Romance – Bitch Flicks

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

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

This guest post is written by Claire White.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Trainwreck‘s Unexpected Dose of the Feels

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

The Feminist’s Box Office Call of Duty

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

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

Concerning the Confusingly Named ‘Love & Friendship’ (Jane Austen’s ‘Lady Susan’)

Whit Stillman’s adaptation celebrates this power. Taking the text off the page necessarily removes it from the female form in which it is written and therefore extends the realm of female power. … Jane Austen is one of the most, if not the most, famous female authors in the world. Yet, over the course of a series of progressively shittier adaptations… a great comedian and social satirist has been pigeonholed as a romance writer.

This guest post written by Laura Witz is an edited version of an article that originally appeared at Witzster. It is cross-posted with permission.

Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship follows the narrative of Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan rather neatly and although many reviews seem to be, often ignorantly, telling us that this is Austen with teeth or some such, what I don’t think they realize is that Austen already has teeth. The film is great, but it is great because it is so faithful to tone.

Austen probably wrote Lady Susan when she was about eighteen (although it wasn’t published until long after her death in 1871), already aware that her hyper intelligence may not stand her in good stead as a woman, but long before the much sadder points in her life, when she was also to fantasize about being able to intellectually and physically subject herself to the whim of the man intended to be her superior (Mansfield Park).

Where in Mansfield Park the Lady Susan character (Mary Crawford) is sidelined and punished, in Lady Susan, she is celebrated. I once read that Lady Susan is a fantasy of female power in a world where, legally speaking, women had none. This power is in the most part manifested in the original text by the fact that the story is told through letters, a medium really only upper class women engaged in, and since the women control the letter form, they do in fact control the boundaries of this reality. Whenever men get involved, their letters are short and stilted and ineffective. I would argue that, to a degree, this reality is also an idealized version of a very real subculture that did exist.

Stillman’s adaptation celebrates this power. Taking the text off the page necessarily removes it from the female form in which it is written and therefore extends the realm of female power. The men in the film are useless and defunct, from the wonderfully silly Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) (my new crush), to the priggish and apparently clever Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel) and in particular to the “very handsome” Mr. Manwaring (Lochlann O’Mearáin) who, although he appears in several scenes, has no lines, not one.

As in the original text, this is a battle between two women, Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) and her sister-in-law Catherine Vernon (Emma Greenwell). Catherine has her mother (Jemma Redgrave) in her court and Lady Susan has her friend Alicia (Chloë Sevigny) in hers. Throughout the film, these two vie for power, over Catherine’s brother, Reginald, over Lady Susan’s daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), and arguably over a position as matriarch of the family.

The film is great and so are the actors. Tom Bennett as Sir James Martin made me cry with laughter. And the ending, in particular, is very interesting. The original text finishes with Austen getting slightly bored and making fun of her own narrative form. Stillman’s adaptation sticks very closely to the spirit of the text, ignoring the potentially problematic tone of the final passage, which is arguably written in the voice of Catherine Vernon anyway. And most importantly, this film has steered clear of any attempt to romanticize the story.

As most people who know me know, I have an ax to grind where it comes to Jane Austen and I’ve been grinding it for the better part of the last seven years. Jane Austen is one of the most, if not the most, famous female authors in the world. Yet, over the course of a series of progressively shittier adaptations made by people who in some cases don’t even seem to have read the source text (Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice), a great comedian and social satirist has been pigeonholed as a romance writer. Now there’s nothing wrong with romance, I very much enjoy a good rom-com (and quite frequently a very crap one). But the fact is that this genre has been sidelined as one that is trivial and silly ever since Austen herself wrote and idle upper class young women got kicks from reading saucy French novels.

Of course if you actually look at Austen’s works, only Pride and Prejudice can reasonably be described as a romance and that romance is running alongside a lot of social commentary and out and out comedy. In particular, look at Sense and Sensibility, where Elinor marries Edward the bland (a far cry from Hugh Grant / Dan Stevens) and Marianne gets Brandon the old. As a rom-com alone, Sense and Sensibility fails since the major love affair of the text remains unfulfilled.

Dickens wrote romances into every book, but nobody refers to him as a romance writer. The name Allan Woodcourt – or I suppose Woodcourt – hasn’t been adopted as a catch-all for everything women desire and everything that is irritating about the romance genre (Bleak House, in case you’re wondering). Because Dickens doesn’t represent a threat because he is a man and therefore it’s okay for him to be a writer and we don’t need to undermine and diminish him.

So what if we make Austen adaptations that don’t conform to that stereotype? What if we write fan fiction that doesn’t include shit fantasies about pseudo-romances with a misunderstanding of Mr. Darcy? What if someone decides to adapt texts Austen wrote that do not conform to this? What kind of writer do we call her then? And that’s where Love & Friendship comes in. It might not seem groundbreaking that there is yet another period drama out there getting some attention and some critical acclaim, but trust me, this film is rocking my fucking world.

And Whit, if you’re reading this, I have an adaptation of the actual Love & Friendship that we can start work on any day. Although the title might be a problem.

Laura Witz is an editor and writer of plays and stories living and working in the UK. She has written plays that have performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Jane Austen Festival in Bath and her articles and stories have been published in a number of institutions and publications, a few of which can be found on her blog. Witz hopes to one day become an aerial clown. You can follow her on Twitter @Charlotte_Prod.

Courage, Death, and Love in Dorothy Arzner’s ‘Christopher Strong’

In spite of the ending or what the trailer suggests, ‘Christopher Strong’ doesn’t demonize Cynthia for her ambition and her desires; instead, the film sheds a sympathetic light on her story even as it depicts her pursuit of independence and love as an impossible one within the context of the world she occupies. The story of such a pursuit and the societal pressures attached likely felt familiar to director Dorothy Arzner, writer Zoë Akins, and star Katharine Hepburn — each of whom occupied positions of creative control in the film’s production and led successful careers in an industry still notorious for undervaluing women today.

This guest post written by Taylor Kenkel appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors. | Spoilers ahead.

When Christopher Strong first hit theaters in 1933, the RKO trailer marketed the 12th film directed by Dorothy Arzner as the tale of “…an alluring young modern who feared her own emotions… a woman of the world, bound by love and shame… a society girl defiant of scandal,” and enticed viewers with a call to “See Katharine Hepburn tackle a man’s job — to escape her emotions!”

The trailer is almost laughable, and it does the heroine a disservice by warping her story into one of salaciousness and disgrace. And far from “run[ning] away from the fires within her,” as other promotional materials suggest, the woman at the center of the film shows a unique, if flawed, sort of courage in her pursuit of independence and love — even as society tells her that she simply cannot have both.

That woman is Cynthia Darrington, played by Katharine Hepburn, in her second screen appearance— and she’s an aviatrix who enjoys independence, lives for adventure, and feels no need for romance until she meets Sir Christopher Strong (Colin Clive), a politician and a well-to-do society man who prides himself on his fidelity to his wife and dedication to his family.

The affair ends badly for Cynthia, and on the surface, the film almost reads just as the trailer spins it. But there’s more at play in this story of a woman who dares to reach for far more than what society will allow her to have; a careful reading of Christopher Strong reveals that — in spite of the film’s unsatisfying end — the criticism it levies is not directed at Cynthia herself, but at the world that simply isn’t ready for a woman of her ambition.

Christopher Strong opens on a scavenger hunt party, where the event’s hostess presents rowdy attendees with a new challenge: a woman must bring back a man who has been married for more than five years and has always been faithful to his wife, and a man must find an attractive woman over 21 who can swear she’s never had a love affair. Harry (Ralph Forbes) and Monica (Helen Chandler) both want to win, but neither of them fit the respective requirements — as Monica is younger than 21 and currently engaged in an affair with Harry, who is married to another woman.

Monica notes with delight that her father, Sir Christopher Strong, has never cheated on her mother. As Monica drives off to fetch him back to the party, Harry finds himself in something of an accidental road race as a woman speeds alongside his motorcycle in her automobile. Both narrowly avoid hitting an oncoming truck. When the woman runs over to see if she can help after Harry is thrown from the motorcycle, he laughs and declares, “Not unless you’re over 21 and can raise your right hand and swear you’ve never had a love affair!” She looks at him with raised eyebrows and quips that she can swear to it, then agrees to accompany him back to the party. Once there, everyone’s delighted to find that the woman is none other than the well-known, record-smashing aviatrix Cynthia Darrington. It is then that Christopher and Cynthia meet, and the whole event unintentionally sets in motion their doomed affair.

Cynthia and Christopher’s relationship stays platonic until an evening several weeks later, when he stops by her home to ask for advice on consoling a heartbroken Monica. Cynthia, on her way to a costume party, emerges from her bedroom to greet him while clad in a silver, form-fitting gown meant to evoke the figure of a moth. In spite of attempts to redirect the discussion, their light flirtations grow serious and they acknowledge their growing attraction to one another.

The affair picks up speed from there — and after an air show in Paris, Cynthia meets the Strong family in Cannes. There’s a sexually charged tango, a confessional boat ride, and an attempt to break off the illicit relationship even as the two admit they love each other. Cynthia abandons Strong in order to enter an around-the-world flying contest, but a stroke of fate brings the two together again shortly after she lands in New York City and wins the race. They spend the night together, and Cynthia decides to give up flying and focus her attention on the affair and on Christopher. She soon grows restless and unsatisfied — but just as she decides to return to the air once more, Cynthia finds out she’s pregnant. After being confronted in very different ways by the now married-and-expecting Monica and by Lady Elaine Strong (Billie Burke), Cynthia decides she doesn’t want to break up the Strong family or tarnish her own reputation with the scandal her pregnancy would cause. She chooses instead to commit suicide by ripping off her oxygen mask while breaking the long-sought-after 33,000 feet altitude record, after which her plane plummets to the earth and explodes as it hits the ground.

The film and its tragedy are very much products of the pre-code era, that brief period of time between the advent of talkies in 1929 and the strict enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934. It’s unlikely the film would have received the green light for production even just two years after it was made — given its depictions of “independent” women, infidelity, divorce, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy — even it if does seem to sufficiently “punish” Hepburn’s character for her actions in the end.

In spite of the ending or what the trailer suggests, Christopher Strong doesn’t demonize Cynthia for her ambition and her desires; instead, the film sheds a sympathetic light on her story even as it depicts her pursuit of independence and love as an impossible one within the context of the world she occupies.

The story of such a pursuit and the societal pressures attached likely felt familiar to Dorothy Arzner, writer Zoë Akins, and Katharine Hepburn — each of whom occupied positions of creative control in the film’s production and led successful careers in an industry still notorious for undervaluing women today. Arzner’s film industry career spanned 1919 to 1943, she was openly lesbian, and the only woman at a major studio to make the directorial jump from silent films to the talkies; Akins was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote everything from plays to poetry to literary criticism; and Hepburn’s image is inextricable from the sort of headstrong characters she played throughout her prolific stage and film career.

That’s not to say the trio’s involvement made Christopher Strong problem-free, or that result isn’t informed and shaped by their respective biases and by the studio system within which they operated. But it is worth noting that, in spite of whatever personal views they might have held, Arzner, Akins, and Hepburn could only continue to find work in Hollywood if their films received studio approval and turned a profit. So much of the subversiveness in this film and others often plays out subtly, in a sort of tug-of-war between the daring and the conventional.

Cynthia Darrington’s initial success and later failure both exemplifies this back-and-forth and mirrors real-world attempts to navigate traditionally male fields while maintaining a sense of power. This is clear from the very beginning, and it’s no accident that the first frames of the film present the title card atop an image of “Boadicea and her Daughters” in the foreground with Big Ben looming behind. On a baser level, it establishes the setting and scene, but, more subtly, it visually and thematically links Cynthia to another woman who sought and gained power in a male-dominated space before meeting a terrible end.

