Selena Gomez – Bitch Flicks

Why Alex Russo Is My Favorite Fictional Female Wizard

The protagonist of Wizards is a girl who acts like girls really act: she has boyfriends and broken hearts, but isn’t overly boy-crazy or dependent on them; she’s curious and smart enough to ask questions when other people are telling her not to; and throughout the series she faces a lot of the struggles women really do face throughout their lives.

This cross-post by Katherine Filaseta previously appeared at her blog Complaining About Things I Like and appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

Disney is sort of objectively awful when it comes to feminism and people of color, so maybe my standards are low, but I firmly believe Wizards of Waverly Place is the best thing Disney has ever created. Disney’s girls are so often either defined entirely by their relationships to the men around them (see: almost every princess movie ever) or overwhelmingly peppy and ditzy (see: most female protagonists on Disney Channel), but not Alex Russo (played by Selena Gomez). The protagonist of Wizards is a girl who acts like girls really act: she has boyfriends and broken hearts, but isn’t overly boy-crazy or dependent on them; she’s curious and smart enough to ask questions when other people are telling her not to; and throughout the series she faces a lot of the struggles women really do face throughout their lives.

Throughout the series, Alex struggles very realistically with her biracial(/biwizard) identity and surpasses the low expectations set for her by her family, school, and the entire wizarding world. She is confident, witty and independent in a way that would make her an instant “hero” if she were a boy, but instead there is an entire post-series made-for-TV movie about how the things she likes most in herself are also the characteristics society is constantly telling her to repress. When this show first came out I had just graduated high school, and I aspired to be as strong of a woman as this fake TV character who was probably five years younger than me. The fact that Disney–the same company that demonstrates female characters’ femininity by making their wrists smaller than their eyes –created a female character this strong still amazes me.

Alex is the middle child of the Russo family, a half-Mexican/half-Italian half-wizard family whose behavior and use of magic is considered too mischievous for her to ever succeed in winning the competition she must have with her siblings to see who becomes the family wizard. Unlike her brother Justin, a hard-working student who always follows the rules, Alex often uses magic in a way that is referred to throughout the series as “selfish.” So selfish, in fact, that in the post-series movie Alex v. Alex, when she extricates the “bad” parts of her personality that make her “misuse magic” they join forces with another “bad” wizard to try to take over the world. Throughout the series these words–bad, selfish, misuse–are used to describe Alex’s behavior, but I don’t think they are quite accurate. Her younger brother Max is often “misusing” magic but doesn’t get chastised for it; it is simply written off as a boy just playing around. So what makes Alex’s curiosity different? She pushes limits to see what she can get away with, she experiments with spells just to see what would happen, and when the “bad” parts of her are isolated we see that she has a desire for power–but none of these seem like extraordinarily “bad” characteristics to me. Especially when you consider that she is constantly being told she is going to lose the wizard competition to her brother, after which point her powers would be taken away forever; any child in her situation would seize the opportunity to use magic as much as possible while they still can.

Alex also struggles with her biracial identity: She understands the importance of a quinceanera to her mother, but doesn’t feel enough of an attachment to her heritage to put up with wearing a frilly pink dress–or, as she puts it, “I love being half-Mexican and half-whatever he is, but look at all this stuff it’s girly and lame.” Throughout the course of the episode she manages to get out of having to wear the awful dress while still learning that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do because they are important traditions to your family, for reasons you might not always understand. Alex and her brothers might not know how to dance the salsa, but they know how to eat it when their mom makes it–and sometimes that’s enough.

When presented with challenges, Alex hardly ever just gives up. Despite everyone telling her she can’t become the family wizard, when she finds a motivation to want to succeed (falling in love with another magical being), she pulls herself together and does everything she can to win. She doesn’t do well in school, and her principal and teachers are always explicitly telling her they don’t have any expectations for her, but when she finds a subject she really truly enjoys (art), she works incredibly hard to put together a mural. In “Justin’s Little Sister,” the children learn that genies are con artists who are always trying to outsmart wizards, to which Alex responds, “Well no genie can trick me; I’d make them wish they never met me.” All the men in her family respond to this confident assertion with annoyance and ask why she can’t be more like her brother. What girl with siblings can’t relate to her struggle?

