of girls and women within it are, sadly, universal. In both films, one set in the 90s, the other in the 50s, teenage girls inhabit dangerous territory, full of sexual assaults and near misses, all ignored by the authorities around them. Their experiences aren’t considered unusual or justified within their respective narratives; instead, they point out that women are given a lot of reasons to feel unsafe and afraid in our society. At the very least, we’ve all been told not to walk home at night or to be frightened by a man following too close on our heels.
Unlike a lot of other films discussed this week, the girls of Foxfire are not avenging a particular rape, but are instead rebelling against rape culture in many forms: catcalls, description of women by only their physical attributes, slut shaming, rape and molestation, predatory authority figures and the society that allows men and their opinions more power than women.
While rape revenge films are often criticized for using rape for titillation or as a means to justify nudity and graphic violence, the ideas are invoked here to make viewers think.
In these films, one girl is mocked by a teacher for her appearance and has her intelligence demeaned. One girl is groped while another is shamed. Yet another is offered a free typewriter by her uncle in exchange for sex; a fifth is spied on in the shower. During a trial, the defendant’s promiscuity is the most important factor in deciding her guilt. And when one girl returns home after being raped, her mother’s only response is to tell her to clean herself up before her father sees.
Forming a girl gang allows the characters to stop seeing sexual assault as the problem of each individual victim, but as something that effects all of them. When one girl, Rita, thanks the group for helping her, their leader assures her that she isn’t to blame–if Rita wasn’t the victim, it would have been someone else. Women need to band together instead of shaming each other if they have any hope of changing things.
Both films center on a passionate and androgynous leader, named Legs, who mobilizes the girls, first in a series of pranks and acts of rebellion small enough that viewers can cheer them on, then through several dangerous and criminal acts, before culminating in the kidnapping of a wealthy man at gunpoint. Maddy (Hedy Burress), Legs’s closest confidant, observes the events and acts are narrator, chronicling the group’s rise and fall.
The original 1996 film, starring Angelina Jolie as Legs, is clearly a product of the 90s Girl Power movement, a period known for being overly commercialized, but it’s an earnest effort with a female screenwriter, Elizabeth White and director, Annette Haywood-Carter. It’s also an attempt to modernize the novel, about working class 50s teens in Upstate New York, relocating the story to Oregon and dressing it in grunge fashion, with topics for discussion like sexism, female disenfranchisement, parental neglect, and masturbation. However, as a mainstream film, it’s sanitized, more playful than the book and as the girls are middle or upper middle class, the stakes are less dire. Foxfire never becomes a literal gang or a lifestyle, just an episode in their lives, that facilitates their coming of age.
For the remake, director Laurent Cantet restored the novel’s setting and stuck pretty faithfully to the book, attempting to cram in all the causes Foxfire rebels against, including ageism, racism, animal rights, and economic disparity as well as sexism. Lead by a cast of newcomers, Cantet’s film takes a more cautionary tone, as Maddy’s attempt to redeem Foxfire, now remembered only for their criminal acts, by telling their history and their original noble goals.
While Legs in the remake (Raven Adamson) was a classmate of the other girls who they had known for years, in the original, she’s an outsider, a drifter who enters into their lives one day and helps them find their voices. Legs is given a grand entrance, heralded by thunder and followed as she boldly trespasses through the school halls.
Punishing Mr. Buttinger for abusing Rita is the impetuous for Foxfire’s founding
Like a superhero, she arrives to save one of the girls, Rita (Rilo Kiley front-woman Jenny Lewis) who is being bullied by her teacher, Mr. Buttinger, for refusing to dissect a frog. Legs tells the student to “Make him stop,” and it’s a truly revolutionary idea, that a teenage girl could have any power over an adult. Her dream-like entrance and exit through the window, mark her as powerful and unconstrained by society’s rules, she doesn’t go to the school and Mr. Buttinger can’t punish her.
Legs is clearly marked as Other–she’s aggressive, with a leather jacket, heavy boots and swagger. As the camera pans up her body when she’s first introduced, not showing her face for several minutes, it’s clear viewers were meant to think momentarily, that she was a man. It is unclear why she goes by such a strange nickname, one usually thought of as objectifying; perhaps it is an attempt to reclaim something men have called out to her in the street.
Her relationship with Maddy is marked by obvious lesbian subtext, as they frequently flirt, confess their love for each other and share a bed, but her sexuality is never explicitly discussed. It is problematic that the character with the courage to fight against rape culture is the one given traits marked as masculine, while the girls she recruits, are mostly feminine and/or weak. It is also troubling that Legs’s suggested queerness is paired with her hatred of men, two things which are often falsely equated.
