Directed and co-written by Jennifer Phang, ‘Advantageous’ is a surprisingly touching and purposeful film that revitalizes certain elements of the sci-fi genre while presenting two powerful voices in women filmmakers: Jennifer Phang and Jacqueline Kim.
You may remember when I first mentioned Advantageousamong several other Sundance films I was anticipating this year. Well, full disclosure, I kinda forgot about it until it popped up in my “recommended” Netflix queue last weekend. Why didn’t anyone tell me it was out this weekend?! Anyway, I caught up with it and I have to tell you, it exceeded my expectations. It’s a small film that tackles a massive issue in a very vulnerable way, yielding a story about a mother’s love, self-worth, and youth obsession.
Advantageous is set in a not-so-distant future (actually, if not for the flying cars, it would be identical to modern times), and follows Gwen (Jacqueline Kim, who also co-wrote the screenplay), a woman working for a technically advanced wellness company that equates beauty with youth and helps women sustain their value by offering a unique procedure that preserves their age. Ironically, as the spokesperson for the company, Gwen finds herself in the position where she has to consider this procedure for herself once she is let go from her job due to her “advanced age.”(By the way, she’s probably, like, 40 — if that — but still bad for business). As I said, not very far off from today’s times.
Though the basis of this film is familiar, what makes the film so special are the relationships between the characters and Kim’s compelling performance of a woman drawn to desperate measures. As the mother of a young daughter in a society quick to invalidate women, Gwen sees a hopelessness in Jules’s (her daughter) future and wants to be able to at least be a role model for her, someone she can be proud of. Through Kim’s visceral performance, you feel the agony of each passing day which is only making Gwen older. Another day without work, without promise, and without a real life for herself. You feel that in every scene Kim is in (which is most of them, if not all), the utter claustrophobia of Gwen’s life.
There’s a heart-crushing moment in the film in which Gwen admits that Jules is the only thing that makes her happy. You feel this most in the quiet, bittersweet scenes the mother and daughter share, which ultimately serve to hasten her life-altering decision. But it is only toward the end of film that we realize the cost.
Directed and co-written by Jennifer Phang, Advantageous is a surprisingly touching and purposeful film that revitalizes certain elements of the sci-fi genre while presenting two powerful voices in women filmmakers: Phang and Kim. I look forward to seeing what they have in store next.
Creator/blogger of Reel Talk Online, Candice Frederick is a writer for hire, lover of snark, former magazine journalist, and co-host of the podcast, “Cinema in Noir.” She is also a Personal Lifestyle Contributor for Black Girl Nerds, and member of the Online Film Critics Society, Alliance of Women Film Journalists, and LAMB (Large Association of Movie Bloggers).
The first season of the British sci-fi show ‘Black Mirror’ frames its stories through an unintentionally narrow and myopic point of view, just like the first season of HBO’s ‘Girls.’ For some reason, though, ‘Black Mirror’s extremely specific point of view is mistaken as being universal, while the extremely specific point of view offered by ‘Girls’ is not.
[Trigger warning: discussion of bestiality and sexual assault]
The first season of the British sci-fi show Black Mirror frames its stories through an unintentionally narrow and myopic point of view, just like the first season of HBO’s Girls. For some reason, though, Black Mirror’s extremely specific point of view is mistaken as being universal, while the extremely specific point of view offered by Girls is not.
Black Mirror is sort of a cult-hit TV show, so far consisting of two seasons with three episodes each, and a Christmas special starring Jon Hamm. The series first aired in the UK in 2011, but only made its way to North America and Netflix more recently. Much like The Twilight Zone, each episode tells a stand-alone story about a world slightly different from our own, where something creepy and terrible happens. Specifically, Black Mirror is focussed on technology and how inventions like social media, robots, virtual currency, and computer animation can be put to destructive use. The three episodes that make up the first season are “The National Anthem,” “Fifteen Million Merits,” and “The Entire History of You” – each of which follows the same broad pattern: the first twenty minutes are fascinating and unsettling, and then you realize that this entire fabricated universe exists to screw up some guy’s sex life.
Let me break it down:
In “The National Anthem,” the Prime Minister awakens to discover that someone has kidnapped the princess and posted a ransom video on YouTube. The terrorists are threatening to kill her unless he gives into their ridiculous demands and has sex with a pig on national television. This is an extreme situation that touches on a very serious question, about which there is much debate in real life: how do you deal with terrorist demands? There’s a very solid school of thought that says you should never give in to terrorist demands because that makes terrorism seem like a good way to get what you want, and another very solid school of thought that says that, if giving in to small demands could save a person’s life, you have a duty to – wait, that’s not what this story’s about. After about twenty minutes, questions of terrorism are completely pushed aside and the story becomes 100% about whether this one particular guy gets pressured into bestiality and whether his wife will forgive him.
In “Fifteen Million Merits” – which, in fairness, has important things to say about class stratification – working class people peddle bikes all day to supply power to the one percent. Their only hope of escape is to compete on an X-Factor-like TV show, which they have been convinced will allow the most talented among them to become celebrities. A working class guy falls in love with a working class girl who has a beautiful singing voice, and he uses all the credits he’s earned from peddling the bike to pay the super expensive contest entry fee so that she can compete and maybe have a better life. When she competes, the judges tell her that they already have enough singers, but she’d make a really good porn star, and she’s pressured into accepting their offer because she knows this is her only chance to not peddle the bikes. Her life becomes a hellish nightmare of drugs and X-rated encounters with strangers and everyone tells her that she should be grateful – but, wait, this episode isn’t about that. This episode is about how the X-Factor-like TV show robbed the working class man of the one thing that was good and pure in his life and perverted it by making it dirty and a porn star. The whole thing builds to a big, dramatic speech where he complains about everything they took from him, because that’s the most important part of what happened.
In “The Entire History of You,” people have chips in their brains that make objective recordings of everything they see, allowing them to play their conversations and experiences back later, looking for the truth. Imagine all the ways that that technology would change the world! What would become of law, education, history, and politics? What would happen if someone could hack your objective memories? What about the people who decide to forego the implant or have it removed? What an interesting cultural divide – but, wait. This story is actually about how some particular guy gets ridiculously jealous after realizing that his wife’s ex-boyfriend plays back recordings of what it was like to have sex with her when he jerks off. Because, apparently, remembering past sexual encounters when you masturbate is a new technology requiring a brain implant.
All of these stories are told from the really particular point of view of a heterosexual man who’s a little bit weird and anxious about sex, and all larger societal concerns and conflicts are pushed aside in favour of focussing on how world events and technologies will affect whether or not he can be with the woman he wants. “The National Anthem,” particularly, is an unintentionally rich vein of data for psychoanalysis – personally, I’m fascinated by the mind that thought, “My greatest fear about the internet is that terrorists will publically pressure me to engage in bestiality. What do you do in that situation? You basically have no choice!” But the point is that it’s really specific. It’s not actually a representation of universal thoughts and fears and experiences that everybody thinks and feels. And yet, the critical appraisal of Black Mirror would lead you to believe that it’s somehow more reflective of our shared humanity than Girls.
I’m sure I don’t need to spend five paragraphs explaining what Girls is, but, when it premiered, it was a highly anticipated series that met with a lot of backlash. The backlash was mostly because the series was framed – through advertising and pre-premiere interviews – as a story that was broadly about women in generation Y, when the content was actually a very specific, idiosyncratic story about what the show-runner’s life had been like in young adulthood. Like, she even cast her real-life friends in those roles.
While I’ve grown to like Girls a lot in the years since it premiered, I’ll admit that I was one of the people put-off by the opening episodes. There’s one early review that describes the characters as working class, because one of them has an unpaid internship, and that makes me laugh out loud, because working for free is a bourgeois luxury. It’s not something that working class people can do. And, the off-putting thing about Girls, at least in its first season, was that it took very specific experiences like that – experiences that only people with a certain amount of wealth and privilege ever have – and behaved as though they were universal coming-of-age rituals. The scene that really got me was the one in the first episode, where the main character casually asks her parents to pay for her apartment, like that’s a normal thing that happens.
Both Girls and Black Mirror improve after the first season – and Girls is now one of the shows I look forward to most every year – but my visceral reaction to the opening episodes was the same in both cases. I felt like I was being excluded from something I was supposed to belong to, and told that a group loosely defined as “Everyone” did not include people like me.
