Tag: Robin Hitchcock

Bisexuality in ‘Orange is the New Black’

Written by Robin Hitchcock

Orange is the New Black
Orange is the New Black has more buzz than an apiary this summer, and with good reason: it’s funny, emotionally affecting, intensely watchable, and as a Netflix original series, suited to an immensely satisfying weekend binge-watch. But on top of all that, OitNB offers a lot to talk about beyond “Did you watch Orange is the New Black yet? It’s so great!”
It’s actually kind of a shame that Orange is the New Black is so revolutionary and fresh. The show has gotten a lot of attention and praise for the character Sophia, a black trans woman, portrayed by black trans woman Laverne Cox (and her twin bother M. Lamar in flashbacks, in some truly fortuitous casting). I wish that kind of representation didn’t seem so revolutionary and fresh, but honestly, it is still revolutionary and fresh merely for there to be a show mostly about women, much less one like OitNB that does its best to reflect womanhood as anything but monolithic and directly addresses race, class and sexuality. 
Laverne Cox as Sophia
Of course, the central and point-of-view character, Piper Chapman, is a privileged white woman–a Smith graduate whose mother is telling everyone she’s volunteering in Africa as an alibi for her 15 months in Federal Prison. Orange is the New Black does its best to address, challenge, and sometimes mock Piper’s privilege (she compares her prison-issue shoes to TOMS), but it can be frustrating that she is the focus while the audience has to wait many episodes for the serious treatment and backstories of some of the most compelling characters of color. 
And it is fitting that the most interesting thing about Piper is her bisexuality, which is the one dimension she isn’t at the top of the hierarchy. Again, it shouldn’t be so fresh and unusual to have a bisexual main character, but it is. And Orange is the New Black doesn’t just use Piper’s sexuality as a representation token or an opportunity for hot girl-on-girl prison action, but as an actual platform to explore the complexities of sexual identity. 
Larry (Jason Biggs) and Piper (Taylor Schilling)
Piper enters prison engaged to a man, who had previously known nothing of Piper’s same-sex relationship with a drug trafficker ten years prior. Piper, her fiance Larry, and her future in-laws are all too happy to brush off that history as a long-passed phase. Larry only becomes nervous about Piper cheating on him in prison when he learns her ex-girlfriend Alex is also incarcerated there. She has to lecture him on the Kinsey Scale to point out that the presence of Alex isn’t going to “turn her gay.” When Piper (spoiler alert) does have sex with and fall for Alex again, it doesn’t make her fall out of love with Larry, defying the common portrayal of bisexuality involving some kind of toggle switch.
Piper and Alex (Laura Prepon)
Orange is the New Black also side-steps the trope of Piper only being “gay for” one person. In a flashback sequence Piper tells her best friend Polly, “I like hot girls. I like hot boys. What can I say? I’m shallow.” [That’s also an absurdly simplistic representation of bisexuality, but absurd simplicity is fairly honest to Piper’s character.]
Piper’s sexuality is as hard for Alex to accept as it is for Larry, though. When their relationship hits the rocks, Alex angrily says she broke her rule number one: “never fall in love with a straight girl.” Alex bonds with Nicky, another lesbian inmate who had been having sex with another “straight” girl engaged to a man. Seeing these characters express frustration with bisexual characters’ ability to “opt-out” and enjoy heterosexual privileges puts Orange is the New Black‘s simple “Kinsey scale”/”I like hot people” depiction of bisexuality back into a realistically complicated and often painful context of negotiating sexualities. 
Discussing Piper’s rekindled affair with Alex, Larry says to her brother Cal, “Is she gay now?” Cal says, “I’m going to go ahead and guess that one of the issues here is your need to say that a person is exactly anything.”

His issue and everyone else’s, Cal.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, and that is not a WASP-y cover story for a prison stint. 

Spike Lee’s "Essential Films": More Annoying Than Your Average List

Filmmaker Spike Lee

 
Written by Robin Hitchcock

Any list of the “greatest” “essential” “best” “definitive” films (or books/tv shows/albums/Got Milk? ads/insert your pop cultural poison) is going to have its detractors. The controversy that inevitably follows these lists is a big part of the reason we make them in the first place. Dissecting a list’s failures and defending its bold choices is most of the fun. So I suppose I should thank Spike Lee for giving us all another opportunity to quibble, with his recently-released selection of 87 “essential” films he tells his NYU students every aspiring filmmaker must see. But mostly, I’m just so tired of this bullshit.

Spike Lee’s Milk ad, which is on my essential list.

The only movie on the list with a female director is City of God, co-directed by Katia Lund. Spike Lee thinks aspiring filmmakers will have the essentials even if they have only seen one movie with a female (co-)director.

Which I don’t have that much to say about. I am ZERO SURPRISED. The marginalization of women filmmakers is nothing new. Seeing it happen again annoys me, of course, but it also EXHAUSTS me. We keep telling male cultural arbiters, “HEY, DON’T IGNORE US” and they keep doing it.
And what makes me particularly upset in this case is that Spike Lee released this list in the context of trying to prove his genuine support of filmmakers excluded from the Hollywood power system.
Spike Lee is funding his latest project with Kickstarter. Like Rob Thomas’s and Zach Braff’s recent Kickstarter campaigns, this has generated a bit of controversy. Sure, we’re all excited there is going to be a Veronica Mars movie, but most of us have mixed feelings about established artists crowdsourcing their projects. It seems to co-opt the platform from the truly independent artists initially associated with Kickstarter, artists without access to the alternative resources (including, among other things, significant personal wealth) these established filmmakers could tap if necessary.

