Let’s face it, ‘Boyhood’ is a gimmick movie. Richard Linklater sporadically filmed it over a twelve-year period so we could see the child actors in it actually grow-up. If you loved Michael Apted’s ‘Up’ series but wanted more fiction and less wait, Boyhood is for you. But if you just love coming-of-age dramas, I’m not sure I can recommend this one.
Ellar Coltrane as Mason at the beginning of Boyhood
Let’s face it, Boyhood is a gimmick movie. Richard Linklater sporadically filmed it over a 12-year period so we could see the child actors in it actually grow up. If you loved Michael Apted’s Up series but wanted more fiction and less wait, Boyhood is for you. But if you just love coming-of-age dramas, I’m not sure I can recommend this one.
The child actors (Ellar Coltrane as central character Mason and the director’s daughter, Lorelai Linklater, as Mason’s sister, Samantha) are extremely natural and sufficiently likable. Patricia Arquette is fantastic as their mother, who faces a roller coaster of personal, professional, and economic ups and downs. And Ethan Hawke plays their intermittently available father as Ethan-Hawke-in-a-Richard-Linklater-movie, that is, opinionated and rambling and just-barely functioning as an adult human being, but I happen to like that character a lot.
Mason and Samantha’s mother (Patricia Arquette) reads them a Harry Potter book
As strong as their performances are, the problem is that Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are recognizable movie stars, in stark contrast with the kids at the center of the film and the unknown Texan character actors in the supporting cast. This evaporates the faux-documentary feeling of Boyhood, and leaves in its place an overlong, meandering, plain-old movie.
What’s left is essentially the non-dinosaur, non-Sean Penn-on-limbo-beach parts of The Tree of Life, with fewer shots of light shining through trees, and nostalgia from the last decade instead of the 1950s. Six-year-old Mason rides his bike in endless loops around his block. Eight-year-old Mason plays Wii boxing. Twelve-year-old Mason finds out about internet porn. Fifteen-year-old Mason smokes weed and gets an earring. Seventeen-year-old Mason has sex with his girlfriend in his sister’s dorm room. Eighteen-year-old Mason wins a photography scholarship and does shrooms in the mountains and we can finally, FINALLY leave the theater. (Boyhood is two hours and 45 minutes long, with exactly zero explosions or giant robot fights. I do not have the patience for such things.)
Mason and his sister Samantha (Lorelai Linklater)
It is possible I lost interest because I never had a boyhood of my own. I kept wanted to see more of Samantha, because I could relate to her girlhood (my favorite scene in the movie was Samantha cringing through The Sex Talk with her dad at a bowling alley) and get my nostalgia kick. I was also more interested in Patricia Arquette’s mother character and her struggles because I could relate to them as an adult and as someone who plans to have children.
Sullen teenage Mason and his father (Ethan Hawke)
I may be placing too much importance on gender here, because there are loads of non-gendered experiences of childhood present in this movie. I played with dirt and found out my parents aren’t perfect and rejected authority figures and aggressively sulked, just like Mason. Maybe if Samantha and the mother hadn’t been there, just out of focus, I would have related more to his journey instead of yearning for more from the sidelined female characters.
And as I got bored with Boyhood, I got distracted by the logistics of its gimmick. The passage of time is largely expressed through changed hairstyles on the kids, and I wondered if that was mandated by the director (would Richard Linklater really make his daughter get a regrettable purple-red dye job? (ETA: he did not.) I morbidly wondered what kind of insurance they took out on the lives of the central actors and how they would have reacted to an untimely death. I tried to remember what year the songs on the soundtrack came out so I could figure out how much longer I had to wait to get out of there (I have never been so excited to hear that Gotye song. I turned to my viewing partner and whispered “only two years left!!”).
Eighteen-year-old Mason at the end of the film
Boyhood is a gimmick movie, but admittedly, the gimmick is pretty cool. If you don’t mind long runtimes and have a strong way to relate to this disjointed series of vignettes (having had a boyhood of your own, having a son around the age of the kids in the movie, growing up in Texas), you may well love Boyhood. I didn’t hate it. I just wanted to see more of the women in, it and have it be over an hour earlier. My own childhood felt shorter.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who still plays with sticks in the dirt.
I’ve recently taken to revisiting some of these forgotten (or culty, depending on who’s looking) classics with a new, more grown-up and feminist eye, and I’ve been examining the lessons that each of these gems showed us. One of my recent new/old film crushes is a 1990 film called Lisa (starring Cheryl Ladd, Staci Keenan, and DW Moffet). It has all the teen angst that a gal could hope for. At first glance you expect this to be a typical thriller, but this film is so much more. It is an open exploration of a young woman coming into her own, exploring her sexuality, rebelling against traditional convention, and if that weren’t interesting enough, Lisa’s story runs parallel to the exploits of a serial rapist/killer. One of the things that makes this film so different is the point at which these two stories intersect, and Lisa proves herself more capable than imaginable and saves herself and her mother from the killer’s clutches. The ending of the film flipped the traditional damsel in distress cliché on its head.
Staci Keenan stars as the teen protagonist in Lisa
This is a guest post by Shay Revolver. Spoilers and Trigger Warning for discussions of rape.