I know that lots of viewers had a similar reaction to Girls, not only for reasons of class, but also because it’s strange that the characters live in a diverse, densely-populated city like New York and only ever socialize with white people. But, reviews of Black Mirror usually don’t mention anything about the point of view. That’s partly because Girls is called Girls and Black Mirror is called Black Mirror. It’s also partly because both seasons of Black Mirror dropped in North America around the same time, so viewers had a chance to appreciate how the series grew in its second season. But, let’s be real – it’s also because stories about men are routinely accepted as being stories about human beings in general, while stories about women are immediately seen as more particular.
A few weeks ago, Linda Holmes said this great thing on Pop Culture Happy Hour about how one of the narrative devices in The Big Short that was specifically intended to draw in the viewer and make the story more relatable for him backfired and made her feel alienated because it became clear that the filmmakers thought “viewer” was the same as “heterosexual man.” While there are some people who felt alienated from Girls the moment they heard the word “girls,” there are other people, like me, who only felt alienated once it turned out that “girls” meant “heterosexual WASP/white Jewish middleclass women,” at which point it felt like a bait-and-switch. In the case of Black Mirror, my suspicion is that the focus on the sex life of Some Particular Straight Dude is supposed to be a way to draw the viewer into the story, and make the stakes and circumstances of the Big Ephemeral Sci-Fi Ideas concrete, and I think the reason that alienates me is that it reveals an assumption that the viewer is also Some Particular Straight Dude and will be able to relate.
The second season of Black Mirror does expand its focus and tell two of its three stories from the point of view of Some Particular Straight Woman – the first of whom is also a little bit weird about sex and the second of whom is part of the show’s most controversial episode, “White Bear.” Without getting into a lot of spoilers for “White Bear,” I’ll confess that, even though I think it’s a good script, I had a hard time going along with it, because the series had failed to build any trust with me before it took these risks. Because I felt alienated by the first season, I went into the second season full of suspicion, and it was hard for me to figure out whether “White Bear” was a story about the horrific corruption of the justice system or about how creepy-cool it is to watch some woman get tortured for hours and hours.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with making a show that’s just about hamsters chasing themselves through some particular writer’s mind, but I find it a little bit annoying that the hamsters in Charlie Broker’s mind are supposedly more reflective of our shared humanity than the hamsters in Lena Dunham’s mind, when they both look equally foreign to me. There are a few experiences that are truly universal – we all love, we all die, we all face up to certain harsh realities of life – but, in an increasingly global community, and in a world where we are more and more aware of others’ voices, it doesn’t make sense to keep pretending that stories about what it’s like to belong to any specific race or class or gender or sexual orientation are stories that cover the whole territory of what it’s like to be a person. My issue isn’t that Black Mirror and Girls shouldn’t exist – it’s that, when we talk about them, we should recognize that they both have a really particular point of view that includes the experience of some people while excluding the experience of others.
The holy grail of writing a story that speaks to universal themes is still a goal that we can all shoot for, but we have to really scale back on our idea of what’s “universal.”
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.
Drake Doremus’ dystopian science fiction movie, Equals, presents a pretty good metaphor for mental illness – just not a very challenging one.
Equals, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this year before coming to TIFF, is set in a future society where people have been genetically engineered not to have emotions. It’s strongly implied that this is the basis for the false utopia the characters live in, where they all wear the same clothes, and live in modular apartments, solving puzzles in the evenings, like so many rational Vulcans. It’s an interesting idea – I, for one, would have liked to hear the characters explain what the purpose of human life was, and why they bothered showing up for jobs, if they didn’t feel any way about anything – but the movie isn’t interested in how this civilization works. Instead, it’s just set up as vaguely bad and communist, in a way that borrows from Nineteen Eighty-Four and other works that came before it, without exhibiting the same interest in social critique.
Instead, the focus of Equals is on personal, idiosyncratic experiences of not fitting in, or being labelled deviant, ill, and outcast because you don’t feel the right way.
The action kicks off when the main character, Silas (played by Nicholas Hoult), develops a rare condition known as SOS. His genetic programming fails and his emotions switch back on, leading him to have a panic attack in his apartment. Trusting the system, he turns himself over to the medical authorities and learns that the prognosis isn’t good. There is no cure for SOS and, while medication can slow the condition’s progression, sufferers eventually become so unstable that they have to be quarantined inside an ominous facility known as the DEN. Living conditions in the DEN are so deplorable that most patients kill themselves within days of arriving and, in fact, they’re encouraged to do so, because the horror of living with emotions is more terrible than death.
Silas, bummed out by this diagnosis but trying not to be, lest he get sent to the DEN, begins to suspect that one of his coworkers, Nia (Kristen Stewart, in one of her best performances yet) is also suffering from SOS, but trying to hide it. The two strike up a friendship that turns into a romance as they bask in the relief of having someone else to talk to about what they’re feeling.
Unfortunately, physical contact of any kind is strictly prohibited in this randomly (and somewhat senselessly) dystopian society – for reasons that, again, I would have been interested to hear about – and, as soon as their fingertips brush, Silas and Nia are on the path to being discovered, with predictably tragic results.
Equals has amazing sound design and a handful of beautiful shots, but it’s not winning any points for originality. The setting is sketched out in pretty vague terms, and the plot doesn’t offer many surprises. If you’re feeling churlish, you can spend all 101 minutes asking why questions that don’t have any answers. Equals isn’t really interested in its own setting except in so far as it establishes the concept “People living here are suspicious of feelings.” And the reason it wants to establish that concept is because the story is really a metaphor for mental illness, designed to tell us that we are too quick to medicate and suppress people whose feelings aren’t normal.
The story in Equals is structured to cover as many contemporary attitudes toward mental illness as possible, and to explore the way that different characters relate to SOS. Nia, distrustful of the system and scared of ending up in the DEN, never tells anyone what’s she’s experiencing and deals with it herself. It takes all her energy, every day, just to act normal; to not let anyone see that she’s different. On the other hand, Silas trust the system and ends up a with a medical record that follows him wherever he goes, counting down the time until he winds up in an institution. Arguably, things are easier for him because he can take medication to suppress his feelings, but he goes back and forth about whether it’s worth it to do that.
Part way through the movie, he joins a support group for other people who have SOS, where each person has a different opinion about how to see the condition and how to live with it. Over the course of the film he goes on a journey where he starts out waiting for a cure and later comes to believe that SOS is a natural part of who he is, and that the real problem is the way everyone else is reacting.
The questions that Silas struggles with are really important and really integral to the lives of people with long-term mental health conditions – especially ones that affect personality development and aren’t going to go away. Is this me or a disease? What does it mean that I’m different from everyone else – am I worse, am I better, am I equally good this way? If someone could cure me tomorrow, would I want to take the cure? Who would I be, if I did?
The metaphor works really, really well. What’s more disappointing is that the movie doesn’t seem to have an interesting perspective on the answers to those questions. Instead of challenging us, it takes the easy way out by setting up a situation where Silas and Nia are clearly correct in their beliefs while everyone else is just… well, crazy. It’s much more like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest than Benny & Joon – Doremus and scriptwriter Nathan Parker make it easy for us to sympathize with Silas and Nia to the point that a lot of the complexities are lost. Of course it’s better to live in a world where people feel something rather than nothing. Of course people should be able to talk about their feelings with each other. Of course it’s good to fall in love with someone. There are never any negative sides to SOS except that The Man is against you.
This Right Side, Wrong Side, Fight-The-Power-For-Your-Right-to-Be-In-Love stuff not only makes the story less challenging – it also makes it less interesting. The story never swerves away from predictable plot developments and, like a train conductor calling out the stops before you arrive, Equals mechanically foreshadows each and every one, suggests the most obvious possible outcome, and then delivers that outcome on schedule. I’d make a joke about Chekov’s cure for SOS and the convenient six-hour lag time before it goes active, but then I’d be telling you how the movie ends just as blatantly as the director does.
Look – there are things to like about Equals. Kristen Stewart’s good in it, the editing is very well thought-out and emotionally evocative, the sound is really good, and, hey – the metaphor is really good, too. But I wish that the metaphor were in service of a message I haven’t heard before.
However, comparing Wood’s deeply personal product with the Wachowskis’ deeply polished one, ‘Glen or Glenda’s explicit gender dysphoria with ‘The Matrix’s allegorical dysphoria reveals parallels that illuminate both films.