Legs enjoys driving the girls in the stolen car
In both cases, the girls are enamored with Legs, who quickly becomes their hero and undisputed leader. In the original, they are all introduced as broad high archetypes, Violet (“the slut”), Goldie (“the druggie”), Rita (“the fat girl”) and Maddy (well-rounded and popular), characterizations which become more three dimensional as the film goes on.
When the other girls learn Mr. Buttinger has been groping Rita’s breasts during detention, they originally hold her responsible. It’s Legs’s influence that makes them realize there is no excuse for Mr. Buttinger’s behavior and no way Rita could deserve his abuse. In the remake, Legs blames Rita only for not fighting back, telling her, “It’s up to you to decide how men are going to treat you.” Rita takes this message to heart, exposing him as sexual predator by painting statements about his attraction to young girls on his car.
In the original, Legs tells the girls that the only way to stop his is to band together. During Rita’s detention, the girls gang up on him, physically assault and threaten him. Rita begins to come out of her shell, finally gaining the confidence to confront her abuser, threatening to castrate him if she ever touches her again. The next day, the girls are called into the principal’s office and suspended, despite their claims of sexual harassment, which are ignored.
The girls perform a candlelit ritual in their headquarters, during which they give each other tattoos
Legs’s idea, that they can fight against abusive men only if they all stick together, but not as individuals, leads them to start Foxfire as their own collective, their own subculture. Before they had banded together, the girls went to the same school and had shared experiences, but cliques kept them segregated. Maddie, from her privileged perspective as a popular girl, looked at someone like Goldie as a sideshow, dismissed Violet as a slut and disdained Rita’s shyness as pathetic, and the cause of her own problems. Later, when they become friends, Goldie is hurt when she notices Maddie’s art project includes an unflattering Polaroid of her, clearly posed as someone to mock.
They begin to gather in an abandoned house in the woods, which they use to make a community and a safe space. Hanging around in the house, they become real friends and partake in typical teenage bonding practices, drinking, dancing, ogling guys, and laughing together. They cement their bond by tattooing each other’s breasts with a small flame logo, marking themselves as part of Foxfire, grouped together for life.
In the remake, the girls rent a house and live together in their own cloistered society as Legs intends to create an institution that would outlast her. The idea of a formal female gang with a manifesto, rules, ritual tattooing, criminal practices and recruitment, is an example of young women adapting masculine rough culture and altering it to suit them. Gangs are typically the province of disenfranchised youth (usually male), those neglected by mainstream society, such as racial minorities and the working class. Foxfire suggests the characters are disenfranchised as women and it is natural for them to act out against the society that oppresses them, as the men around them, in their own gangs, have been doing for years.
Maddy admires her tattoo
In the original film, rape culture is tied to sports culture, as both are posed as masculine spaces men feel women have no right to infringe on nor attempt to police. Their attack on Mr. Buttinger upset a group of jocks who respect him as the coach of their football team and they resent the girls. The boys begin harassing them, visiting their house in the woods and attempting to attack them, eventually trying to rape Maddy. Struggling to escape the jocks, the Foxfire girls steal a car and are arrested for it. At their trial, is implied that the jocks lied and blamed the girls for everything, leading to a “he said, she said” dynamic where the boys’ testimonies are taken more seriously. Legs in sentenced to juvie, while the others are on parole. For trying to dismantle rape culture and save themselves from attack, they are punished and lose Legs, the heart of the group.
There are also girls who help the jocks; one lures Maddy into an ambush, understanding the goal is to rape her, and lies at their trial. Later she gains some redemption when she confesses to the judge. Early on in the remake, the girls in Foxfire are reluctant to let Violet, a beautiful girl all the boys are crazy about, join. They decide Violet is promiscuous because she attracts male attention, without any evidence she returns their interest, and look down on her for it. In the remake, Legs’s mental state begins to deteriorate as she becomes disillusioned with her vision of women helping each other as a community after watching women fighting each other in juvie.
After juvie, both versions of Legs turn to darker, more violent acts. Narrating the remake, Maddy says the committed many crimes against men but most of their were not reported because their male victims were ashamed of having been attacked by girls. The films suggest revenge is acceptable to a certain level, where it’s exposing men who have who they know to be predators or teaching lessons to men who have wronged them, but is wrong once the focus moves away from specific individuals. When Foxfire starts targeting men in general, moving out of the area of defensible grey morality, Legs moves into villainous territory herself.