The 90s were a confusing time for pre- and full-on teenage girls. The 80s teen flick era had ended and left us a legacy of lessons on male-female relations that was nowhere near empowering. Mostly girls learned that if a guy really loves you then he’s got to stalk you to show it, and if you love him you’d better take off those glasses and ditch that ponytail. That was the extent of teen girl roles in movies; we were objects and trophies. When the 90s rolled around, girl power (pre-Spice Girls) was bubbling under the skin of society, and we were about to boil over. There are a few movies that I can think of that hinted at the dawning of the age of girlquarius, where teenage girls were thinking for themselves, acting how they wanted, living on screen on their own terms.
I’ve recently taken to revisiting some of these forgotten (or culty, depending on who’s looking) classics with a new, more grown-up and feminist eye, and I’ve been examining the lessons that each of these gems showed us. One of my recent new/old film crushes is a 1990 film called Lisa (starring Cheryl Ladd, Staci Keenan, and DW Moffet). It has all the teen angst that a gal could hope for. At first glance you expect this to be a typical thriller, but this film is so much more. It is an open exploration of a young woman coming into her own, exploring her sexuality, rebelling against traditional convention, and if that weren’t interesting enough, Lisa’s story runs parallel to the exploits of a serial rapist/killer. One of the things that makes this film so different is the point at which these two stories intersect, and Lisa proves herself more capable than imaginable and saves herself and her mother from the killer’s clutches. The ending of the film flipped the traditional damsel in distress cliché on its head.
Staci Keenan and DW Moffett in Lisa
In case you missed this one, Lisa is the story of a super curious 14-year-old girl named Lisa Holland. Lisa has started growing into her sexuality and, like many teenage heterosexual girls, she is more than a little boy crazy. Her sexual awakening is made more complicated by the fact that her mother, Katherine, a single mom who had Lisa at 15 and has raised her on her own, is having no part of Lisa dating–until she’s 16. Katherine understandably doesn’t want her daughter to make the same mistakes, and she is worried that dating will lead to sex, which might lead to her daughter ending up being a single mom. Most films would have taken this situation and made sure that the mother has a horrible life, thoroughly punishing her for her choice to have premarital sex. Instead, the writer and director take a rare approach to female yearnings and desires. The mother comes off sympathetic; she gives guidance more than criticism. There is also no slut shaming. Her mother actually acknowledges that her daughter has these very natural urges. At first glance, the conversations between them might come off as an all-out attempt at suppressing Lisa’s sexuality, but the way it is handled is beautiful. Her mother is honest with her reasoning and is very clear that she feels her daughter is too young to have sex. The openness attached to their conversations is refreshing, and it is kind of nice to see a young woman trying to come to terms with her feelings and sexuality. Katherine, in her role as single mother and successful working woman, who didn’t end up a statistic despite being a young single mother, is even involved in a relationship. She straddles a line, however, and keeps it from her daughter in an effort to protect her.
Staci Keenan in Lisa
Lisa’s best friend is another young woman named Wendy Marks. There is a beautiful contrast between the two of them. Wendy’s parents aren’t as strict as Lisa’s mother. Wendy is allowed to date, and Lisa is fascinated. Having all of these new feelings and no outlet or experience, Lisa creates a fantasy world in which she can express herself and explore these new feelings. She and her friend Wendy keep a scrapbook of men that they see and would like to date, much like the heart covered Mr * Mrs. (or Mrs. & Mrs.) notebook that many of us had when we were growing up. Lisa and her friend Wendy see men they like and follow them to gain more information about them. Sometimes they even phone the men and record their intel in the scrapbook. This notebook helps Lisa explore new feelings in a more private way and allows her to explore the qualities that she wants her future beau to have. She gains her outlet and comes to an understanding of her sexuality and, in some ways, her relationship desires. I also found it lovely that while the girls’ budding sexuality is growing at different rates there is no pressure to compete or follow or judge.
All of these explorations combined with a protagonist portrayed by a young woman trying to figure out relationships and sexuality would have been more than enough to satiate my wish list for a good film, but this thriller threw in a serial rapist and murderer dubbed The Candlelight Killer, who stalks women and then calls and kills them after discovering where they live. This added a whole new level to the film. First of all, the film does something super rare; the rapist isn’t some worn, wrinkled , unattractive guy who can’t get a date. Richard, played by DW Moffett, is a hottie. It highlights a fact that is often overlooked in these types of characters when they are portrayed on TV or film: rape isn’t about a guy who can’t get a date, or about a woman being an undercover seductress who was asking for it. Rape is about power and hatred of women. This fact is reinforced by the psychological torture that Richard inflicts upon these women before he rapes and ultimately brutally murders them. He leaves messages on their answering machine telling them that he is in their house and announces his plans to kill them. He strips these women of the safety that their homes are supposed to provide. It is a clear, honest portrayal–and a parallel to rape itself. Having such a violation of sexuality portrayed in a storyline that runs parallel to the story of Lisa’s budding sexuality is an odd but brilliant choice. It doesn’t just use the message that all men are monsters, or blame the victims for their beauty taunting him. They portray this heinous crime as what it is: an attempt to remove a woman’s power.
