Only one of the Best Actress nominations is from one of the Best Picture nominees, whereas four of the five Best Actor nominations are for Best Picture-nominated films. As I wrote in 2013, this trend suggests that movies with significant roles for women aren’t considered as great or important by the Academy. This year, it is even worse: four of the five Best Actresses were in movies not nominated outside of the acting categories.
White hands holding Oscar statuettes.
Nominations for the 87th Academy Awards came out today, and I should have been on the edge of my seat. I normally completely buy into all the Oscars hype. But this awards season just hasn’t been doing it for me, and now that the Oscar noms are out the stage is set for the Boringest Academy Awards In History (or at least since that year Lord of the Rings won everything).
Honestly, the most exciting nomination to me is “Everything is Awesome” getting a nod for Best Original Song. But everything is not awesome on this nominees list:
Eight out of the nine Best Picture nominees are primarily about white dudes. Two of them are historical dramas about real life white dude geniuses.
Selma, the only Best Picture nominee about people of color, was shut out in all the other major categories (its director Ava DuVernay would have been the first Black woman nominated in the category).
Snubbed Selma director Ava DuVernay
All of the acting nominees are white.
Nominees include Whitest Man Alive Benedict Cumberbatch
There are no women nominated for best director or in either screenplay category.
Only one of the Best Actress nominations is from one of the Best Picture nominees, whereas four of the five Best Actor nominations are for Best Picture-nominated films. As I wrote in 2013, this trend suggests that movies with significant roles for women aren’t considered as great or important by the Academy. This year, it is even worse: four of the five Best Actresses were in movies not nominated outside of the acting categories.
Still Alice shut out aside from Julianne Moore’s nomination for Best Actress
Note that the one Best Actress nominee from a Best Picture nominee is Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything, as the love interest to White Dude Genius #2.
And aside from my disappointment at the total lack of representation in the slate of nominees, I’m also just BORED by these movies. The Grand Budapest Hotel tied with Birdmanfor total number of nominations. The Grand Budapest Hotel was released all the way back in February, before last year’s Oscars even aired, and I had no idea it was even in contention. And I still have no idea why. I fell asleep trying to watch that movie no less than three times. I thought Boyhood was mediocre (although I’m glad Patricia Arquette was nominated). Birdman was great, but I’d rather be rooting for it as an offbeat dark horse instead of a front runner in an incredibly weak field.
The Grand Budapest Ambien
The past few years I’ve mounted my own attempts at what Sarah D. Bunting calls the “Oscars Death Race” by trying to see every nominated film. I’ve never even come close to succeeding (it is hard to do in any circumstance, but basically impossible in South Africa), but through the effort I’ve seen a lot of great movies I would have otherwise missed. (I also subjected myself to The Wolf of Wall Street, but it has still been a net positive.)
I’m not sure I’m going to even bother this year. I mean, maybe one or both of the White Dude Genius Period Piece movies will actually turn out to be lovely. Maybe American Sniper will be this year’s Captain Phillips, a “dad movie” that is actually an incredibly well-crafted piece of cinema. Maybe Whiplash, which I honestly had not even heard of before today, will be my favorite movie of the year.
For all I know, Whiplash could be the greatest film of all time.
But I’m not optimistic. My love of Awards Season pomp and circumstance is waning in the face of my growing cynicism about Hollywood. Do I really want to throw more money at movies about white dudes just because the white dudes in the Academy voted for them? Maybe I should save my Oscars Death Race bib for next year.
How do you feel about the Oscar nominations? What would you have rather seen get recognition this year?
It’s not just seeing a badass chick beat the wide ties off of sexist dudes with a stapler that makes ‘Agent Carter’ so gratifying (although that’s a big part of it). I’ve been lucky enough to live my adult life in a post-‘Xena’ and ‘Buffy’ world where I can count on a fairly steady stream of ladies who can kick butt in my media. I think the heart of what makes ‘Agent Carter’ feel like a feminist triumph is that we are watching a would-be love interest as the hero of her own story
Promo image for ‘Agent Carter’
Let me be perfectly clear: I loved the premiere of Marvel’s Agent Carter. I was already a huge fan of the character from the Captain America movies and her Marvel One-Shot short film, and these first two episodes of her new TV series lived up to my high expectations.
The best word I can think of to describe the show is satisfying. Watching it feels like slipping into a warm bubble bath or necking an ice-cold beer. Or doing both at the same time. And you have a pizza.
Agent Carter at work.
It’s New York, 1946, and Hayley Atwell’s Peggy Carter is an agent with the Strategic Scientific Reserve. Despite her clout during the war, she’s now the sole female agent in her office and is treated as a secretary. Enter Howard Stark with a secret mission for her to clear his name while saving the world from his stolen weaponry, and Agent Carter has a lot of spying and fighting to do on top of her usual daily sassing of her sexist co-workers. She puts chauvinist jerks in their place, she kicks guys in the face, and she looks great (and I mean great) doing it: “weaponized femininity” is laid on so thick here she actually knocks a guy out with her “Sweet Dreams” spy lipstick.
I might leave my husband for this gold dress.
But it’s not just seeing a badass chick beat the wide ties off of sexist dudes with a stapler that makes Agent Carter so gratifying (although that’s a big part of it). I’ve been lucky enough to live my adult life in a post-Xena and Buffy world where I can count on a fairly steady stream of ladies who can kick butt in my media.
But I think the heart of what makes Agent Carter feel like a feminist triumph is that we are watching a would-be love interest as the hero of her own story. As tumblr user mcpricekissed put it:
it would be so cool to have a superhero movie or a show where the story starts with a hero kicking ass but then he dies and his so called love interest takes over and finishes off his job oh wait that’s literally happening with agent carter
Peggy mourns Steve Rogers the way male action heroes morn their tragically dead wives/girlfriends/daughters. Captain America himself is this woman’s tragic backstory. Re-positioning Peggy as the central character this way is not only satisfying from a feminist perspective, it also helps overcome the also-ran status of a TV tie-in to a billion dollar film franchise.
Peggy after Captain America’s “death” in The First Avenger
Unfortunately, the show still felt the need to kill off a supporting female character in the pilot to add to Peggy’s guilt pile, either because we know Cap isn’t really dead, or because there is some obscure Writers Guild bylaw where the blood of a female character must be spilt in the first episode of any action series to appease the cruel and vicious gods of television.
And here’s where I get to the rub with Agent Carter. While the first word I use to describe it is satisfying, the second is indulgent. This is feel-good feminism knocking down cartoonishly chauvinist straw men from the Bad Old Days, so we can pat ourselves on the back for how far we’ve come, and not worry about the complicated problems of the present. But just because something feminist is set in the 1940s doesn’t mean it has to embody old-fashioned feminism, with its total disregard for all the other systems of oppression that intersect with the patriarchy.
Agent Carter‘s simple representation of the patriarchy: chauvinist co-workers
But just as several clever feminist commentators worried it would be, Agent Carter‘s feminism is fairly one-dimensional. There are little glimmers of commentary on class and disability, but both as they specifically relate to the post-war era. Where the show really fails is race, with its all-white cast and absurd under/mis-use of its only person of color with a speaking role in these two episodes, Andre Royo’s Harlem night club owner who is a) in cahoots with the bad guys and b) ends up dead.
love it when a show set in the late ’40s/early ’50s RELENTLESSLY addresses misogyny against white women but ignores race while using people of color as expendable villains
it’s just great
There are six more episodes of Agent Carter, and hopefully we’ll see improved representation and more thoughtful, truer feminism as the season progresses. If not, then I, as a white feminist who tries not to be a White Feminist, will face the arduous task of forcing myself to not unconditionally love Agent Carter.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who is now shopping for a red hat.