The Foxfire girls use their members as bait to rob men
Strapped for cash, Foxfire (in the remake) begins to use its most conventionally attractive girls to bait men, luring them into secluded areas and then ambushing them and stealing money. One girl, Violet, finds she can make more by pretending the man tried to rape her and acting afraid until he gives her money to try and comfort her. Though baiting, these girls attempt to turn rape culture on its head and make it work for them. These acts are justified in their eyes as Foxfire begins to operate with the view that all men are rapists deserving punishment, even casting out any girl involved in a relationship as the enemy.
Out of the group in the original film, only one girl, Goldie (Jenny Shimizu) has a dysfunctional home life. In one scene, her father orders her into his car and hits her while her friends watch. Instead of struggling or hitting back as would be expected from the character, Goldie submits. When the girls discover Goldie has been using drugs, Legs goes to her father, demanding money to pay for rehab. When he refuses, though he can clearly afford it, she kidnaps him at gunpoint and ties him up, continuing to pressure him for money. The girls, as both teenagers and girls, would ordinarily be powerless to help Goldie, here, as in many areas of their lives, they find they can only get results through violence. In these scenes, the other girls surround her yelling that she’s gone too far.
In the end, Legs leaves town to escape arrest, as well as the loss of the other girls’ respect. These girls who had previously viewed Legs as a hero, looked at her with disgust and disappointment and admitted to being afraid of her. In the remake, we get some understanding of Legs’s family and background, as her father, an alcoholic, condemns her at her trial and refuses to let her live with him. Conversely, the original leaves Legs’s origins a mystery. She’s clearly damaged and something must have happened to make her, a teenage girl with a criminal record, no place to live, and roaming from town to town. The easiest explanation, is that she may have left home because of her own abuse and it’s easy to speculate that her anger at society, particularly fierce towards Goldie’s father, comes from projecting her own experiences onto their relationship.
Everything begins to go downhill when Legs is released from juvie
Moreover, the 1996 version is framed as a coming of age story, cast as the year Legs came to town, changing everything, making Maddy question her perfect world and then disappeared never to be seen or heard from again- merely an episode in her life. But while the Maddy is central to the remake as its narrator, her observations of Legs and Foxfire’s history form the thrust of the narrative, rather than her own maturation. Both films end with the mystery of Legs’s disappearance and Maddy’s continuing obsession. In the original, Maddy’s decision not to go with Legs when she leaves town is framed as the one decision of her life she has always looked back on, wondering “what if?”
While the original film shows what happens when the leader of a group becomes an extremist or is mentally unstable, the remake suggests the whole group, excluding Maddy who defects, has begun to reject the rules and laws of society. Toward the end, most of the other girls are excited by their efforts at baiting and see Foxfire as one big, dangerous game that allows them to reject the limiting framework they grew up in. For her part, Legs always means well, trying, in the only way she understands, to help her friends and women as a whole.
Both endings are bittersweet. Foxfire disbands and the girls stop fighting for their causes, but they’ve helped some people and made their mark. But Legs is gone and it’s uncertain what ideas viewers are meant to come away with. It’s tricky to judge, as the films are full of feminist ideas and urgings for female empowerment, yet have dark endings where characters are hurt and disgraced. A tagline for the original celebrates the girls’ rebellion and encourages the teenage girl viewer to follow suit: “If you don’t like the rules, Make your own.”
In more light-hearted moments, the girls still have fun together
But what are these films saying about young women who dare to break the rules? That their efforts will succeed unless our leader is unstable? That movements for rape revenge will always become uncontrollable and dangerous or that they’ll succeed only while punishing the guilty, but not when attempting to change the culture?
In the end, what the girls of the Foxfire films have is a strength they might not have found otherwise. That strength and the idea of community are what viewers should remember.
Older women in film and TV are generally a stereotypical lot. They’re usually sexless matrons or grandmothers who perform roles of support for their screen-stealing husbands or children. These older women are typically preoccupied with home and family, lacking a complex inner life because they are gendered symbols of, you guessed it, home and family. Occasionally we see older women who go beyond that trope, even defying it to focus more on power, prestige, winning, and their own personal success and public image rather than that of others. Two potent examples of this are Patty Hewes from Damages and Victoria Grayson from Revenge.
The award-winning actress Glenn Close brings Damages‘ corporate lawyer and anti-heroine, Patty Hewes, to life with complexity, subtlety, and sheer force of presence. Patty Hewes is the uncannily successful proprietor of the law firm Hewes & Associates. She has high-up connections that she thinks nothing of exploiting, and she has no problem circumnavigating the law and propriety to win a case or to get what she wants. She thinks nothing of, say, attempting to murder her protege, Ellen, and succeeding in murdering Ellen’s fiance or blackmailing witnesses or judges. Patty has a reputation for ruthlessness, and, basically, people know she’s not a woman to be fucked with because she will toy with her opponents before unleashing an unholy shit storm that utterly destroys them. She’s beyond smart; she’s brilliant. She’s dedicated, ambitious, addicted to winning seemingly unwinnable cases, and cares more about her career than she does about anything else in her life.