You can pretty much see where the story is headed. Richard is going to end up in Lisa’s scrapbook, and she will be punished for her desires. Of course you would think that because that’s the message we’ve been shown. Good girls have no desires; if you have them you will be punished. I would have thought it too, but this film has already bucked every trend. You’ve got an attractive rapist, a former teen mom who is successful and raising a brilliant daughter, and a young woman having her budding sexuality acknowledged. When the stories intersect, they continue this realistic trend. Lisa accidentally bumps into Richard when he’s coming from a kill. He aids her and flirts with her a little bit, and she awkwardly flirts back, making him scrapbook worthy. She goes about her usual routine, follows him and gathers his license plate number and uses that to track him down and get his phone number from the DMV. After another failed attempt at bypassing her mother’s bothersome no-dating rule, she has to turn down a chance for a double date with Wendy and a boy her own age. Lisa locks herself in her room and decides to call Richard. She flirts with him some more, pretending she’s an older woman, and she piques his interest.
Tanya Fenmore and Staci Keenan (as Wendy and Lisa) enjoy some girl talk
Lisa keeps up her game, and with Wendy’s help, she continues to stalk him, which isn’t that smart of an idea, but it is age appropriate and realistic. She even continues her phone conversations after nearly getting caught. The plot progresses as Lisa reveals more and more about herself with every conversation, and soon Lisa realizes her game is going to have to end because Richard begins to push for a face-to-face meeting. The film doesn’t shy away from the more manipulative ways of teenage girls, but it gives a rationale and adds method and logic to the madness. There is no right or wrong, but a whole lot of gray. There is no punishment for Lisa’s actions per se; her actions do cause her mother to become Richard’s next and final victim. But, the film doesn’t end as bad as it could have. Katherine doesn’t get killed. Lisa isn’t punished for having desires or growing up and trying to figure out who she is going to be as a woman. After sneaking away to go on a trip, Lisa returns just in time to see the stage set for her mother’s murder at the hands of The Candlelight Killer, and she is forced to defend her life and the life of her unconscious mother. She doesn’t play damsel in distress or fall down the stairs; she chooses to fight, and even though she doesn’t initially come out on top, her mother wakes in time to come to her aid. The fight and movie ends with Richard going out of the window thanks to a handy baseball bat and the women holding each other in solidarity and love.
There are so many things about Lisa that make it interesting. The honest portrayal of a young woman’s burgeoning womanhood. The open expression of Lisa’s sexuality and desires. The over protectiveness of a single mother that truly rides a fine line between cautionary and plot building without delving into the gray area of slut shaming, a teen pregnancy, or portraying the mother as a failure whose life went wrong because she had sex at a young age. All in all this film , even at its campiest, showed strong women, and in the end, Lisa and her mother saved themselves from the clutches of the killer. They relied on each other to overcome the situation; there were no cops or men rushing to their rescue. And, there is something super awesome about watching two women surviving after killing a serial killer/rapist. Thank you Lisa for giving us a movie that didn’t shame young women for having urges and desires but instead giving us a movie that showed life as it often is: filled with areas of gray. Lisa showed independence and strength in the face of danger. And there is something truly beautiful about a young woman coming into her own, making and learning from her mistakes.
Shay Revolver is a vegan, feminist, cinephile, insomniac , recovering NYU student and former roller derby player currently working as a NY-based microcinema filmmaker, web series creator and writer. She’s obsessed with most books , especially the Pop Culture and Philosophy series and loves movies and TV shows from low brow to high class. As long as the image is moving she’s all in and believes that everything is worth a watch. She still believes that movies make the best bedtime stories because books are a daytime activity to rev up your engine and once you flip that first page, you have to keep going until you finish it and that is beautiful in its own right. She enjoys talking about the feminist perspective in comic book and gaming culture and the lack of gender equality in main stream cinema and television productions.. Twitter @socialslumber13
Some writers, like professor Stacy Wolf, have enjoyed yet criticized the film adaptation of Les Miserables for not being feminist enough and turning the female characters into “bit players.” While others have lauded its feminism. Sure it irks me yet another film focuses on the journey, salvation and redemption of a man. We clearly have enough of those. But that ignores the importance of women in Les Mis. It ignores how, as Bitch Flicks writer Leigh Kolb astutely points out, a film featuring poverty and class struggles is feminist.
I have loved Les Miserables for years. After reading it in junior high, the book absorbed me — the horrific tragedy, pain and oppression. The vivid characters and their stories stirred and moved me. I immediately went out and bought the soundtrack, falling under its spell. 5 years later I saw it on Broadway, it mesmerized me. So when I heard a film adaptation of the musical? With Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman? With live singing?? Hearing Samantha Barks as the awesome Eponine belt out “On My Own?” Oh yeah. Saying I was psyched was definitely an understatement.
Sure the numbers 24601 will always be synonymous with Jean Valjean and the cruel incarceration he faced for stealing a loaf of bread. And yes, I love the standoff between Valjean and Inspector Javert or the passion of Enjolras at the barricades. But the person who has haunted me the most throughout the years? It wasn’t any of the men. It was Fantine.
Anne Hathaway embodies the tragic role, giving a phenomenal, powerful and transcendentperformance. She deserves all the hype and accolades she’s received. I’ve always been a fan of Hathaway in anything from Rachel Getting Married to The Devil Wears Prada. But she takes acting to a whole other level in this devastating performance. In “I Dreamed a Dream,” the show-stopping tragic song — which btw, made me weep in ragged sobs in the movie theatre…oh fuck, who am I kidding, even when watching the trailer too — Hathaway pours every emotion, every ounce of herself into the role. She trembles, rages, weeps. Her voice wavering from angelically soft to ragged and hoarse. Her performance alone is reason to watch the entire film. No joke. She’s that outstanding.