Examining my sexist reaction to this season of ‘MasterChef’ made me realize the pervasive role of gender expectations in the series. ‘MasterChef’ distinguishes itself from other cooking reality competition shows by focusing on “home cooks” without any formal training.
This repost by Robin Hitchcock appears as part of our theme week on Reality TV.
Being a feminist can be hard, like when it interferes with my god-given right to irrationally hate reality TV contestants. The “love-to-hate” feeling is basically the entire point of watching reality television. There is no room for guilty consciences. And yet, this past season of MasterChef USA forced me and my partner to wrestle with why we were hating on our least favorite contestants, because the obvious answer was that we’re sexist jerks.
Contestants from Season 5 of MasterChef USA make shocked faces.
Examining my sexist reaction to this season of MasterChef made me realize the pervasive role of gender expectations in the series. MasterChef distinguishes itself from other cooking reality competition shows by focusing on “home cooks” without any formal training. Between traditional gendered work divisions regarding who cooks at home (somehow persisting even in the era of the “foodie”), and the rampant sexism of the professional culinary industry, the line between “home cooks” and “chefs” is undeniably gendered.
But the MasterChef producers have done their best to obscure this dynamic: there are a roughly equal number of male and female contestants at the start of each series; and over five seasons, the collective male/female breakdown between the top ten, top five, and top three contestants stays close to 50-50 (26-24 women-to-men in the top ten, 12-13 in the top five, and 8-7 in the top three). This steady equality might be the result of some producer meddling, but MasterChef contestants are never explicitly separated into gender ranks (whereas on the long-running Hell’s Kitchen, also hosted by Gordon Ramsay, has a “boys team” and “girls team” for the bulk of each season, but not necessarily a steady rate of loss from each side as one team is generally made safe from elimination in each episode).
MasterChef season 5’s top three (from left): Courtney, Leslie, and Elizabeth
This hasn’t stopped the MasterChef contestants from breaking into gendered ranks. A recurring theme is for male contestants to look down on creating desserts and baking as lesser talents, and to dismiss their female competitors’ successes in those challenges. The quintessential example is the first-season elimination of would-be front-runner Sharone, a cocksure Finance Dude, by Whitney, the Personification of Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice, in a challenge to bake a chocolate souffle. Sharone’s attempts to “elevate the dish” (the second most liver-damaging item on the MasterChef drinking game, after Gordon Ramsay using “most amazing” to describe an ingredient) with sea salt backfired, and Whitney’s straightforward but perfectly executed souffle carried her forward to become the first US MasterChef winner. In his exit interview, Sharone expressed lament that “the pastry princess” had the chance to knock him from the competition in a baking challenge.
Season 1’s “Pastry Princess” Whitney
The High Cuisine Pretenders of MasterChef, who scoff at “rustic” challenges to make comfort food and awkwardly attempt molecular gastronomy, have been nearly exclusively male contestants. They are not there to be crowned “the best home cook in America,” they are there to be discovered as culinary geniuses. These guys usually flame out before the top 10. But notably, even the more grounded male competitors usually say they will use their winnings to open a restaurant, while the women in the competition often focus on the opportunity of the winner’s published cookbook, and see the $250,000 prize as a financial break rather than a seed investment.
The “this will change my life” reality TV cliche applies neatly to the MasterChef Season 5 HitchDied Hateoff. My most-hated contestant, season-winner Courtney, leaned on this trope with all her weight. My husband’s most-hated contestant, Leslie (second-runner up), was notably privileged and “didn’t need” the winnings.
Leslie, no doubt dreaming of his yacht
But this is not just a matter of haves and have-nots, because of what Courtney and Leslie each do for a living. Leslie is a stay-at-home father with a very successful wife. Or, as fellow contestant Cutter put it, “an ex-beautician house bitch.”
Courtney, per her talking head caption, is an aerial dancer. But in her own words, she frames her work as the desperate choice of a woman struggling to make ends meet: “I’ve done things I’m not proud of. No being able to pay my rent, I made the difficult, embarrassing decision to work in a gentleman’s club.”
Courtney shown with her job title, aerial dancer
And so the HitchDied Hate-off for MasterChef Season 5 became mired in dueling accusations of antifeminism. Collin would insist it is not that Leslie is a metrosexual stay-at-home dad that makes him unlikable, but that he’s haughty phony. I would insist that I don’t judge Courtney for her job, just her attitude about it. (Neither of us could get away with saying we hate them for being untalented chefs or cruel competitors, they both clearly deserved their success on the show.)
Runner-up Elizabeth says, “If Courtney wins this… I’m going to stab kittens”
But I also made fun of Courtney for her aggressively performed femininity (her kitchen uniform is poufy dresses and towering heels) and breathy baby voice, and I can’t deny the sexism in finding these “girly” traits annoying. Especially because I’m a big fan of poufy dresses myself, and might wear towering heels if I weren’t so clumsy. (I thought maybe the heels were to “keep in shape for work,” but aerial dancers perform barefoot, right?) MasterChef‘s narrative didn’t let me feel alone in my hate: other female contestants (including runner-up Elizabeth) complained in their talking heads that Courtney benefited from favoritism from the judges, something we never heard when former Miss Delaware Jennifer came out on top of season 2. So why is Courtney so specially hate-able? Do we hate her because she’s beautiful? Do we hate her because she does sex work? Do we hate her because she’s a girly girl? Is there some other answer here that doesn’t make me a bad feminist for hating Courtney?
Gif of camera zooming in on Courtney’s glittering high heels
And is my internalized misogyny to blame, or the MasterChef producers for exploiting it? I couldn’t tell you what any of the other contestants in four seasons of MasterChef wore on their feet, because they didn’t cut ShoeCam every time they walked their dish to the judges. Judge Joe Bastianich bizarrely wears running shoes with his super fancy suits, and I think that took me three seasons to notice. But we saw more of Courtney’s shoes than we saw of some contestant’s faces. It seemed like a sneaky way for the producers to remind us “Courtney is a stripper!” in between her self-shaming confessions, because reality TV producers would see a woman being “saved” from sex work the greatest possible form of the “this will change my life” narrative.
So it goes. Courtney gets her trophy and cookbook, the producers get their “provocative” storyline, Leslie probably has enough money to do whatever he wants anyway, and the HitchDieds will continue irrationally hating reality show contestants despite our feminist misgivings.
Have you ever hated-to-hate a reality TV contestant? Have you caught yourself hating people on TV for sexist reasons?
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town and slightly-better-than-mediocre home cook.
The complete series of ‘Friends’ is coming to Netflix Jan. 1, 2015, and I’m sure many of you are planning to spend your NYE hangover with the old gang. Lucky for you, I started my personal ‘Friends’ series rewatch in September, and finished last night, just in time to warn you of some of the pitfalls you may experience over the coming months.
The cast of Friends
The complete series of Friends is coming to Netflix Jan. 1, 2015, and I’m sure many of you are planning to spend your NYE hangover with the old gang. Lucky for you, I started my personal Friends series rewatch in September, and finished last night, just in time to warn you of some of the pitfalls you may experience over the coming months:
1. Watching Friends means confronting 10 years of fashion mistakes.
Sadly this was not a trend.