In the YouTube clip above, Spike Lee argues that criticism is a fallacy. Kickstarter isn’t a zero sum game, and he’s bringing people who have never even heard of Kickstarter, especially people of color, to the site and to the crowdfunding movement generally. I have no idea if that is true. He says there is data regarding Thomas’s and Braff’s Kickstarters bringing in first-time backers, but I haven’t actually seen that data. Anyway, it’s a plausible idea, and a nice one. I hope it is true.
But wishing doesn’t make it so. And when Spike Lee points out that he’s been crowdsourcing his movies his whole career, he seems to fail to recognize that so has every other independent filmmaker in the history of ever and the entire point of the Kickstarter revolution is to help out those people who don’t have the personal networks he refers to. [I know Spike Lee has had trouble with studios over fear of controversy, and that his films haven’t been huge financial successes, but he is a LIVING LEGEND. When he makes those phone calls, people will answer.]
In the same video defense, Spike Lee argues that he must be on the side of young filmmakers because he’s taught at NYU for fifteen years and has donated $20,000 to the Spike Lee production fund at NYU for young filmmakers. [Lee’s Kickstarter goal is $1,500,000.]
[He also name drops Mike Tyson as “his good friend.” I can’t tell if he is kidding?]
Lee shared this list, part of his curriculum for this students, as evidence of this “I just want to advance the medium” message. And then the list pretty much ignores women, and is surprisingly mainstream in a lot of other ways (choosing an “unexpected” Woody Allen movie isn’t really THAT outré). I’m not reassured by it at all.  
Though I’m guessing this additional angle of controversy brought more eyes to Spike Lee’s Kickstarter. Someone remind me when I’m famous and revered to use my immense media platform to argue that Gremlins 2: The New Batch is the greatest film of the 20th century so I can generate some hype through grumpy blog posts like this one. 

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who really does love Gremlins 2, even if it isn’t quite as good as Do the Right Thing.

The Women of ‘White House Down’

Written by Robin Hitchcock
Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, and a billion other dudes in White House Down.
I swear there are chicks, though.
Even though I’m running into the risk of painting myself into a month of themed posts about the women in dumb-but-entertaining movies about ‘MERICA, I have to write about the few, the proud, the women characters in White House Down. [Mostly because it is the only movie I’ve seen in the past week.]
White House Down has very few women on screen, and most of those (including the FIRST LADY) have no characterization and hardly any dialogue. Only three remain–and one is a one-scene wonder–but I still lapped up these scant offerings. [Unfortunately, I must admit my standards can get pretty low during summer movie season.]
A quick plot overview just to get you oriented: White House Down features terrorists taking control of Nakatomi Plaza the White House as part of an elaborate plot with a muddled endgame. But the bad guys didn’t count on John McClane John Cale, an under appreciated law-enforcement tough guy who was just there for the Christmas Party just there for a job interview. And this time it’s personal: our hero’s estranged wife tween daughter is one of the hostages. 
Now on to the lady parts:
Special Agent Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal)
Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal)
Carol Finnerty is a character that could have gone horribly wrong in less skilled hands than Maggie Gyllenhaal’s. A top-ranking member of the President’s Secret Service detail, she’s one of those movie characters who is good at her job AND good-hearted AND beloved by all who know her (including the president)… and devoid of any depth. But Gyllenhaal plays to every square inch of this limited character and then some. When Finnerty must go head-to-head with military brass while responding to the crisis, tropes about women in power struggles abound: she’s more easily dismissed by the male military authority because she is a woman, but she also flashes a smile and “please help me eyes” at a male mark to get what she needs anyway. This might have annoyed me A LOT more if a less genuine actress were in the role. Gyllenhaal made it clear that flirting was a last-resort method, but one she was nevertheless willing to employ to save the life of the president. 
Muriel Walker (Barbara Williams) 
No images of this character or actress exist so I’m taking the Ms. Pac-Man approach.
You know that scene in these movies where the marginally-sympathetic bad guy’s wife is called in to talk him down from his evil plot? That scene happens in White House Down. But [spoiler alert] when Muriel Walker takes that call, it doesn’t go the way it normally does. This woman, already stunned by the terrorist attack unfolding around her, is told her husband is behind all of it. She’s clearly devastated. But when she gets him on the phone, and he explains he’s doing this to avenge the death of their son (killed in a failed black op authorized by the president), she incredulously asks, “You’re doing this for Kevin?” And I’m thinking, “Yeah, sister, it doesn’t make sense to me either.” But then her face sours and she awesomely says, “Then you do whatever it takes. You make them pay for what they did to our boy.” WHAT!? Look, this one line of dialogue does not a good female character make. But it was maybe THE ONLY surprising thing that happened in this entire movie, and I have to give them props for that. Muriel is led away with Finnerty swearing she’ll have her prosecuted to the full extent of the law and is never heard from again in this movie. But I gotta say I’d be addicted to the cable news coverage of THAT trial. 
Emily Cale (Joey King)
Emily Cale (Joey King)
The hero’s aforementioned tween daughter, Emily, starts out as a sullen brat glued to her cell phone. But then she’s told she’s going to the White House so her dad can interview to join the Secret Service, and she starts overflowing with America Joy. And facts! So many facts she annoys her tour guide because she keeps stealing his lines. At this point I have to recuse myself from fairly judging this character. Emily Cale is basically everything I wanted to be as a child. Scratch that, she’s everything I want to be as an adult. And on top of the adorable know-it-all-ness, she’s brave and clever! She surreptitiously records video of the terrorists and uploads it to her YouTube channel, providing the good guys with vital intelligence. Her pint-sized badassery continues [More spoilers! Do you care?] when the main villain tries to get the President to nuke basically the whole planet by holding a gun to her head, and the President is like, “Sorry, kiddo, I like you and everything but not more than billions of innocent people,” and she’s ENTIRELY on board for this heroic sacrifice. She’s pretty much like, “Please don’t feel guilty for watching me get murdered in cold blood in your Oval Office, Mr. President.” And then she saves the president’s life and the White House itself with a flag twirling routine. Seriously. Like I said, I’m well past the point of nuanced feminist analysis here, but… EMILY CALE FOR PRESIDENT! 
In sum, while White House Down isn’t really doing any favors for the sisterhood, I’m happy that its marginalized and one-dimensional female characters are at least one-dimensionally awesome. There are a lot of flaws in White House Down I had to overlook to enjoy the heck out of it, and the women weren’t even close to the top of the list. /faint praise out!
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who has never helped save the world with an upload to her YouTube channel … yet.