Fantine is the archetypal sacrificial mother, giving up everything for her daughter Cosette. But Fantine transcends merely rearticulating tropes and archetypes. Fantine is downtrodden. Life has beaten her down. The tigers at night have torn her hopes apart and crushed her dreams. Hathaway imbues Fantine with a fiery passion balanced with forlorn desperation. She’s angry at her circumstances, angry at her pain, desperate to save her daughter.
Fantine works in a factory and is fired after the lecherous foreman discovers through her gossipy coworkers (gee, thanks for the female camaraderie, ladies) that she has a daughter out of wedlock whom she sends money. When she’s thrown out on the streets, Fantine has nowhere to turn. She eventually sells her locket and her prized luscious locks. But then she sells the thing that always makes me shudder. Her teeth. And then, when she has nothing left to sell, she sells her body becoming a prostitute. She sells herself.
“There was no way I could relate to what my character was going through. I live a very successful, happy life. I don’t have any children that I’ve had to give up…or keep. So I tried to get inside the reality of her story as it exists in our world. And to do that, I read a lot of articles and watched a lot of documentaries and news clips about sexual slavery. And for me, and this particular story, I came to the realization that I had been thinking about Fantine as someone who lived in the past, but she doesn’t. She’s living in New York City right now, probably less than a block away. This injustice exists in our world. So every day that I was her, I just thought ‘This isn’t an invention. This isn’t me acting. This is me honoring that this pain lives in this world.’ I hope that in all our lifetimes, we see it end.”
“Her framing of Fantine as a sexual slave, NOT a prostitute, is key, as it refuses to glorify or joke about what is so often swept under the rug regarding sex work: that the majority of women do not “choose” it but are forced into it.”
Traditionally, people view the sex industry in two ways. There exists a range of ways to be in it, either by choice, circumstance or coercion, but regardless it’s work and we must make it safe for sex workers and regulate disease. Or the sex industry is a form of violence against women and girls, exploitative and a form of gender-based violence.
Choice is the keystone in the argument. Do people choose sex work? Or are they forced into it via trafficking? Or do they choose it only because they have no other options or means to earn a living, negating its categorization as a “choice?”
In the book Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn “confront theliberal myth that prostitution is a voluntary vocation for women.” As a reproductive justice advocate, I believe a woman’s body should be her legal and personal domain. While some sex workers may choose their profession willingly, too many women – 3 million women and girls – are forced into sex trafficking. Traffickers coerce, beat and rape women into submission. Trafficking is human slavery, a human rights travesty. Numerous women, children and men are savagely sold. Whether people choose sex work willingly or are trafficked, they shouldn’t face criminalization. People who’ve survived trafficking lose jobs or can’t get jobs due to convictions.
Les Mis fuses these two views. It shows that sexual slavery is exploitative and a human rights violation — Fantine enters prostitution for she has no other choice, she has no other way to earn money. But it simultaneously reinforces that we shouldn’t punish sex workers for their circumstances. Les Mis doesn’t devalue, demonize or erase the humanity of those in sex work.
Some assert Les Mis suffers from outdates gender roles and gender stereotypes. Sure it’s set in 1810s-1830s Paris and Victor Hugo wrote it in 1862. But that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t critique Les Mis through a current lens, especially considering the film is current. But I don’t think Les Mis is chained to the past.
Sexual slavery and oppression aren’t merely in history books. Women today face poverty, trafficking, domestic abuse, rape, assault. Even if we don’t personally confront these struggles, we all must deal with binding constrictions of sexism and rape culture, which Les Mis illustrates.
“Well, it was obviously an unfortunate incident. Um, I think— It kinda made me sad on two accounts. One was that I was very sad that we live in an age when someone takes a picture of another person in a vulnerable moment and, rather than delete it, and do the decent thing, sells it. And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants, which brings us back to Les Mis, because that’s what my character is — she is someone who is forced to sell sex to benefit her child, because she has nothing and there’s no social safety net. And I— Yeah, so, um, so let’s get back to Les Mis.”
Les Mis also sheds light on rape culture. After Fantine fights back against a man harassing her, putting snow down her dress, she’s the one punished, not the assailant. Inspector Javert wants to arrest Fantine, reinforcing a victim-blaming rape culture which criminalizes and demonizes women’s behavior and punishes victims/survivors, rather than the perpetrators of abuse and assault. With the global rape epidemic now taking center stage — Steubenville, Jyoti Singh Pandey in India, Notre Dame’s rape cover-up — we must question how we as a society perpetuate and enable violence against women.
Feminism and social justice push us to not only see the world from our own perspective and privilege. But to see it from others’ perspectives and circumstances as well. Now I recognize it’s problematic that Fantine can only achieve salvation and peace in death. Or that she becomes a saintly prostitute, a symbolic Mary Magdalene. But through Fantine’s eyes, we see the horrors of poverty, trafficking, sexismand rape culture. She symbolizes the oppression women combat — throughout history and today.
Fighting oppression, looking at the intersectionality of gender and class, critiquing – these are the core of Les Mis’ message. Isn’t that what feminism is all about?