Before she meets that end, Cynthia asserts her independence in the way relatively wealthy, educated, and white women could in the 1930s. She lives alone, enjoys intellectual hobbies, moves effortlessly from jodhpurs and trousers to shimmering costumes and flower-trimmed gowns — and, of course, she pushes both her snazzy roadster and her airplane as fast and far as they’ll go, personifying a sort of recklessness that puts most of the men around her on edge. It’s a recklessness that’s tangled up in her approach to the affair with Strong and to other objects of her desire, and the film reinforces Cynthia’s pursuit of things she can’t have through less-than-subtle visual metaphors: while clad in her moth costume, she is unable to pull her eyes away from the match she struck to light Christopher’s cigarette, and the statue built to commemorate Cynthia after her death is a twin to the figure of Icarus flying too close to the sun.

Women and their desires play a key part in Christopher Strong. Each woman in the film is unique, complicated, and resistant to stereotypes, and their relationships with one another and with the world around them change in unexpected ways. At the beginning of the film, Monica and Elaine exist as opposites: Monica is a “modern” party girl, and Elaine is the self-described “traditionalist” who disapproves of her daughter’s late nights out and of her affair with a married man. When this creates an estrangement between Elaine and her daughter, Monica finds a replacement in her relationship with Cynthia. Their friendship only ends near the end of the film, after Monica finds out about her father’s affair with the pilot she once admired. Now married and pregnant, Monica is more aligned with her mother’s “traditional” values; she sees Cynthia as a threat to familial security, even though her own relationship is the byproduct of an affair not unlike Cynthia’s own.

The deterioration of Monica and Cynthia’s friendship is a near-inversion of the peculiar evolution of the relationship between Elaine and Cynthia. Lady Strong at first views Cynthia with wariness and jealousy, but in the film’s last minutes, she sincerely thanks the woman for her influence on both her husband and her daughter. Elaine speaks in a sort of code indicating that she not only knows about the affair, but that she feels it indirectly caused Christopher to change his attitude about Monica marrying a divorced man — helping the pair avoid “wrecking” their only daughter’s life with disapproval and distance.

While Cynthia and Christopher’s affair indirectly bring the Strong family together, it evolves into a source of tension for Cynthia as she attempts to reconcile her romantic desires with her own sense of independence. And as much as Christopher is drawn to Cynthia for her courage and modernity, he does nearly everything he can along the way to stifle both — and Cynthia spends much of the film resisting his repeated attempts to assert possession and mold their relationship into one that mimics the structure of marriage, usually exemplified in his appeals to her to quit flying. After Christopher begs her to drop out of an around-the-world race, Cynthia fiercely replies, “Oh no, certainly not!” When he asks her to “never take such risks again” during their reunion afterward, Cynthia says, in a line that foreshadows events to come, “I must, and you must let me. Promise you’ll always let me do what I want to do, or we’ll both be terribly unhappy.”

This all changes just minutes later, after their first night together and during one of the film’s more “scandalous” scenes. Cynthia’s arm enters the frame as she reaches to switch on a bedside light, her wrist adorned with a jeweled bracelet Christopher has just given her. “I love my beautiful bracelet, and I’ve never given a button for jewels before,” she says, arm still stretched across the screen, “Now, I’m shackled.” Christopher once again asks her to give up flying, and it’s only after she’s “shackled” in this way that she consents — effectively clipping her own wings in an attempt to fit the structural box of their relationship. She is, at this point, unable to reconcile her feelings and their affair with her sense of independence, and so she decides to commit to the former.

But there’s another piece of jewelry at play in the “shackling” scene: a ring Cynthia wears throughout the film, the meaning of which is diametrically opposed to that of the bracelet. When Christopher takes notice of the ring, Cynthia explains that it’s her family’s crest and motto: “Virtus mortem vincit.” He promptly translates for the viewer: “Courage conquers death”, and Cynthia replies near-instantaneously that while courage conquers death, she does not believe it can conquer love. Curiously enough, “virtus,” the Latin word for “courage” in the motto, also translates to “power.” This seems to indicate that courage and power are inextricable, and combined they conquer death — and that Cynthia believes her “power” can’t conquer love because the two are fundamentally incompatible within the context of their relationship structure.

The “shackling” scene is one of many moments in the film that criticizes marriage or marriage-esque relationships and the gendered assumptions often attached. Such cynicism is a hallmark of Arzner’s work, and it’s apparent throughout Christopher Strong. The film shows us that the treasure hunt rests on a series of harmful assumptions — that convention dictates men always cheat and it’s only the rare one that’s faithful; that women will inevitably desire a “love affair” or marriage even if those institutions offer limited security while stifling their freedom; and those who don’t fit in either box are anomalies to be exhibited. At a party midway through the film, Monica’s aunt (Irene Brown) seems to comment directly on one result of accepting those assumptions when she notes that, “If every wife would only keep her misgivings to herself and her fingers crossed, marriage might sometimes be a success.” In other words: a woman must sacrifice her own agency and independence for a patriarchal conceptualization of marriage, and implicitly love, to “work.”

It’s an idea the film hints at again later on, while Cynthia waits for Christopher in an out-of-the-way restaurant. A man in the lobby recognizes and approaches Cynthia to ask about her flying career, but she tells him she’s given it all up. He laments her decision: “You had the instincts of a pioneer. And you gave all of us courage.” Cynthia dryly replies that she seems to have lost her own courage, in an indication that she equates it to power and to her former independence, and feels her relationship with Christopher required its sacrifice.

Cynthia clearly grapples with the realization that a relationship alone, if defined in those terms, will not fully satisfy her — and, moments after speaking with her admirer in the restaurant, she expresses that dissatisfaction in a powerful monologue:

“I’ve nothing to do all day but wait for you or your telephone calls or your telegrams saying you can’t come,” she tells Christopher, “I only know I want to go up again. I want to break records. I want to train hard and not eat or drink all the time. I want to get up at dawn, I want to smell the field in the morning air, not mind getting oil in my hair and on my hands, and I want to talk to the boys I’ve flown with again.”

But the realization and the attempt to re-claim her independence come too late — as just after her declaration, when she’s at the doctor to receive the all-clear to take to the skies again, she finds out she’s pregnant. When Cynthia later presents the situation to Christopher as a hypothetical one, she’s unsettled by his reply that it would be his duty to marry her if she were pregnant; and while he admits he’s not averse to the idea, he would hate hurting his wife and daughter in the process. When Cynthia says she could manage a life and a child without him, even if doing so would tarnish her reputation, Christopher replies, “Well, I wouldn’t let you.”

The outcomes aren’t ones Cynthia can accept. Abortion is unavailable to her in the context of the film, and a pregnancy out of wedlock would cause a scandal and tarnish her legacy. Even if she did consent to marry Christopher, she doesn’t want to break up the Strong family just when they’ve managed to reconcile — and after the failed attempt to make herself fit the mold of a “traditional” relationship, Cynthia also knows she wouldn’t feel fulfilled by a life defined in those terms. She’s surrounded by undesirable choices, and so she escapes from them the only way she knows how.

Cynthia’s inability to resolve her situation in any way other than permanently removing herself from it reads at first, as the trailer suggests, like an indictment of the character and her actions: she was too recklessly independent in life and in love, and her pursuit of the impossible does not come without consequence. But the last moments of the film aren’t just about Cynthia Darrington, and the spectacle of her death forces the viewer to focus on factors that lead her there. As she pushes her plane higher and higher, the film’s pivotal moments flash in a montage over the altimeter — and we realize the film is not a critique of an ambitious woman herself or of her desires, but of the society that prevents her from obtaining fulfillment and leads her to conclude she has no other option but to tear the oxygen mask from her face and let her plane crash to the ground.

The ending is a far cry from the one that Cynthia deserves, especially since the film suggests her choice is driven by the pressure to prioritize the Strong family’s conventional happiness over her own desires. And while she declares, “Courage can conquer even love,” in her final note to Christopher, the sentiment leaves us with the unsatisfying idea that she has to choose one or the other, and that the expression of her power leads her to such a drastic end.

But as imperfect and disappointing as it is, there is a tragic sort of reasoning behind the self-sacrifice. In Cynthia’s eyes, the decision to end it all while breaking an altitude record everyone thought impossible to break is an not only assertion of power, but one that allows the idea of her courage as an aviatrix to live on after her death.

It’s a faint yet important silver lining, as Cynthia’s ability to inspire the people around her with that courage is clear throughout the film. Monica gushes with admiration the first time she meets Cynthia; the city gives the aviatrix a ticker-tape parade upon her successful flight around the world; a woman asks for Cynthia’s autograph and praises her as a heroine who gave everyone at her school “courage for everything.”

As her plane falls from the sky, we are left with the smallest consolation that Cynthia Darrington will continue to live on as a symbol to others — a beacon of courage and a reminder to keep trying, climbing, flying, even if the sun threatens to burn the feathers from your arms.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Great Kate: A Woman for All Ages

Quote of the Day: Judith Mayne on Dorothy Arzner

Taylor Kenkel is an ex-copy editor who broke up with the newspaper industry after it found out about her affair with the Oxford comma. She’s now a librarian, and spends too much time thinking about 1930s-1940s film, feminism, comics, queer culture, and too many fandoms to even list. You can find her on Twitter @treegeekay, where she tweets about all of those things (and many more) when she should probably be writing instead.

One Woman’s View: Martha Fiennes’ ‘Onegin’

Director Martha Fiennes unlocks this costume classic for a modern audience, deftly allowing the two main characters to take their share of the center stage to tell their stories. While Ralph Fiennes’ Onegin plays a familiar type of romantic male, Liv Tyler’s Tatyana is not often familiar, even in modern love stories. She does not play the martyr, pining for someone she can’t have, but rather takes stock of what she needs in life and makes her choices accordingly, regardless of how others may feel.

This guest post written by Paulette Reynolds appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors. | Spoilers ahead.

“A woman’s film is a movie that places at the center of its universe a female who is trying to deal with the emotional, social, and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the fact that she is a woman.” — Jeanine Basinger

Although film historian Jeanine Basinger was referring to a particular period of films about women in her seminal book, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, she was also one of the earliest female film critics to hone in on what are the essential elements of the woman’s film. She defines such a film as “…[Where] women actually take on heroic dimensions, bursting forth from the boundaries of female behavior to become “female heroes”…[as] a woman who defies conventional rules and redefines her life on her own terms…” Published in 1993, many of Basinger’s observations are now just breaking through the cinematic glass ceiling, thanks in part to the recent upsurge in the Women’s Movement. This awareness and celebration of female empowerment is growing across multiple media platforms, as a new generation of women artists add their voices to the demand for equal representation in the entertainment industry.

In the spirit of that celebration, I’d like to include Martha Fiennes to Bitch Flicks‘ list of women directors to honor. Fiennes falls into that category of female film directors who holds a scant résumé of two narrative films and a documentary — Onegin (1999), Indians’ Sacred Spirit (1999) and Chromophobia (2005) — yet deserves a second look, especially for Onegin, her directorial debut.

Onegin is based on the 1833 novel, Eugene Onegin, written by what many consider to be the father of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin. In his celebrated story, he creates a woman of strength and empowerment in Tatyana, the first female hero of Russian literature. Martha Fiennes’ adaptation appears to focus on Eugene Onegin, a bored and aimless Russian aristocrat (portrayed by Ralph Fiennes), who’s forced back to his ancestral roots when his rich uncle dies. He reluctantly takes up residence on his new estate, which include several mansions, villages and serfs. That he is now wealthy beyond imagination — and hence, more powerful — means little to Onegin, who scorns the idle rich (while including himself in his contemptuous worldview).