“The Rachel” is only the beginning of this fashion shame. From the denim vests and cropped sweaters of season one to the handkerchief dresses of season 10, it is a whirlwind of everything you ever tried to pull off but could not. If you are like me, however, this is not so much of a warning as a promise. I especially liked being reminded of trends I’d forgotten, like those shirts with a pointless seam above the boobs, or that year when hard nipples were the must-have accessory.
2. The writers fail Phoebe time and time again.
Phoebe Buffay is a really cool person
Phoebe Buffay is a classic sitcom weird-o, and Lisa Kudrow is maybe the most talented member of the cast of Friends, but the writers didn’t know what to do with her other than make her say kooky things. The other characters get storylines and character arcs and romances and career changes and she gets to sing “Smelly Cat” a bunch of times. The best plot Phoebe gets is having triplets as a surrogate for her brother, and that was brought about by Kudrow’s real-life pregnancy. As the series winds down, it seems the writers suddenly realized that Phoebe’s been under-served, so they “make up for it” by quickly marrying her off to Paul Rudd. Because nothing says “character development” like filing joint tax returns.
3. Could this show BE any more homophobic?
It is funny because they are dudes and they are touching.
The very concept of homosexuality apparently topped the writers “never not funny” list. Ross’s ex-wife left him for a woman. EDGY! THIS AIN’T YOUR GRANDMA’S SITCOM! Everyone thinks Chandler is gay when they first meet him. HILARS! Joey and Chandler’s friendship resembles a romantic relationship. HEE HAW. Chandler’s dad is a gay drag performer in Las Vegas. CAST KATHLEEN TURNER IN THE ROLE! BRILLIANT!
The gay “humor” on the show is probably its most dated aspect (and that includes all the denim vests!) and it’s more pervasive than I would have thought (especially in the earlier seasons). If you hate the idea of homosexuality as an alleged punchline, don’t rewatch Friends.
4. It is even whiter than you remember.
There’s pretty much just Aisha Tyler’s Charlie, and she’s in nine episodes. In the last two seasons.
“Drink every time a person of color appears on Friends” is a drinking game that is safe for pregnant women.
5. You will be forced to care about Ross and Rachel.
Ross and Rachel kiss.
I have flames on the sides of my face level hate for Ross Geller. I was a tender girl of 12 when he first uttered the words “We were on a break,” and that was when I stopped believing in fairytale romance. Watching the show as an adult, you can see from the start there is no fairytale. Ross is a “Nice Guy” who makes himself feel better about being the reacher in his relationship with Rachel by putting her down for her intelligence. Their relationship falls apart entirely because of his jealousy, ostensibly of Rachel’s co-worker Mark, but he’s clearly most threatened by Rachel’s career. It’s a bad relationship. And Ross is pretty much a bad dude.
And watching Friends means signing up to ride this rollercoaster of toxic romance for 10 seasons. And you will get caught up in that ride sometimes, and you’ll hate yourself for it. The near-romance between Rachel and Joey was the only thing that had the chance to break the spell, but it was thrown under the bus so Joey could be single for his spinoff. Getting married couldn’t keep Ross and Rachel together. Having a baby couldn’t keep Ross and Rachel together. But the power of a series finale could.
6. It’s still really good.
Friends clapping!
If you can handle the above, then you’ll have a lot of good to take with the bad. The chemistry between the cast is as magical as you remember it, the writing takes sitcom tropes to their zenith, and now you’ll have a nice side of nostalgia to go along with it. So as you enjoy/tolerate the holidays, keep in mind that Friends is waiting for you on the other side of the New Year.
Happy viewing!
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa. Her favorite friend is Joey.
I know, I know, you are tired of hearing about Manic Pixie Dream Girls. We feminist critics, we’re always Manic Pixie This, Bechdel Test That, Sexual Objectification of the Other Thing. And I’m tired of hearing about Manic Pixies too, but I’m even more tired of seeing them.
I know, I know, you are tired of hearing about Manic Pixie Dream Girls. We feminist critics, we’re always Manic Pixie This, Bechdel Test That, Sexual Objectification of the Other Thing. And I’m tired of hearing about Manic Pixies too, but I’m even more tired of seeing them.
Ansel Elgort and Shailene Woodley in The Fault in Our Stars
So tired, that when the elusive Manic Pixie Dream Boy appeared on my seatback video player on the long trip back to Cape Town last week, I was so annoyed by him I almost had to turn off The Fault in Our Stars even though I had 12 hours of flight time to fill.
TFiOS’s Augustus Waters is so much of a Manic Pixie he appears on the Wikipedia page for the concept. He’s handsome, “charming,” aggressively quirky. He fully embraces life’s glorious mysteries, he’s completely devoted (for reasons we don’t need to worry about) to the protagonist, and to making her also embrace life’s glorious mysteries (including his boners). He calls her by her first and middle names, Hazel Grace, because of course he does.
Gus Waters smirks. Always.
John Green, author of the YA novel the film is based on, responds that he was trying to make Gus the kind of character who seems perfect until you realize his whole life is a performance: (this quotation is from a weird podcast over soccer video game playing, so it’s edited down quite a bit):
I don’t think that Gus is really very much like those characters at all. I mean certainly he starts out I think as, you know, as most romantic leads do… like very sort of improbably charming and precocious and quick on his feet…to seem cooler than cool, you know.
I think in a lot of ways Gus is one of those guys who like, the first time you meet him you’re like “that guy’s amazing” and then the second time you meet him you’re like “that guy only has five funny stories about himself” those people who are sort of very performed in their lives… they have those performative qualities but… their charisma is… somewhat superficial and certainly that’s the case with Gus.
This character actually sounds really interesting, if not totally original (I immediately thought of Justin Theroux’s character on Parks and Recreation). And I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know if these nuances came across in the text, but in the film adaptation, it’s clear they stopped at “cooler than cool” with their characterization of Gus.
Gus is the worst.
And boy, was I ever irritated with him. He’s the human equivalent of scraping your teeth on a popsicle stick. Everything he does is put-on nonsense he’ll defend in a wordy speech delivered through a perma-smerk. For example: he likes putting unlit cigarettes in his mouth as a “metaphor”: “you put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.” Ohhhhhkay buddy.
He’s also from the “Pushy and Persistent” school of wooing, as well documented by Matt Patches in this piece for Vulture. Gus repeatedly disregards Hazel’s rejections because he’s too in love to be held back by something as pesky as her feelings. It’s one of those things where you change the music and it becomes a horror movie, and next thing you know Gus is killing Hazel’s pets.
Dun dun DUN!
But. My hatred of Gus Waters comes from the perspective of a 30-year-old woman. The intended audience for this character is teenagers. And I can assure you, that when I was 16, I would have looooooooved Augustus Waters. I would have sticky-tacked a magazine cutout of Ansel Elgort to my bedroom wall. I would have thought about Gus and Hazel Grace when I heard sad love songs on the radio. I would have written “okay” over and over in the margins of all my school notebooks.
I actually went and looked at my diary from when I was 15 (I wrote it on my computer, like Doogie Howser, so I still have an electronic copy), knowing I had made a list of 80-odd things that at the time I thought would make me fall in love with a boy: “He’s fascinated with old maps.” “He can turn a trip to the grocery store into a grand adventure.” “He uses antiquated slang.” I wanted to fall in love with an enthusiastic pile of affectations. I wanted Gus Waters. I wanted a Manic Pixie Dream Boy.