Nine Months, contrary to all expectations, is not about pregnancy. It’s about a man coping with a pregnancy. Yes. Here’s a film whose subject absolutely and biologically requires a woman – and it’s still about a man.
However, Nine Months does achieve sex equality of the most dubious sort – it’s insulting to men and women.
In the world of Nine Months, women have already accepted that their value lies primarily in their fecundity and that raising children is the only thing that matters. And now, it’s time for men to learn the same lesson.
The Mothers of Anarchy, on the surface, have no control. In reality, they have all of the control.
The matriarch “old lady” (the endearing term club members give to their partners) of the California motorcycle club is Gemma (Katey Sagal). She is the Gertrude-inspired character who has married one of the original members of the club, after her husband was killed. Her first husband helped found the Sons of Anarchy motorcycle club after Gemma became pregnant with their son and wanted to settle in Charming, where her parents were from. She may not ride, but her instincts and desires steered the club from its inception. The town’s police chief refers to Gemma as “leaving Charming when she was sixteen and showing up 10 years later with a baby and a biker gang.”
On the surface, it’s so easy to criticize Margaret. But there is something so inherently evil yet desperately loving about Laurie’s pitch-perfect performance of the religion-stricken single mother. You know she wants what she thinks is best for her child, like all great mothers do. But she’s too terrified—or terrifying?—to really consider what she’s saying. She wanted Carrie to be God-fearing, like herself. She wanted her to not suffer the tainted feeling of self-disgust with which she was burdened every day. In essence, she wanted her daughter’s life to be better than her own, by not making the same mistakes she did.
But when Mrs. White saw her daughter developing breasts and getting her period, and even receiving interest to attend the prom, her maternal preference overwhelmed her. She had to intervene before her Carrie ended up shameful, deflowered and ungodly like she had become. It was imperative.
For me, no television mother springs to mind faster than Lorelai Gilmore of the long running show The Gilmore Girls. In fact, what is arguably so special about the show is that it offers a popular mainstream venue to focus on mothering, and especially the challenges of mother/daughter relationships. Of course mothers are a constant feature in the media (how else would mothers know how to behave!?) but teenagers are rarely depicted as having a positive relationship with their mother. Rory and Lorelai have a tight bond that remains the central focus of the show despite relationship drama for both mother and daughter. They also bring in the dual roles of mother and daughter when Lorelai interacts with her own mother, Emily.
Rosemary’s Baby, the Roman Polanski 1968 adaptation of the novel with the same name, uses minimal effects. While it is a horror story about the mother of Satan’s child, we only briefly glimpse the arm and eyes of the feature’s supposed monster. And, while the plot against Rosemary is conceived by a coven of witches, we don’t see bubbling potions. That is because Rosemary’s Baby is not a horror story about Satan or witchcraft.
Rosemary’s Baby is a horror story about being a woman.
Rosemary, played by the waifish Mia Farrow, is a young woman excited for her role as wife and soon-to-be mother. But, even in her acceptance and celebration of traditional gender roles she is exploited, robbed of autonomy, discounted as hysterical and ultimately must give up all control of herself and her body.
Sound familiar? That’s because her terrors are real ones with just a dash of supernatural motivations.
I saw the 1976 version of Carrie for the first time nearly five years ago, and it wasn’t until recently that I realized what doesn’t work for me about Laurie’s performance – it’s entirely one-dimensional. It’s cartoonish, even. It’s hard to be frightened by Laurie’s Margaret when she seems so unlike any mother who could realistically exist. But that isn’t how the character has to be. I thought about this in March, when I saw the MCC Theater’s Off-Broadway revival of the Carrie musical. Now, I did not see the original version of the musical, which opened on Broadway in 1988 and closed after only five performances, making it one of the biggest Broadway flops of all time. I cannot speak to that version, but I can speak to the heavily revised revival, in which Marin Mazzie played an unnervingly sympathetic version of Margaret. Though the story is the same, and Margaret is still deeply disturbed and abusive, there is a greater emphasis on Margaret’s inner struggle and the reality that she truly wants to help her daughter. In the second act, Margaret sings, “When There’s No One,” a moving ballad that reveals her intention to murder her daughter and the despair she feels about that decision. Rather than solely seeing Margaret’s evil and rage, in this version we see her rationalization. We see a fully developed character, a person who truly believes she is making the right decision, which makes the decision even more horrifying. There is nothing cartoonish about Mazzie’s Margaret, which made her far more terrifying than Laurie’s Margaret ever could be.
What is so extraordinary about “Sherrybaby” is the main character is so completely rounded and real that she bursts free from the predictable constraints imposed by stereotypes. The film follows Sherry Swanson, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, as she tries to reconnect with her daughter after being released from prison. Yet although this provides the main motivation for virtually everything she does in the film, writer and director Laurie Collyer has brought to the screen a female character who is not just a passionate mother, not just a recovering addict, not just a victim of abuse, not just a sexually confident woman, not just a sweet primary school teacher, but ALL of these things.
Game of Thrones is the buzzword for this season’s TV community: the backbiting, the plotting, the violence, the sex (which everyone is discussing). What horrific plot twist will the Lannisters think of next, we wonder out loud?