In the end of the series, Alex shows everyone she is capable of way more than what they expected by winning the wizard competition with flying colors and getting to keep her powers. Post-series, she shows everyone they were wrong again, when even after winning the competition they still doubt her ability to responsibly handle magic. Even a children’s TV show is addressing the difficulties strong, successful women face: that when a woman surpasses all expectations by doing really well, her actual merits are still questioned. In fact, Alex’s family makes her feel so terrible about her success that she tries to solve the “problem” by removing her “bad” parts. In the end, she learns that this was the wrong decision and that even the “bad” parts of herself are actually making her a stronger woman–a fantastic end to a fantastic series. Wizards might be just a cheap rip-off of Harry Potter, but as far as girl wizards are concerned, I’ll take Alex Russo over Hermione any day.

Katherine Filaseta is a recent graduate of Washington University in Saint Louis whose life has somehow managed to become constantly split between the United States and India. She really likes Bollywood, education, feminism, the performing arts, and apparently children’s TV. Follow her on twitter and wordpress.

Travel Films Week: ‘Spring Breakers’ Forever

This is a guest review by Marcia Herring.

Movie poster for Spring Breakers

In a lifetime, how many chances are we granted to truly reinvent ourselves? Growing up, I would often daydream about taking a trip: leaving my conservative duds, Midwestern accent, and semi-closeted life behind me. I would wake up and magically be able to fill the shoes of an exaggerated version of myself. I could experience life on the other side without the backlash of disapproving parents, poisonous social norms, and my own fear of change.

Many viewers may not consider the 2013 film Spring Breakers a discussion of how a little change of location can open the doors wide for reinvention — after all it is easy to get distracted by the bright lights and dubstep of Harmony Korine’s portrait of excess and meaninglessness. The plot of Spring Breakers centers around four girls; daydreaming their way through a semester at college in their Kentucky hometown, they become driven by the idea that they might escape and finally have some fun — or discover themselves, depending on which girl you asked.

Being typical college students, Faith, Candy, Brit and Cotty are broke. How, then, will they get away from the copy-of-a-copy existence they lead? The idea comes — a strange bubble of a thing — to rob a convenience store. It goes down without Faith’s knowledge; she is busy singing half-hearted worship songs at a Christian campus group, and would never approve anyway. Cotty plays getaway driver while Candy and Brit don ski masks and water guns and terrorize their way into enough money to get all four girls to Florida.

Once there, the freedom proves heady. The girls overindulge in drugs, late-night scooter rides, flirtations, and alcohol. St. Petersburg is already full to the brim of people just like them — here for the week and ready to party, their “real” selves be damned.

Of course, the hedonistic bliss cannot last long. After all, spring break isn’t forever. Spring Break is not some magical concept that, although it certainly feels like it, exists separate from the rest of the world. The girls get caught. They spend the night in jail, miserable and worried. A judge passes their (relatively tame) sentence, and the girls are rescued from having to call their parents by local “businessman” named Alien (James Franco, in the role he must have been born to play). Conversation with Alien quickly reveals that he is far from the lifeless folk the girls are used to encountering. Alien has his hands in the drug trade of St. Pete, engages in petty crime for entertainment, and even has a rival (Gucci Mane). Alien’s dream is the American Dream, the dream of more, better stuff … and he wants to share that dream with the girls.