But Teenage Robin would have wanted this.
And I’m no adolescent psychologist, but I think it’s OK for us to have our Manic Pixie fantasies when we’re teens. One of the things I hate most about the MPDG trope is how she is often infantilized to make the man feel above his arrested adolescence while simultaneously making him “feel alive” by encouraging him to continue doing childlike things (committing impromptu misdemeanors and such). This problem really only applies to adults. I’ve gotta say I more or less support teenagers encouraging each other to be little shits, especially teenagers who had to “grow up too soon” because of illness. (Remind me I’ve written this should I ever have to bail out my teenage kid from jail after they egg someone’s house.)
Moreover, as much as I internally screamed, “Who does that!?” at Gus Waters’ antics, the answer is: teenagers do that. A lot of teenagers are performative and forced-quirky, because they haven’t figured out who they really are, or even if they have aren’t sure it is okay to be that person. And while the overlap between normal teenage behavior and that of a Manic Pixie makes the original trope all the more disturbing, it does make me feel like I should let Gus Waters off the hook. So teenagers, doodle hearts around his name all you want. Someday you’ll realize what a tool he is.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who is glad she grew out of being a teenager.
‘Birdman’ bears striking similarities to ‘Black Swan,’ both in the broad strokes—each follow their protagonist’s slipping grip on sanity in the days before a high pressure stage debut—and in a strange number of superficial details—hallucinations of menacing black winged creatures, “surprise” lesbian scenes, and ambiguous suicides at least partially showcased on stage.
This review contains spoilers for both Birdman and Black Swan.
Michael Keaton in Birdman
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) bears striking similarities to Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan, both in the broad strokes—each follow their protagonist’s slipping grip on sanity in the days before a high pressure stage debut—and in a strange number of superficial details—hallucinations of menacing black winged creatures, “surprise” lesbian scenes, and ambiguous suicides at least partially showcased on stage. Of course, these two films differ in many ways, most significantly in tone (Birdman is a black comedy, Black Swan is a chilling psychodrama if not an outright horror movie). It is in these departures that we see the significance of gender in stories about identity, art, and mental illness.
1. Phase of life
Riggan in front of his dressing room mirror in Birdman
Birdman‘s Riggan Thomson is a fading movie star, years after playing the title character in a series of superhero blockbusters (casting Michael Keaton in the role deepens the character tenfold). The play at the center of the film is his own adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which he is also directing and starring in. This vanity project is Riggan’s hope to change his legacy, to transform from the kind of has-been actor who gets attention from tourists to the kind of eternally relevant artist who gets respect from theatre critics.
Nina in front of a mirror in Black Swan
Where Riggan is in the twilight of his career, Black Swan shows Nina Sayers is at the dawn of hers, as she ascends from the corps to play the Swan Queen in Swan Lake. Nina’s transformation over the course of the film is partially a metaphor for her belated sexual awakening and maturation from girl to woman. This becoming is the crucial moment in Nina’s life; she will never face Riggan’s struggle to stay relevant. As we see from the prima ballerina Nina replaces, Winona Ryder’s Beth Turner, there is no option to age gracefully. This is why, even as Nina apparently dies at the end of the film, it is “perfect.”
2. Perfection vs. Superpowers
Riggan’s first appears in Birdman, impossibly levitating
It is the pressure to be perfect that pulls Nina apart in Black Swan. Not only the physical rigors and intense competition of professional ballet, but the paradoxical obligations of womanhood as represented through her dual role as the Swan Queen and Black Swan. But Riggan doesn’t want to be perfect, he wants to be exceptional. His delusions of his superhuman abilities are his way of reassuring himself that his existence is noteworthy, that he matters, that he deserves to be remembered.
Nina finds herself sprouting feathers
Nina hallucinates body horrors and birdlike transformations reminding her of the separation between her human self and the perfection required for her role. Riggan has easily incorporated superhuman abilities into his sense of self. As a man, he is entitled to do so. Nina’s are horrific transformations as she loses her sense of self.
3. Rivals
Mila Kunis as Lily in Black Swan
Although early marketing for Black Swan played up the “rivalry” between Nina and Mila Kunis’s Lily, Lily is not so important to the plot as she is a character foil for Nina. Lily represents the raw sexuality and effortless grace that Nina’s drive for perfection precludes her from acheiving. Lily is the Natural Beauty, the girl who can eat hamburgers and stay ballerina slim, party all night and still be perky and gorgeous in the morning, who you’ll never see touching up her lipstick but she’ll always have a perfect glossy pout. No matter how hard Nina works, she’ll never best Lily, because she’s less than her just by having to work for it at all.
Edward Norton as the difficult Method actor Mike Shiner in Birdman
In Birdman, Riggan’s “rival” is a hotshot actor named Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), even though he is known to be difficult to work with. Mike, a rigorous method actor, is the opposite of Lily: his talent comes from his dedication to his craft. And it is Mike’s well-honed skills that make him threatening to Riggan, who landed his career through charisma, good looks, and luck. That’s not the fame Riggan wants. It is the fame of a woman, and he knows he cannot carry it into old age and beyond (see Beth Turner). As a man, Riggan is not only allowed to “work for” his success, he even more respectable for doing so.
Just before opening night, Riggan faces off with theatre critic Tabitha Dickinson (Lindsay Duncan), who resents a movie star for taking up Broadway stage space that could go to a real artist. Riggan throws back the usual barbs against critics labeling art without making it: “None of it costs you anything. You risk nothing.” Putting on the airs of the hardworking artist he knows he is not, Riggan sounds just like someone denying their male privilege played any role in their success. Because achieved greatness is the highest virtue for a man.
4. Conclusions (the films’, and mine)
Both Birdman and Black Swan end ambiguously, with their protagonists appearing to die by suicide. In Black Swan, we see Nina’s apparent murder of Lily was not real, and that Nina rather stabbed herself. At that point in the film we’re neck deep in duality symbolism and pretty much all accept Nina attacking herself with a shard of mirror glass is a metaphor for killing the innocent side of herself, especially because girlfriend is one heck of a dancer for a stab victim. But in the final moments first Lily, then director Thomas and the other dancers also see the wound and the audience is left thinking Nina’s suicide must have been real. Because, as I mentioned before, dying after a brilliant debut performance is actually perfect for Nina, because she has nowhere higher to go from there.
Nina’s apparent suicide in Black Swan
In Birdman, Riggan first attempts suicide by replacing a prop gun with a loaded pistol on stage. Apparently, he only shoots off his nose (earning him a superhero’s face mask of bandages). Then, after hearing Tabitha gave him a glowing review and finding personal resolution with his estranged ex-wife, his best friend, and his troubled daughter, he leaps from his hospital room window. When his daughter Sam (Emma Stone) returns to his empty hospital room with an open window, we see her horrified realization that her father probably jumped. But when she looks down to the street level, she appears confused. Then she looks up, to the sky, and her face fills with wonderment. There’s ambiguous hope where Black Swan offers only ambiguous despair. Even in the darkest interpretation, that Riggan actually killed himself on stage and these final scenes aren’t real, we see that Riggan has successfully circumvented his fade to mediocrity. He “wins” in a way that Nina never could.
The more hopefully ambiguous final moment of Birdman
Looking at Birdman and Black Swan as two versions of the same story highlight the immense differences men and women face in life and in art, in expectation and in reality. It is in large part the significance of gender that makes these two movies that seem to have so much in common ultimately turn out to be quite different.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who cannot fly nor grow feathers.