Patty Hewes: You do not want to fuck with her.
The much acclaimed Madeleine Stowe portrays the equally ruthless Victoria Grayson on Revenge. The playing field is different: instead of a court of law, Victoria reigns supreme as a filthy rich socialite in the Hamptons who, like Patty, plays deep games of power and manipulation and is a woman who gets what she wants. Victoria shamelessly throws around her wealth to gloatingly buy off people and services, and if that doesn’t work, she capitalizes on her cool poise to threaten unspeakable reprisal if her powerful will is not obeyed. In all honesty, it was hard to find emotive pictures of Victoria because Madeleine Stowe masterfully plays her character’s unruffled containment, with emotion only briefly escaping through her eyes or a momentary flash of facial expression before disappearing beneath a well-practiced veneer of composure.
Victoria Grayson sits in her signature chair smugly triumphant about…something. To be fair she’s usually smugly triumphant.
Both Patty and Victoria have elegant homes and expensive wardrobes that are further embodiments of their success. They both play the game. It is usually a game of their own making where the rules are known only to them and are likely to change when it suits them. Both are detached and calculating, having trouble relating in genuine, meaningful ways even to the people who mean the most to them. In fact, their closest loved ones tend to despise them the most for the atrocity of their actions. However, their maternal instincts (or lack thereof) are points of differentiation. Patty has a son, Michael, and she wrests custody of his daughter from him primarily to teach him a lesson. She is cold and harsh with Michael, and once she has sole custody, Patty is distant and downright absent from the upbringing of her granddaughter, Catherine. We also come to find out that she aborted a child in her youth, choosing her career over motherhood. This sets Patty up as a typical Hollywood example of the masculinized female authority figure. Her lack of maternal instinct is set up as proof that her power has dehumanized her, implying that a woman who succeeds in the masculine world of corporate law can’t possibly be a good mother with a happy home life. Aside from the glory of her career, Patty’s life is depicted as empty and lonely; her nights are filled with solo booze consumption, and the only companion to whom she can freely relate is her pet dog, Cory.
Patty feeds her beloved Cory.
While she is a twisted excuse for a mother, Victoria has a ferocious maternal instinct. She ascribes the utmost importance to her role as “mother.” Though her games, plots, and intrigues enmesh her children in a suffocating web of deceit and motherly control, Victoria’s goals (however misguided) are always designed to protect and benefit her children. For example, Victoria offers her daughter Charlotte’s boyfriend $20,000 to piss off, and in her mind, she’s doing it to save her child from a boy who is unworthy and with whom a lasting relationship is doubtful. Victoria also has her son, Daniel, viciously beaten in prison in order to show the court that his life is in danger and he should be remanded to house arrest under her direct care and supervision. Power, in Victoria’s hands, hasn’t robbed her of her maternal instinct; instead it has made her love dark and hard and cruel.
Victoria bears the strongest distaste for Emily Thorne, her son’s fiancee; her maternal instinct telling her (correctly) that Emily is up to no good.
Patty and Victoria also differ in the depictions of their sexuality. Patty is basically an asexual being, especially after her vitriolic divorce from her cheating husband, Phil. The show alludes to her complex sexual past (with two marriages and a sordid affair with a witness resulting in the birth of her son), but no relationships or trysts materialize throughout the series because when would she have the time? Like her maternal instinct, Patty has surrendered the freedom of sexuality in return for power and prestige.
Patty sacrifices what society tells us it means to be a woman for masculine power.
Victoria, on the other hand, has a passionate sexuality that is as fierce as her ambition, as fierce as her maternal instinct. Equal to the contained control of Victoria’s public facade, is the pure abandonment of her sexuality. Unlike Patty, Victoria desperately wants love. Revenge shows that Victoria’s denial of love and the denial of the honesty of her sexual desires (first with her painter/counterfeiter Dominik and later with her husband’s coworker David Clarke) in exchange for money and power has lead her to deeper darkness, deeper emptiness, and a dwindling moral compass. The supposition seems to be that a woman can’t be rich and powerful while feeling love and tenderness.
Victoria rapt in her lover David Clarke’s arms.