“You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You felt it your entire life.” – Morpheus, The Matrix
Though Lana Wachowski’s coming out should not be an excuse to limit interpretation of the Wachowski siblings’ most iconic film,The Matrix, to a closeted discussion of gender dysphoria, yet it is a film that is profoundly concerned with psychic dysphoria as sci-fi dystopia: with jarring disconnects between perceived reality and actuality, embodied in a heroic struggle for the reimagination of the self against escalating systems of social control. Ed Wood Jr.’s cult 1953 B-movie, Glen or Glenda, explicitly harnesses classic science fiction to dramatize the psychology of gender dysphoria. As was fictionalized in Tim Burton’s biopicEd Wood, Wood was a self-accepting crossdresser who approached the topic of gender dysphoria with an empathy almost unique for his era, clumsily advancing enlightened opinions that would later become orthodoxy. There may be deceptive cunning underneath Wood’s film’s rough surface. Assigned to create a cheap, B-movie freak-show exploitation of the notoriety of Christine Jorgensen’s sex change, Wood delivers a freak-show of random mad scientists, mischievously accuses the cismale audience of suffering from pattern baldness due to their failure to wear women’s hats, creates a surreal nightmare of social conditioning, and then allows his transgender subjects to be islands of humanity within this freakish world. He effectively delivers a transgender freakshow in which the transgender are never freaks. On the surface, Wood’s film and the Wachowskis’ could not be more different: one is the cheap and amateurish product of a man popularized by the Golden Turkey Awards as “the worst director of all time,” while the other is a slick blockbuster considered a milestone in special effects, that has spawned serious, academic debate over its philosophical meanings. However, comparing Wood’s deeply personal product with the Wachowskis’ deeply polished one, Glen or Glenda‘s explicit gender dysphoria with The Matrix‘s allegorical dysphoria reveals parallels that illuminate both films.
Dystopia, Now: Contemporary Reality As Sci-Fi Nightmare
“It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth” – Morpheus, The Matrix
The most fundamental parallel between The Matrix and Glen or Glenda is their shared concept of present reality as a creation of sci-fi dystopia. In Glen or Glenda, Boris Karloff’s mad scientist is positioned as a creator-figure, who performs sex change transformations with a wave of his hand, while omnisciently supervising all life. Though Karloff’s never-really-specified relationship to the film’s realist narrative, complete with weirdly hovering intrusions over the action, are celebrated ironically as symptoms of Wood’s incompetence and oddness, yet Karloff’s role in Glen or Glenda mirrors that of the machines in The Matrix: he enables a dual discourse of irresistible predestination and faulty creation. Karloff’s “pulling of the string” drives surges of wildebeest like irresistible animal impulses, which place Wood’s hero as a puppet who must “dance to that which one is created for” while recognizing that “nature makes mistakes, it’s proven every day”, just as Neo struggles to accept that he is not in control of his own life through the guidance of his re-creator Morpheus.
Using a nightmare sequence of mobbing crowds and mocking variants of the schoolyard chant “slugs and snails and puppy dog’s tails, that’s what little boys are made of, sugar and spice and all things nice, that’s what little girls are made of,” Wood dramatizes the sinister power of social conditioning in a way that would be considered Lynchian surrealism, if he wasn’t dismissed as the worst director of all time. Where Wood uses a nightmarish dream sequence, the Wachowskis use body horror, in the violation of flesh-penetrating bugs and the imposed silence of a mouth literally sealed shut, to expressively dramatize the sinister power of their Agent “gatekeepers” over the hero’s most intimate body and self. Wood’s visual vocabulary for expressing the internal experience of gender dysphoria is drawn from James Whale’s Frankenstein, a queer lexicon of absent nurture and flawed divinity. The Wachowskis’ visual vocabulary in The Matrix is drawn fromGhost In The Shell, a cyberpunk anime that explores gender identity through a dystopia where characters can explore their identity by “plugging themselves in” to superpowered new bodies (or “shells”) of any gender. The effect of both texts, however, is to code lived reality as a profoundly unnatural and imposed nightmare that is essentially dystopian and demands the psyche’s resistance, symbolized for the Wachowskis by re-Creator Morpheus’ red pill.
Wood’s decision to open his film with a trans* woman’s suicide, narrated through her suicide note of repeated arrests for cross-dressing–“let my body rest in death, forever, in the things I cannot wear in life”–underlines the seriousness of the psychological crisis of gender dysphoria. Wood’s dramatization also recognizes the individual nature of each trans* experience, from the “transvestite,” who was conditioned by the environment of early youth to value femininity over masculinity and yearn to express his feminine side, to the “pseudo-hermaphrodite” Anne, who seems to correspond to a trans woman in her description as “a woman within… indeed meant to be a woman.” Anne challenges gender stereotypes by excelling as an army officer, before choosing a sex change operation. The “removal of the man and the formation of the woman” is represented onscreen by Bela Lugosi’s scientist blessing the new incarnation in a pseudo-religious ceremony.
The Holy Trinity: Variations And Incarnations
“You’ve been living two lives. In one life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson… the other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias “Neo”… One of these lives has a future and one of them does not.” – Agent Smith, The Matrix
When Keanu Reeves’ hero, hacker Thomas Anderson, is introduced, he has constructed an imaginary identity and vicarious second life as “Neo” that is confined within the cyber-realm. The basic plot of the first film is Anderson’s gradual embrace and embodiment of “Neo” as his true identity, while realizing his imposed identity of Thomas Anderson as a fictional construct. It is Hugo Weaving’s sinister Agent Smith of the social-conditioning “matrix” who continually imposes the (explicitly masculine) identity of “Mr. Anderson” onto Neo. It is when Neo finally resists and asserts “my name is Neo!” that he frees himself from the inevitability of his defeat. It is Neo’s allies who affirm his true identity, with Trinity’s iron belief in his potential self, embodied as a kiss, acting as the catalyst for his final awakening into unbounded liberation. Many commentators have pointed out that Neo can be read as a Christ allegory. Fewer have highlighted that Trinity’s name evokes the Holy Trinity’s conception of a single being’s incarnation into multiple forms. If Morpheus functions as a Creator/Father mentor to Neo’s Christ-figure, Trinity must represent his Holy Spirit. Her kiss is therefore not only Mary Magdalene’s handmaiden witnessing Christ’s resurrection, but the descent of the dove/spirit as agent of his baptism and awakening to mission.
The film’s iconic uniform of black leather, slicked back hair and shades visually codes Carrie-Anne Moss as a female variant of Keanu Reeves’ hero, reimagining the patriarchal Holy Trinity of the Christian religion as a transracial, transsexual one (the theme of transracial incarnation would later play a controversially race-bending role in the Wachowskis’Cloud Atlas). While the dizzying complexity of the Matrix sequels are beyond the scope of my study, it should be noted that they center on Neo’s battle through ever complicating systems of social control and predestination to avoid the compelled sacrifice of Trinity. A traditional feminist reading would bemoan that Trinity serves as yet another apparently Strong Woman reduced to damsel-in-distress. However, reading Trinity as Neo’s liberated alter-ego enables an interpretation that is more coherent and thematically rich. Trinity is introduced before Neo – demonstrating her super-strength and desirable mastery over laws of nature, she is his ultimate goal throughout the films.
Glen Or Glenda describes the relationship of “Glen” and “Glenda” as “not half man, half woman, but nevertheless man and woman in the same body,” evokes the idea of multiple incarnation of a unified being. A kind of trinity is established between Glen, Glenda and the supervising creator Karloff, similar to that between Morpheus, Trinity and Neo.
The Blue Pill: The Lure Of The Cure
“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.” – Morpheus, The Matrix
In The Matrix, the “blue pill” represents returning to the “prison for your mind” that is coercive social conditioning. The character of Cypher represents the lure of the cure, in rejecting the “desert of the real” with its lack of comforts, its isolation and its persecution by patrolling machines, in order to resume a pre-programmed, conforming life where he forgets his past and betrays the team because “ignorance is bliss.”