‘National Treasure’s Abigail Chase: a Loveable Badass Who Makes Questionable Choices

Written by Robin Hitchcock
I’ve made it a tradition to watch National Treasure every 4th of July, not only because it is a fantastic dumb-fun movie, but because I don’t own Independence Day (who am I kidding, I would just do a double feature).
Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) in National Treasure
So I had planned to do an appreciation post celebrating Abigail Chase, the Smurfette of this goofy movie played by the exquisite Diane Kruger. And she is wonderful, as I’ll explain in a moment, but I find myself pretty disturbed by how quickly she gets over essentially being kidnapped by a pair of lunatic criminals. Not since Beauty and the Beast’s Belle has a tough and lovable movie character had such disturbing symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome.
Abigail starts out charmingly sassing Nicolas Cage’s Ben Gates, whackadoo treasure hunter who tells her there’s a map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. She asks to see one of the many clues that led him on his Dan Brown-ian mystery quest, but he doesn’t have it anymore. “Did Bigfoot take it?” she asks.
Oh, another bit in that first meeting that makes me just love her. She explains her accent is German, and doofy sidekick Riley incredulously asks, “You’re not American?” She replies, “Oh, I’m American. I just wasn’t born here.” Statue of Liberty FIST PUMP!
Abigail in action hero mode
Before her Stockholm Syndrome sets in, Abigail awesomely and badassly tries to stop our alleged heroes’ theft of the Declaration of Independence, snatching it (or what she thinks is it) out of Ben’s hands and hanging off a truck to keep it away from the Really Bad Guys (who are adorably British—THE VERY ENEMY WE DECLARED INDEPENDENCE FROM!). All while wearing a really beautiful dress!
Abigail’s stunning dress. LOVE IT, COVET.
Ben saves her from being kidnapped by the Really Bad Guys by kidnapping her himself, much like he stole the Declaration of Independence to stop them from stealing it. And he’s extremely rude to her, telling her to shut up over and over again, and when she yanks the real document out of his hands and tries to run away (still in her formal wear, mind you) he picks her up bodily. Just in case there was any doubt she was being kidnapped. 
Abigail starts cooperating
Somewhere along the way (around when Ben convinces her there actually is a treasure to be found) she goes along willingly. You could argue that this is just because of her personal interest in history and curiosity about the treasure. BUT THEN SHE GETS ALL SMOOCHY WITH BEN. Girlfriend, that dude does not deserve your kisses.
Later he drops her off a rickety swinging platform to save the Declaration, but at least when he apologizes for it she tells him not to apologize because “I would have done exactly the same thing to you.” But then Ben makes a frowny face because he’s a jerkwad.
Ben disregarding Abigail’s safety
And the final insult: even though Abigail has done a significant part of the work following the clues to the treasure, and put her life in danger, she isn’t rewarded. Riley and Ben collectively take 1% of the value of the treasure, which is enough to buy Ben a palatial estate and Riley a sports car (and general economic security, presumably). Riley says he got “one half of one percent.” It stands to reason that Ben got the other half. Leaving nothing for Abigail! Except a relationship with Ben. HER KIDNAPPER.
But I still love her despite her questionable choices.
Happy Fourth of July to our US-ian readers!
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa. She misses her beloved home country extra hard today.

Wedding Week: The HitchDied Guide to Wedding Movies

Written by Robin Hitchcock

When I was planning my own wedding in 2010 and 2011, I blogged about the strange experience of getting sucked into wedding-world as an allegedly savvy and feminist chick who nevertheless loves weddings. To round out my personal journey through wedding culture (and have a good excuse to watch and write about movies), I watched and reviewed dozens of wedding movies on HitchDied. I’ve finally compiled a full index for those of you following Bitch Flicks’ wedding movies week.

The HitchDied Guide to Wedding Movies

I’ll also share my general reflections on the wedding movie genre: Weddings are such popular centerpieces for movies because they’re sort of a free pass on logical character behavior. Even in real life, weddings exaggerate emotions and make people do strange things (like spend thousands of dollars on chair rental). So in the movies, weddings are basically an anything-goes wonderland of high drahms. None of the characters have to act realistically or believably and the stakes are always extremely high (“til death do us part”!!!). Wedding movies practically write themselves.
So you have your “I suddenly love this person now that they are marrying someone else!” movies (My Best Friend’s Wedding, Made of Honor), “I am going insane because my sister is getting married and I am still single!” movies (When in Rome, The Wedding Date), your “I’m trying to be a good friend here but engagement has turned you into a pod person” movies (Bridesmaids, Bride Wars), your “Oh crap going to this wedding means confronting people and events from my past!” movies (The Best Man, Rachel Getting Married). Ur-Wedding Movie 27 Dresses hits all of these notes and more! 
Even though I had fun with it, I have to say if you are engaged, you should probably limit your exposure to wedding movies. Because so many of them end with broken engagements or dramatic jiltings at the altar, you’ll start seeing potential wedding saboteurs in all your friends, family, and hired wedding professionals. You’ll see the obviously doomed engagements at the start of those movies and worry that if those characters could be so deluded, are you and your partner as well? You’ll think spending thousands of dollars renting chairs is ok because at least you didn’t invite random strangers from your mother’s past for an ABBA-scored  paternity-off. 
Wedding movies are really silly, and they all kind of follow the same patterns, and as such it’s a shame that they take up so much of a share of the movies Hollywood makes about women. But action movies are really silly and all kind of follow the same patterns, and I certainly don’t want Hollywood to stop cranking those out. Really, I love wedding movies (just like I love weddings) even though—or more honestly, because—they can be absurd.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa. Her wedding colors were blush and bashful. 