So I won’t really talk about those things, because to my mind, those aspects of the show have been reviewed by dozens of worthy reviewers: The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Mary Sue and Bitch Flicks, just to name a few. (If you’re not really sure of the plot or premise of the movie, you should definitely Wikipedia it, as I’m not really going to talk about that here, considering that so many other reviewers and websites have already provided a synopsis for it.)
One of the aspects that struck me in the show though, is the portrayal of motherhood. Far from being absent or swept to the side, the film’s mothers are a driving force in the plot development and are some of the most multi-dimensional of the series (credit has to be given to the actresses who play them).
There are thee instances of motherhood being portrayed here: Cercei and Lady Arryn’s obsessive, spoiling, “my child is a god” kind of motherhood, Lady Stark’s “good mom” style, and lastly, the Dothraki queen Daenerys Targaryen’s pregnancy where she is worshipped by her people.
The caretaker role falls exclusively to Hillary. She’s a stay-at-home mom trying to write a book while also attempting to care for two young daughters. While her struggle to play The Good Mom definitely lends sympathy to her character—I mean, honestly, what the hell is a good mom?—I couldn’t help but despise her selfishness and blatant disregard for Phoebe’s needs. Even though both parents decide to (finally) get Phoebe into therapy, it’s Hillary who refuses to accept the doctor’s diagnosis, even going so far as to remove Phoebe from therapy, deliberately hiding the diagnosis from her husband.
The problem here, and where the movie most succeeds, is that Hillary feels alone as a parent. She believes that her children’s struggles will ultimately reflect poorly on her as The Good Mom, and she even says at one point that she doesn’t want her daughter to be “less than.” Obviously, we live in a society that mandates the over-the-top importance of living up to an unattainable standard of proper mothering (see: any celebrity mother and the scrutiny she faces, with barely a mention of celebrity fathers), and Hillary definitely effectively represents that unattainable standard.
There are two scenes in The Great Lie that made an indelible impression on my teenage psyche. One involves crossdressing, the other involves food, and both express the anxiety attached to giving birth and the difficulties modern women have integrating this biological imperative into an otherwise blithely artificial lifestyle. But mostly, these two scenes depict powerful moments of emotional intimacy between women in which conventional gender roles go out the window.
Laura and Rob Petrie had one child together, a son named Richie. Because Richie is in elementary school for the whole of the show, Laura’s role as a mother focuses on the challenges of raising a small child. She worries that he might be sick when he refuses a cupcake, and helps Rob explain why Richie’s middle name is Rosebud. (It’s an acronym for the names that their parents and grandparents suggested for the baby. Unsurprisingly, that was Rob’s idea.) In the episode “Girls Will Be Boys,” Richie comes home from school three days in a row with bruises on his face, and admits that a girl has been beating him up. After Rob’s visit to the suspected lady bully’s father turns up empty, Laura goes to the child’s house to get to the bottom of the strange beatings. After the girl’s mother insults and dismisses her, Laura refuses to leave until she’s said her piece. “You may not be the rudest person I’ve ever met,” she declares with her trademark quiver, “but you are certainly in the top two.” Door slam, and our girl storms off with the moral high ground and not a hair out of place in her perfect coif.
Just because Urban Fantasy is largely produced by women and consumed by women does not mean that it is free of sexism and misogyny. When it comes to motherhood, a role that most women will one day assume, it is hardly surprising that within the genre most examples are highly problematic — when they appear at all.
The lack of representation of motherhood is so extreme that the viewer is forced to ask is, “where are the mothers?”. It seems like such an odd question, because you’d expect most characters, like most people, to have a mother lurking around somewhere; especially since most of the heroines in these stories are young women or even teenagers. Search as we might, the mothers are conspicuous by their absence.
Lorelai Gilmore is certainly depicted as a non-conventional mother. She has been described as a “disgraced Connecticut Brahmin teen heiress who flees prep school to keep and raise her now teen-aged daughter while estranged from her own parents” (Jennifer Crusie, Coffee at Luke’s, p. 174). But she is not the only mother in the series. Gilmore Girls spends a surprisingly large amount of time focusing on mother-characters, some of which are shown more often and more in-depth than others.
The thing is, I wouldn’t mind if characters like Rachel and Catherine were just like all the other characters – ridiculously gorgeous and ace at their jobs, yet somehow flawed and kooky at the same time – while also being mommies, albeit ones whose lives aren’t that much impinged on by having a child. I wouldn’t mind that. It’s just that Rachel and Catherine seem to have MOMMY tattooed in big letters across their botoxed foreheads. You can almost hear the sound of scriptwriters patting themselves on the back. “Hey guys, relax! We’ve done the “mommy issues” bit! Now let’s send everyone off to Central Perk.” This creates an environment in which it no longer seems legitimate to assert that motherhood still doesn’t really exist as a theme in our TV programmes. But by and large it doesn’t. You wouldn’t have to do much. You don’t literally have to show shitty diapers or a woman crying her eyes out at 3am with engorged breasts and a howling newborn. It’s just the little things. Perhaps you have women who aren’t able to go to the bar with colleagues at the drop of a hat. Women who don’t always have childcare issues magically resolved by a grumpy ex who’s half new man, half self-pitying passive aggressive bully. Women who work part-time. Women who are, most of the time, in the company of children, not for one “doing the issues” childcare episode, but all the time. You can still have humor and drama in that. Let’s face it, children can be total lunatics; there’s loads of humor and drama in that.