Neo is dissuaded from his own instincts for comforting conformity by Trinity, the empowered alter-ego who gives him strength to resist his moments of doubt with her own certainty: “You know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you wanna be.” In Glen or Glenda, Barbara becomes the strengthening image, with her willingness to accept and love Glen, even if he never abandons women’s clothing, being the catalyst for his mental freedom. While insisting that a sex change is a happy ending for Anne, Glen’s happy ending becomes his reabsorption into a standard male role by finding his cravings for loving femininity fully answered by Barbara. This ending satisfies the mainstream audience’s urge to “cure” Glen, but only if they can grant the trans* audience’s demand that Glenda be accepted as she is, as a part of Glen, as a crucial precondition of the cure.
Gender policing limits the opportunities for full self-realization of all people, though their realized selves might take many forms across a wide spectrum of gender identity. In Lugosi’s words, “one is wrong because he does right. One is right because he does wrong.” Paradoxically, the mainstream audience are the obstacle to their own liberation, because of their mental indoctrination into an ideology of gender policing. As The Matrix‘s Morpheus puts it, they are “the very minds of the people we are trying to save, but until we do these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy.” Or as Glen or Glenda has it: “YouAreSociety – JUDGE YE NOT.” In the struggle to envision a world without rules or controls, without borders or boundaries, the self-actualization of all people is implied. As long as their matrix of policing thoughts and ingrained prejudices exists, the human race will never be free. What an everyday nightmare.
Brigit McCone covets the Bride of Frankenstein hairdo, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and hanging out with her friends.
The Oxford Dictionary defines dystopia as “An imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.” Literature and pop culture are brimming with examples of dystopian landscapes because they serve as a vehicle through which we can follow certain ills in society to their potentially logical and tragic conclusions.
Our theme week for July 2015 will be Dystopian Landscapes.
The Oxford Dictionary defines dystopia as “An imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.” Literature and pop culture are brimming with examples of dystopian landscapes because they serve as a vehicle through which we can follow certain ills in society to their potentially logical and tragic conclusions. Common themes explored include: the stratification of wealth, dwindling resources, race relations, patriarchy, criminalization of youth, environmental concerns, consumerism, and totalitarianism.
Though sci-fi representations of dystopian landscapes are probably the most common with classics like Soylent Green (where the last remaining source of nutrition is humans) or the more recent comic book-based Snowpiercer(where the last of humanity lives aboard a train because the world was destroyed in an attempt to combat climate change), other genres also have a their own excavations of dystopian themes. Horror films are particularly fruitful with their varied examination of the zombie apocalypse. Zombies throughout time have articulated fears of everything from consumer culture (Dawn of the Dead) to the military (28 Days Later) to medical pandemics (World War Z) to class warfare (Land of the Dead).
Then there are action/sci-fi genre hybrids that take on dystopia. 1990’s action-packed Total Recall (loosely based on a short story by legendary sci-fi dystopian writer Philip K. Dick) imagines a future in which capitalism and colonialism run rampant, leading to the privatization of air and water on colonized Mars. The recent Mad Max: Fury Road is an excellent example of an action movie tackling the dystopian landscape, in which all the world is a desert, and the remainder of humanity struggles over natural resources like gasoline and water. The line, “Who killed the world?” encapsulates the film’s accusation that patriarchy and toxic masculinity are the cause of great misery and, perhaps, the end of all life on earth.
There are also more literary dramas like The Road that depict dystopian landscapes in an effort to articulate what becomes of the nature of humanity when all the rules and trappings of society are lost. Another literary drama, The Handmaid’s Tale (based on Margaret Atwood’s eponymous feminist novel), investigates a future in which religious totalitarianism has laid claim to the female body.
What does the end of everything show us about ourselves? What will the end of everything look like? What lessons can we learn to avoid these dire outcomes?
Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.
We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.
Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.
If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.
Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).
The final due date for these submissions is Friday, July 24 by midnight.
So yes, ‘Jupiter Ascending’ provides women and girls the “you’re secretly the most important person in the solar system” narrative that is so often granted to cishet white men, the demographic who already are treated as the most important people by virtue of the kyriarchy. What’s missing, however, is the part where Jupiter taps into her secret set of special skills.
Poster for ‘Jupiter Ascending’
If you’re not on Tumblr, you might have entirely missed the existence of The Wachowskis’ space opera Jupiter Ascending. Bumped from last summer to a mercy-kill February release, it was panned by critics and ignored by audiences. Save the fannishly inclined, largely female Tumblr users who happen to populate my dashboard, who completely lost their minds over this movie. I blinked and missed its momentary theatrical release and had to wait for it on video to find out if it met the subculture hype. And I am here to report that Jupiter Ascending is a delightful cheesy sci-fi flick, if you’re into that sort of thing. And while it isn’t a feminist triumph in the way that Mad Max: Fury Road is (and even that movie’s feminism has been called into question), Jupiter Ascending is unusually suited to a female viewership, which is sadly still rather revolutionary, particularly for a genre flick.
Why does this spaceship look like a fancy mechanical fish? Why doesn’t yours!?
Gavia Baker-Whitlaw’s Daily Dot piece “Why Women Love Jupiter Ascending“ notes that its story “is the precise gender-flipped equivalent of all those movies where some weak-chinned rando turns out to be the Chosen One” usually with a hyper-competent and hot “Strong Female Character” acting as his guide through his Newly Discovered Destiny. In Jupiter Ascending, Mila Kunis’s Jupiter Jones is a mild-mannered housecleaner who discovers she is actually solar system royalty after Genetically Engineered Space Werewolf Channing Tatum rescues her from an alien attack. Jupiter finds that she is at the center of a war between three royal Jovian siblings (yes I just had to look up the demonym for Jupiter I love my life) who all seek to control Earth and its seven billion harvestable humans so they can rejuvenate their youth by bathing in Soylent Green Espom Salts. She has a claim to Earth because she is the reincarnation of their mother and is also immune to bee stings. Or something. (The intricacies of the plot are not important, I only recount them here because they amuse me.)
Bees don’t sting solar system royalty for some reason.
So yes, Jupiter Ascending provides women and girls the “you’re secretly the most important person in the solar system” narrative that is so often granted to cishet white men, the demographic who already are treated as the most important people by virtue of the kyriarchy (you really need to be MORE important, cishet white dudes?). What’s missing, however, is the part where Jupiter taps into her secret set of special skills, as we see with our once-mundane male Chosen Ones from The Matrix‘s Neo to The Lego Movie‘s Emmett to Wanted‘s Whatever-James-McAvoy’s-character-was-named. She never eclipses the badassness of her Trinity-equivalent, the aforementioned Genetically-Engineered Space Werewolf, Caine Wise (one of the great joys of the film is when people call him “Wise” while he’s doing foolishly reckless things. I’m not sure if that was intentional). Caine needs to rescue Jupiter throughout the film; his preferred style of rescue is to give her a piggyback ride while he zooms around on his gravity-defying space rollerblades. If all these absurd details haven’t convinced you to watch this movie yet, I’m not sure what will. When she’s on her own, Jupiter’s “action” is largely about contract law.
Jupiter gets a lot of piggyback rides from Caine
Because Jupiter’s secret importance doesn’t come with previously untapped hyper-competence or the unique importance of her particular abilities, it is simply a royal birthright. She’s more along the lines of The Princess Diaries‘ Mia Thermopolis than Neo. And women aren’t really wanting for “you are actually a princess!” narratives. There are 30-odd Disney movies about that. Jupiter Ascending isn’t a power fantasy, it is a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Women already have “you’re really a princess!” stories
But it is still a fantasy for women in a big-budget sci fi movie, which is incredibly rare. Is that why Jupiter Ascending flopped at the box office, or at least why the studio lost confidence in it as a potential summer release? I suspect it has more to do with the current difficulty selling big movies without source material. If even the Wachowskis’ own Matrix trilogy (which provided the very namesake of Tasha Robinson’s Trinity Syndrome) couldn’t bring in a new era of original sci-fi blockbusters (the only two I can think of are Avatar and Pacific Rim), the failure of Jupiter Ascending seems foretold. So hopefully studios will focus on JupiterAscending‘s lack of source materialrather than its female protagonist when they try to avoid making other movies that meet its fate. Then again, only basing movies on properties that already exist will perpetuate male-dominated stories. So we’re kinda screwed either way, which isn’t an unfamiliar position for feminist film fans.