Singer writes of Nolan’s fans’ approach: “If there’s a potential mistake or flaw, it’s always the viewer’s fault, never the film’s (or, Nolan forbid, the director’s).” This is all too familiar in feminist media criticism. How many times do commenters assert we’re “just looking for something to be upset about”; that is our criticism should be attributed to our own over-sensitivity rather than the actual presence of flaws in the subject?
Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar
Christopher Nolan is undeniably an extremely talented filmmaker with a unique voice. He has a high batting average with his movies; for my money his only real stinker is The Prestige, and that still has plenty of fans. Nolan deserves his clout. Interstellar deserves its moment in the cultural spotlight.
But there is something about Christopher Nolan’s movies that warrants a devotion that is just too extreme. As noted in Matt Singer’s Screen Crush article “What Makes Nolan Fans So Intense?”, daring to speak ill of a Nolan film tends to lure the kind of trollish comments that make internet writers wake up with cold sweats. In the case of The Dark Knight Rises, apparently these rose to the level of death threats (particularly harrowing considering the mass murder at a screening of the film in Colorado).
As a feminist internet writer, I’m familiar with nasty commenters. And maybe that is why I suspect a substantial overlap between the Nolan Defense Squad and the Misandry Accusation Squad I know so well. I might be misperceiving this; I certainly don’t have any hard data to back it up. It’s clear that both groups offer plenty to the general pool of internet trolls, but that doesn’t necessitate they overlap themselves. So I look to the underlying motivations of these groups for further support.
“Why so serious?” image from Joker poster for The Dark Knight
Singer aptly characterizes the intensity of Nolan fans by describing their approach to his films’ critics: “If there’s a potential mistake or flaw, it’s always the viewer’s fault, never the film’s (or, Nolan forbid, the director’s).” This is all too familiar in feminist media criticism. How many times do commenters assert we’re “just looking for something to be upset about”; that is, our criticism should be attributed to our own over-sensitivity rather than the actual presence of flaws in the subject?
The similarities don’t stop there. Singer further posits:
“Looking over Nolan’s filmography you see the same archetypal protagonist reappear again and again: the moody loner who is laser-focused on his mission… perhaps Nolan’s subject matter and his preferred sort of hero resonates particularly strongly with the kind of person who might, oh I dunno, feel so passionately about a movie that they would threaten to strangle someone over it.”
What’s more, this archetypal protagonist is also always a man. Sady Doyle’s review of Interstellar described “Christopher Nolan disease”:
“There is a man. He is a sad man. His sadness makes him no less manly. The wife of this man, she is dead now…The man’s sadness, a great struggle conducted in the deep darkness of his soul, fuels his life’s grandest endeavor: The blowing-up of cool shit. In this noble pursuit of the blowing-up of things, the man’s wounds are healed and his masculinity reaffirmed.”
Matthew M crying manly tears.
So not only do we have the celebration of Men with a Higher Purpose, we have the reassurance that unwavering devotion to this Higher Purpose redeems the masculinity of men who succumb to the weakness of emotion in the face of their immense suffering.
I’d add the third prong to Nolan Fan Intensity: that there is intellectual cache in understanding his excruciatingly complex films, and in enjoying their darker themes. If you have to have a profound understanding of theoretical physics to properly appreciate Interstellar, people who like it are smarter than people who don’t. If you can keep track of the layered narratives of Inception and Memento, it proves your cleverness over people who were confused. If the bleak worldview of his Batman trilogy appeals to you more than those other inconsequential “fun” superhero movies, you are a more serious and thoughtful person.
Community’s Troy Barnes tearfully admitting “I didn’t get Inception“
The Misandry Accusation Squad tend to have the same self-satisfied intellectual superiority complex. See: mansplaining, tone policing, unmeetable burdens of proof. And that’s where my glimmers of recognition when it comes to the Nolan Defense Squad become blaring misogynist troll warning klaxons.
A time library or a love boat or a black hole or something.
Let me be very straightforward: I had no idea what was going on for 90 percent of Interstellar, and I don’t really care to spend any more time trying to figure it out. Maybe love was the fifth dimension or maybe it was gravity; maybe black holes are made of tesseracting bookshelves, maybe transporting hundreds of embryos and (presumably) only one uterus in which to gestate them on the ark to save humanity was a totally great Plan B.
(While I’m at it: Nikola Tesla was not a sorcerer. Your daddy issues cannot be resolved by opening a dream safe. You probably couldn’t be a superhero even if you were a billionaire, or at least your broken back would not heal that quickly.)
Nikola Tesla was not a sorcerer.
So, yeah, I’m not smart enough to understand the science or lack thereof in Interstellar. But if you’re going to reject my hypothesis about Nolan fans because I can’t be bothered with theoretical physics, you’re kind of proving it for me. (Yep, that’s pretty circular logic. So is a lot of the bootstrap paradox nonsense going on in Interstellar.)
Do you think misogynist trolls and the Nolan Defense Squad overlap, or do they independently share a lot of traits? Do you have other explanations for their similarities?
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who firmly believes she did get Inception.
To my fellow Americans, happy election week! (Or, depending on your politics and your jurisdiction, unhappy election week.) I thought I’d celebrate by revisiting one of my favorite political thrillers, 2000’s ‘The Contender.’ I’m not sure if it is a credit to this film or a knock against America politics that it holds up so well 14 years later. When ‘The Contender’ was released, Hillary Clinton was in the midst of her first Senate campaign. Now, she’s the front-runner to be the democratic nominee in the next presidential election. But ‘The Contender’ still feels extremely relevant.
Image from The Contender movie poster.
To my fellow Americans, happy election week! (Or, depending on your politics and your jurisdiction, unhappy election week). I thought I’d celebrate by revisiting one of my favorite political thrillers, 2000’s The Contender. I’m not sure if it is a credit to this film or a knock against American politics that that it holds up so well 14 years later. When The Contender was released, Hillary Clinton was in the midst of her first Senate campaign. Now, she’s the front-runner to be the democratic nominee in the next presidential election. But The Contender still feels extremely relevant.
You’d think The Contender’s assertion that “A woman will serve in the highest level of the executive. Simple as that!” would feel less bold now, with 14 years and eight elections having passed, aBlack president in his second term and a woman poised to succeed him. But everything we see Joan Allen’s Laine Hanson go through to be confirmed as a vice presidential appointee seems no less plausible in 2014 than it was in 2000.
Joan Allen as Senator Laine Hanson
The Contender sees Jeff Bridges as lame duck president Jackson Evans (what a great fake president name that is) designating a replacement for his deceased vice president. After the presumptive designee gets tangled up in a news story involving an accidental death, he chooses Ohio senator Laine Hanson, daughter of a governor, liberal Republican turned conservative Democrat, mother of one, terrible basketball player. She’s a lifelong public servant, a true believer in American democracy, 100 percent ready to serve at the pleasure of the president despite her concerns the vice presidency will mean a loss of political power.
But she’s surrounded by doubters, in public opinion, in Congress, even within the president’s staff. The symbolic importance of a woman in the office means something to President Evans, and his aides dismiss the historic designation his “swan song.” The members of Congress in her confirmation hearing, led by the repugnant Rep. Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman) speak a lot of “greatness,” doubting that Sen. Hanson has it. It seems rather apparent that at least Runyon believes greatness and womanhood are mutually exclusive. Or at least her womanhood automatically makes her greatness suspect, because surely if “the cancer of affirmative action” were not in play, a man would get the nod.