The Grifters; Yeuch

Written by Robin Hitchcock
The Grifters poster
The Grifters (1990) is a movie that’s been on my “to see” list for years. I knew it had epic critical acclaim at the time of its release. I’ve liked nearly every film I’ve seen by director Stephan Frears. I absolutely adore all three members of the main cast (Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, and Annette Bening). And it gets bonus points for having two women as central characters.
But when I finally caught The Grifters this week, it was a big disappointment. There are plenty of things to recommend about this film: It’s not quite like anything I’ve seen before even though it’s in the trope-heavy noir genre. There is some wonderful acting, with Anjelica Huston in particular delivering a riveting performance. Frears brings in some directorial flourishes worthy of the opening credit “A Martin Scorsese Production,” but others feel awkwardly dated, such as the disjointed flashback sequences.
What overshadows these good qualities is that The Grifters is incredibly unpleasant to watch. Unlike most con artist movies, there is no outsider “mark” character to identify with. Roy (John Cusack), his mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston), and his paramour Myra (Annette Bening) are all in the game. The question becomes, as the poster reads, “Who’s conning who?” [sic, I think; I went to public school ;)]
Seductress Myra (Annette Bening)

But the question is actually a distraction from the real plot of the movie, a relationship-focused tragedy. None of the players is naive enough to trust anyone else, so no one gets conned. When Myra suggests to Roy that they team up, he flat out refuses. The inevitable betrayals and violence are all crimes of passion, not the planned schemes we’d expect.
Small-time con Roy (John Cusack)
Seeing this play out is an exercise in misery. And here is where I must issue spoilery trigger warnings for incest and violence against women. One scene that turned my stomach so badly I did not recover for the rest of the film depicts Lilly being intimidated by her racketeering boss Bobo Justus (how’s that for a character name with “sub”textual meaning?) after she fails at the odds-fixing racetrack scheme she works for him. I can’t even bring myself to type a description of the scene, but it is available streaming online if you want to look for it. Lilly is clearly terrified of Bobo (with good reason), but treats him with a kind humility; she hopes her sweetness and deference can save her life. The terrible thing is that it’s clear her actions and demeanor aren’t what let her survive the confrontation, but rather the whims of the man terrorizing her.
Lilly (Anjelica Huston)
Then there is the shocking violence of the third act, with such graphic gore as a woman with her face blown off on a morgue table. The Oedipal twinge to Roy’s relationship with Lilly, who had him when she was only 14 years old, comes to the fore in one of the film’s final scenes. I don’t enjoy incestual themes in any circumstances, but I found Lilly’s attempted seduction of Roy especially disturbing because she does it as a last-ditch effort to convince him to give her the cash she needs to flee Bobo’s wrath. It’s mutually non-consensual. It gets no further than a kiss, but that relief is immediately side-swept by more graphic violence.
And so The Grifters is a well-made and fantastically-acted movie that I would never recommend. Certainly some people will have a stronger tolerance than I do for its dark themes. My guess is that it’s easier to be entertained by this sort of thing when you are at the top of the kyriarchy like most film critics from the early 90’s (and sadly, today as well). But everyone else comes from a position of heightened awareness of their own vulnerability to violence and sexual assault. And that makes a movie like The Grifters seem more like a psychological weapon than a great film.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa.