A chance encounter with a young poet, Vladimir (Toby Stephens), from a neighboring estate makes his stay in the unsophisticated countryside bearable, especially when he meets Tatyana Larina, played by Liv Tyler. Tatyana’s sister, Olga (Lena Headey) and Vladimir are expecting to marry, much to her mother’s annoyance, since she looks forward to both her daughters marrying within their social circle. Onegin, with his worldly experience, can see at once that Olga is rather vain and shallow, and considers her beneath Vladimir’s station, but she suits the young poet’s youthful ego and he eagerly awaits their wedding day. Tatyana however, is not so easily stereotyped, as she is no country girl looking forward to the bridal veil. This serious young woman reads literature, which causes her mother to fear it will warp her feminine sensibilities.

During a small dinner party, Tatyana firmly voices her disagreement with the Russian policy of serfdom, something that Onegin initially shares when he states he will free his serfs and rent them his land to farm. Later, curiosity gets the better of Tatyana and she seeks out Onegin in his library. She asks him if he’ll really free his serfs, and he answers that his idle lifestyle rules out the responsibility of maintaining the land, so he really doesn’t care about the question of serfdom at all. Rather than be offended by his lack of political conscience, Tatyana values his honesty, something that she sees few people display in her small community.

While Tatyana and Olga are like oil and water, one common belief they share is in the romantic ideal of love, and Tatyana wastes no time in falling for the aloof, brooding Onegin. Her lack of experience encourages her to read about love and romance in books and she tries to make sense of why a cosmopolitan man would hang around the rural shade of an empty estate. The viewer is already aware that Onegin cares more than he’s willing to admit, and Tatyana takes a chance and shares her feelings for him in an ink-smudged letter. Once sent however, she notices her inky hands and slowly wipes them on her white nightgown, and as the quiet moonlight falls upon her we can feel her misgivings giving birth.

Tatyana’s mother invites Onegin to her daughter’s naming party and she takes the opportunity to confront him about his silence. Diplomatically, he tells her that any affair they might have would end in ruination for her, due to his dislike of marriage. “Can’t you see where this leads? A declaration, a kiss, a wedding, family, obligation, boredom, adultery.” He sees her feelings as “romantic imaginations” of a young girl that will ripen into something more meaningful for someone else at a later time. She sorrowfully states, “You curse yourself,” and no sooner are the words uttered than everything goes horribly wrong for Onegin. In the next few hours, he will be forced into a fatal duel with Vladimir and flee Russia for a more peaceful isolation.

Six years later, Onegin returns and happens to spy a woman at a ball hosted by his cousin, Russian Crown Prince Nikitin. His eyes and the camera follow this tall, dark-haired woman, who’s scarlet red gown stands out amid a sea of pale dresses and fans. She casually encircles the entire room, proud and confident, as we realize that it’s Tatyana. Onegin asks the Prince who she is, and is astounded to recognize the girl who once gave her heart to him is now Nikitin’s Princess. He asks for the next dance as a pretext to speaking with her, but she gently rebuffs him and walks away. “It’s true,” her husband confides sadly, “She doesn’t like to dance.”

In the days that follow, Onegin feverishly pursues Tatyana with his own letter and declarations of love, but it doesn’t take much to see that this Tatyana is not so easily swayed. Although she married as society expected her to do, she wisely chose a man who could be happy with an independent woman. Prince Nikitin might one day govern a country, but in the matters of marriage and sex Tatyana rules her world with a calm and steady grace. Onegin is finally able to snatch a few moments alone with Tatyana, where he begs her to run away with him. She tearfully informs him that he’s just a bit too late, finding it ironic that he would eagerly aid in her downfall, now that it is he who feels the sharp pains of unrequited love. The mature Tatyana may still care for Onegin, but she refuses to go against her own standards to ease his suffering and her discomfort. She orders him not to see her ever again and walks away, leaving Onegin to wander alone, yet again.

It might be helpful to the Western gaze to keep in mind that on one level Onegin and Tatyana represent twin aspects of the universal “Russian soul” in literature, blazing with passion just below a cool surface. Director Martha Fiennes unlocks this costume classic for a modern audience, deftly allowing the two main characters to take their share of the center stage to tell their stories. While Ralph Fiennes’ Onegin plays a familiar type of romantic male, Liv Tyler’s Tatyana is not often familiar, even in modern love stories. She does not play the martyr, pining for someone she can’t have, but rather takes stock of what she needs in life and makes her choices accordingly, regardless of how others may feel. Tyler’s well-crafted performance brings Puskin’s female hero forever into our consciousness, where she can add her voice to the growing feminine collective.

References:

Jeanine Basinger. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960 Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, Connecticut | Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1993. Print

Paulette Reynolds is the Editor and Publisher of Cine Mata’s Movie Madness film appreciation blog. Film viewing and theory are her passion, but film noir remains her first love. Paulette breathes the rarified Austin, Texas air and can be seen on Twitter @CinesMovieBlog.

The Future of Anime Is Female: ‘Yuri!!! On Ice’s Director Sayo Yamamoto

Thankfully, this hasn’t stopped animator/director Sayo Yamamoto from not only surviving over the past two decades — but thriving. And in style. Like Attack on Titan, Yamamoto’s ‘Yuri!!! On Ice’ has become a breakout hit, and amazingly, it’s only her third time as a series director. … Yamamoto’s success as a woman director shouldn’t be the exception to the rule in the anime industry.

This guest post written by Hannah Collins appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

The meteoric global success of Mokoto Shinkai’s feature-length anime, Your Name, coupled with recent news that anime streaming service, Crunchyroll, now has over 1 million subscribers, might lead most to believe that the anime machine is chugging along nicely at the moment. The reality is unfortunately very different for those doing all the hard work to keep that machine churning to meet rabid fan demand. These success stories punctuate a general aura of “doom and gloom” that has hung over the Japanese animation industry for several years now. The workload is unreasonably high, the pay is unreasonably low, and intense pressure to succeed has even proved fatal for some.

Industry legend and beloved grandfather of anime, Hayao Miyazaki, isn’t known for his sunny disposition at the best of times in regards to the future of his trade, made all the more evident by this tweet in 2011. Surprise, surprise — the “end times” for a male-dominated field are apparently signaled by women trying to muscle their way in. Miyazaki wrote:

“They say it’s over for animation in Japan. When we look for new hires only women respond, and I get the feeling that we’re done for. In our last hurrah we borrow from outside staff (i.e. outsource), but soon we won’t be able to do that forever.”

Considering his championing of strong-willed, independent heroines throughout his body of work, this statement was all the more disheartening. Working in such a toxic environment is tough enough, but for Japan’s female population, who still earn up to 30% less than their male counterparts (60% less for working mothers) and are now even labeled as symptoms of its stagnation by male industry leaders, the odds are doubly stacked against them to survive.

Thankfully, this hasn’t stopped animator/director Sayo Yamamoto from not only surviving over the past two decades — but thriving. And in style. Like Attack on Titan, Yamamoto’s Yuri!!! On Ice has become a breakout hit, and amazingly, it’s only her third time as a series director. For those who’ve only dipped their toe into the weird and wonderful world of “Japanimation,” her name might not ring any bells, but the shows and films she’s worked on prior to Yuri!!! On Ice most likely will. Beginning with CLAMP’s “X” in 2001, Yamamoto has storyboarded and/or directed episodes of some of the most popular shows of the past decade, including Space Dandy, Psycho-Pass, Highschool of the Dead, Gunslinger Girl, Eureka Seven, Death Note, Ergo Proxy and Attack On Titan, as well as films Redline and Neon Genesis Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance.

In 2004, she got her first big break as a director, helming several episodes of Samurai Champloo under the tutelage of the legendary Shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop), an experience that would prove to be hugely influential on her. In the screencaps below, you can see her playful experiments with different styles developing through her work.

Fast-forward four years, Yamamoto is given her next even bigger break: an opportunity to direct a whole series. This was 2008’s Michiko & Hatchin, an action-packed, crime-caper across a Brazilian-inspired land that saw the young and sheltered, Michiko, team up with the dangerous and sultry, Hana, in search of a missing man from their pasts.

Though the series was sadly financially unsuccessful, it garnered enough praise for Yamamoto to be offered another series in 2012, commemorating the 40th anniversary of Lupin III. Never one to follow expectation, Yamamoto opted to craft an origin story, not around the eponymous gentleman thief, but around his love interest and rival, Fujiko Mine, instead. This became the cult series, The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. Similarly to Michiko & Hatchin, Yamamoto was given full creative freedom, allowing her bold, pop art-inflected visuals and thematic fixations — feminine sensuality, comedy, multiculturalism and complex, queer relationships — to begin to blossom.

Yamamoto’s continuing exploration of eroticism through a female gaze is particularly important within a medium infamous for leering “panty shots” and unwanted groping being normalized and excused as “fan service,” with too many female characters swinging between either hypersexualisation or infantilization. During an AnimeFest panel in 2012, Yamamoto made no secret of what attracted her to Fujiko Mine as a character:

“In almost every chapter or episode [of ‘Lupin’] there were some sort of naked female somewhere in there. I felt that the recent TV series animation was really aimed at kids, made intentionally with kids in mind. So I wanted to go back in history and bring back the original manga, how I felt it was intended to be entertaining to adults. […] When I was growing up watching Fujiko in the original series of ‘Lupin’, I always watched her with anticipation of when she was going to take off her clothes.”

The key word here is “adult.” Sexual content alone is not the problem; it’s the context and tenor of that content. Too often in anime and manga, sexuality and “ecchi” humor fixate on teenage characters with a similarly teenage sensibility. Yamamoto, however, crafts stories about adults for adults, with a suitably mature and artful understanding of the power and mystique of sensuality — both heterosexual and queer.

Considering Yamamoto’s female-focused track record, directing a series like Yuri!!! On Ice — a show about professional male ice skaters — seemed like an odd move. But, despite men taking center-stage, Yamamoto was characteristically careful not to underrepresent women throughout the series. Also, considering the show falls into the shonen-ai or “Boys Love” (BL) genre (stories about queer male relationships created by and for women) a woman director and storyboarder (Mitsurou Kubo) team was also a logical move. As fans of BL stories like myself know, the genre has long been plagued by problems of the kind of festishization that always seems to sadly come part and parcel of hetero-appropriation of LGBTQ stories. But in the hands of Yamamoto and Kubo, Yuri!!! On Ice thankfully dodges most of this, managing instead to channel Yamamoto’s skillful handling of comedy and adult eroticism into protagonist Yuri Katsuki’s journey of self-discovery with complexity and sensitivity. Aside from the dazzlingly choreographed skating, it’s this competent handling that’s been key to enthralling the show’s fans.

Episode three is particularly pivotal in Yuri’s journey, as he is challenged by his skating idol, Victor Nikiforov, to perform a program titled, “On Love: Eros.” To tackle his severe lack of confidence in his ability to channel the “eroticism” needed for the routine, Yuri imagines a story about an 18th century “playboy,” which Yamamoto and Kubo animate beautifully using a sketchy, shadow-puppet technique to accentuate the fairy tale aspect of the story.

Reflecting upon the narrative he created, Yuri begins to realize that he identifies with both the feminine and masculine characters, a revelation that empowers him both on and off the rink. During his first performance, he compares himself to a “woman” skater and makes the suave and handsome Victor the object of his seducing. The costume Yuri chooses to wear during competitions visually reinforces all this — a replica of one that Victor once wore, incorporating both masculine and feminine elements into its design with a half-skirt layered over the trousers.