Eddie Redmayne as Balem Abrasax (that’s the kind of character name you get with Jupiter Ascending)
Jupiter Ascending might go on to be a cult classic, and if you like bizarre scifi you should help it get there. I didn’t even get into Academy Award Winner Eddie Redmayne’s astonishingly campy performance as Balem Abrasax, who prefers the cape-but-no-shirt look and only speaks in whispers and screams (in the alternate universe where Jupiter Ascending was released in Summer 2014, Michael Keaton gazes lovingly upon his Best Actor Oscar). While Jupiter Ascending deserves accolades for providing female-centric fantasy, it doesn’t go the distance to become a truly feminist film (it is certainly nine or ten notches below Mad Max: Fury Road, which doesn’t even meet the bar for some people). But while I can’t recommend Jupiter Ascending as a feminist film, I do recommend it as a fun film. They can’t all have Furiosa.
Robin Hitchcock is a Pittsburgh-based writer who sadly has been stung by bees.
But don’t let the buzz mislead you into thinking ‘Fury Road’ is some sort of feminist watershed, a 21st century cinematic ‘Feminine Mystique’ with monster trucks. I would have enjoyed this flick even if it had typical gender politics, because I love car chases and over-the-top action sequences and the sort of high camp that yields a vehicular war party having its own flamethrower-enhanced metal guitarist. If you don’t love those things, you probably don’t want to see this movie. But if you are into that kind of action flick, this is a really good one that has the bonus of a thick layer of sweet, sweet feminist icing.
Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road
This review contains some minor spoilers for Mad Max: Fury Road.
Thank you, MRAs, for calling for a boycott of “”feminist piece of propaganda” Mad Max: Fury Road. You certainly got this feminist fired up to see it opening weekend, and I loved it just as much as you promised me I would.
But don’t let the buzz mislead you into thinking Fury Road is some sort of feminist watershed, a 21st century cinematic Feminine Mystique with monster trucks. I would have enjoyed this flick even if it had typical gender politics, because I love car chases and over-the-top action sequences and the sort of high camp that yields a vehicular war party having its own flamethrower-enhanced metal guitarist. If you don’t love those things, you probably don’t want to see this movie. But if you are into that kind of action flick, this is a really good one that has the bonus of a thick layer of sweet, sweet feminist icing.
If you like double-neck guitar flamethrowers, you’ll like Fury Road
Even though it is his franchise and his name is right there in the title, Max (Tom Hardy) is really the sidekick to Fury Road‘s true hero, Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. Furiosa is the one with the mission and the character arc, Max is pretty much just along for her ride. He ends up feeling like a gender-flipped version of the Hot Action Chick, a Studly Action Dude of sorts. Now, Furiosa isn’t the most well-rounded character you ever did see, but there’s precious little downtime between bouts of vehicular warfare for serious character development (though Charlize does put her acting chops to work in the moments she has). But she is 100 percent glorious badass, the kind of female action star I could never get enough even if Hollywood didn’t churn out only a couple every decade.
Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa
And what sets Furiosa apart from her cinematic foremothers Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor is that she is surrounded by other strong women. She was raised in what appears to be a matriarchal community, and the women we meet from her home are, like her, fearsome warriors. The plot (other than “cars explode”) of Fury Road concerns Furiosa smuggling out the “wives” (sex slaves/”prized breeders”) of evil warlord Immortan Joe. These five beautiful women (supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and perfect genetic specimen Zoë Kravitz among them) wear strategically placed strips of white fabric, and are the only people in this universe with access to soap, hot wax, and hair brushes.
The escaped wives
In a lesser movie, the wives could be an embarrassing cliché of damsels in distress. But in Fury Road, they are women with agency, choosing their own liberation as they experience a feminist awakening (when one considers going back, she’s reminded “we are not things”). They’re not as capable as Furiosa or the other women from her homeland, but they don’t shy away from the fight either. I was surprised to see one (several months pregnant) become a causality of war, not killed off in a particularly dramatic fashion. It’s strangely humanizing to see a pregnant woman be killed among the hoards of other victims in a movie where countless cars crash and things blow up. (However, I did not think her dead son being cut out of her dying body added anything to the film, and suspect it would trigger some people in the audience.) But that death underscored that women are people in Mad Max: Fury Road, not just plot constructs: because people can get killed in a tornado of violence, even if they’re eight months pregnant.
And ultimately, Fury Road is a parable about bringing down the patriarchy, which makes all of its orgiastic destruction a thoroughly satisfying outlet for feminist rage. I saw the movie with a mixed group of male and female friends, who all loved it, but it was the women who walked out saying things like, “I’m so pumped up I could run home right now” and “I might name my daughter Furiosa.”
Patriarchy go boom
So is Mad Max: Fury Road going to bring us equal pay, sexual liberation, a woman in the White House, and ladies’ jackets with inside pockets? Probably not. In fact, it’s probably better news for women that Pitch Perfect 2, a film by, about, and marketed to women, soundly beat Fury Road at the box office (HT to my friend @MattMarcotte to pointing this out to me). But a teenage boy leaving the theater behind me shouted that Fury Road was the “MOST F***ING AWESOME MOVIE EVER!” He might not have realized it was about women destroying male power structures, but I can rest easy tonight knowing that he enjoyed his experience with this feminist piece of propaganda. I hope he gets to see many more.
Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh who was in an improv troupe with one of the stunt performers in this movie. DROP. (Hi, Anneli!)
‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ succeeds in all the places you’d expect it to fail, but while Joss Whedon was tiptoeing around all the expected pitfalls of a major franchise sequel, he stumbled over a cliff when it came to the one character I would have most trusted him to get right: Scarlet Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, or Black Widow.
Scarlet Johansson as Black Widow in Avengers: Age of Ultron
I liked Avengers: Age of Ultron. A lot. What follows is going to read like a very negative review. If I could selectively switch off my feminism, I could write you the most thumbs-uppiest of glowing reviews for Age of Ultron. But I cannot, and this is why my dad would say “it’s hard to be Robin.” But if you’re a regular Bitch Flicks reader, it is also probably hard to be you (that’s sort of why we exist). And you also will probably walk away from this movie with some serious reservations.
Age of Ultron succeeds in all the places you’d expect it to fail: the new characters are compelling; the amped-up battle sequences manage to be as coherent as they are thrilling; and for a movie with 17 actors listed on its poster, it somehow manages to not feel that overstuffed. But while Joss Whedon was tiptoeing around all the expected pitfalls of a major franchise sequel, he stumbled over a cliff when it came to the one character I would have most trusted him to get right: Scarlet Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, or Black Widow.
Spoilers from here on out, friends.
Black Widow under the male gaze
When Black Widow was introduced in Iron Man 2 (a sequel which DID fail in all the predictable ways), her character was so fully entrenched in the male gaze it was kind of gross. We’re first introduced to her cover identity, Natalie Rushman: a submissive secretary who modeled in Japan and suggestively asks, “is that dirty enough for you” after leaning over to present her boss Tony Stark with a martini. But what’s even hotter Natalie Rushman? Natasha Romanoff pretending to be meek and accommodating while in fact being a badass superspy who can take out fifteen guys, hack computers, and save the day without mussing her flowing red curls (one of the worst wigs in the history of cinema, but that’s just a personal bugaboo of mine). This kind of sarcastic-quotation-marks “strong female character” is a dime a dozen in action movies and not someone I’d beg to see a standalone movie about.
Black Widow beating people up in a terrible wig in Iron Man 2
But then came The Avengers, where Black Widow was so much more than the Fighting Fucktoy. She was still a sexy badass, but she also got to be wickedly clever, dryly funny, warm and loyal to her friends, and in what was probably the biggest revelation for a Strong Female Character: fearful of scary things. This more solid characterization carried over to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where we continued to see Natasha’s rare moments of emotional vulnerability alongside her intellectual and physical competence.
In Avengers and Captain America 2, Black Widow was more than eye candy
Black Widow had become a character I loved. And I would have given a lot of credit for that to Joss Whedon. But then he went and did this all this to her.
These two? Seriously?
AoU‘s first sin against Natasha is awkwardly shoehorning her into a romantic subplot with Bruce Banner, of all people. Maybe I’d be less disgruntled about Natasha in lurve if the pairing worked better for me? But it felt pretty out of left field, and lacking in chemistry. Like they crossed off the crossed off the characters who already had love interests and flipped a coin to settle on Bruce.