‘Terms of Endearment’ IS NOT a Melodrama

Written by Robin Hitchcock
Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment
Terms of Endearment has a lasting reputation as a melodramatic, emotionally-manipulative chick flick. This is a film that grossed over $100 million (an even more significant benchmark in the early 80’s) and won five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for James L. Brooks, Best Actress for Shirley MacLaine and Best Supporting Actor for Jack Nicholson). If Nicholson’s performance as astronaut playboy Garrett Breedlove had been shuffled into the lead actor category (I didn’t do an exact minute count, but I’m fairly certain he appears in as much if not more of the film than Anthony Hopkins did for his Best Actor winning performance in Silence of the Lambs) Terms of Endearment would join that film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and It Happened One Night in the rarefied Big Five Sweep club. 
But Terms of Endearment is now oft-cited as one of the worst Best Picture winners and an example of the Oscar’s fleeting fascination with family dramas instead of “Important” issues. 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer and 1980’s Ordinary People also make worst best picture lists, at least in part because they “unjustly” beat out Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull for those top prizes. Those also-rans are undeniably powerful films that have had a lasting impact on cinema, but is part of what made their “worthiness” of the title Best Picture their focus on men? [See also Shakespeare in Love’s much-derided win over Saving Private Ryan].  
James L. Brooks, Shirley MacLaine, and Jack Nicholson with their Oscars for Terms of Endearment
The muddled legacy of Terms of Endearment, and the seeming unlikeliness that such a picture would find such box office and awards success today, supports my fear that movies focused on women are seen as inherently less important and respectable. When I was watching Terms of Endearment this week, all traces of its reputation fell from my mind as I fell into simply enjoying watching the film. It is incredibly easy to be swept into caring about the lives of Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter Emma (Debra Winger). Their mother-daughter dynamic is very recognizable: they are eternally frustrated with each other but nevertheless co-dependently needful of each other’s love, and can switch from delightfully supportive of the other person’s happiness to cruel about the other person’s problems and back in seconds. These relatable characters are made alive by incredible performances, and the film is generously sprinkled with the winning dialogue (“I don’t think I was treating her badly.” “Then you must be from New York.”) and memorable moments (Emma and Aurora instantaneously making up over the phone after Aurora has boycotted Emma’s wedding) that create that undeniable feeling of  “movie magic.” 
For a so-called melodrama, Terms of Endearment‘s plot is actually quite true to life. Emma and her husband Flip (Jeff Daniels) move to Iowa for Flip’s stalled academic career; their relationship falters as they struggle with money and child rearing and both take on affairs. Aurora has an opposites-attract fling with her self-satisfied cad of a neighbor (Nicholson), who eventually shows surprising tenderness toward her. These are the kinds of things that happen all the time in the lives of people we know but are hardly ever seen in movies. Emma’s affair with her banker Sam (John Lithgow) is presented as two people filling emotional and physical needs outside of their marriages, not as an epic romance that cannot be because of the constraints of society a la Anna Karenina and countless other works of fiction. 
Aurora and Garrett in bed.
How is that melodrama? And how refreshing is it to see a wife and mother having extramarital sex be portrayed sympathetically? It’s even more refreshing to see a sexual relationship between two fifty-somethings treated as normal and—get this—sexy. They’re even played by actors ROUGHLY THE SAME AGE (contra Jack Nicholson’s next Oscar-winning romance with a woman a quarter-century younger than him in As Good as It Gets). 
I’m guessing that the accusations of sentimentality mainly come about from the film’s third act, in which Emma discovers she has terminal cancer and dies. There are some very emotionally fraught scenes, like the Oscar clip reel-bait in which Aurora takes out her pain and frustration at watching her daughter die by screaming at the nurses that Emma needs a shot of pain medication. The most famous scene in Terms of Endearment may be Emma saying goodbye to her children when she knows she is dying. The scene does not hold back: her oldest acts sullen and distant, her younger son cannot hold back his sobs, and Emma finds the strength to say the exact right thing to each of them (including: get haircuts). I don’t think the choice to share such an emotionally raw scene with the audience should be dismissed as “manipulative.” It’s certainly no more manipulative than the countless examples in fiction where people just miss their chance to say goodbye. 
Emma says goodbye to her sons.
Desperately attempting to find closure with a dying loved one is something that most people experience at some point in their life. Presenting a common problem with unflinching honesty is in fact THE OPPOSITE of melodrama. As such, I’m pretty sure that “Terms of Endearment is a sentimental melodramatic manipulative tear-jerker” is just another way of saying, “It can’t be good if girls like it.”
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa who would like to get one look at Des Moines before she dies.

Travel Films Week: Othering and Alienation in ‘Lost in Translation’

Written by Robin Hitchcock

Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob (Bill Murray) in Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is remembered mostly for the genuinely affecting romance between its leads Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, but it also offers a singular depiction of culture shock. Unfortunately, in representing the “strangeness” of Japan through the eyes of its American characters, Lost in Translation often veers into racist stereotypes and caricatures. When the film was up for several Academy Awards including Best Picture in 2004, the anti-racism group Asian Mediawatch advocated an Oscar shut-out for the film because it “dehumanises the Japanese people by portraying them as a collection of shallow stereotypes who are treated with disregard and disdain.” [Despite this protest, Lost in Translation did garner writer–director Sofia Coppola an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.]
Bob Harris (Bill Murray) stands tallest in a Japanese elevator
My viewing (as a white American) of Lost in Translation didn’t see disdain for Japan or Japanese people, but rather an aggressive othering, which of course is problematic in its own right. But emphasizing the differences between Tokyo and the American homeland of main characters Charlotte (Johansson) and Bob (Murray) is vital to the narrative of Lost in Translation: both characters are in crisis, unmoored in their daily lives, and the mundane discomfort of their foreign surroundings brings these deeper struggles to bear.
Charlotte looks out at Tokyo from her hotel room window
Focusing on the existential angst of two white Americans in Japan without any well-defined Japanese characters is enough to turn off many race-conscious viewers to begin with, and Lost in Translation doubles down with some cringeworthy Japanese stereotypes. The film gets alarming mileage out of its Japanese characters pronouncing l’s and r’s similarly, which feels even more dated than the also strangely boundless fax-machine humor in this 2003 film. Charlotte at one point asks Bob why “they mix up l’s and r’s” and he suggests it is “for yuks,” but it isn’t actually funny.
Take for example the biggest belly flop of a “comedic” scene in the film, in which an escort arrives at Bob’s hotel room; his host in Japan having gifted him with the “premium fantasy” package. She demands Bob “lip” her stockings. After a classic Bill Murray line reading of “Hey, ‘lip’ them, ‘lip’ them, what!?” the scene devolves as the escort one-sidedly plays out a rape fantasy. Too much of this scene rests on the “humor” of “lip” vs. “rip,” and the rest relies on judging sexism in Japanese business culture from a dubious moral high ground. It’s hard to watch.
Directions during a whiskey ad shoot are literally lost in translation
In contrast, the comedic highlights of the film are the shoots for the whiskey advertisement that brought Bob Harris to Tokyo. The humor in these scenes doesn’t come so much from mocking the Japanese characters as it does mining the disconnect between them and English-speaking Bob (alluding to the film’s title). The flashy director of the ad gives detailed, impassioned instructions in Japanese which are relayed to Bob in brief and inscrutable English directions (“Turn from the right, with intensity!” “Like an old friend, and into the camera.”)
Scarlet Johansson spends a lot of this movie looking out of windows.
Charlotte’s interactions with Japanese culture aren’t comedic, which is likely because Scarlett Johansson is not the established comedic actor that Bill Murray is. Instead, we get a lot of her gazing with wonder at beautiful scenery and meekly participating in ikebana. I think anyone who has ever been a tourist can relate to Charlotte’s wide-eyed stares out of cab windows, but her fascinated observation gets laid on a little thick and starts reeking of Orientalism. Early in the film she peers into a Buddhist temple and cries over the phone to a friend back home that it didn’t make her “feel anything.” That moment lends a lot of credence to those who would dismiss this film out of hand for its white-centricism. 
Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob (Bill Murray) in Lost in Translation
But the true heart of Lost in Translation is the relationship between Charlotte and Bob, a sudden and profound connection between two lost souls that transcends its blurred line between friendship and romance. This connection is only credible because of these characters’ alienation in their surroundings, so the emphasis on Tokyo’s foreignness to them is important to the film. And from my limited and privileged perspective as a white American living abroad, the representation of culture shock as alternately funny, sad, and spiritually moving rings true. But Lost in Translation‘s othering of Japan too often crosses into racism and xenophobia, which makes it much less of a movie than it could be.
Bob and Charlotte say goodbye.
I would love to see a Before Sunset type follow-up to this film, to revisit Charlotte and Bob and see what might come of a second meeting between their characters, but also to give us a new take on the experience of being in an unfamiliar location. A more nuanced take reflecting the advancing maturity of the characters and of Sofia Coppola, crafting a better film that’s not only enjoyable with privileged blinders on.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who usually wears pants when she stares out her window to gaze wistfully upon the city. 