Yamamoto’s success as a woman director shouldn’t be the exception to the rule in the anime industry. A report from the Women in Animation (WIA) board formed by The Animation Guild found that a staggering 84% of roles in animation were taken by men and 16% by women in 2006. By 2015, this ratio had shifted slightly to 80% men and 20% women, with just 10% of animation directors/producers being women. Though these figures come from American studios, a comment made by Yamamoto during AnimeFest seemed to corroborate a similar — or worse — gender imbalance in Japan:

“At the time that I started work on ‘Michiko & Hatchin’ [in 2008] there were only about 5 female directors. But as I moved on to ‘Lupin’, I do feel the female influence on the industry is definitely increasing and growing.”

Her optimism is shared by Naoko Yamada (A Silent Voice) who is currently the youngest female director of feature-length anime. In a recent interview, Yamada shared this advice to women hoping to beat the considerable odds stacked against them:

“There’s no limit in a creative industry, so just look at what you like and create and make what you like to create and just be passionate about it.”

The immense popularity of Yuri!!! On Ice and the positive reception of Yamada’s A Silent Voice proves that Miyazaki’s fears are completely misplaced. Female directors and animators are not symptomatic of the anime industry’s failings. Rather — if given enough opportunity, encouragement and fairer wages — they could instead be the driving force behind its salvation.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Michiko to Hatchin: Anime’s Newest Mom Has Some Issues

Hannah Collins is a London-born writer and illustrator fascinated by the intersection between pop/visual culture and feminism. On the blogging scene, Hannah has attracted over 1 million readers to her blog on gender representation in pop culture. By day, she is currently a freelance illustrator for children’s books and comics, and by night (and any other available hour) she contributes to the Cosmic Anvil and Fanny Pack blogs, as well as her own.

Teen Girls Coming of Age in ‘Clueless’ and ‘The Edge of Seventeen’

These two women directors, Amy Heckerling (‘Clueless’) and Kelly Fremon Craig (‘The Edge of Seventeen’), use their films to give a focused examination on the insecurity and self-doubt teen girls face. Cher and Nadine’s personal struggles, as well as their relationships with older mentors, reveal how patriarchal expectations shape their lives as they come of age.

This guest post written by Emma Casley appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

The Edge of Seventeen’s protagonist Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) says, “There are two types of people in the world: The people who naturally excel in life and the people who hope all those people die in a big explosion,” placing herself firmly in the second camp. Though Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) is the star of an entirely different film released 21 years before, there’s little doubt that Nadine would categorize the Clueless character in the first group. Despite differences in tone and the personalities of their leads, both films share a similarity in subject matter: teenage girls growing up. And both films are written and directed by women – a rarity in mainstream movies.

These two women directors, Amy Heckerling (Clueless) and Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), use their films to give a focused examination on the insecurity and self-doubt teen girls face. Cher and Nadine’s personal struggles, as well as their relationships with older mentors, reveal how patriarchal expectations shape their lives as they come of age. Though the two films both focus on a very particular demographic of white, well-off teenagers, they do point to the ways in which even these girls of relative privilege suffer under the boundaries of gender roles. The films do what they aim to do well: give depth and nuance to a demographic that is often written off as being frivolous and shallow. However there are obvious limits in what these films can portray. Though casting a critical look at male privilege, both films leave issues like racial and economic inequality untouched. The success of Heckerling and Craig’s films demonstrates the need for even more diversity of voices in film rather than being the end goal of more inclusive filmmaking.

The similarities between Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen can be most clearly seen in the parallels between their lead characters. Their actions reveal how they both struggle with the immense pressure that society places on young women. Cher sees herself as an expert and mentor for her family, fellow students, and teachers; Nadine frets over her social awkwardness and isolation. Cher spends her weekend choosing non-school books to read and workout regimens; Nadine’s nights off involve crying while throwing up into a toilet while her one friend (Haley Lu Richardson) holds her hair back. Cher uses strategically delivered flowers and chocolates to woo the object of her affection; Nadine sends a painfully awkward and explicit Facebook message to her crush about “doing it in the Petland stockroom.”

Cher might present herself as more put together through reading Fit or Fat and working out to buns of steel, but this urge to constantly “improve” herself and others demonstrates how she sees herself as something that needs to be improved upon. She complains about “feeling like such a heifer” after spending the day eating candy and snacks, and after her friend declines her suggestions for sex, she worries that she wasn’t presenting herself as attractive enough: “Did my hair get flat? Did I stumble into some bad lighting? What’s wrong with me?” While it’s a line played for laughs in the film, Cher clearly isn’t so different from Nadine as she despairs that she “feels so grotesque” and outcast from her cooler peers. They just have different ways of expressing this insecurity.

It doesn’t help that the few female role models Cher and Nadine have don’t provide much reassurance that things will get any better once they reach adulthood. Nadine’s mother (Kyra Sedgwick) seems to be constantly on the edge of breaking down – struggling between her job and taking care of her children and dealing with the emotional aftermath of her husband’s death. Cher’s mother has passed away, but her teacher Miss Geist (Twink Caplan) serves as an example of what the future might have in store for her. Similar to Nadine’s mom, Miss Geist is overworked and lonely. Though Miss Geist has a happier ending in Clueless, she still demonstrates the difficulties of living up to social expectations, even as an adult. Nadine and Cher are young women struggling with insecurity and feeling like they’re failing to perform femininity in the right way and they watch as their older female mentors struggle with the exact same performance. Nadine’s mother even tells her that she comforts herself thinking that everyone is as miserable and dead inside as she is – not exactly an “it gets better” message for the teenager.

Especially in comparison to many of the male characters in both films, the women in Clueless and Edge of Seventeen are unhappy and flawed, unable to provide support for the young female protagonists. While one reading might interpret this as plain old sexism in the writing, another way to look at it is that these films showcase the wear and tear that these women experience under a patriarchal society. While Nadine and Cher feel the pressure to twist and conform to impossible standards, their male counterparts (both teenagers and adults) are allowed to just simply be. This translates into many of the male characters being mentors or supportive figures for the female characters: Nadine has her teacher Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson); her mother has her son Darian (Blake Jenner); Cher has her father (Dan Hedaya) and Josh (Paul Rudd). Darian might express frustration with being the only “stable” one in the family, but The Edge of Seventeen never shows him struggle to live up to gendered social expectations as his mother and sister experience. Both films portray many of the male characters in a very positive way: they act as a sympathetic ear to Nadine and Cher’s problems without having much personal stake in the matter.

However, both films also demonstrate how a lack of awareness of societal pressures on women manifests a much less positive, and much more dangerous, way in other male characters. The Edge of Seventeen and Clueless contain very similar scenes that take place between the protagonists and a male classmate while they drive together in a car. In both cases, the girls reject the boys’ sexual advances and subsequently are stranded after leaving the car to escape the situation. In these scenes, from the boy’s perspectives, they were responding to “obvious” signs that the girls were interested in a romantic and/or sexual relationship with them. But the films suggest that actually the boys simply felt their own desires and assumed that the girls would accommodate them.

In this way, the male characters in both films, whether they are understanding mentors or aggressive sexual assaulters, are ignorant of their own power. Characters like Mr. Bruner and Cher’s father can be so “good” because they’re not dealing with the same kinds of social pressures as characters like Nadine’s mother and Miss Geist are, and can instead be pillars of stability in the main characters’ lives. But their pillar-like quality can be seen in a different way: as the men stay static, then women must constantly bend and be flexible to accommodate their positions. Cher’s father and Mr. Bruner remain ignorant to this dynamic, even when offering support to the two girls. This lack of awareness shows its darker side in the two car scenes. The two boys assume that they “know best” in these situations and expect the girls to acquiesce to their advances. Neither film gives credence to this assumption. They instead give a sympathetic view to Cher and Nadine’s hurt and betrayal, pointing the finger at the dangerous presumption of male privilege. Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen show empathy for the deeply flawed female characters and the societal oppression they face. They also demonstrate how men, as kind advisers or dangerous predators, have a tendency to assume the impartiality of their views — of course they can give good advice to their students and daughters, of course they know that when a girl gets in a car with them it’s an invitation for sex. One of the main functions of male privilege is men not even knowing that they have it.

Of course other kinds of structural oppression exist in conjunction with male privilege, and both Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen center on the lives of well-off, white, suburban girls. The two films focus on giving detailed portraits of a single character so it does make sense within the context of their stories for them both to have such a focus on a particular demographic and lifestyle. However, neither film deviates from the larger film canon’s intense fixation on the stories of the rich and the white and the otherwise privileged at the expensive of other narratives. Both directors have discussed their process in writing and directing their films; Heckerling details how she fought for Clueless to focus on the girls rather than the boys, and Craig used her own experiences with self loathing and insecurity to inform Nadine’s struggles. So while it might not have been essential that these films give nuance to female coming-of-age stories, in both cases, their role as writers and directors shaped the films into stories that echoed their own life experiences. What would other women, of different backgrounds, bring to their stories if they were given more opportunities to get behind the camera?

For both Heckerling and Craig, their efforts have translated into films that bring depth to the stories of teenage girls, but Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen shouldn’t be seen as the end goal of gender inclusivity in film direction. They represent two good examples of what can be accomplished when women directors are given more control over the stories they tell, but there are still a vast array of voices that have remained unheard.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Clueless: Way Existential

Emma Casley is a Brooklyn-based film writer. Last year she participated in the New York Film Festival’s Critics Academy. She can be found wandering the streets for good coffee and also on Twitter @EmmaLCasley.

Flaws Make the Woman: In Praise of ‘Love’s Mickey Dobbs

Too often, representations of women fall into clichéd binary opposites in the style of Levi-Strauss. Thus, TV shows feature the “good” woman in direct conflict with the “bad” woman, with this clash driving the narrative forward. Mickey encompasses both; she is simultaneously good and bad, selfish and giving, childish and mature. It is this complexity that ensures Mickey’s believability and development as a character. She is real and human, and thus, relatable.

This guest post is written by Siobhan Denton.

Now in its second season, Love, starring Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust, is far more complex and developed than its detractors would have you believe. For those that have failed to truly engage with the show, the central relationship between Mickey (Jacobs) and Gus (Rust) is simply another restrictive addition to a long line of improbable relationships between a manic pixie dream girl and a less conventionally attractive “geeky” lead. While this is understandable to a casual viewer, it must be noted that to define Love as such is hugely limiting and fails to recognize the complexity that is at the heart of the series. Love’s characters, given room to breathe, are problematic and through this, are fully developed and engaging.

Quickly, it is apparent that Mickey and Gus reject the stereotypes that they initially appear to fulfill. Gus, despite presenting as a “nice guy,” is often passive aggressive and dependent. He is desperate to receive praise, and seeks it through attempting to be as amenable as possible, even when it is detrimental to his plans or aims. Gus strongly believes that he is a nice guy, and as such, should be treated accordingly. Similarly Mickey, who initially presents as a quirky, kooky, attractive woman, quickly rejects this image. She is a complicated, imperfect woman who, despite the various demands on her mental health, manages to maintain a successful career. Indeed, her ways of maintaining this career are, at times, questionable, including sleeping with her boss to ensure that she is not at risk of being fired. It’s as if Mickey cannot believe that she is successful within her role, despite the viewer witnessing her ability to multitask and appease colleagues at work, so she feels the need to ensure her success in methods that are more suited to her personal experience.

Mickey Dobbs is not an immediately likable character. Certainly she is engaging, and entertaining to watch, but her selfishness, borne out of her various addictions, often leads to narcissistic behavior. Initially seemingly motivated by self-interest, her interactions with those around her, including her work colleagues, highlights her ability to use and manipulate others. Given the room to develop without clichéd conflict or drama, the viewer soon recognizes that Mickey’s behavior is learned, and she acknowledges and recognizes it as damaging to both herself and the others around her.