Gary Oldman as the villainous Rep. Shelly Runyon
This doubt of Sen. Hanson leads to brutal and baldly sexist attacks against her. The tamest of these is probably her being questioned about how she’d handle having a child in office, and the shocked silence that follows her answer “my husband and I practice birth control.” The crux of her oppositions strategy against her is a sex scandal involving her alleged “deviant sexual behavior” (basically, semi-public group sex) at a frat party she attended at the age of 19. Sen. Hanson refuses to dignify these “accusations” with a response because “if I were a man, no one would care how many sexual partners I had in college.” Photographs purporting to show her in the act are published on the internet. She’s ambushed on national television by a man claiming to have been a participant. But she remains steadfast in her refusal to deny or respond to the story, which does nothing to silence it.
Interestingly, it is a second “sex scandal,” one where she does admit to the allegations, that is nearly Sen. Hanson’s undoing. Runyon subpoenas the ex-wife of Hanson’s husband, who reveals his affair with Hanson when he ran her first campaign is what led to their divorce. Hanson admits she slept with another woman’s husband. This comparably “mainstream” sexual indiscretion, which again, would unlikely be seen as particularly relevant to the nomination of a man to the post, almost damns Hanson’s confirmation.
Sen. Hansen’s confirmation hearing
Sen. Hanson’s personal life is the main focus of her confirmation hearings even though she has some political views and personal beliefs that make even her election to the Senate suspect: she’s an atheist, she “stands for every gun taken out of every home, period,” though she’s also a military hawk. But with the exception of her support for reproductive rights and her atheism, her politics don’t seem much of interest to those who oppose her nomination. Both her supporters and her detractors mainly care about the symbolic importance of a woman as vice president.
Ultimately, Sen. Hanson is saved by a plot twist revealed through the investigation of plucky FBI agent Paige Willomina (Kathryn Morris, stealing scenes with her wickedly clever interrogations) that rules out the alternative designee, and President Evans deciding to stick by her and pull on all his charisma and clout to force her confirmation through. In his speech to a joint session of Congress, he says a woman in this office is “an idea whose time has come,” and claims Hanson has all the greatness she was doubted because she refused to play the petty political games to which Runyon and his cronies subjected her.
Jeff Bridges as President Jackson Evans
The Contender succeeds not only as an excoriation of attack politics and sexism against female politicians, but an endorsement of a candidate’s identity being relevant to their qualifications, another way of thinking about the so-called cancer of affirmative action. Something the film does extremely well is deny the myth of meritocracy in national politics. When you’ve got a huge pool of qualified candidates for a position like the vice presidency, “the best person for the job” is rarely if ever going to be a clear choice. After she’s completed her investigation, Agent Willomina begs the president’s chief of staff not to dump Hanson because “She’s hope… hope that there is no double standard. That the goals can be the same.” Hansen being a woman is part of what makes her the best choice for the job.
Fourteen years later, and none of this feels dated (well, the part where a Washington Post reporter literally prints out the faux Drudge Report Internet piece on the sex scandal and acts like he has a scoop is a bit jarring). It all feels pretty depressingly familiar, in fact. As much as I love the film, I wish The Contender didn’t stand up so well to the test of time.
‘Dance Academy’ is a teen soap opera set at a ballet school. So basically, it’s ‘Degrassi’ meets ‘Center Stage.’ That should be enough to have you diving for your remote right now.
The central female characters of Dance Academy
Netflix subscribers, as soon as you’ve gotten through Gilmore Girls (or maybe sooner, should you get GG fatigue once Logan gets in the picture), you need to watch the Australian TV series Dance Academy. My Cape Town bestie KDax has been telling me to watch Dance Academy for months, and now that I’ve finally taken her advice I can only think “so much lost time!” I could be through my third rewatch by now, instead of only having seen one of the three available seasons! Don’t make my mistake: watch this series NOW.
Dance Academy is a teen soap opera set at a ballet school. So basically, it’s Degrassi meets Center Stage. That should be enough to have you diving for your remote right now, but if you need more convincing, here are some more details:
Psst… the joey is a metaphor for Tara!
Tara Webster is a naive 15-year-old girl from the Australian Outback whose talent for ballet has her plucked out of her small-town life and brought to the National Academy of Dance in Sydney. We see her adjust to life in the big city and going from being the best dancer for miles to a small fish in a big, ultra-competitive pond, while going through the standard coming-of-age drama with the rest of her teenage classmates.
The cast of Season One of Dance Academy
There’s her best friend Kat, who grew up in the industry as the daughter of the Sydney Ballet’s prima ballerina, who is as loyal to her friends as she is rebellious against authority. Kat’s older brother, Ethan, is the self-serious choreographer and apparent ladies’ man who Tara instantly crushes on. Kat and Tara’s platonic dude friend is Sammy, equal parts awkward and earnest. Christian, the troubled kid from the wrong side of the tracks, is out on bail after robbing a convenience store (also, distressingly, the only PoC in the main cast of the first season). And finally Tara’s roommate Abigail, the Queen Bitch antagonist, who remains a sympathetic character despite all her cruel manipulations.
If you want love triangles, you got it
While the teen drama plots of Dance Academy are not particularly original, the cast is so natural and likable that the even the most standard material feels fresh. The first season relies very heavily on two intersecting love triangles (I’d say love quadrilateral if two of the points were not siblings, and Dance Academy is not enough of a soap opera to head down Incest Drama Lane). I would have said that another teen love triangle was number one with a bullet on my list of things I never needed to be asked to care about again. But Dance Academy made a liar out of me, by making every character involved compelling, every relationship plausible, and all the shifting degrees of attraction and loyalty make sense within the story.
Similarly, Dance Academy successfully takes on many After School Special-esque “Issue” storylines by committing to the emotion at their core. I was particularly impressed with the handling of the seemingly inevitable eating disorder plot when Abigail responds to her growing breasts with extreme calorie restriction. Dance Academy is able to condemn the ballet world’s absurd body standards without falling into the insulting oversimplification that ballet causes anorexia, and never blames the victim even though she’s the ostensible “villain” of the series. Her eating disorder isn’t confined to a single “Lesson Episode” along the lines of DJ Tanner’s exercise bulimia or Jessie Spano’s “I’m so excited I’m so scared” caffeine addiction; Abigail’s recovery and how it effects her relationships and other emotional issues is an ongoing plot.
Abigail, the sympathetic antagonist.
Oh, and did I mention how whatever ballet they are working on always has symbolic parallels to the plot? I love this show.
Dance Academy does have a handful of awkward fumbles, though, like the cringe-inducing episode where Christian takes Ethan to “the hood” to show him what Real Hip Hop Moves look like. As painful as that was, I wish the series didn’t shy away from class commentary so much. For the first half of the season it feels like Christian only exists as a character so they can “address” class, which is as unfair to the character as it is to the issue. There’s also a huge contrast between Tara’s rural upbringing and the world of privilege most of her classmates come from, but it is rarely acknowledged. The one episode that really deals with Tara’s embarrassment over her “simple country folk” parents swiftly overshadows cultural class differences by making the story about cold hard cash, when Tara’s mom asks her to defer school to save their finances. This problem is immediately solved with a scholarship and never mentioned again. Meanwhile, Kat and Ethan are never called out on their bratty entitlement (Kat’s my favorite character, but when she complains about traveling the world with her famous mother I seethe).