How The Office’s Jim & Pam Negotiated their Conflicting Dreams

Written by Robin Hitchcock

Jim and Pam of The Office
The US iteration of The Office concluded its nine-year run last week with a somewhat mawkish but nevertheless emotionally satisfying finale. We left these characters in a place of personal fulfillment—Dwight and Angela marry, Dwight is regional manager of the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin, Andy has turned his embarrassing experiences into something positive and returned to the site of his glory days, Kelly and Ryan foolishly and selfishly run off into the sunset, Erin meets her birth parents. And Jim and Pam, the emotional core of the series, leave Scranton together for Austin so Jim may rejoin the sports marketing startup he and Darryl began working for earlier this season. 
In case you haven’t been watching The Office in its autumn years, Jim and Pam’s relationship has followed the push and pull of the conflict between their commitment to each other and their own personal dreams. In season 5, aspiring artist Pam moved to New York for a graphic design program. The series mined the pressures of long-distance relationships for both comedy and drama, but Jim and Pam’s partnership stayed strong and they got engaged at the gas station midpoint between Scranton and New York. Shortly thereafter, Pam left New York “the wrong way” because she failed a class and doesn’t want to remain in the city for another three months to retake it. She insists it is not because of Jim, but because she doesn’t actually like graphic design, but the viewer knows it is a complex combination of those two forces. 
Pam and Jim after the birth of their first child.
This dynamic is flipped in the final season when Jim joins a friend in Athlead, a new venture connecting famous athletes to sponsorship opportunities. With Athlead, Jim is finally able to work a job he feels passionate about, in stark contrast to his years as a paper salesman. But Jim’s new job puts an immense strain on his marriage with Pam—with whom he now has two children—as he divides his time between Philadelphia and Scranton and has less attention to give to his family. 
Pam is driven to tears by the growing conflict between her and Jim
This is exacerbated by a lack of communication as Jim inexplicably keeps his initial involvement with Athlead from Pam, and increases his commitment to this new job without consulting her several times over. Jim and Pam’s relationship reaches the breaking point, and Jim finally decides to leave Athlead and return to Scranton full-time to save his marriage. 
Pam is wracked with guilt and fears that she is “not enough” to justify Jim abandoning his new career direction. Notably, we saw nothing of this type of guilt in Jim when Pam left art school. With the help of the documentary crew that is finally explicitly woven into the story in this finale season, Jim presents Pam a video montage of their relationship and tells her “not enough for me? You are everything.” 
The series finale is set some time in the future, after the documentary has aired on PBS and Jim and Pam’s relationship is as important to in-universe fans as it is to those of us watching The Office in the real world. During the public Q&A at a reunion panel, several women criticize Pam for stifling Jim’s career. Jim does a satisfactory job of dissuading these questions, but they clearly affect Pam. She’s also moved by seeing the success and happiness Darryl, who has followed Athlead (now Athleap) to Austin. So she secretly sells her and Jim’s house (secrecy is a recurring and frustrating undercurrent in their relationship; this is the same house Jim bought without consulting Pam first) and tells Jim it’s time for them to move on from Dunder Mifflin and relocate to Austin. 
Pam and Jim decide to move on from Scranton
From a Doylist perspective, this gives the audience closure; without Jim and Pam present, the story of The Office feels complete. But on the Watsonian side of things, it means Jim’s career path decidedly beats out Pam’s after many years of back and forth, which puts a damper on my personal satisfaction as a viewer. 
My personal life is clearly influencing my reaction to this storyline: I moved 8,000 miles away from home so my partner could accept his dream job. Obviously, every couple needs to resolve these issues on their own, and it is dated and heteronormative to think this is always going to be a gendered struggle. But for many mixed-gender couples, gendered expectations of whose career matters more and the importance of career vs. family often play a part. And it’s a bit of a let down to see one of the iconic on-screen couples of the last ten years fall into the traditional resolution of the man’s career coming first.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who works out her personal issues by writing about sitcoms.