Alien (James Franco) and his girls (l to r: Rachel Korine, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, and Vanessa Hudgens)

The film, which stars Selena Gomez (Wizards of Waverly Place) as Faith, a sheltered good girl gone bad, Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical) as Candy, Ashley Benson (Pretty Little Liars) as Brit, and Rachel Korine (known mostly as director Korine’s much-younger wife) as Cotty, would be easy to read as exploitative. After all, three of the four female stars are known for their roles in relatively-wholesome entertainment. Both Hudgens and Gomez have been a major part of the Disney generation of girls (including Miley Cyrus). Upon reaching late adolescence and the chance to become “real” stars, they have taken career moves that bared skin. They’ve also been subjected to sexual scandals. Is this casting intentional? I don’t doubt it! Does it play into our culture’s obsession with the graduation of young girls into women by subjugating them to a particular brand of role? Yes — in a way.

Caveat: I am certainly not an advocate for the nudity = mature film career movement; I wanted to touch on a few of the ways Spring Breakers might, depending on how you view the thing, do this a little better than most. For one, none of the “Disney girls” is ever shown nude. The sex scene that focuses on Brit and Candy is much less explicit than the earlier scene where the camera is on Alien. The only top-billed nudity comes from Korine, who is quite a bit older than the other girls — and as director Korine’s wife, I’m sure she had a voice in how to appear in the film. Rachel Korine also spoke to Vice Magazine about being a mentor to the other girls. Many party scenes featured a large number of extras, and Gomez had some hesitance about being in such a mob. Korine physically protected Gomez, and announced that any inappropriate behavior toward Selena would not go unpunished. End caveat!

I don’t think that Spring Breakers, despite its perpetually-bikini-clad bodies, is an addition to the list of ways these young female bodies have been exploited. Instead, Spring Breakers turns that sexualizing gaze back onto the audience members who may have been enticed to see the film based on the promise of nubile bodies. The opening scene — a montage of spring breakers partying hard set to dubstep — is full of drunk white kids, many of the girls flashing their breasts in true Girls Gone Wild fashion. On a small scale, this may have been titillating, but Korine returns to the theme of careless youth partying with a regularity and focus that not only de-sensitizes the flash of nudity, but eventually makes us grimace. This is a generation partaking in activities they’ll regret because they are bored and aimless. The nudity and partying have no meaning, no purpose, because life for these co-eds has no meaning, no purpose. Korine notes that the film “is more music-based than cinema-based. Music now is mostly loop and sample-based … ” — not even the music of this generation is original. We rely on copies of copies for entertainment. Nothing is real. And when nothing is real, nothing matters.

Here lies the generational gap when it comes to perception of the film. I went to see Spring Breakers on opening night with my little sister, who happens to be the age of the protagonists. Because she grew up with me for a sister, someone who is constantly looking at media as a reflection of society, my sister could appreciate the self-examination of her generation — after all, a few years ago she was just as lost and aimless as many in the film. A quick look at twitter reviews, however, suggest that many other teens — who were lured in with the promise of a party flick — left the theater frustrated and angry. They keep doing the same things, saying the same lines, these viewers critique, unable or unwilling to look at their own lives, their own twitter accounts and see that cyclical action and speech is indicative of an entire movement of youth. (Oddly enough, if viewers were familiar with Harmony Korine’s previous work, they would be surprised by the strength of the narrative plot in Spring Breakers!)

That narrative plot is purposefully left open to interpretation. Korine himself has said that just about any interpretation of the film is a valid one. I’ve written previously about the economic implications of the world Korine shows us, but Spring Breakers is also rich with discussion of the female body (as evidenced above!), sexuality, and female power.

The key for my enjoyment and promotion of this film is that, unlike many other woman-centric narratives, the women make choices and are not unduly punished for them. [The rest of this review contains specific spoilers for the film. Read with caution.] Faith chooses, despite her (ahem) faith, to explore herself with drugs and sexual behavior. She “finds herself” but when threatened with real life consequences, she chooses to return to Kentucky. The other characters are sad to see her go, but never shame her for making this decision. Cotty parties hard, strips down, and flirts with sexual situations. She is not raped — the fact that I was expecting her to be raped really says something about our culture and media depictions of our culture — and when she is shot during a street showdown, it is a wake-up call. Cotty’s wound is directly related to hanging out with a known criminal, not her sexual choices. Again, when she returns home, she is not shamed.