Both Patty and Victoria live in a perpetual state of guilt and remorse for their actions. Victoria suffers from interminable guilt for helping her husband frame her lover, the only man she ever loved, David Clarke, for terrorism and murder. She does this, presumably, because she is afraid to lose her wealth, her position, and the power that come with them. Victoria identifies her past crimes as “heinous.” In flashbacks, there’s a softer edge to Victoria, an openness and a willingness to love and to connect. Over the years, we see that her choice of power over principles has eroded her ability to empathize and turned her into the stereotypical ice queen. Eventually, we see a shift in Victoria where it seems she can no longer bear the guilt she suffers, and she seeks to purge herself of her crimes through confession (of course she manipulates the situation to ensure her own immunity…and it doesn’t end up happening).
A seemingly pivotal moment for Victoria as she prepares to board a federal plane to Washington and make her confession.
Patty also feels unassuageable remorse about many of her decisions, most notably her youthful abortion and the path on which it set her life. The symbolic weight that the abortion bears and the resulting demonization of Patty for her choice are disappointing. The implication is that if Patty had had the child instead of aborting it, she would’ve been a better person, contented and whole. This idea goes against the very grain of Patty Hewes. Would her ambition have dissipated upon the birth of her daughter? Her love of power, the law, the game, and manipulation disappeared when she looked at her screaming newborn? None of those things happened when she later gave birth to her son, so the reality is that having that child instead of aborting it would’ve made her gravely unhappy and trapped her, and she probably would’ve fucked up that kid’s life and its sense of self even worse than she fucked up Michael’s.
Though we learn much of Victoria’s past which casts her in a more sympathetic light (i.e. her mother was a gold digger who resented her, allowed her to be molested, and then kicked her out when she turned 15), she remains aloof and composed, while Patty has more moments of genuine vulnerability. Barefoot, curled on her couch with Ellen and her dog, Patty becomes human. Her temper tantrums where she wrecks her desk and throws her oft-held whiskey glass across the room show the depth of her frustration and impotence. Her wracking sobs and hysteria after she’s given the order for Ellen’s murder show the viewer the true emotional cost of her choices…and that she makes them anyway.
Patty loses it after giving the order to have Ellen murdered.
It’s no secret that I’m fascinated by women with power. I wrote about the machinations of women and corporate power in my review of Passion, and I wrote about the ruthless Claire Underwood of House of Cards (another aging anti-heroine). Patty Hewes and Victoria Grayson are both complex, compelling characters. The way they inhabit their power is endlessly watchable. Despite their borderline amorality, it’s infinitely gratifying to watch both of them at work, setting up the players and knocking them down in a life-sized game of chess. Unfortunately, there is such a profound darkness and emptiness in both Patty and Victoria as well as in their lives. They have cut themselves off from human connection and have lost the ability to love the simpler things in life. The message is “power corrupts,” but I wonder if Victoria and Patty are extreme examples of this because they are women, as if femaleness automatically bestows qualities of nurturing, affection, connectivity, and compassion. The implication is that the kind of power these women seek is outside the feminine realm, and to grasp it, they must reject their very nature, which leaves them a hollow shell of a person. It’s all too rare that we see a subtle, powerful woman who commands respect who hasn’t sacrificed her humanness in the bargain. Though I love these wicked, wicked anti-heroines, I want to see more balanced representations of women with power who aren’t demonized and damaged due to its pursuit.
In 2011, two presidential hopefuls signed a pledge that, in its original form, insinuated that African-American children had families that were more cohesive and better off during slavery.
Texas and Tennessee both in the last two years have seen school boards and political activist groups push K-12 curriculum that “softens” slavery references, explores the “positive aspects of American slavery” and downplays minority struggles throughout American history.
A southern governor issued a proclamation for Confederate History Month with no references to slavery in 2010.
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, an anti-slavery revenge fantasy (based more in fact than fiction) was released just a few days before the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was passed on Jan. 1, 1863 (however, it would be almost three more years until slavery was outlawed in the United States with the Thirteenth Amendment).
If you find the above information upsetting–that many are trying to whitewash a history so fresh and raw (after all, 150 years is not that long ago)–then Django Unchained is for you. If you don’t find the above information jarring, then perhaps the film is especially for you.
Tarantino has been candid in many interviews about his desire to showcase this time in American history (the film is set in 1858, two years before the start of the Civil War). His 2009 film Inglourious Basterds was a Holocaust revenge fantasy–not historically accurate, but emotionally fulfilling. Django Unchained‘s fiction isn’t as factually inaccurate, but the cathartic nature of looking at a historical horror through the lens of revenge is still there.
Tarantino recently explained this catharsis on NPR:
“… to actually take an action story and put it in that kind of backdrop where slavery or the pain of World War II is the backdrop of an exciting adventure story — that can be something else. And then in my adventure story, I can have the people who are historically portrayed as the victims be the victors and the avengers.”