In recent years, this concept of a flawed female protagonist on-screen has gained traction in television series such as How to Get Away with Murder, You’re the Worst, House of Cards, Insecure, Game of Thrones, Empire, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Nurse Jackie, Fleabag, Damages, Jessica Jones, and Orange Is the New Black. One salient example is Girls, which features a cast of difficult and often problematic characters. Each of creator Lena Dunham’s characters is uniquely flawed, but their issues are often borne out of social status, class privilege, and white privilege. Certainly these flaws are worthy of focus, and their issues range from the complex to the superficial, yet the characters often generate their own problems leading to them isolating themselves from the audience. Unlike Girls’ Hannah Horvath, Mickey knows that she needs to work on her flaws. She also recognizes, and tries to rectify, the impact that her mistakes have had on others.

Take her interactions with Bertie (Claudia O’Doherty), her roommate, whose value as a friend Mickey does not initially recognize. Hoping to see Gus after a moment of conflict, she manipulates Bertie into attending a studio tour at the studios where Gus works as an on-set tutor. She knows that Bertie will resent the manipulation, especially when she has relied on Bertie for moral support previously, yet undertakes the ruse anyway. Once confronted by Bertie, she willing admits to her machinations and has subsequently recognized the importance of Bertie’s friendship (attempting to dissect Bertie’s relationship with Randy in hopes of protecting Bertie).

Mickey, in recognizing her issues, has endeavored to ensure that she is honest with those that she cares about. Thus she is honest about her addictions, particularly with Gus, and there is a clear sense that Mickey is consistently and resolutely herself with Gus. After their confrontation in season one, both Gus and Mickey recognize that honesty is crucial in ensuring the success of their relationship. Addictions and flaws aside, both Gus and Mickey offer no pretenses in their interactions with one another, and, in being afforded time to develop (as seen in the date episode in season two) are able to demonstrate their genuine chemistry with one another. Such a representation of a relationship, in which the characters simply enjoy each other’s company, is rare. Indeed, despite the external complications, their relationship thus far (midway through season two) is fairly uncomplicated – they simply like one another.

Ultimately, Mickey Dobbs’ characterization should be praised. She is a character who is allowed to make mistakes, act selfishly, and still be likable. Her representation is grounded in reality and thus makes her relatable and eminently watchable.

Siobhan Denton is a teacher and writer living in Wales, UK. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Film and Television Studies. She is especially interested in depictions of female desire and transitions from youth to adulthood. She tweets at @siobhan_denton and writes at The Blue and the Dim.

Does ‘Pitch Perfect’s Fat Amy Deserve to Be a Fat Positivity Mascot?

It’s great to see a character whose fatness is a part of her identity without being a point of dehumanization, but the films try to make Fat Amy likable at the expense of other characters, positioning her as acceptably quirky, in contrast to the women of color, who are portrayed in a more two-dimensional manner, or Stacie, who is unacceptable due to her promiscuity. Ultimately, the underlying current of stereotype-based humor puts the film’s fat positivity in a dubious light…

This guest post written by Tessa Racked appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions. An earlier version of this essay appears on Consistent Panda Bear Shape. | Spoilers ahead for Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2.

I’ve been writing about film from an intersectional feminist perspective for a little over two years now; most of that writing is unpacking how fat characters function in film on my blog, Consistent Panda Bear Shape. Multiple patterns have been emerging from that work; there are three trends in particular that make it difficult for me to write from an intersectional and/or optimistic perspective. I don’t think, reader, that you will find them too surprising:

Fat characters existing to receive the audience’s contempt, disgust, and/or pity. Mad Max: Fury Road is a great example, where the fat characters are autocrat Immortan Joe and his villainous ally, the People Eater, and the Milk Mothers, who exist as a grotesque example of how Immortan Joe objectifies and exploits the populace under his control.
Likable fat characters having some workaround where they aren’t “actually” fat, so when the character finds confidence or asserts themselves, it can be a feel-good moment without leading the audience to question established standards of acceptable bodies on a broad social scale. Two common workarounds are embodied by Olive in Little Miss Sunshine. While her story revolves around her transgression of physical beauty standards, these standards only apply to the strict, hyperfeminine pageant world; outside that context, her body is within the range of social acceptability. Additionally, actor Abigail Breslin wore a fat suit for the role, further disconnecting Olive’s story from the lived experiences of fat people.
Fat protagonists who are “actually” fat being men, usually of the straight, white variety. Of the 62 films featuring fat characters that I’ve written articles about thus far: 41 of the predominant fat characters were male, 35 of those male characters were white, and only 3 of them were identified as queer within the text of the film. Of the 2 non-human fat characters referred to male in their respective screenplays, both were voiced by white men. (The films I write about haven’t been curated in an objective manner, so take this anecdata with a grain of salt.)

The movies that I watch utilize at least one of these patterns time and time again, if they include fat characters at all. Considering this, when I do see a film featuring a decently-written character in a plot-significant role who is played by a fat actor and isn’t a straight white dude, I start having hopes for a bold new cinematic vision wherein fat people aren’t treated like garbage. Pitch Perfect is a perfect example of the kind of film that will stoke the flames of my high expectations, featuring Rebel Wilson as Fat Amy. When it was making its way into theaters, I remember seeing this exchange all over Tumblr:

This exchange says everything about why I and many others were excited: a female character, played by someone who looks like she gets relegated to the same measly section of clothing stores that I do, being funny and unapologetic about how she gets treated based on her size. (And on a more personal note, Fat Amy is also the cover girl for an AV Club article about humanized portrayals of fat characters that was an inspiration for Consistent Panda Bear Shape.) However, I didn’t actually get around to watching Pitch Perfect until it and its sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, were already out on DVD. I’ve seen a lot of positive press around Fat Amy, but for me, the viewing experience of the two films back-to-back was overall a four-hour anti-climax to my hopes for a new approach to fat representation in a mainstream comedy.

It isn’t all bad. There are some significantly refreshing aspects to how Fat Amy is represented, especially in the original movie. Where a fat body is often employed as visual shorthand for incompetence, she proves her ability as a singer in her introductory scene, impressing Aubrey (Anna Camp) and Chloe (Brittany Snow) with her voice despite their focus on finding women with “bikini-ready bodies” to audition for the Barden Bellas a capella choir. She is also the most self-assured of the Bellas by far. Her sense of humor is often outlandish but her deadpan delivery suggests that she gets more out of confusing the other characters than entertaining them. The majority of comments characterizing Fat Amy as fat are self-referential but, surprisingly, not self-deprecating. She casually remarks at her surprise that her “sexy fat ass” was chosen to be part of the Bellas. Fatness is part of how she sees herself, and isn’t a source of shame or something that needs to be sanitized; rather, it’s a part of her identity that she modifies appropriately to her mood and context. It felt oddly empowering as a fat viewer to hear her angrily threaten to “finish [someone] like a cheesecake.” Another detail that resonated with me was her fearlessness at calling attention to her body. She sprawls and flails. She has a habit of nonchalantly slapping a rhythm on her belly — a woman having fun with her fat! imagine! — or cupping her breasts during a performance. She inhabits her body and her personal space without apologizing or minimizing.

Beyond how Fat Amy is portrayed as an individual, Pitch Perfect also has progressive aspects to how Fat Amy functions as part of the Bellas. As opposed to what one might expect from a fat character in an ensemble cast, Pitch Perfect doesn’t put Fat Amy in a position where she drags the group down. There is a requisite joke about her avoiding physical activity (while the other singers jog, Aubrey finds Fat Amy lying down, or as she calls it, “horizontal running”), but her sloth seems less sinful in contrast to Aubrey’s drill sergeant seriousness about their shared extracurricular activity. Instead, both films focus on Beca (Anna Kendrick) as the problematic member of the group due to her lack of commitment. As a group, the Bellas have to deal with a change in their image from normatively attractive young women to one that includes singers who don’t meet stereotypical sorority girl standards. They are the classic rag-tag underdogs in a story focuses on competition. “I wanted the hot Bellas,” complains a frat brother who books the group to perform at a mixer, when shutting them down mid-song, “not this barnyard explosion.” Even the senior Bellas, thin and preppy Aubrey and Chloe, have bodies that defy expectations of femininity. It’s common to see fat female characters in comedies as a focal point of gross or bizarre body humor, but Pitch Perfect takes a more democratic approach. Aubrey struggles with stress-induced projectile vomiting, and soprano Chloe gains the ability to sing deep bass notes after a surgery to remove nodes on her vocal cords.

Although Fat Amy isn’t presented as more grotesque or cartoonish than the other characters, Pitch Perfect doesn’t extend the favor to other Bellas who aren’t straight and white, as Fat Amy is. The most glaring contrast is Cynthia Rose (Ester Dean), a Black butch lesbian (with an incredible set of pipes) who is also larger-bodied than the average young woman seen in a mainstream comedy. We first meet her at auditions, where she is immediately misgendered. She doesn’t come out as gay to her chorus mates until towards the end of the movie, although we get “hints” to her sexuality via shots of her leering at or groping other women, or other characters making snide comments about her sexual orientation and/or gender presentation. The audition sequence where we meet Cynthia Rose also introduces Lilly (Hana Mae Lee), who embodies the stereotype of the quiet Asian girl through a running gag where she says disturbing things in a soft voice that none of the other characters are able to hear.

Although all of the characters are part of the same underdog team, mining tired caricatures for humor reifies divides in the group via racism and homophobia. And while Fat Amy transgresses stereotypes about fat women, she is straight and white, which within the world of the film, puts her in an uncriticizable position to make snarky comments about Cynthia Rose’s sexuality and other uncomfortable remarks at the expense of marginalized groups (e.g. a clunky improv moment referring to her hairstyle as an “Orthodox Jew ponytail”).

The “fat positive” aspects of Fat Amy’s depiction aren’t just positioned against other characters who don’t share her privileged social identities. Stacie’s (Alexis Knapp) function in the group as the humorously promiscuous Bella complicates the praise Pitch Perfect gets for showing Fat Amy’s active sex life. Stacie’s sexuality is coded as excessive, a joke that becomes the majority of her screen time, whether Aubrey is trying to get her to tone down her dance moves or she’s referring to her vagina as a “hunter.” However, we never see Stacie involved with anyone. Fat Amy, on the other hand, is shown in the company of two hunks on her spring break and also makes comments about her own sexual prowess. So why is the line drawn between Stacie and Fat Amy, where one’s sexuality is the butt of jokes and the other’s is an empowering aspect of her character? When we see Bumper (Adam Devine) flirting with Fat Amy and getting shot down or hear Fat Amy talk about how she joined the Bellas because she needed to step back from her busy love life, we see her defying the expectations that we have for fat girls in movies, the assumption that nobody will want to have sex with her or that she won’t have the confidence to approach someone. Stacie, however, is thin and normatively attractive. The audience expects that she has no shortage of willing sexual partners and doesn’t restrain herself in the way she is expected to; thus, she is deserving of ridicule. The inconsistency between how the two characters’ sex lives are valued demeans Stacie and condescends to Fat Amy.

As Pitch Perfect 2 is helmed by a female director and writer with some skin in the game (Elizabeth Banks, who is in a supporting role in both films, and Kay Cannon, who wrote the original), one might hope that the sequel would amend the issues in the original, perhaps by giving more screen time to find some depth in characters like Cynthia Rose and Lilly. Unfortunately, the franchise loses more feminist cred by doubling down on the cheap stereotypes. Cynthia Rose is still a source for jokes about lesbians creeping on straight women, Lilly is still the quiet Asian girl, and now Flo (Chrissie Fit) has joined the Bellas, a Latina woman whose every comment is about how harsh and dangerous her life was in her unspecified Latin American home country.