Brit (Ashley Benson) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) dress the part

Brit and Candy are in the film for the longest time, so it makes sense that their story has the most to say about women. Early in the film, they are shown using drugs and not caring about school. They flirt with each other but don’t appear to have a romantic history. Spring break is, for them, not an escape from reality, but a new reality in which they can truly come to life. Something awakens in them when Brit and Candy rob the convenience store — something tied in this narrative with sexuality, violence, and self-awareness. Different readings of the film can boil this awakening down to any one of these aspects, but again, the key for me is that Brit and Candy are not punished for their choices. At first, they seem to need Alien’s presence and permission to embark on these new levels of claiming power through violence and sexual attraction, but as the film unwinds, Brit and Candy leave Alien behind.

Alien’s own weirdness — he feels, and sometimes acts, like an alien in his own surroundings — lay the groundwork for Brit and Candy to feel safe enough to explore what they want. And what do they want? They want weapons, and the skills to use them well. They want sex, with each other, with someone who loves them. They want to have agency in relationships. They want to flip traditional gender roles around, listening while Alien gets sentimental about Britney Spears, holding the gun Alien simulates fellatio on, committing violent acts without motive or feeling. They want freedom — to display their bodies how they want, to claim power and use it in all aspects of life, to live the life they choose and not one that has been prescribed for them by a culture obsessed with non-reality. True, the extreme new lives of Brit and Candy are also laced with non-reality, but how much of that is because our culture refuses to let this sort of narrative be real? None of these things is granted to women in media, or, for the most part, in life.

Spring Breakers brings something new to the discussion of women in film. Young female characters with agency populate this critique of youth culture, and young female characters with agency walk away from the narrative unscathed. For some, spring break may be a break from reality. I, for one, hope it is the new normal.

Marcia Herring is a writer from Missouri. She is still working on her graduate degree, has a day job in retail, and writes freelance for the Lesbrary. She spends most of her free time watching television and movies. She wrote an analysis of Degrassi, Teens and Rape Apologism, contributed a review of X-Men First Class, V/H/S, and reviewed Atonement, Imagine Me & You and The Yellow Wallpaper for Bitch Flicks.

Poster Analysis: Summer Movie Preview

We all know that summer is the worst season for movies. It’s when the heat melts all of our feeble brains into mush and we’re only capable of grunting approval at explosions, special effects, scantily clad women, and the most simplistic plots, while sitting in icily air-conditioned theatres and shoveling $7 bags of popcorn into our face holes. Here’s a sampling of films opening in wide release that we have to look forward to, now that summer has officially begun.

In these posters I see a “maneater,” a teacher who is bad at her job, a “dirty girl,” some arm candy, black maids, almost up a Disney princess’ dress, a scooter passenger, and an invitation to ,ahem, a hole. The Debt offers the only poster with not one, but two women showing agency. One Day might be interesting, as we see Anne Hathaway’s pleasured expression while kissing a man. The Help could possibly be progressive, since it at least shows the black women in the more active, central position. Maybe.

In these posters I also see a bunch of white dudes who win battles: Harry Potter, Conan, Captain America, and that guy from Transformers. I see male-driven comedies (Horrible Bosses, 30 Minutes or Less, Change Up). I see one “idiot,” although it seems “our” in the title might refer to women. I see machines. And those damn dirty apes are back.

As we’ve pointed out in other Poster Analysis pieces (often in the comments), the way a film is marketed can have very little to do with the actual content of the film. But by choosing to market films in a way that presents women as passive or as objects for male admiration, or that excludes them completely, production companies tend to reveal internal biases and expectations, and who their target audience actually is.

What do you think of this year’s crop of summer movie posters? (I am actually happy to see the Transformers babe fully clothed.) Did I leave out any movies on your radar? Finally, what movies do you plan to see in the theatre this summer?