He goes on:
“You know, there’s not this big demand for, you know, movies that deal with the darkest part of America’s history, and the part that we’re still paying for to this day. They’re scared of how white audiences are going to feel about it; they’re scared about how black audiences are going to feel about it.”
This fear is certainly understandable, since America’s history of slavery, racism and subjugation is still, in many ways, a taboo topic (or a topic rife with revisionism). Django Unchained, however, does everything right.
The opening scene of the film is a line of raw, whipped black backs. This image is not foreign to audiences–people are generally well-versed in that aspect of violence against slaves. The image is awful and uncomfortable, but eases the audience in to this time period with something familiar. As the film progresses, layers of violence and misery are peeled back until audiences are squirming and uncomfortable. As they should be.
For the first part of the film, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and Django (Jamie Foxx) are portrayed as partners. Both have stories, and basically split the role of protagonist. Schultz frees Django to aid in his bounty hunting. In their time together, Schultz teaches Django to read, shoot and “act” however he needed to in order to accomplish his goals.
Schultz teaches Django how to shoot and read, granting him access to the free world.
The poignant scenes where Schultz and Django are eating together in their camp highlight the importance of authentic voices. They ask one other questions and learn one another’s stories. Schultz acts shocked when he learns that Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), speaks German. He was intrigued by their story, and asked Django about her and their life together.
The importance of the authentic voice and hearing people tell their own stories is essential. How, then, can Tarantino, a white man in 2012, effectively bring the injustice of slavery to mass audiences?
The answer can really be found in the film itself.
Schultz tells Django the legend of Brünnhilda (which mirrors Django’s own journey for his wife). Django asks Schultz why he is helping him, and why he cares whether he finds his wife, and Schultz answers, “I’ve never given anybody their freedom before. I feel responsible for you.”
This responsibility to give Django access to the free world is similar to Tarantino’s responsibility to bring this black empowerment film to mass audiences. It’s about access, not help or hand outs. Access is what white Americans (especially white American males) still have at this point, and they should be responsible for sharing that access with others and telling important stories. Tarantino’s popularity and neutrality (as a white man with no other “agenda”) gave access to this story.
Could a black man have made a film with a celebrated hero who says, “Kill white people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?” I can’t imagine that would have had the same mass appeal. While I’m not suggesting that this is a fair or good scenario, that’s where we are in our history. And if we’re going to continue to have people downplaying our nation’s history of oppression and “softening” slavery, we need these stories more than ever.
As this access is granted to Django, the story becomes more and more his own. He changes after the first bounty kill. Two men are getting ready to whip an enslaved woman; Django shoots the one who is quoting Bible passages and holding the Bible (he shoots him through a Bible page that is stapled to his shirt) and whips the other. He has claimed his place, and his journey begins to be more wholly his own. (The shot to the Bible page is also important considering pro-slavery factions would use the Bible as a defense for owning slaves.)
Django turns the whip on the oppressor.
By the time the two reach Candyland, Django has truly come into his own. As they travel across the horizon, rapper Rick Ross’s “100 Black Coffins” plays as Django struts on his horse (Foxx was instrumental in helping choose this music). The rap works, and indicates a shift in whose story we’re really starting to see. When Schultz warns Django to stop “antagonizing” plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), Django asserts that he’s just “getting dirty,” and acting like he knows he needs to. This dialogue upends the “know your place” rhetoric that even well-meaning, slavery-hating Schultz falls into.
The use of mandingo fighting as a plot point (both to get Schultz and Django to Candyland, and also to horrify the audience) is important. While forcing slaves to fight or entertain for sport and profit was not uncommon, this kind of fighting until death didn’t appear to happen. And before you take a big sigh of relief (it wasn’t that bad, then), the main reason this kind of fighting would not have happened is because it was economically unwise to kill someone who would be a strong worker. It’s all business.
Candie’s continued references to phrenology remind us that in addition to the perceived Biblical support of slavery, pseudoscience of the time also supported racist (and sexist) ideas about people’s capabilities.
When he breaks apart old Ben’s skull at the dining room table, one can’t help but think about poor Yorick in Hamlet. As Hamlet cradles the skull of his father’s jester who he knew well as a child (much like Ben’s role as Candie’s father’s slave), he considers life and death and reflects upon how we all end up the same. Ben’s skull, however, launches Candie into a tirade about phrenology, as he breaks a piece off to show the indentions that prove black people are biologically subservient.
House slave Stephen, left, Broomhilda and Candie.