The Terminatrix Problem

Written by Robin Hitchcock
Kristanna Loken as the T-X or “Terminatrix” in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
On round one thousand seventy eight of the eternal “do the time travel rules in the Terminator movies make any sense?” debate, my partner and I decided the only reasonable course of action was a Terminator movie marathon [we excused ourselves from having to suffer through Terminator Salvation, because life is too short to watch that dull abomination more than once].
The time travel debate, of course, rages on, but watching the first three Terminator films in short order made their relative strengths and weaknesses all the more clear. [Or, in the case of T2: Judgment Day, relative strengths. That movie HAS NO WEAKNESSES.] I held out hope that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines might have some new charms or interest placed directly next to its legendary big sister. It’s a movie I want to like more than I do, despite the crippling absence of Sarah Connor, awkward recasting of John Connor, and the distractingly aged Schwarzenegger. Oh, and James Cameron out of the director’s chair, half-heartedly replaced by some “I made one of those submarine movies from the early aughts, and no my name isn’t Kathryn Bigelow” hack (Jonathan Mostow).
I know now why you Botox
And then there’s that whole thing where Terminator 3 completely defies the defining spirit of the series “no fate but what we make for ourselves” and goes all predestination on our asses. You have a fate! You have a fate! EVERYONE HAS A FATE! Man, this movie has a lot of problems.
But allow me to expand on just one of them: The T-X, or Terminatrix, played by Kristanna Loken. Judgment Day had one of the most memorable movie villains of all time in Robert Patrick’s T-1000. Living up to that standard is a tall order. T3’s only answer for how to up the ante is boobies.
Inflatable boobies! [To be fair, they also give the T-X various and sundry additional powers like technopathy and plasma weapons, but they feel thrown against the lingerie billboard and they don’t quite stick.]
From a gender studies point of view, there’s a lot of potential in introducing the first female terminator. What are the tactical advantages of boobies? Why do robots (shape-shifting robots, at that!) even have gender identities? Why does the T-X have a “sexy” curvy endoskeleton?
That’s not how skeletons work!
Spoiler alert: none of these questions will be answered or even adequately addressed by T3. Instead, Kristanna Loken will do her best Robert Patrick impression whilst having boobies, and it will fall completely flat (pun perhaps subconsciously intended).
Nothing will ever be this scary.
There’s several problems with Loken (as well as the writers and the director) deciding to go the T-1000 imitative route. First, obviously, is that it’s essentially impossible to live up to the memory of Robert Patrick’s chilling performance. Secondly, it throws away the fascinating idea introduced in T2 that different Terminators have distinct personalities (thankfully, the Battlestar Galactica reboot would pick up their fumble).
And finally, a beautiful woman acting robotic just isn’t that notable in our culture of objectification.
Women are so often used as beautiful emotionless props it can be hard even for feminists to notice when it’s happening. In the era of widespread photoshop abuse, images of women are increasingly not quite human: everyone has the same glowy, flawless, fresh-off-the-factory line look.
3-D printed Natalie Portman
Emma Stone with upgraded robolashes
Olivia Wilde is a female pleasure unit.
She requires a new coat of paint.
These images should freak us out, but they’re all too easy to accept as honest representations of a inhuman beauty to which we should all aspire. This objectification is such a pernicious part of the cultural DNA that the usual rules of the uncanny valley don’t apply to beautiful women. When Robert Patrick played the T-1000 with inhuman rigidity and emotionless focus, it was terrifying. But when Kristanna Loken played the Terminatrix using exactly the same mannerisms, she was just another sexy fembot.
Ask your beautician about mimetic polyalloy, the new revolution in skincare
Even when something is as thoroughly pre-ruined as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the patriarchy finds ways to make it even worse.
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Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town. She always leaves the room when Sarah Connor starts carving “no fate” into a picnic table during T2 because she’s afraid to watch the nuclear attack dream sequence that comes next. 

Let’s Re-Brand "Disney Princesses" as "Disney Heroines"

Written by Robin Hitchcock
A piece of fan art and the particularities of French to English translation may have solved our Disney Princess problem: 
Disney Heroines Simple Lines, by David Gilson
Feminist parents (and grandparents and aunts and uncles and siblings) often worry about their young girls getting sucked into Disney Princess culture, and not just because of the intimidating price tags at the Disney store. We don’t want our kids growing up with female role models solely labelled with the coveted status of “princess,” and therefore defined by their relationships with men (be they fathers or husbands), and admired largely for their status over others. It’s pretty much the last thing a feminist would want for their kids. 
A more typical (but still very clever) piece of fan art depicting
Disney Princesses as cover models on women’s magazines. Artist unknown.
However, criticism of Disney Princess culture often overlooks that Disney has created a battalion of strong female characters who are in fact fantastic role models for children, particularly since the dawn of the Disney Renaissance. 
There’s a recurring theme of headstrong rebellion against societal expectations (Ariel, Jasmine, Mulan, Merida), which might sound a little scary from a parenting point of view but is certainly a vital part of a developing feminist consciousness. Disney Heroines are accepting of people their peers reject and other because of their differences (Belle, Pocahontas, Esmerelda, Jane). And Disney Heroines are self-assured even though they themselves can be awkward and not really fit in (Ariel, Belle, Mulan, Lilo, Rapunzel), even when they are actively scorned by society (Esmerelda, Vanellope Von Schweets). 
Particularly in the most recent films, Disney Heroines expressly have their own interests, skills, and goals completely unrelated to romance and social status (Tiana, Sgt. Calhoun). And they’re smart and sassy and lovable (pretty much all of them, but I just want to give a special shout-out to my homegirl Megara). 
These are characters we should want our kids to be obsessed with. Shifting from “Disney Princesses” to “Disney Heroines” widens the field on a semantic level to include a lot more fantastic characters, but more importantly highlights what really makes these women special. It’s not their status as princesses; it is who they are.
———–
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa. Disney movies are her favorite cold medicine, hangover cure, and anti-depressant.