Even the progressive aspects of Fat Amy’s depiction in Pitch Perfect largely erode in the sequel. The opening sequence is perhaps the most telling, where Fat Amy experiences a costume malfunction during a performance at President Obama’s birthday gala and accidentally exposes her vulva to the TV cameras and the concert audience. Typical to a comedy film, the audience reacts with disgust and terror, some even running away. Although unintentional, her body is deemed excessive and the resulting outcry nearly destroys the Bellas.

A similar scene of disgust comes later in the film, where a romantic moment between Fat Amy and Bumper (Adam Devine) causes his friends to run away in order to avoid looking at the couple. (While Bumper isn’t as outside the normative range of bodies seen on-camera, he is larger-bodied than the other Treblemakers.) The plotline of their relationship doesn’t meet the standards of a romantic partner that Fat Amy sets in the first film, where she brushes off his advances (though she raises the eyebrows of the other Bellas by having his number in her phone). In Pitch Perfect 2, she and Bumper are hooking up. He asks her to date him officially with a romantic dinner; she initially turns him down, saying that she’s a “free range pony who can’t be tamed,” but eventually realizes that she’s in love with him (for no discernible reason) and wins him back with a rendition of Pat Benatar’s “We Belong.” The main conflict of Pitch Perfect is the competition between the Bellas and the Treblemakers, which sets up Fat Amy and Bumper as well-balanced adversaries, both confident and ambitious. Fat Amy disdains Bumper’s advances and flirts with aforementioned hunks; Bumper quits school for an opportunity to work for John Mayer. However, in the second film, former antagonist Bumper has been humbled, now working as a college security guard and desperately trying to hang on to his past glory days as a college a capella big shot. It is at this point that he becomes a suitable partner for Fat Amy.

In Pitch Perfect, the Bellas achieve a competitive edge by using Beca’s mash-up arrangements instead of more traditional medley formats in their performances. This works as an apt allegory for Pitch Perfect as feminist films: there are some welcome updates, but ultimately it’s the same song. It’s great to see a character whose fatness is a part of her identity without being a point of dehumanization, but the films try to make Fat Amy likable at the expense of other characters, positioning her as acceptably quirky, in contrast to the women of color, who are portrayed in a more two-dimensional manner, or Stacie, who is unacceptable due to her promiscuity. Ultimately, the underlying current of stereotype-based humor puts the film’s fat positivity in a dubious light, compounded by the erosion of Fat Amy’s status as kickass fat girl, as well as any thematic content about female friendship.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Pitch Perfect and Third Wave Feminism

Tessa Racked can be heard as a guest contributor to film podcasts including Directors Club and Tracks of the Damned, on the Now Playing Network. They are good at modern dance, olden dance, mermaid dancing, and peppering the Internet with cleverness. You can follow them on Twitter @tessa_racked.

The Unvoiced Indigenous Feminism of ‘Frida’

Frida Kahlo’s sense of kyriarchy, in which the tension between Indigenous culture and European imperialism is a core aspect of her multi-faceted narratives of oppression and resistance, is simplified in Julie Taymor’s film ‘Frida’ towards a more Euro-American feminism, focused on Kahlo’s struggle for artistic recognition and romantic fulfillment as a woman, to the exclusion of her ethnic struggle.

Written by Brigit McCone as part of our theme week on Indigenous Women.

The Tzotzil Mayan activist Comandanta Ramona has become an iconic figure in the struggle for Indigenous women’s rights, as an officer of Mexico’s Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which was one-third comprised of women, and as a drafter of the Revolutionary Women’s Law which set out an uncompromisingly feminist agenda for self-determination, equality, and reproductive rights on behalf of the Indigenous women of Chiapas. Comandanta Ramona was also a founder of the National Indigenous Congress of Mexico, and led an EZLN delegation to the First National Congress of Indigenous Women in Oaxaca. In San Cristóbal, dolls of Comandanta Ramona are sold, while posters of her are a shorthand for revolutionary Indigenous feminism, comparable to the use of Che Guevara as the shorthand for wider revolution.

The iconic image of Ramona seems, from a Euro-American perspective, unusual: the combination of a revolutionary’s balaclava with a long, floral, traditional dress. In Euro-American culture, the floral dress tends to be viewed as a symbol of traditional femininity, alluding to female submission and domestic dependence. To find a long, floral dress combined with a militant image like a balaclava, representing a feminist ideology like the Revolutionary Women’s Law, may seem contradictory from other cultural perspectives. It declares that Indigenous feminism is an evolution and reclamation of Indigenous culture, not a revolution against it. Ramona’s floral dress expresses the traditions of a specific Mayan culture whose women had their extensive agency undermined by Spanish colonization. The costume is political; it is the visual shorthand and physical embodiment of Ramona’s Indigenous feminism.

If that is true of the iconic image of Comandanta Ramona, it is equally true of the even more iconic image of another famous wearer of Indigenous clothing: Frida Kahlo.

Granddaughter of the Indigenous Purépecha photographer Antonio Calderón Sandoval, daughter of a mother who befriended and aided Zapatista rebels, Frida Kahlo joined with her husband Diego Rivera in the Mexicanismo movement, which sought to reintegrate Indigenous culture and pre-Columbian heritage into the national identity of Mexico. Kahlo, probably the most significant female representative of Mexicanismo, focused on embodying the philosophy through her wearing of Indigenous clothing, particularly Tehuana dress, and its celebration in her painting. This was not merely an aesthetic choice or desire to be “exotic”: writers such as Brasseur de Bourbourg, and the Mexican educator José Vasconcelos had declared Tehuantepec to be a matriarchal society, and Frida’s choice of dress thus serves as a visual shorthand for her support of the matriarchal values that the Tehuana were famed for. Although Tehuantepec is no longer considered a true matriarchy, as its women were traditionally excluded from political power, Tehuana women did achieve a large degree of economic independence as market-traders, and were celebrated for their outspoken and sexually liberated manner. At the start of the 20th century, the Tehuana Juana Cata Romero became a revered power broker, entrepreneur, landowner, and a sexually liberated woman known for her affair with the Mexican president Porfirio Diaz, all while promoting traditional Tehuana costume.

With such precedents, Frida Kahlo’s decision to wear Tehuana dress makes a political statement of Indigenous feminism: the embodiment of female emancipation as a natural evolution of reclaimed Indigenous culture, rather than as a colonial import. It is a gesture stripped of its vital meaning if removed from the context of Tehuana (Zapotec) culture, reduced to flowery exoticism when interpreted from a Euro-American viewpoint.

For that reason, it is unfortunate that the most famous and Oscar-nominated cinematic account of Frida’s life, 2002’s Frida by the Euro-American director Julie Taymor, revels in the colorful Tehuana costumes of Salma Hayek’s Frida without providing a single line of dialogue to address their significance or the matriarchal values that they represent.

Kahlo’s Mexico was a culture of assumed hierarchies: the superiority of the European over the Indigenous, of the rich over the poor, of the masculine over the feminine. In her specific choice of peasant garb from a matriarchal Indigenous culture, Kahlo wordlessly resists each of these hierarchies simultaneously. She is, as Andre Breton described her, “a ribbon around a bomb” against a complicated, interconnected kyriarchy of oppressions.

Kahlo’s sense of kyriarchy permeates her work. “Two Nudes in the Forest” is a queer-positive work that visualizes nature as a space of lesbian eroticism, but it is equally and simultaneously a representation of solidarity between Indigenous people and cultures and European people and cultures. In “Portrait of Lucha Maria, a Girl from Tehuacan,” an Indigenous Tehuacan girl, whose very name means “struggle” in Spanish, clutches a military plane as her toy, suggesting she must be raised in preparation for battle rather than domesticated with dolls. By her military plane’s juxtaposition with her traditional costume, Kahlo’s “Lucha Maria” resembles the iconic image of Comandanta Ramona. In “My Dress Hangs There,” a chaotic collage of the decadence of Euro-American civilization is dominated by Kahlo’s Tehuana dress, hanging as a flag of mute resistance. In her most famous work, “The Two Fridas,” Kahlo celebrates the strength and wholeness of her Tehuana self, in contrast to an alternate self in colonial dress who is bleeding and has her heart torn open, associating European values with romantic weakness and dependence. The image of the empowered Tehuana, either as a disembodied dress or as an aspect of Kahlo’s dual self, continued to evolve throughout her art.

Kahlo’s sense of kyriarchy, in which the tension between Indigenous culture and European imperialism is a core aspect of her multi-faceted narratives of oppression and resistance, is simplified in Taymor’s film towards a more Euro-American feminism, focused on Kahlo’s struggle for artistic recognition and romantic fulfillment as a woman, to the exclusion of her ethnic struggle. Frida’s communism is acknowledged, but not her admiration for Stalin’s cultural nationalism, which formed the subject of several of her paintings. The political beliefs of Kahlo, and of Mexican communists generally, are left largely unexplored by Taymor’s film, or reduced to a naive admiration for the imported ideals of foreign revolutionaries such as Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush).

Another major Indigenous aspect of Kahlo’s work is its integration of Aztec and Mayan cosmology into artistic landscapes defined by the mythic Aztec struggle between light and dark, and peopled by a pantheon of pre-Columbian gods and heroes. Here again, feminism plays a key role in the emphasis that Kahlo lays on the pre-Columbian female divinities, in contrast to the wholly masculine trinity of the Christian worldview. The snake-headed Aztec goddess of birth and death, Coatlicue, sits atop the pantheon of heroes and deities in “Moses,” while in “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl” the motherhood and fertility goddess Cihuacoatl cradles Kahlo, mirroring Kahlo’s own maternal pose like a universal alter-ego.

Indigenous mythology serves as a source of strength and inspiration to Kahlo, through which she envisions a distinct feminine life-force within a complementary parity of male and female energies. This aspect of Kahlo’s art is entirely absent from Taymor’s film, though it does depict a visit by Kahlo and Trotsky to pre-Columbian pyramids. For a filmmaker with Taymor’s brilliant visual sense and gift for surreal sequences, this is surely a missed opportunity. What might Taymor not have achieved with a vision of a scarred earth transforming into the heaving bosom of Cihuacoatl, or a moon that shelters a sacrificial Mayan hare, or a writhing and devouring goddess of skulls and snakes who embodies the fearful ordeal of birthing life from death? There is no doubt that Taymor’s film is vivid and captivating, but could it not have been more so, if it had delved deeper into the brutally beautiful mytho-poetry of Kahlo’s painted world and the richness of the Indigenous heritage that informs it?

Paul LeDuc’s 1983 film Frida Naturaleza Viva, starring Ofelia Medina, is slow in pace and bleak in tone, more a collage of impressions and immaculately posed images than a coherent account of the artist’s life or work. Nevertheless, it does place Kahlo and Rivera at gatherings of Indigenous Mexicans, commemorating Emiliano Zapata through folk song and celebration, and thereby representing the political roots and ideological leanings of the artists themselves.

Julie Taymor’s 2002 work is a far more satisfying film, dramatizing a coherent account of Kahlo’s life, and a vibrant portrait of her will to succeed as a bisexual woman with a disability. Frida is saturated in Mexican music and the beauty of Mexican culture, and filled with visual references to Kahlo’s art that are a treat for fans to spot. It fails, however, to provide any context for Kahlo’s political convictions as a Mexican cultural nationalist, her identification with folk art, or her profound interest in pre-Columbian culture. Surely, the purpose of an artist’s biopic is to explore the beliefs and experiences which have shaped their work, to give voice to what was silent on the canvas? Kahlo’s images live in Taymor’s film, but the animating beliefs and Indigenous feminism behind them remain unspoken. In the opening sequence, Kahlo with a mobility disability is carried to her final exhibition in her bed and she’s accompanied by her sister Cristina and an Indigenous peasant woman, who smiles at Kahlo in affection but whose relationship with her will never be explored, and who will never even utter a line of dialogue. Her voicelessness seems to sadly typify the film’s continual use of the Indigenous as silenced accessory.