Steel Magnolias shows the undying love of mothers and daughters through disagreements, tragedy and happiness. Shelby exemplifies the young woman desiring to become a mother despite unruly and unpredictable circumstances. Her choice to bear children despite her physical limitations shows that all she wanted was motherhood, despite the cost. M’Lynn exemplifies the experienced mother who only wants to protect her daughter from harm. Both Shelby and M’Lynn make the ultimate sacrifice for motherhood, that being a kidney and a life.
This quote ultimately summarizes my experience with MOTHER – a film about a mother willing to do whatever it takes to save her child. In many American films, mothers are often portrayed as deranged (such as the biopic Mommy Dearest) or some kind of superhero (based entirely on tropes) mom who does everything for everyone else but nothing for herself (such as I Don’t Know How She Does It, starring Sarah Jessica Parker).
As kickass as she is, Sarah possesses no other identity beyond motherhood. She exists solely to protect her John from assassination or humanity will be wiped out. Every decision, every choice she makes, is to protect her son. In Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cameron tells Sarah that “Without John, your life has no purpose.” Sarah tells her ex-fiancé that she’s not trying to change her fate but change John’s. Even before she becomes a mother in Terminator, her identity is tied to her uterus and her capacity for motherhood.
Now, I realize she’s saving the world, trying to keep her son alive and stop a cyborg onslaught. But the underlying theme — motherhood must consume women — is troublesome. Mothers don’t have to squelch their desires and sacrifice their identity and entire lives in order to be a “good” mother.
I recently saw the film Future Weather at the Tribeca Film Festival and was blown away by the honest portrayal of motherhood onscreen. The film captures the ups and downs characteristic of mother-daughter relationships and does so without simplifying the women or relegating them to either/or binaries; there is no exclusively Good Mom or Bad Mom in this film. Not only is it nearly unheard of in films today to watch women interact with one another in ways that don’t involve men, but in typical feature films showcasing mother-daughter relationships, audiences are often subjected to a litany of unrealistic absolutes: Good Moms always love and nurture their daughters, sacrificing their entire adult existences and maintaining some virgin-esque purity while doing so; yet Bad Moms ruin their daughters’ lives through manipulation, neglect, or—conversely—smothering and over-protection, to the point that the audience labels these mothers nothing more than villains—usually mentally unstable villains—with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
But Future Weather avoids these clichés. The women in this film lead hard, complex lives. We know these women. We live with these women. Their interactions remind of us our own multifaceted mother-daughter relationships. And, fortunately—while they’re sometimes messy and often difficult to watch—the women in Future Weather aren’t treated as tropes to merely move a plot forward (no dead ladies/moms for dudes to avenge the deaths of!), and the filmmakers spare the audience from two hours of that cringe-worthy, all-too-familiar “lone woman among a group of complex, likeably awful men” thing.
So it’s no surprise to see broken and dysfunctional single moms reflected on-screen. And don’t get me wrong. I love watching flawed female characters. But what about single mom Sarah Connor, “the mother of destiny?” Often labeled a feminist hero, topping lists for greatest female characters, is she the “ultimate protective single mother?”
Along with Ellen Ripley, Sarah helped pave the way for strong female characters. In Terminator, Sarah (Linda Hamilton) is a friendly college student and food server, lacking confidence, who “can’t even balance [her] checkbook.” Targeted by cyborg assassins sent from the future to kill her son, the future resistance leader fighting against domineering machines, she is thrust into a hellish nightmare fighting for her life. The Sarah (Linda Hamilton) of Terminator 2: Judgment Daytransforms into a badass goddess. With her sculpted muscles doing pull-ups and firing guns, she’s a ferocious warrior filled with rage (something women are rarely allowed to exhibit) yet haunted and struggling with mental stability. In the cancelled-way-too-early fantastic TV series Sarah Connor Chronicles, we witness Sarah (Lena Headey) as a brave single mother, passionate, smart, angry and flawed, doing everything she can to not only survive but thrive.
Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) in Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles
As kickass as she is, Sarah possesses no other identity beyond motherhood. She exists solely to protect her John from assassination or humanity will be wiped out. Every decision, every choice she makes, is to protect her son. In Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cameron tells Sarah that “Without John, your life has no purpose.” Sarah tells her ex-fiancé that she’s not trying to change her fate but change John’s. Even before she becomes a mother in Terminator, her identity is tied to her uterus and her capacity for motherhood.
Now, I realize she’s saving the world, trying to keep her son alive and stop a cyborg onslaught. But the underlying theme — motherhood must consume women — is troublesome. Mothers don’t have to squelch their desires and sacrifice their identity and entire lives in order to be a “good” mother.
Succumbing to the Mystical Pregnancy Trope (which usually reduces women to their reproductive organs) with the father of her baby coming from the future, Sarah’s pregnancy and birth of her son eerily parallels the Virgin Mary and the birth of Christ. A woman who gives birth to a messianic son. Kyle Reese (Sarah’s time-traveling love and baby daddy) tells Sarah she’s revered in the future as a warrior and strategist, for raising and teaching her son John to be a leader and the world’s salvation. So not only is she John Connor’s mother. Sarah transcends her role becoming the mother of humanity.