Pretty much any time they do hip hop it is awkward.
But this is just season one, and every time I’ve made a criticism of Dance Academy, KDax has said, “just you wait.” For example, this would be the paragraph where I’d complain about the universally cis-het cast and grumble some more about the general excess of white people, but I know the subsequent seasons are going to attempt to correct these problems.
Given how much I’ve loved this first season of Dance Academy despite its failings, I have high hopes for my ongoing obsession over the next two seasons. Won’t you come and dance with me?
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who had bits of Swan Lake stuck in her head the entire time she was writing this.
Learning that ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ is based on a Japanese work with a Japanese hero with the action set in East Asia really changed my feelings about the resulting film. I actually really enjoyed the movie despite its derivativeness and lapses in sense-making, well-chronicled by my colleague Andé Morgan here. But now it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Because I’m fine with liking an unoriginal and illogical sci-fi movie, but I’m not so cool with liking an unoriginal, illogical, and racist sci-fi movie.
Because turning Keiji Kiriya into William Cage, casting Tom Cruise, moving the action to Western Europe, and casting white people in 98% of the speaking roles are all racist acts perpetuating bullshit white supremacy in Hollywood.
Tom Cruise is A White Dude in ‘Edge of Tomorrow’
I watched Edge of Tomorrow without knowing it was an adaptation. It seems like a movie without source material, because the plot depends on you not thinking too critically about any of the details. (How does this time loop work? Why does it also involve psychic visions? Why are these alien invaders called “mimics” when the only thing they mimic is the Sentinels from The Matrix?)
Edge of Tomorrow is in fact based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel All You Need Is Kill, which was also adapted into a manga of the same name by Ryōsuke Takeuchi and Takeshi Obata. Edge of Tomorrow is SWIMMING in source material.
Cover of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel All You Need Is Kill.
I have read neither the novel nor the manga, but learning that Edge of Tomorrow is based on a Japanese work with a Japanese hero with the action set in East Asia really changed my feelings about the resulting film. I actually really enjoyed the movie despite its derivativeness and lapses in sense-making, well-chronicled by my colleague Andé Morgan here. But now it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Because I’m fine with liking an unoriginal and illogical sci-fi movie, but I’m not so cool with liking an unoriginal, illogical, and racist sci-fi movie.
Because turning Keiji Kiriya into William Cage, casting Tom Cruise, moving the action to Western Europe, and casting white people in 98 percent of the speaking roles are all racist acts perpetuating bullshit white supremacy in Hollywood.
Emily Blunt as Rita Vrataski, the most interesting character.
Sure, there are no Japanese actors as big as Tom Cruise. There are few actors, period, who are as big as Tom Cruise. That didn’t stop Edge of Tomorrow from pretty much tanking at the box office, though. And they could cast their precious white Name Actor as the female lead Rita Vrataski, who is a white American in the book and a white Brit (Emily Blunt) in the film. She’s a more interesting character anyway, and the film would probably benefit from re-centering on her. And maybe a sci-fi movie headlined by a woman and a Japanese man would have gotten more notice from audiences who dismissed Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow as generic enough to wait for home video?
And why change the setting to Europe? What makes that more interesting or dramatic a setting, other than racism? I was reminded of this summer’s Godzilla, which used “increasing whiteness of populations at risk” as its form of raising the dramatic stakes as the monsters trekked across the Pacific Ocean.
Oh man, that is pretty racist.
I need Hollywood to figure out that white people’s lives are not intrinsically more valuable. And that white movies stars are often not as valuable as they’re supposed to be. “Bankability” is not a justification for whitewashing. I’d like to think the weak performance of Edge of Tomorrow might clue Hollywood in on this. Especially because Edge of Tomorrow was saved from being a total bomb by the foreign grosses from the very countries deemed not interesting enough to be the setting of the adaptation (although, notably, there was tepid reception in Japan).
In Edge of Tomorrow, every time Tom Cruise’s character dies he learns from his mistakes. But when a movie like it dies at the box office, Hollywood just shrugs and says “it probably needed more white people.”
Being a feminist can be hard, like when it interferes with my god-given right to irrationally hate reality TV contestants. The “love-to-hate” feeling is basically the entire point of watching reality television. There is no room for guilty consciences. And yet, this past season of ‘MasterChef USA’ forced me and my partner to wrestle with why we were hating on our least favorite contestants, because the obvious answer was that we’re sexist jerks.
Being a feminist can be hard, like when it interferes with my god-given right to irrationally hate reality TV contestants. The “love-to-hate” feeling is basically the entire point of watching reality television. There is no room for guilty consciences. And yet, this past season of MasterChef USA forced me and my partner to wrestle with why we were hating on our least favorite contestants, because the obvious answer was that we’re sexist jerks.
Contestants from Season 5 of MasterChef USA make shocked faces.
Examining my sexist reaction to this season of MasterChef made me realize the pervasive role of gender expectations in the series. MasterChef distinguishes itself from other cooking reality competition shows by focusing on “home cooks” without any formal training. Between traditional gendered work divisions regarding who cooks at home (somehow persisting even in the era of the “foodie”), and the rampant sexism of the professional culinary industry, the line between “home cooks” and “chefs” is undeniably gendered.
But the MasterChef producers have done their best to obscure this dynamic: there are a roughly equal number of male and female contestants at the start of each series; and over five seasons, the collective male/female breakdown between the top ten, top five, and top three contestants stays close to 50-50 (26-24 women-to-men in the top ten, 12-13 in the top five, and 8-7 in the top three). This steady equality might be the result of some producer meddling, but MasterChef contestants are never explicitly separated into gender ranks (whereas on the long-running Hell’s Kitchen, also hosted by Gordon Ramsay, has a “boys team” and “girls team” for the bulk of each season, but not necessarily a steady rate of loss from each side as one team is generally made safe from elimination in each episode).
MasterChef season 5’s top three (from left): Courtney, Leslie, and Elizabeth
This hasn’t stopped the MasterChef contestants from breaking into gendered ranks. A recurring theme is for male contestants to look down on creating desserts and baking as lesser talents, and to dismiss their female competitors’ successes in those challenges. The quintessential example is the first-season elimination of would-be front-runner Sharone, a cocksure Finance Dude, by Whitney, the Personification of Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice, in a challenge to bake a chocolate souffle. Sharone’s attempts to “elevate the dish” (the second most liver-damaging item on the MasterChef drinking game, after Gordon Ramsay using “most amazing” to describe an ingredient) with sea salt backfired, and Whitney’s straightforward but perfectly executed souffle carried her forward to become the first US MasterChef winner. In his exit interview, Sharone expressed lament that “the pastry princess” had the chance to knock him from the competition in a baking challenge.
Season 1’s “Pastry Princess” Whitney
The High Cuisine Pretenders of MasterChef, who scoff at “rustic” challenges to make comfort food and awkwardly attempt molecular gastronomy, have been nearly exclusively male contestants. They are not there to be crowned “the best home cook in America,” they are there to be discovered as culinary geniuses. These guys usually flame out before the top 10. But notably, even the more grounded male competitors usually say they will use their winnings to open a restaurant, while the women in the competition often focus on the opportunity of the winner’s published cookbook, and see the $250,000 prize as a financial break rather than a seed investment.