Now, one of the benefits of being a well-rounded character should be the chance for a love interest. The rest of the core six all have their sweeties! But note how all of them had outside characters as their love interest. Usually our male Avengers have their own movie or movies to make space for that character, but Hawkeye’s previously-unseen wife was given screen time in Age of Ultron. It is unthinkable for Natasha to have a similar surprise husband, because “doting pregnant wife” is a complete female character as far as Hollywood is concerned. A side character male love interest is much harder for Hollywood to handle, because they see “man” and think “center of the story.”
Natasha is responsible for de-Hulking Bruce with a “lullaby”
So Natasha had to be connected to another main character, and it happened to be Bruce, and even if that didn’t feel as random to you as it did to me, it brings about some problems. First, I wasn’t crazy about Natasha having the role of soothing Bruce out of Hulk form with their”lullaby” ritual to begin with, but adding romantic overtones makes it even more skeevy. There are unavoidable allusions to domestic violence inherent to the Hulk. Having his romantic partner hold the responsibility for talking him down from his rage state, and portraying this as part of their bond, underscores this in an unpleasant way.
Scarlet Witch induces a vision of Black Widow’s past
Worse, Natasha’s arc in Age of Ultron got completely wrapped up in her feelings for Banner, even though we finally—finally! In her fourth appearance in a Marvel movie—got to see Natasha’s backstory, her childhood training/brainwashing into superspyness by the sinister Red Room. (Granted, we see it in a dream-like flashback that’s only long enough for you to go, “Hey, is that Julie Delpy?”).
Natasha’s history gets rolled over into her romantic subplot in the most bizarre, uncomfortable—let’s just say worst—scene in the film. Bruce is giving Natasha the speech about how she could have no future with him, gesturing around to the child’s room they are in. She tearfully reveals that she can’t have children either, because she was sterilized as part of her “graduation” from the Red Room. She speculates the forced sterilization was to avoid problems, attachments, and that “It made everything easier, even killing.” And then she calls herself a monster.
WAIT… WHAT?
RECORD SCRATCH. Wait, a woman who can’t get pregnant is A MONSTER? On a level comparable to a dude who turns into an actual unstoppable force of destruction we had just seen level a city? What… I just… what? What!!!!????? The idea that anyone—*cough* Joss Whedon *cough*—would think infertility makes a woman something less than human is extremely gross, but it’s even worse to see Natasha internalize such warped misogyny and biological essentialism.
And I haven’t even mentioned the part where Black Widow gets kidnapped by the bad guy and locked in a dungeon. That really happens. For real for real. I assume this was to accommodate Scarlett Johansson’s pregnancy during filming, but there are plenty of ways to write her out of the story for a little while without making her a damsel in distress (send her on a side mission, any side mission, DON’T LOCK BLACK WIDOW IN A DUNGEON). And thinking about how Johansson was pregnant at the time somehow manages to make that horrible sterilization confession scene even more unpleasant.
Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch in Age of Ultron
The only good news when it comes to Black Widow in Age of Ultron is that she’s no longer saddled with being the Smurfette, as Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch provides us with a Sassette Smurf of sorts. Cobie Smulders is also back as Maria Hill, but she doesn’t have much to do. Claudia Kim plays Dr. Helen Cho, who does things that are important for the plot but gets less character development than Hawkeye’s wife, who might as well be listed in the credits as “Hawkeye’s wife.” But even though Natasha isn’t the only woman in Age of Ultron, she’s still the one nearest and dearest to the audience, and it is heartbreaking to see her utilized so poorly.
Black Widow deserves better
Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh who has never been pregnant. Is she, too, a monster!?
The new Netflix original series ‘Daredevil,’ about Marvel’s blind defense-attorney-by-day-vigilante-by-night Matt Murdock, surprised me. It’s extremely different from the other Marvel Studios properties. First, it has the “dark, edgy” tone normally associated with Warner Bros. DC movies, particularly the Nolan Batman films. Second, it is really, REALLY violent (like, graphic decapitations violent) in a way that Marvel’s PG-13 movies cannot be. Finally, ‘Daredevil’ is almost a complete disaster when it comes to its female characters. Marvel’s track record with female characters isn’t perfect, but I’ve come to expect much better than what we get here.
This review contains spoilers for Daredevil and some graphic images of violence against women.
The new Netflix original series Daredevil, about Marvel’s blind defense-attorney-by-day-vigilante-by-night Matt Murdock, surprised me. It’s extremely different from the other Marvel Studios properties, the MCU films and the broadcast television series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.Dand Agent Carter. First, it has the “dark, edgy” tone normally associated with Warner Bros. DC movies, particularly the Nolan Batman films. Second, it is really, REALLY violent (like, graphic decapitations violent) in a way that Marvel’s PG-13 movies cannot be. Finally, Daredevil is almost a complete disaster when it comes to its female characters. Marvel’s track record with female charactersisn’tperfect, but I’ve come to expectmuch better than what we get here.
Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page in Daredevil
The first woman we meet on Daredevil is Karen Page, the most prevalent if not necessarily the most important female character from the source comics. Karen Page is a notorious example of women being treated horribly in comics, with Frank Miller writing an arc where she’s addicted to drugs and “tragically” became a porn star, and Kevin Smith later fridging her and then having himself drawn into her funeral. She does better in this series, but that’s not saying much.
Panel from Daredevil comic when Karen is killed
In the first episode of Daredevil, Karen is set up for murder in a complicated cover-up that’s tied into all the series’ other complicated criminal ongoings (which are hard to keep track of even when marathoning the episodes). Do-gooding lawyer noobs Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson take on her case, and protect her from all the bad guys who want to kill her, with legal jujitsu as well as the actual kind from Matt in his masked vigilante alter ego that will become Daredevil. They take her on as their assistant, so she can continue to be imperiled.
Karen in peril
In the comics, she’s a love interest of Matt’s, but many of the early episodes give her nothing more to do than be made goo goo eyes at by Foggy. (Nearly every female recurring character on this show is a love interest for someone.) Later, Karen is given “something to do” as she conducts her own investigation of the Kingpin alongside journalist Ben Urich. Naturally, this makes her a damsel in distress once again, but at least she’s given the opportunity to save herself.
Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple in Daredevil
Next up is Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson), a nurse who drags a half-dead Matt out of a dumpster and tends to his wounds. Their relationship grows because Matt loses and a lot of fights and falls out of a lot of buildings and regularly needs patching up. But it only takes a couple of episodes before she’s kidnapped, beaten up, and rescued by Matt. Who she’s falling in love with, which makes no sense (I mean, dude is fine, but he’s also seems to be pretty much wrecking her life). Claire peaces out for pretty much the rest of the season, probably because Rosario Dawson was too expensive to have in many episodes. The role is really a waste of her talents.
Claire in peril
The third and final female character in the main cast is Ayelet Zurer’s Vanessa, the romantic interest of the Kingpin, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). I can’t decide if I should call Vanessa “complicated” or just “confusing.” I really do not understand why she falls for Fisk, and grows closer to him the more she learns about his criminal lifestyle. Vanessa feels more like a construct designed to humanize Fisk than a character in her own right. And of course she also functions to give Fisk angst when she inevitably ends up in a hospital bed, because this show sure does love its damsels in distress.
Vanessa in peril
The minor female characters continue the depressing trends: Elena, a friendly elderly client of Nelson & Murdock, is murdered to draw out Daredevil. Evil drug dealer Madam Gao is one of two villainous East Asian characters who just happen to be martial arts experts. And Ben Urich has a dying wife, because not only violence imperils the women our male heroes love, but also the cruel fates of sickness and natural death!
Nice old lady Elena, killed to “get to” Daredevil
And to answer your burning question, no, there’s no Elektra. (Not even a teaser in a post-credits scene, which I was suspecting we’d get at the very least.) I guess they’re saving her for season two.
Ultimately, I still enjoyed Daredevil enough to watch the whole season in two days (it helped that I’m nursing a cold and didn’t feel up to much more than curling up in front of the TV). But I’m terribly let down by its treatment of women, and hope Netflix’s forthcoming Marvel series do much better.
Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh who actually liked the Ben Affleck Daredevil movie, so you should possibly disregard all of her opinions about everything, ever.
‘Coherence’ is a triumph of low-budget filmmaking, a reality show about an extreme acting challenge, a disturbing science fiction take on human nature and identity, a fascinating puzzle box, and a movie with a well-written, well-acted female lead. Bet you wish you’d seen it, now.