Behind Candie always in these dining room scenes is a marble statue of two Roman gladiators fighting (his hobby is nothing new), and is Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), his house slave. Stephen embodies the Stockholm Syndrome kind of subservience that Candie sees as inherent. He plays the ultimate “Uncle Tom” character to foil Django’s free and increasingly independent and violent nature. Of course, in keeping with the Ben/Yorick parallel, Stephen also is much more clever than Candie is, and has wisdom and knowledge (Shakespeare often gave the jesters/fools much more wisdom than their masters).
Stephen.
The way Candie and Stephen treat Broomhilda is abhorrent, and Django predicted correctly that she was used as a “comfort girl” (sex slave). While her part is the damsel in distress, she’s clearly as fierce and independent as she can be (when they arrive at Candyland, she’s being brutally punished for trying to escape).
As business is being settled toward the end, Schultz cannot stop the images of a dog killing a runaway slave they’d encountered earlier. He’s not angered by losing a much larger amount of money than he’d anticipated, or being “caught” in a scheme. He’s haunted by the brutality he’s seen at Candyland. He starts discussing The Three Musketeers with Candie, and tells him that Alexandre Dumas was black (again reinforcing the idea that it is important to have the whole story to avoid reducing people to stereotypes). A demand for a handshake becomes too much for Schultz, and he shoots Candie, setting off a bloodbath. He knows he’s sacrificing himself with that gesture, but it’s worth it to him.
Few remain alive after the resulting gunfight, but Django and Broomhilda are both caught and punished. Django, in the throes of torture and seconds away from castration, is visited by Stephen, who rattles off all the ways they could have punished him, but Candie’s sister ordered that he be shipped to a quarry, where he’d be enslaved again.
“This will be the story of you, Django,” says Stephen.
While Django’s story began by being freed by Schultz and partnering with him, thus receiving access to the free world, he long ago became the author of his own story. And Stephen’s wrong–Django wins. Django frees himself this time.
As Django kills Stephen, Stephen screams, “You can’t destroy Candyland–there’ll always be a Candyland!”
And while Django does effectively end Candyland, Stephen isn’t incorrect. Candylands will exist for years after Django leaves, and we are still feeling what Candyland was in America today.
In an interview with VIBE, DiCaprio, Washington and Foxx discussed their reactions to the screenplay. DiCaprio said,
“For me, the initial thing obviously was playing someone so disreputable and horrible whose ideas I obviously couldn’t connect with on any level. I remember our first read through, and some of my questions were about the amount of violence, the amount of racism, the explicit use of certain language. It was hard for me to wrap my head around it. My initial response was, ‘Do we need to go this far?'”
Foxx and Washington said,
Foxx: “When President Obama became president in 2008, a blemish on my hometown was the fact that it wasn’t on the front page of the newspaper. When they went down to talk to them, they went [country accent] ‘Hey listen, we run a newspaper, not a scrap book.’ I’m paraphrasing. So I had both of my daughters come down to the plantation, and I walked them through and I said, ‘This is where your people come from. This is your background.’ And I said, ‘this is more than just a movie for your father.’ My little daughter, I took her into the shack, and I said, ‘these are where the slaves stayed.’ Every two, three years there is a movie about the holocaust because they want you to remember and they want you to be reminded of what it was. When was the last time you seen a movie about slavery?” Washington: “When is the last time you saw a movie about slavery where a black man frees himself?” Foxx: “We read back in the day about Nat Turner and other guys who were not taking it. That’s why, when I read the script and we went back to the plantation, there were certain things inside me bubbling up.”
These responses are indicative of the conversations about our own history. White people frequently echo variations on a theme of “I didn’t have anything to do with that.” It’s easy to denigrate and forget a past that we keep ourselves disconnected from. For black Americans, however, there is a sense of connectivity, of history, to that time and place. As there should be–for everyone, no matter how painful it is.
Django leaves a pile of bodies in his trail to freedom.
Django Unchained is an excellent film. The writing, direction, acting and soundtrack are powerful. And while it’s poised to be at the receiving end of many accolades this awards season, the best, most lasting impression it can leave is to change conversations and common narratives (even fictional ones) so that whitewashing our history becomes impossible.
— Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
On the surface Bellflower seems very much like a film made by men, for men. Staring director Evan Glodell, and shot on homemade cameras, the film begins by following Woodrow (Glodell) and his buddy Aiden as they build flame throwers from scratch to outfit their imaginary post-apocalyptic gang “Mother Medusa.” But while watching the film, the stereotypical “dude” exterior quickly wilts away and you are left watching an original, intimate portrayal of a love gone wrong; a love gone, horrifically, violently, and very engagingly wrong. The film ultimately defies gender constraints by showing complex characters that are developed much more than in a typical Hollywood film.