On one of the film’s posters, Kahlo’s painting “The Two Fridas” is restaged with dual Salma Hayeks clasping hands, one in a male suit and one in a Tehuana costume. The duality is now between her masculine and feminine selves, a tension of gender identity and sexuality, rather than the original painting’s tension between European and Indigenous models of womanhood, that is a distinctly Mexican cultural tension. The alteration appears to reflect the film’s wider purpose of universalizing Kahlo’s story of love and physical suffering. Are Mexican struggles to decolonize really so threatening or so difficult for international audiences to relate to? By reinforcing the impression that a “universal” and relatable story of a woman’s struggle must be a story in which specifically Indigenous concerns are silenced, Frida perhaps unwittingly contributes to the marginalization of Indigenous feminism, depriving it of a potent international icon. While an excellent film in many aspects, it could have been much more. It remains to us as viewers to put back the meanings that are left unsaid.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Biopic and Documentary Week: Frida

Brigit McCone has a passion for all things Frida Kahlo and Salma Hayek. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and memorizing lists of underrated female artists. Brigit McCone is an extremely boring dinner party guest.

The Women of the New York Film Festival 2016

The New York Film Festival (NYFF) wraps up this weekend. Here are the best of films about women or directed by women (or both) that still have NYFF weekend screenings (including some “encore” shows on Sunday) or are streaming or open today in theaters: including Ava DuVernay’s ’13th,’ Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Certain Women,’ and Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Julieta.’

Written by Ren Jender.

Julieta

I wanted to laugh when writer-director Pedro Almodóvar said after the press screening that this film is a “restrained” one. Compared to his other films, Julieta is subdued, but it also shows that even when he tries, Almodóvar can never tamp down his love of bright colors, ’80s fashion, overwhelming emotion and dramatic music — thank God! Julieta is one of his best films, a meditation on secular guilt, focusing on one woman’s life. Julieta (non-Spanish speakers: say, “who’ll-YAY-tah”) has all the little regrets most of us have, but circumstances beyond her control lead to some of those regrets becoming deep sorrow. He and Canadian writer Alice Munro (who wrote the short stories the film is based on) are a perfect, if unlikely, match. And Munro is two for two, so far, in films I’ve seen based on her work: Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (with Julie Christie as the “her” of the title), another very different examination of guilt, was magnificent.

I was a little hesitant about Julieta before I saw it: Almodóvar swings wildly from making films that are my favorites to making ones that bore and offend me at the same time. The trailer shows that its lead actresses spend time in bad wigs (the film spans 30 years and in one amusing scene, we see the covered face of the actress who plays the younger Julieta, Adriana Ugarte, and when she’s uncovered she is Emma Suárez, the actress playing the older Julieta) but the wigs are the only non-outstanding elements in Julieta.

Praising a male director like Almodóvar for putting women characters at the center of his films and making them multilayered, with complicated lives that don’t revolve around men may seem retro. But after sitting through Paterson, with its I Love Lucy wife who has a wildly different ambition every day and plies her husband to fund her far-fetched “dreams,” and the fraudulent Manchester by the Sea, which in spite of some good acting (by Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck — and only those two), has not one main woman character who seems to have a job or much of an identity beyond “wife/mother/girlfriend,” congratulating male directors for not being cavemen is apparently still necessary.

Karl Marx City

This documentary about the pervasive spying — using ordinary citizens as well as trained professionals — in the former East Germany where the co-director (with Michael Tucker), Petra Epperlein, was born and raised, blends satiny black and white cinematography with clips of vintage surveillance film and video. We follow Epperlein back home as she tries to get some answers about who was an informer and who wasn’t.

Epperlein transcends the divide between personal documentaries and the “talking heads” kind as she interviews everyone, not just her own family, but those in charge of disseminating the files meticulously kept on nearly everyone in the country until that country didn’t exist anymore. One of her best friends in school had parents who were officials who spied on the populace; she gets them to talk about their work (which they now regret). Epperlein explains that in a place where, the joke went, in every gathering of three people, one was an informant, people couldn’t trust one another so, “everyone was the enemy,” including, perhaps, her own father. Epperlein doesn’t just expose this culture of mistrust, she recreates it in this extraordinary film.

13th

At first, I was slightly disappointed with Ava DuVernay’s documentary but she confirmed when she spoke after the press screening something I had suspected: this film is not really meant for those of us who have already heard Bryan Stevenson speak about racism in the justice system or for those who have already seen Angela Davis, in a vintage clip from The Black Power Mixtape, speak about the particular history of violence Black people in this country have faced. 13th is an overview of the oppression of Black people by the U.S. criminal justice system meant for people who haven’t been exposed to this info in other venues — which is the majority of those who will see it on Netflix (the producer of the film, currently streaming it).

Still I can’t help wishing the film had fewer professors and writers explaining events — though one does have a great riff on how Angela Davis, when she was on trial, presented herself differently than other Black defendants would. Much more powerful is the cross cutting of Donald Trump’s incitements of violence, violence against protesters at his rallies, and a clip from the Civil Rights era in which an older man in a suit is attacked by young white men. Also unforgettable are the clips of the original Birth of a Nation with commentary explaining that the burning cross was an invention of the film, becoming a signature of the real Ku Klux Klan after it was reinvigorated by Birth of a Nation’s heroic portrayal. Don’t tell me harmful stereotypes in film don’t foster violence ever again.

Toni Erdmann

I liked this feature from German writer-director Maren Ade, but I’m shocked so many other people like it too. Toni Erdmann has no score, no real laugh-out-loud moments past its first ten minutes, and its “jokes” go on for far too long. But as Ade explained after the press screening, the film is about humor but it’s not a comedy. A bear-like father (Peter Simonischek) puts on a (bad) wig and tells strings of lies in front of his grown, corporate-consultant daughter (Sandra Hüller), but unlike many “jokers,” his impulse doesn’t seem sadistic. As he glances out of the corner of his eye at his daughter Ines, he seems nothing more than a little boy who wants to play. Ines is matter-of-fact about the ruthless nature of her work, but she’s also melancholy and frustrated.

This film isn’t the kind that ends with the daughter giving up her career to start a clown college with her father. The changes the characters go through are small ones, and the connections they make are fleeting. But this lack of an easy resolution and the film’s portrait of the mendacity and absurdity of the corporate world are precisely what resonates with its audience.

Certain Women

I fell asleep during part of writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s new film, and sleep is legitimate criticism: whatever is happening on-screen isn’t engaging the viewer. But Lily Gladstone, the Indigenous actress who plays the young, soft-butch, half-Crow rancher in the film’s last interlude is an actress I could watch all day. Gladstone is the only one of the main cast who is from Montana, where the film takes place (and where Maile Meloy, the author of the collection of short stories the movie is based on, is from). The openness of her smile, her calm voice, and steady gaze make her character, Jamie, stick with us in a way the other characters (including Kristen Stewart’s Beth, the adult ed teacher and lawyer Jamie has a crush on) do not. Gladstone is beautiful wearing little to no makeup, but she looks like a woman who works on a ranch: she’s not as sylphlike as the other actresses in the film, and her hair, even when she’s trying to look “nice” is unstyled. I hope Gladstone becomes the big star she deserves to be, but I also hope she can remain unscathed by Hollywood’s physical expectations for actresses. We’ll see.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH5_4osOZK8″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Village Voice, The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the The Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Bi Erasure in Film and TV: The Difficulty of Representing Bisexual People On-Screen

As frustrating as our erasure and stereotyping is, however, I’d like to go beyond the question of “good” and “bad” representations of bisexual characters to ask this: exactly what it is about bisexuality which makes it so hard to represent on-screen? And why, when bisexuality is visible, is it so likely to collapse back into dominant stereotypes of bisexuality as either promiscuous or merely a phase?

This guest post written by Amy Davis appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

Positive and complex representations of bisexual and pansexual characters on-screen are so few and far between that film critics discussing bisexual representation are often left lamenting our erasure, or – on the rare occasions we are represented – our stereotyping and demonization.

In the 100 top-grossing domestic films in the U.S. in 2015, out of 4,370 characters (speaking or named), only 32 characters or .7% were LGBT, and only 5 of those characters were bisexual, according to USC Annenberg. According to GLAAD, 4% of regular characters on primetime broadcast television series are LGBT characters. Of the 271 LGBT characters (regular and recurring) on primetime, cable, and streaming television series, 76 or 28% are bisexual. According to Stonewall’s report on the representation of LGB people (unfortunately they did not include statistics on trans characters) on television series watched by young people in the U.K., in over 126 hours of programming, bisexual people were portrayed for just 5 minutes and 9 seconds, compared to 4 hours and 24 minutes for gay men, and 42 minutes for lesbian women.

When we do appear on-screen, bisexuality is often used to indicate hypersexuality, such as Bo from Lost Girl and Doctor Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. At its most extreme depictions of reinforcing biphobic tropes, the character’s bisexuality is also used to code “evil” or “dangerous” or “murderous,” using their (hyper)sexuality as a method of manipulation and control, for instance Sharon Stone’s character in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct.

Narrative film and television, with its emphasis on conflict and resolution, is poorly equipped to represent bisexuality. The committed, monogamous couple continues to represent the pinnacle of romantic fulfillment in contemporary Western culture. As such the familiar romantic plot in narrative film and television involves some kind of conflict – usually an erotic triangle – which is resolved when the protagonist makes a choice between potential suitors and becomes part of a couple (see, honestly, any rom-com ever made). Within this format then, bisexuality can often only be a disturbance to the status quo. In 2010 comedy-drama The Kids Are All Right, for example, the lesbian relationship between Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) is disrupted when Jules begins an affair with Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the sperm donor of their children. Throughout the film, Jules identifies as a lesbian, never declaring she’s bisexual or questioning her sexuality. So long as Jules’ infidelity persists, bisexuality has a spectral presence in the film. The narrative conflict presented by bisexuality/infidelity is resolved, however, when Jules ends the affair and the lesbian/monogamous status quo is restored. In the final scene, Jules and Nic are shown smiling at each other and holding hands, the threat of Jules’ bisexuality effectively repudiated. At best, bisexuality is depicted in The Kids Are Alright as a temporary phase, at worst, as non-existent; a mere moment of weakness within an overarching narrative of monogamous lesbian couplehood.

Of course the widespread misconception of bisexual desire as triangulated and therefore always split between two object choices is demonstrably false. Many bi spectrum individuals see themselves as attracted to people rather than genders and do not feel unfulfilled when they are in a relationship with a person of a particular gender. What’s more, many queer people reject the notion of the gender binary altogether, having relationships with people all over the gender spectrum, including genderqueer and non-binary people. Nonetheless, the notion that gender is binary and the overwhelming importance placed on (binary) gender as object choice in our society means that bisexuality is inevitably viewed as dichotomous desire within our society. In The Kids Are All Right, and numerous other films with bi potential, bisexuality then gets mischaracterized as an unstable, dichotomous desire which must be subsumed back into the monogamous, monosexual (straight or gay) status quo.