School of Rock: Where Shrewish Women are "The Man"

Written by Robin Hitchcock

Jack Black in School of Rock

The first decade of this millennium was a pretty good time for American culture, all in all, George W. Bush notwithstanding.  YouTube was invented, the pound symbol was saved from oblivion by hashtags, and Tina Fey got famous.
But the early-to-mid aughts also brought something really unpleasant to our culture, something that had been brewing since the dawn of Generation X: the celebration of The Man Child.  In everything from Old School to Role Models to the Complete Works of Judd Apatow, male characters Peter Pan’d their way through life,  even as pesky forces like bills and harping girlfriends tried to harsh their mellow.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Man Child trope from a feminist point of view is his female counterpoint: the Nagging Killjoy Shrew. This woman tells the Man Child to grow up, to accept responsibility, to stop acting exactly like he did when he was 19. To which the Man Child responds, “stop crushing my soul and my dreams! I just gotta be me.”
I have no idea where the cultural idea that women are better at being grown-ups than men came from. I think it may have been some misguided attempt to correct previous sexism while simultaneously getting out of having to do the dishes. I’m also not sure how the patiently suffering Sitcom Wife of the Man Child so prevalent in the 80’s and 90’s turned into the Hellish Shrewbeast of the 2000’s Aptovian comedy.
School of Rock, the 2003 film written by Mike White and directed by Richard Linklater, typifies the Man Child vs. Shrewbeast dynamic, which is a shame, because it is otherwise an extremely entertaining and lovable film, and I wish I could recommend it without reservation.
Jack Black plays Dewey Finn, a man-child whose unyielding pursuit of a rock n roll stardom has thwarted his maturation and upward mobility toward certain signifiers of adulthood like having an actual bed in an actual bedroom instead of a mattress on the floor of your buddy’s living room.  Dewey’s roommate Ned Schneebly (Mike White) has given up the rock and roll dreams he shared with Dewey in his younger days for the more stable and adult life of a substitute teacher. Dewey assumes Ned’s identity, taking a substitute teaching job at an elite prep school in order to make rent, with the side bonus of recruiting a bunch of children into his new rock band. Events occur, life lessons are learned by all, young selves are actualized by the transformative power of music, and humble offerings are made to the gods or rock. Like so many stunted artists, Dewey and Ned discover that teaching their craft to the next generation of dreamers allows them to stay active with their passion while earning a respectable living doing it. Roll adorable credits with the kids’ band playing an AC/DC song.
Dewey vs. The Man, including a cop, the man whose identity he stole, his employer, and Patty

But along the way, Dewey (and Ned) conflict with various Hellish Shrewbeasts.  First, Ned’s girlfriend, Patty (Sarah Silverman), who instigates Dewey’s deception by insisting he GASP, actually pay rent to continue staying in her boyfriend’s apartment (that bitch.) I cannot for the life of me figure out why Sarah Silverman accepted this role. Every word out of Patty’s mouth comes out sounding like a verbal a punch in the face (to Dewey) or yank on the leash (to Ned). She’s one of the most unpleasant characters I’ve ever seen on screen, indisputably the villain of the piece, even though her attitudes (Dewey should get a job so her boyfriend doesn’t have a Man Child living on his living room floor anymore; Dewey should not be casually forgiven for fraud and child endangerment) are entirely reasonable.  I don’t know if Silverman was miscast and/or misdirected, but her caustic performance unfortunately bolsters the Man-Child-Good/Responsible-Adult-Woman-Bad dynamic in School of Rock. Silverman is fantastic at playing the elusive female variant of the Man Child [see also Dee Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (after the pilot, where her character is a much more pedestrian voice of reason), and Daisy Steiner in Spaced] so she might have exaggerated the shrewish aspects of her character in an attempt to show range.

Joan Cusack as Principal Mullins with Jack Black

Patty isn’t the only flavor of Shrewish Nemesis Dewey must work around in School of Rock, and I’m not sure if that makes matters better or worse. Next up is the principle of the school Dewey has conned his way into, Rosalie Mullins (Joan Cusack).  Ms. Mullins is a stickler for rules and discipline, but it is clear that her straight-laced authority is part of what makes her school so exceptional. While Ms. Mullins inspires fear in her students and isn’t exactly liked by her colleagues (which she laments), but she is undeniably respected, both by the characters (even Dewey!) and by the film itself.  Unlike Patty, we see the lighter side of Ms. Mullins, first when Dewey discovers the key to loosening her up is a third of a beer and a Stevie Nicks jam on the jukebox, and later when she jubilantly congratulates her students after their climactic performance at the battle of the bands.

Miranda Cosgrove as Summer Hathaway, class factotum and band manager. 

Finally, there is a mini-Shrew in the form of “Class Factotum” Summer (Miranda Cosgrove). Summer has learned to play the game at her elite school, racking up gold stars and grade grubbing her way to the top. She and Dewey butt heads at first, but Dewey quickly deduces he can manipulate Summer into going along with his antics by giving her a somewhat specious mantle of authority as Band Manager. The twist is that Summer takes on this role with aplomb and ends up being a vital part of the Band’s production team (her new interest leading her father to ask in one of the best lines of the movie, “Why has my daughter become obsessed with David Geffen?”). One of the many ways that School of Rock is exceptional is how much dignity it affords its well-rounded child characters, which makes it no surprise that young Summer is the most sympathetic of the Shrews.
It’s unfortunate that School of Rock relies so heavily on the Man Child vs. Shrewish Woman dynamic, because it is otherwise a funny, heartwarming, endlessly entertaining film. It’s a comfort food flick for me, something I put on to pull me out of a funk. I was almost mad at my feminist goggles for revealing this unfortunate pattern.
“Write me a better reference!”

One more quick feminist gripe before I go: I know the character speaking this line of dialogue is nine and wouldn’t necessarily know any better, but it is a CRIME that when drummer Freddie challenges Bassist Katie to name “two great chick drummers” she offers up Meg White before Moe Tucker or Gina Schock. A CRIME.