While the film starts by focusing its attention on Woodrow and Aiden’s weapon building, it is not actually about that. The film is actually about Woodrow and Milly. Woodrow first meets Milly at a local bar, where they are both casually hanging with their friends. When the bar introduces a cricket eating competition, both Woodrow and Milly flirt their way up on stage, chomp on those disgusting bugs, and end up in each other’s hearts. The next night they go on their first official date, which they spontaneously turn into a road trip from southern California to a Texas greasy spoon for barbeque. They seem like the perfect match. Both are young, impulsive, pretty hipsters, who are witty, sarcastic, and they enjoy completely launching themselves into the depths of an instant relationship with no reservations.
Milly and Woodrow
The problem comes when these two love birds attempt to settle down and turn their whirlwind romance into a stable, domestic relationship. Milly prophetically warns Woodrow that she is often the one who hurts the other person when in a relationship, but through his rose-colored glasses Woodrow doesn’t believe her. Woodrow becomes smothering, and Milly’s knee jerk reaction is cheating on him, and, ultimately choosing her previous free-spirited lifestyle over Woodrow’s stifling affection. After their heated break-up, an accident leaves Woodrow in the hospital with plenty of time to recover and wallow in his self-pity.
Here is where the ingenuity of Bellflower really begins to take shape. While a different film might follow Woodrow’s plotting to get back at Milly or, more optimistically, try to win her back, these scenarios do not happen here. Woodrow tries to pour himself back in to his work (after all, that car with built-in flamethrowers isn’t going to assemble itself), and even tries to date a friend, Courtney, who has been throwing herself at him. But none of it works, and he cannot get over Milly. He seems to snap suddenly, and wants revenge. Milly is ready for him, and after his attack, she engages with him in an ever-escalating sequence of vengeance. Both Milly and Woodward become monsters: they are unpredictable, and are hell-bent on permanently damaging each other. The film takes a decided turn from romance, to horror, along with buckets of blood, and bodies piling up.
A turn from romance to horror.
This sharp turn in tone is what makes Bellflower memorable. It is impulsive, and does not follow the typical conventions of narrative cinema. However, what makes the film successful in this execution is the extensive character development.
All of the characters in the film are complete, flawed, and at times vulnerable. We get a rare insight into the heart-to-hearts between Aiden and Woodrow. We also can see the internal conflict in Milly as she is torn between being tied down to a man she clearly loves, and the love of her independent life. Both the women and the men are portrayed as actual people, and not single-dimensional caricatures.
Additionally, the treatment of both women and men in respect to their gender portrayals is like a breath of fresh air. Though Aiden and Woodrow spend their time doing typically masculine activities in their workshop, they are doing it because they are unnaturally obsessed with Mad Max, and not because they are acting the part of manly men. And while in their shop, they are usually talking about the machines themselves, and occasionally Milly. As a woman in the audience who thinks flamethrowers are pretty bad-ass too, I am not alienated, or made to feel voyeuristic for peering into their world, because Glodell is not creating any reason for me to think that women would be unwelcome here. If you share their love for post-apocalyptic armament, then you are at home here too.
Milly herself is most decidedly a feminine woman, but the flaws in her character are just single elements that make up the larger web of her personality. When you know very little about a character aside from their flaws (think an evil Disney queen), it is easy for the audience to boil their negative aspects down to their demographics, rather than them as individuals. (For example, the evil queen in Snow White essentially communicates that all older women are evil and will punish people for being younger and more feminine than they are. That read of the queen’s character seems one dimensional, because the character of the queen is in fact one dimensional.) But when the audience is presented with multifaceted character, as Milly is presented, it is impossible to boil her down to an archetype. Milly is a woman scorned, but she is so much more than that. She is a fun loving free spirit, and a cricket eater, and a road trip enthusiast, too. If Hollywood made more of an effort to make these complex characters available for actresses, we would all benefit.
The one caveat to the glowing review of Bellflower’s equitable gender representation is the character of Courtney. She clings to Woodrow, is obviously jealous of Milly, and it is ultimately this obsession that leads to her demise. Courtney is one of the minor characters in the film, and I can only hope that were she given more screen time, she would have been additionally fleshed out and her character would have been more nuanced. Glodell has shown how well he can construct a character, but he needs to work on making even his minor characters avoid stereotypical gender pitfalls.
By showing the complexity of emotions, and human interaction, Glodell takes what could have been a simple revenge flick and makes it a film that sticks with you for some time.
Deirdre Crimmins lives in Boston with her husband and two black cats. She wrote her Master’s thesis on George Romero and works too much.