Coherence is a triumph of low-budget filmmaking, a reality show about an extreme acting challenge, a disturbing science fiction take on human nature and identity, a fascinating puzzle box, and a movie with a well-written, well-acted female lead. Bet you wish you’d seen it, now.
Emily Foxler as Emily in Coherence
It’s awfully hard to talk about Coherence without wrecking all of the surprises in the story – even the central conceit is secret that’s buried until you’re well into the film. Without giving away too much more than the trailer, the story is about a group of friends at a dinner party where really weird shit starts to happen. There’s a comet passing overhead, and – we are told – the last time this comet passed by, people got confused about who they were, and where they were, and what was going on.
During the dinner party, cell phone service goes down, and the power goes out. Two of the characters walk to a house two blocks over, which seems to have power, to ask if they can use a landline phone. When they get back, they’re visibly shaken and don’t want to share what they’ve seen.
From that point forward, everything starts to get weird. People act strangely; they repeat themselves; events seem to happen out of order; the characters discover a box that seems like it shouldn’t exist. As they try to piece together what’s happening, and what they should do to survive, the stress of the situation puts pressure on their relationships, and the darker sides of their personalities come to the surface.
The explanation of what’s happening, when we get it, is internally consistent with everything we’ve seen – and the finale is disturbing, but eerily believable. It’s a movie you have to watch twice – once for the experience of suspense and confusion, and once for the experience of piecing all the clues together, and seeing how carefully plotted each event was. It’s the kind of awesome, well-made film that grabs you right away, makes you want to find out more, and then delivers on its promises in the final act.
Nicholas Brendon as a guy who used to be on a TV show
Although this isn’t clear at first, the protagonist of Coherence is Emily (played by Emily Foxler), a dancer who regrets the trajectory her career path has taken. Without giving too much away, it’s fair to say that the film follows her from beginning to end, and that she’s the character who’s forced to make a choice in the final moments – about who she wants to be, what she wants to have, and what she’s willing to do to get it.
The second most important character, from a narrative standpoint, is Mike – played by Nicholas Brendon as an exaggerated version of himself (spoilers in the link). Mike is the former star of a cult-hit TV show and doesn’t like who he turns into when he’s drinking. He goes dark as soon as things start to get strange, exhibiting a mix of paranoia and self-hatred, followed by radical, destructive behaviour. Eventually, he starts drinking again, much to the others’ dismay.
By the end of the film, it’s clear that Mike’s story exists to prepare the audience for the choices that Emily’s going to face later on. The dark side of his personality is so close to the surface that it comes spilling out right away, priming us to look for signs of darkness in the other characters. He also states one of the movie’s biggest themes during a small, self-pitying speech, but I can’t tell you, here, what it is.
The reason I bring this all up – in annoyingly cryptic terms – is just to say that, in a lot of ways, Coherence is one of the movies I wished for when I wrote about how big idea movies usually don’t have female leads. This is a story about selfhood and the way we understand ourselves as individuals, in very broad, universal terms, and we’re invited to follow and identify with a woman as the centre of that story.
Also – perhaps because this is a dinner party made up of heterosexual couples – half of the characters in this movie are women. I notice that, in general, the male characters are more action-oriented and push the story forward through doing things, whereas the women tend to push the story forward by talking about and discovering things, but I don’t think that’s necessarily bad. If Emily weren’t the central character, then the way that men seem to make all the really explosive decisions would be more annoying, but, since the story comes back to her in the end, the whole thing feels more balanced.
The cast as confused, but intrigued
The other really cool thing about Coherence, and the reason I recommend watching it, is that, in addition to telling a good, suspenseful, interesting story, this movie is also a reality show about acting. Writer/director James Ward Byrkit, and one of the actors, Alex Manugian, spent a year plotting the story before filming it in Byrkit’s home. Manugian was the only actor who knew the whole plot – the others were given notes every day, explaining background information that their characters would have, talking points that they should try to hit in group discussions, and what their motivations were at present. They then had to improvise their way through each scene, working together to tell a story that only one of them knew, trying to stay in character while it was happening.
Not to sound like I normally overlook acting, but this is the kind of movie that reminds you of what actors actually do, and of the skill, self-control, and self-awareness required to do it.
I’m sure that good editing plays a role in making Coherence look seamless, but there’s still something really exciting about watching eight people (seven, if you don’t count Alex Manugian) dive into an acting experiment and just try to do their jobs. Knowing how the film was made, and then watching it play out on screen, I’m reminded that acting is about collaboration – in every scene, each of these actors has to split their attention between hitting the marks set out before them, and helping the others do the same – in this case, without knowing ahead of time what’s actually going to happen. And while all of that’s going on behind the scenes, inside their heads, they have to make it look like it’s just natural, and like they’re the people they’ve been cast to play.
Coherence, for me, involves that sense of pleasure that comes from watching people who are good at something do that thing well. It also makes me wonder what other cool things actors could do, if there were more experiments like this.
When you put it all together, you’ve got an interesting, suspenseful, tightly-plotted movie about identity, starring a female protagonist, full of good acting and editing. There is absolutely no reason you would not want to watch this, so go watch it now.
Bisexual protagonists, scenes that pass the Bechdel Test, women making choices that drive the action of the story – I’m still the only person who watches ‘The 100,’ but, boy, do I enjoy it when I do.
Bisexual protagonists, scenes that pass the Bechdel Test, women making choices that drive the action of the story – I’m still the only person who watches The 100, but, boy, do I enjoy it when I do.
The day The 100 unironically became my favorite current show
Last year, I wrote about the first season of The 100, a dystopian YA science fiction series on The CW, based on a dystopian YA science fiction novel of the same name. While the first few episodes were laughably terrible, the series later took a sharp (and dark) turn toward being kind of good. The second season of The 100, which airs the first half of its two-part finale this week, is also laughably terrible in places, but also kind of surprisingly good.
One of the good surprises happened last week, when the series hero, Clarke, turned out to be bisexual in a low-key, fairly believable way, that didn’t involve any hand-wringing about her sexual identity. The major story line this season has been that Clarke’s group, the Sky People, are trying to forge an alliance with the Grounders – a group of clans native to the planet the Sky People have landed on. The Grounders’ leader, Lexa, is a girl Clarke’s age who’s also been pushed into a position of responsibility, and the two of them grow closer as the season progresses, because no one else understands the pressure of making life and death decisions for thousands of people, or of sacrificing those you love for the sake of the greater good. There’s tension between them, because they have different ideas about what it means to be a leader, and Clarke’s character arc this season is partly about whether she’s going to end up as cold as Lexa.
That’s already unusual for a network TV show, in that the story is about a serious philosophical difference between two female characters who talk to each other about it, and make life and death decisions based on their discussion, but it’s also unusual because the showrunners decided to let them kiss, and didn’t make a whole big deal about it.
It turns out that Lexa doesn’t make Clarke a cold, hard-hearted leader after all – the opposite happens, and Clarke gets Lexa to warm up a little – at least enough to admit that there’s a place in her hard heart for Clarke. And, rather than having her push Lexa away, or say, “I’m not gay – god, what if I’m gay?!” it turns out that Clarke’s been quietly bisexual all along, and it never came up before because it’s not all that noteworthy a thing. It’s exactly the same as if she were kissing a guy.
In other words, the fact that it’s not a big deal is what makes it a really big deal.
As Allyson Johnson writes in The Mary Sue: “It’s not pandering, or queer-baiting; it’s simply a part of [Clarke’s] characterization that’s played as if it’s totally and beautifully normal.” Series creator and executive producer, Jason Rothenberg, also went on Twitter to explain that people don’t get freaked out about bisexuals in the future world of The 100 and that “if Clarke’s attracted to someone, gender isn’t a factor. Some things improve post-apocalypse.”
We’ve already had bisexual characters on science fiction shows – Torchwood is notable for making bisexuality as part of its mission statement – but there’s still something surprising and refreshing about the easy-going way that The 100 made this happen. It’s a step forward in the portrayal of LGBT people in general, but of Bi people especially. That Clarke’s comfortable with who she is – that she already knew this about herself, and the only thing that’s new is that we’re learning it about her; that she doesn’t turn into a lesbian as soon as she kisses a girl – that’s a big deal.