The “this will change my life” reality TV cliche applies neatly to the MasterChef Season 5 HitchDied Hateoff. My most-hated contestant, season-winner Courtney, leaned on this trope with all her weight. My husband’s most-hated contestant, Leslie (second-runner up), was notably privileged and “didn’t need” the winnings.
Leslie, no doubt dreaming of his yacht
But this is not just a matter of haves and have-nots, because of what Courtney and Leslie each do for a living. Leslie is a stay-at-home father with a very successful wife. Or, as fellow contestant Cutter put it, “an ex-beautician house bitch.”
Courtney, per her talking head caption, is an aerial dancer. But in her own words, she frames her work as the desperate choice of a woman struggling to make ends meet: “I’ve done things I’m not proud of. No being able to pay my rent, I made the difficult, embarrassing decision to work in a gentleman’s club.”
Courtney shown with her job title, aerial dancer
And so the HitchDied Hate-off for MasterChef Season 5 became mired in dueling accusations of antifeminism. Collin would insist it is not that Leslie is a metrosexual stay-at-home dad that makes him unlikable, but that he’s haughty phony. I would insist that I don’t judge Courtney for her job, just her attitude about it. (Neither of us could get away with saying we hate them for being untalented chefs or cruel competitors, they both clearly deserved their success on the show.)
Runner-up Elizabeth says, “If Courtney wins this… I’m going to stab kittens”
But I also made fun of Courtney for her aggressively performed femininity (her kitchen uniform is poufy dresses and towering heels) and breathy baby voice, and I can’t deny the sexism in finding these “girly” traits annoying. Especially because I’m a big fan of poufy dresses myself, and might wear towering heels if I weren’t so clumsy. (I thought maybe the heels were to “keep in shape for work,” but aerial dancers perform barefoot, right?) MasterChef‘s narrative didn’t let me feel alone in my hate: other female contestants (including runner-up Elizabeth) complained in their talking heads that Courtney benefited from favoritism from the judges, something we never heard when former Miss Delaware Jennifer came out on top of season 2. So why is Courtney so specially hate-able? Do we hate her because she’s beautiful? Do we hate her because she does sex work? Do we hate her because she’s a girly girl? Is there some other answer here that doesn’t make me a bad feminist for hating Courtney?
Gif of camera zooming in on Courtney’s glittering high heels
And is my internalized misogyny to blame, or the MasterChef producers for exploiting it? I couldn’t tell you what any of the other contestants in four seasons of MasterChef wore on their feet, because they didn’t cut ShoeCam every time they walked their dish to the judges. Judge Joe Bastianich bizarrely wears running shoes with his super fancy suits, and I think that took me three seasons to notice. But we saw more of Courtney’s shoes than we saw of some contestant’s faces. It seemed like a sneaky way for the producers to remind us “Courtney is a stripper!” in between her self-shaming confessions, because reality TV producers would see a woman being “saved” from sex work the greatest possible form of the “this will change my life” narrative.
So it goes. Courtney gets her trophy and cookbook, the producers get their “provocative” storyline, Leslie probably has enough money to do whatever he wants anyway, and the HitchDieds will continue irrationally hating reality show contestants despite our feminist misgivings.
Have you ever hated-to-hate a reality TV contestant? Have you caught yourself hating people on TV for sexist reasons?
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town and slightly-better-than-mediocre home cook.
Let’s face it, ‘Boyhood’ is a gimmick movie. Richard Linklater sporadically filmed it over a twelve-year period so we could see the child actors in it actually grow-up. If you loved Michael Apted’s ‘Up’ series but wanted more fiction and less wait, Boyhood is for you. But if you just love coming-of-age dramas, I’m not sure I can recommend this one.
Ellar Coltrane as Mason at the beginning of Boyhood
Let’s face it, Boyhood is a gimmick movie. Richard Linklater sporadically filmed it over a 12-year period so we could see the child actors in it actually grow up. If you loved Michael Apted’s Up series but wanted more fiction and less wait, Boyhood is for you. But if you just love coming-of-age dramas, I’m not sure I can recommend this one.
The child actors (Ellar Coltrane as central character Mason and the director’s daughter, Lorelai Linklater, as Mason’s sister, Samantha) are extremely natural and sufficiently likable. Patricia Arquette is fantastic as their mother, who faces a roller coaster of personal, professional, and economic ups and downs. And Ethan Hawke plays their intermittently available father as Ethan-Hawke-in-a-Richard-Linklater-movie, that is, opinionated and rambling and just-barely functioning as an adult human being, but I happen to like that character a lot.
Mason and Samantha’s mother (Patricia Arquette) reads them a Harry Potter book
As strong as their performances are, the problem is that Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are recognizable movie stars, in stark contrast with the kids at the center of the film and the unknown Texan character actors in the supporting cast. This evaporates the faux-documentary feeling of Boyhood, and leaves in its place an overlong, meandering, plain-old movie.
What’s left is essentially the non-dinosaur, non-Sean Penn-on-limbo-beach parts of The Tree of Life, with fewer shots of light shining through trees, and nostalgia from the last decade instead of the 1950s. Six-year-old Mason rides his bike in endless loops around his block. Eight-year-old Mason plays Wii boxing. Twelve-year-old Mason finds out about internet porn. Fifteen-year-old Mason smokes weed and gets an earring. Seventeen-year-old Mason has sex with his girlfriend in his sister’s dorm room. Eighteen-year-old Mason wins a photography scholarship and does shrooms in the mountains and we can finally, FINALLY leave the theater. (Boyhood is two hours and 45 minutes long, with exactly zero explosions or giant robot fights. I do not have the patience for such things.)
Mason and his sister Samantha (Lorelai Linklater)
It is possible I lost interest because I never had a boyhood of my own. I kept wanted to see more of Samantha, because I could relate to her girlhood (my favorite scene in the movie was Samantha cringing through The Sex Talk with her dad at a bowling alley) and get my nostalgia kick. I was also more interested in Patricia Arquette’s mother character and her struggles because I could relate to them as an adult and as someone who plans to have children.
Sullen teenage Mason and his father (Ethan Hawke)
I may be placing too much importance on gender here, because there are loads of non-gendered experiences of childhood present in this movie. I played with dirt and found out my parents aren’t perfect and rejected authority figures and aggressively sulked, just like Mason. Maybe if Samantha and the mother hadn’t been there, just out of focus, I would have related more to his journey instead of yearning for more from the sidelined female characters.
And as I got bored with Boyhood, I got distracted by the logistics of its gimmick. The passage of time is largely expressed through changed hairstyles on the kids, and I wondered if that was mandated by the director (would Richard Linklater really make his daughter get a regrettable purple-red dye job? (ETA: he did not.) I morbidly wondered what kind of insurance they took out on the lives of the central actors and how they would have reacted to an untimely death. I tried to remember what year the songs on the soundtrack came out so I could figure out how much longer I had to wait to get out of there (I have never been so excited to hear that Gotye song. I turned to my viewing partner and whispered “only two years left!!”).
Eighteen-year-old Mason at the end of the film
Boyhood is a gimmick movie, but admittedly, the gimmick is pretty cool. If you don’t mind long runtimes and have a strong way to relate to this disjointed series of vignettes (having had a boyhood of your own, having a son around the age of the kids in the movie, growing up in Texas), you may well love Boyhood. I didn’t hate it. I just wanted to see more of the women in, it and have it be over an hour earlier. My own childhood felt shorter.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who still plays with sticks in the dirt.