But to understand the mechanisms through which this occurs, it is necessary to understand the dominant logic of monogamy. In its most perfect and pure form, a narrative of monogamy involves the notion that there is one true partner for everyone. The truth for many of us, however, is that we have several romantic relationships and sometimes even several marriages in the course of our lives, which is described as “serial monogamy.”. For the logic of the “soul mate” to work alongside the realities of serial monogamy, however, is it necessary to de-emphasize the importance of past relationships or disregard them as mere mistakes on the road to finding one’s eventual life partner (“I thought I was in love but I didn’t know what love was”).

Within this dominant paradigm of monogamy, depictions of characters who have serial, monogamous relationships with men and women are rarely read as bisexual since their past relationships (with a particular gender) are dismissed as not meaningful. A classic example of this is Willow (Alyson Hannigan) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who is depicted as straight for the first few seasons, during which time she has a relationship with boyfriend Oz (Seth Green), and upon entering a relationship with Tara (Amber Benson) is subsequently depicted as a lesbian. Her past relationships with and interest in men becomes re-written as “not real” (or not as as “real” as her newfound lesbian love) and thus any potential bisexuality is erased.

Too often bisexual visibility requires individuals to trace relationship histories which subvert the dominant ideals of monogamy, even if they themselves are consistently monogamous. Alan Cumming, actor and bi advocate, said in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2014:

“I used to be married to a woman. Before that I had had a relationship with a man. I then had another relationship with a woman, and I since then have had relationships with men. I still would define myself as bisexual partly because that’s how I feel but also because I think it’s important to — I think sexuality in this country especially is seen as a very black and white thing, and I think we should encourage the gray. You know?”

I was struck, reading this quote, by just how familiar this form of bisexual storytelling is. I’ve told a version of this story myself when talking about my bisexuality, and heard it from friends and strangers alike. It’s a story designed to make one’s bisexuality visible and legitimate with full awareness that it could slip through the cracks, becoming subsumed into heterosexuality or homosexuality, at any moment. Cumming is all too aware that his expression of desire for men and women is insufficient in itself to make his bisexuality visible, and that in the context of his marriage to a man his “mere” desire could be easily dismissed to create a coherent homosexuality. His bisexual narrative instead involves emphasizing the importance of his past relationships and marriage, describing them alongside his current relationship and implying that while they are not current they are nonetheless still meaningful in his sexual identity.

Further, Cumming’s narrative involves relationships with men and women which are dispersed throughout time, rather than a series of relationships with women followed by a series of relationships with men, which could be easily subsumed into a gay (rather than bi) “coming out” narrative similar to Willow’s plotline. And although none of these relationships are depicted as non-monogamous in themselves, Cumming’s narrative disrupts the “one true love” logic of monogamy at the same time as making his bisexuality visible over time. In making explicit reference to his past relationships as significant to his current sexuality, Cummings refuses to be dismissed, revised, or excluded by monogamy’s “one true love” narrative or bi erasure.

Similar disruptions accompany other moments of bisexual visibility in film and television. How to Get Away with Murder, for example, successfully depicts Annalise Keating’s (Viola Davis) character as bisexual or pansexual by bringing a past relationship into the present. In the course of season one, Annalise’s love interests are male. However, early in season two, it is revealed that she had a relationship with law school classmate Eve Rothlo (Famke Janssen) and the two briefly rekindle their relationship in the course of working together.

Given the dominant ideals of monogamy, had it merely been revealed that Annalise had a college relationship with a woman, it would have been too easy for audiences to dismiss her past relationship in order to reinscribe a current straight identity. On the other hand, had she kissed a previously unknown woman, audiences would likely have read it as a loose erotic triangle – involving the woman and on-again-off-again boyfriend, Detective Nate Lahey (Billy Brown) – probably requiring resolution into a straight or lesbian identity. However, Annalise’s sexual and emotional intimacy with Eve in the present avoids the bisexuality-as-narrative-disruption trope and instead functions to draw our attention to the importance of Annalise’s historic relationship with Eve. The previous relationship cannot (and should not) therefore be easily dismissed as a “phase,” simultaneously disrupting the logic of monogamy which relegate previous relationships to the past only and allowing Annalise to remain visible as a bi character.

As bisexual people, we get tired of the persistent association between bisexuality and non-monogamy, demonstrated through popular stereotypes which position us as promiscuous, confused, dangerous, greedy, deceptive, cheaters, and unable to commit. A familiar response to this charge is the reminder that, like straight and gay/lesbian people, bisexual people can be (and are) both monogamous and non-monogamous. While this refutes the myth that bisexual people are necessarily non-monogamous, it does little to explain how the association between bisexuality and non-monogamy emerged in the first place. And more importantly for our representation on-screen, the ways in which dominant narratives of monogamy create the conditions of both our erasure and our visibility.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bisexual Representation
Is Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Willow Rosenberg a Lesbian or Bisexual?
Exploring Bisexual Tension in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Joss Whedon’s Binary Excludes Bisexuality
LGBTQ Week: The Kids Are All Right
How to Get Away with Murder Is Everything “That” New York Times Review Said It Is
How to Get Away with Dynamic Black Women Leads

Amy Davis is currently completing a PhD on bisexual erasure at the University of Wollongong. Amy is interested in feminism, queer and trans politics, animal rights, law, ethics and, most importantly, cats.

‘The O.C.’s Alex Kelly Deserved Better; All Bisexual Characters Do

I’ve had countless conversations with other queer women who had similar awakenings in 2004, when Alex Kelly burst onto our TV screens and shook up the Orange County. But upon subsequent re-watches, I’ve been forced to notice that Alex’s storyline isn’t the empowering queer narrative I remembered. For one thing, all of her romantic interests take advantage of her and use her for personal gain.

This guest post written by Kate Sloan appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

The first time Olivia Wilde’s character Alex Kelly appears on-screen in The O.C., protagonist Seth (Adam Brody) creeps up behind her while she’s wearing headphones. Startled, she traps him in a headlock. “Touch me again, I’ll hurt you,” she promises. But actually, it’s Alex who ends up getting hurt, over and over again, by every character she gets close to. She enters the television show tough and fighting, and leaves it heartbroken and crying. She’s used, thrown aside, and objectified. I want better for Alex, because she deserves it, and I want better for every other bisexual character, too.

Alex is introduced in season two of The O.C. as a love interest for Seth Cohen, the show’s awkward, geeky, self-absorbed antihero. Seth needs tickets to a sold-out concert to impress his ex-girlfriend Summer (Rachel Bilson), so he shows up at music venue the Bait Shop to try to weasel his way into the show. There, he finds Alex, the Bait Shop’s bartender and de facto manager. To get the tickets, he applies to work at the club as a janitor, and she hires him. But as is always the way with drama-soaked soap operas like The O.C., their professional relationship quickly becomes more than that.

Alex is everything the show’s spoiled protagonists are not (with the exception of “beautiful,” because everyone on this show is beautiful). Her blue-streaked blonde hair, tough tattoos, and rock-’n’-roll fashion sense make her stick out like a cactus spike amongst all the wealthy girl-next-door types in the cast. By the age of 17, we learn, Alex has been expelled from three different high schools for misbehaving, and her parents kicked her out when they discovered she was dating a girl. But she petitioned the court for emancipation, successfully escaped her parents, got the Bait Shop job, and moved into her own apartment. She’s doing well; she’s happy. At least, until Seth and his friends enter her life.

I’m enormously sentimental about The O.C. It was formative viewing for me at the tender age of 12, when the openly bisexual Alex made me realize that I, too, might be queer. I devoured each new episode with rabid enthusiasm, and pored over Alex-related fanfiction, LiveJournal discussions, and screencaps. She was tenacious and bold, but also feminine and sweet. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to make out with her, be her best friend, or be her. I’ve had countless conversations with other queer women who had similar awakenings in 2004, when Alex Kelly burst onto our TV screens and shook up the Orange County.

But upon subsequent re-watches, I’ve been forced to notice that Alex’s storyline isn’t the empowering queer narrative I remembered.

For one thing, all of her romantic interests take advantage of her and use her for personal gain. Seth, the cute dweeb she starts dating shortly after she hires him to clean her club’s toilets, just wants her so he can make his ex-girlfriend jealous: he brags about her in front of Summer. He consistently fetishizes her rebelliousness and queerness, talking about her like her tattoos, underage alcohol consumption, and sexual encounters with other girls are the most interesting things about her. He eventually breaks up with her because he says her too-cool persona is an “act,” a “crutch,” when in fact it seems to be the only thing that drew him to her in the first place.

From the ashes of her romance with Seth, Alex falls into a fling with Marissa (Mischa Barton), the show’s beautiful, rich, vapid female lead. Marissa’s spent the entire series rebelling against her mom, whom she hates. Earlier in the season, Marissa dates her family’s hot gardener, intentionally inciting her mother’s classist rage by mingling with such an undesirable person. “I’m not saying you didn’t like me,” he says when he breaks up with her, “just not as much as you hate [your mom].” But just a few episodes later, Marissa’s pulling the exact same trick again, by dating someone who’s not only working-class but also (gasp!) a girl.

To the credit of actors Olivia Wilde and Mischa Barton, their courtship is portrayed with an authenticity and vulnerability that the writing lacks. There’s one memorable episode where Alex’s vindictive ex makes off with her favorite heart-shaped necklace and Marissa accompanies her on a road trip to recover it. “You can’t let her steal your heart,” Marissa says, and the look they share is meant to be smoldering but comes across as sweet. It’s an emotional closeness I recognize from my own exciting initial forays into queer romance.

It’s heartbreaking for both Alex and the viewer, then, when Marissa gets overwhelmed by the social stigma of dating a girl and runs back into the arms of her safe ex-boyfriend. “I didn’t ask you to give up your life,” Alex pleads during their break-up scene, “All I ever wanted was to be a part of it.” For the remainder of the show’s four-season run, there were no further indications that Marissa actually liked women or identified as anything other than straight. She tried on bisexuality, and Alex, like a Marc Jacobs trench coat, before deciding it was so last season and she didn’t want it after all. And Alex disappeared from the show, just a footnote in the lives of the characters who had walked all over her.

Because of the sweet and brave way Olivia Wilde played her, I love Alex. I want a different outcome for her every time I rewatch her plot arc, but she always gets pigeonholed and mistreated in the end. I want her to be more than a “sweeps-week lesbian”; I want the other characters to appreciate her for qualities other than her aesthetic and her sex life; I want the show’s creator to have thought of her as more than just a punchline for the male lead. Josh Schwartz has written other queer characters whose storylines were meaningful and defied stereotypes: Eric van der Woodsen and Jonathan Whitney in Gossip Girl, and even another character from earlier in The O.C.’s run: Carson Ward. Why can’t he seem to craft a female queer character who isn’t a mishmash of stereotypes, objectification, and sad endings?

Call me a sap if you will, but I want a better outcome for Marissa, too. Actual queer women know how life-changing it is to fall for another woman for the first time. You don’t just dust yourself off and go back to a fancy-free life of shopping, lounging by the pool, and dating exclusively boys after a breakthrough like that. I want a Marissa whose queer identity matters to her, informs her decisions, or at least brings up some big questions for her. I don’t want it swept under the rug as soon as the “lesbian storyline” is wrapped up.

Bisexual characters shouldn’t be props, caricatures, or Manic Pixie Dream Girls. They deserve better than that. Bisexual people deserve better than that.

Kate Sloan’s writing on sex, kink, and feminism has appeared in The Establishment, The Plaid Zebra, Maisonneuve, Herizons, and her blog. You can follow her on Twitter @Girly_Juice and Instagram, and subscribe to her podcast for sex nerds, The Dildorks, on iTunes. Kate lives in Toronto and spends her free time playing the ukulele, curating her impeccable sex toy collection, and swooning over Olivia Wilde.