Major Byrne, looking for her chance to cause some conflict
Another pleasant surprise in the second season is how willing The 100 is to cast women in roles where they just need some generic person. Almost every time – if not every time – groups of random, redshirt, background characters convene, some of them – and some of the ones with speaking parts – are women. The show also fills a lot of secondary roles with women – the generically menacing doctor who works for this season’s enemy, the Mountain Men, is a woman; the super hard core Grounder who distrusts the Sky People and causes tension is a woman – but I was most impressed by Major Byrne.
Major Byrne is a cookie-cutter character who exists just to create conflict among the Sky People now that the conflict-creators from last year have been rehabilitated. The Major is the hard-ass, shoot first and ask questions later, “they are the enemy,” letter of the law, peace-hating, harsh justice head of security who keeps telling the other characters that they’re screwing up by being too lenient and soft-hearted. It’s the kind of role that casting directors usually fill with a male actor, because that’s the person we all picture in our heads when we think of this archetype. The reason I’m impressed that Major Byrne turned out to be a woman is that it shows that someone, somewhere along the line, thought past their knee-jerk reactions and made a deliberate choice about casting the role – and I think that’s indicative of the deliberate choices that The 100 makes in casting female actors in general.
That doesn’t mean that Major Byrne was more than a military stereotype, or that the doctor mentioned above was more than generically evil, or that female redshirts are any more useful than male redshirts as characters – it just means that rather than defaulting to “male unless otherwise specified” it seems like The 100 makes a conscious effort to present a world where both men and women are present and involved in what’s happening.
Octavia 3.0, now with added grime and bad-ass
The third good surprise, and the last one I’ll talk about – although I could mention the show’s humour, and its interesting grimdark twists – is that the writers seem to understand that there was a problem with Octavia in season one. They haven’t figured out the right way to fix it yet, but they’re trying, and I appreciate that.
If you recall, Octavia is the character who began the first season as a sassy, hypersexualized rebel, and then was rebooted as The Kindest Girl Who Ever Lived. In both incarnations, the main point of Octavia was how other people felt about her, and she constantly fell into danger and had to be rescued by other characters.
Season two reboots Octavia again as kind and rebellious, resourceful, independent, and brave. Her character arc this season is that she spends less time with her Grounder boyfriend, and more time training to be a warrior in the Grounder army, after proving herself to the really hard core Grounder, Indra.
There are some ooky colonial elements to Octavia 3.0’s story, and I don’t at all buy that she’s now an honorary Grounder because she started braiding her hair and lost a fist fight in a really spectacular way. She also looks hilarious when she tries to join them in a tribal yell, and she uses literally the worst strategy ever when she tries to take hostages during an early episode. Like, it’s really so bad that I have to believe Indra let her walk away with a hostage because she just didn’t like the guy Octavia was holding hostage very much.
That said, I appreciate that the show is trying to turn Octavia into a person rather than a chess piece in a game that other characters are playing. Right now, the character’s exhibiting a pretty superficial, and unrealistic form of girl power (“Let’s just make her awesome at everything!”), but it’s an improvement over the days when she used to trip over her feet and get knocked unconscious in the woods. If the producers were going to learn any lessons from season one, and latch onto anything as being the core of their show, I think trying to build strong female characters is a fine thing to latch onto – even if they haven’t quite got it right with Octavia.
The 100, like Battlestar Galactica before it, is still remarkable for having women make so many choices that drive the story, and I think that, once they find a way for Octavia’s choices to matter, things will finally slide into place.
And I haven’t even told you about the episode where the A-plot is that the characters go to the zoo and get chased by a monkey!
If you live in the United States, The CW airs The 100 on Wednesday nights. If you live in Canada, you can catch it on Netflix the following morning. Please watch it – I think it deserves to exist.
While watching ‘Mockingjay Part I,’ I had an epiphany. I asked myself why Katniss Everdeen is such a compelling heroine to audiences and why other heroines modeled after her are popping up all over the place? There’s no denying that audiences (especially young women) are hungry for strong female representation on screen. We love to see Katniss use her wits and her bow to save the day, but in ‘Mockingjay Part I,’ there is very little action (Katniss uses her bow only once), and Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is still riveting. Why, do you think, that is?
First off, let’s get the unpleasant part out of the way. Serious fans of The Hunger Games series will likely hate me, but we’ve all got to face the truth. The third installment in the series, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I should not have been made. Splitting movies into two parts is an ever-growing trend in Hollywood’s never-ending quest for more money. Over the course of the two-hour film, not enough happens to warrant its existence. There is little moving the plot forward, and the ending itself is anticlimactic as our heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) isn’t even involved in the ultimately uneventful final showdown mission to rescue the captive tributes. The vital events that do happen in Part I could have easily been condensed into the first 20 minutes of the finale of a legitimate trilogy.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about what does work in Mockingjay Part I. There are a lot of women involved in the film itself, from the writer of the novels, Suzanne Collins, who adapted her books for the screen, to Nina Jacobson, the producer of the entire series, to our tenacious heroine Katniss, played by the increasingly popular, amazing performer and feminist Jennifer Lawrence.
I particularly liked that Mockingjay Part I also sets up the opposition between patriarchy and matriarchy with the introduction of Julianne Moore as President Coin of District 13. Under the patriarchal tyranny of President Snow (Donald Sutherland), the districts of Panem suffer as the people are used for their labor and their districts’ resources while fear and capital punishment are the norm. His Capitol, however, is rich, fashion-obsessed, and completely self-serving. The matriarchal President Coin, on the other hand, represents revolution with a strict focus on democracy and a socialist emphasis on the sharing of resources. District 13 is a militaristic, utilitarian underground compound that eschews fashion in favor of function (as evinced by the monotone uniforms all residents wear). Those of us who have read the books know that a lot will shift before the series concludes, but for now, this embodiment of a nontraditional representation of matriarchy in Coin is refreshing. She is decisive, smart, calm when under attack, and always thinking about the greater good of the people.
While watching Mockingjay Part I, I had an epiphany. I asked myself why Katniss Everdeen is such a compelling heroine to audiences and why other heroines modeled after her are popping up all over the place? There’s no denying that audiences (especially young women) are hungry for strong female representation on screen. We love to see Katniss use her wits and her bow to save the day, but in Mockingjay Part I, there is very little action (Katniss uses her bow only once), and Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is still riveting. Why, do you think, that is?
Two words for you: emotional range. While there are a plethora of limitations and stereotypes by which female characters are plagued, audiences are getting tired of the limited range of emotion that male heroes are allowed to exhibit due to the strictness of masculinity within our culture. Women are increasingly allowed to showcase a greater range of emotions without it damaging their perception as a strong, good leader.
In Mockingjay Part I, Katniss is suffering from intense PTSD. She has flashbacks, night terrors, uncontrollable bouts of crying, and dissociates from her surroundings. Throughout the film, she is an emotional wreck, as she should be after what she’s gone through, from being hunted and forced to kill for sport, to having her home of District 12 genocided as a result of her actions.
We watch Katniss go through an emotional roller coaster as she experiences shock, horror, terror, guilt, sadness, loss, anger, grief, and devastation. She is overcome with love for her family, Gale, and Peta, and, at her core, we are the most compelled by Katniss’ compassion and her instinctual drive to protect others. Katniss is sometimes wrong and often rash in her actions. In truth, it is her vulnerability displayed on screen like a raw wound from which we cannot look away.
This is the stuff of heroes. We see her experiences nearly break her time and time again, but she won’t give up. Carrying on is so hard that it nearly destroys her, but her sense of what is right is so strong that she cannot turn her back on her fellow oppressed district dwellers.
Like Katniss is the symbol of revolution as the mockingjay, she’s also the symbol of a movement that values women as nonsexualized leads with rich, complex characterization. We’re increasingly bored with the stoic male hero and instead crave the strength and vulnerability of the growing number of female sci-fi action heroines that are emerging thanks to the success of Katniss Everdeen and The Hunger Games.
Aside: The United States IS the Capitol. The storyline of The Hunger Games is so popular in the US, but we’re missing the point if we don’t confess that we are the oppressive world superpower that tyrannizes the rest of the word, exploiting the labor and resources of others so that most of us can live in relative wealth and comfort. End rant.
Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. Her short story “The Woman Who Fell in Love with a Mermaid” was published in Germ Magazine. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.