While not sexualized, Sarah is still defined by her relationship to the men in her life. In the films, there are no women for her to interact with, aside from her roommate Ginger and a female guard at the institution. One of my favorite components of Sarah Connor Chronicles is that we’re introduced to several strong, complex women. Sarah is forced to work with Terminator-reprogrammed-protector Cameron (Summer Glau) whom she distrusts. Of course Cameron isn’t even human. But she takes the form of a teen girl so people she encounters treat her accordingly. While I love the series, it can’t go unnoticed that rather than showcase female camaraderie, the series pits its two female leads against one another — a common media theme — essentially competing for John’s trust.
Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and John Connor (Eddie Furlong) in Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Single mothers are often portrayed as reckless, promiscuous or damaged. Or the trifecta jackpot…all 3! As competent and fierce as Sarah is, she’s still portrayed as mentally unstable in Terminator 2. Suffering from PTSD, she’s terrorized by nightmares and flashbacks. Sarah’s trauma is never truly discussed, treated as if it’s something she needs to snap out of or shake off. She’s often calmed down and reined in by John. Now, as a child raised by an emotionally unstable single mother, I understand this dynamic. And of course if someone told me I was going to give birth to humanity’s savior, that machines were coming to kill me and then machines did…yeah, I might lose my shit too.
Throughout T2, Sarah’s humanity erodes as she becomes more and more cold and calculated like a machine. Her emotional journey and breakthrough — balancing her fierce survival instincts with her humanity — doesn’t transpire until her son stops her from killing an innocent man and she crumbles, breaking down in tears. Was Sarah’s state of mind depicted to convey her character’s complexity? Or was it to show John’s strength and resolve at such an early age? Either way, it’s her motherhood that essentially conjures her transformation.
A theme throughout the Terminator films and series is “child-rearing divides our attention, making us less fit for heroism.” At the start of Terminator 2, Sarah’s actions cause her to lose custody of John as he’s raised in foster homes. In Sarah Connor Chronicles, she struggles to balance her duties as a nurturing single mom to John and her role as a soldier trying to alter the course of history. In the series, she’s the one reminding John and Cameron about what they’re fighting for: the value and beauty of humanity.
Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) and John Connor (Thomas Dekker) in Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles
Of the few truly empowered female characters in action films, most (Sarah Connor, Ripley, The Bride/Beatrix Kiddo) are lioness mothers. Linking violence “with the archetype of protectress,” these women risk everything to save their children. But women who are assertive, intelligent, complicated, self-reliant survivors (like Sarah) exhibit empowerment, whether they strap on a gun or not.
Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator
Patriarchy presents itself as a constant threat. Like Alien’s Ripley, Sarah constantly tries to assert her agency and is stifled. Both women try to convince the men around them that threats — murderous robots and acid-bleeding aliens — are real. Yet no one heeds their warnings. In T2, when talking to Miles Dyson, the scientist responsible for the creation of Skynet, Sarah talks about the threat of patriarchy and the salvation of motherhood:
“Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you’re so creative. You don’t know what it’s like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death…and destruction…”
Sarah designates a gender binary implying that women create and men destroy, reifying the stereotypical gender roles of women as caretakers and men as conquerors. Yet she herself straddles that line — a nurturing, protective mother utilizing violence as a freedom-fighting soldier to save her son and the planet.
Of course, everything John Connor learns can be attributed to his mother’s resilience and ingenuity. And that’s awesome. But while I love Sarah Connor every bit now as I did when I was 10 years old, I can’t shake my unease that just like the majority of films in Hollywood echoing society’s views, a woman is supposed to sacrifice everything for a man. Even her son.
Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2
On the surface, it seems like the Terminator franchise revolves around a dude often searching for a father figure rather than appreciating his mother. And problematic depictions of motherhood do emerge. But who’s really the hero? Is it the smart hacker son destined to be a leader? Is it the cyborg that learns humanity? Or is it the brave and fierce single mother who sacrifices everything to protect humanity and doesn’t wait for destiny to unfold but takes matters into her own hands?
Ultimately, the Terminatorstory is an allegory of single mothers in today’s world. With her narrations throughout the films and series, we hear her perspective and see the world through her eyes. Whether juggling jobs to pay the rent, balancing the demands of work and raising a child, or battling cyborgs — Sarah crystallizes the sacrifices and struggles single moms endure in a patriarchal society to ensure a better life for their children.
Single mothers aren’t vilified in the Terminator saga, they’re admired and celebrated. If that’s not feminist, I don’t know what is.
For me, no television mother springs to mind faster than Lorelai Gilmore of the long running show The Gilmore Girls. In fact, what is arguably so special about the show is that it offers a popular mainstream venue to focus on mothering, and especially the challenges of mother/daughter relationships. Of course mothers are a constant feature in the media (how else would mothers know how to behave!?) but teenagers are rarely depicted as having a positive relationship with their mother. Rory and Lorelai have a tight bond that remains the central focus of the show despite relationship drama for both mother and daughter. They also bring in the dual roles of mother and daughter when Lorelai interacts with her own mother, Emily.
Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel)
Lauren Graham plays Lorelai, an over-caffeinated, high energy manager of a successful inn. As her daughter Rory, Alexis Bledel is a teenager striving more for a Harvard acceptance letter than a date, who has inside jokes with her mother, and clearly thrives in this single mother household. Lorelai’s status as a single mother is important because we are reminded time and time again that Lorelai has created a life that she (and her daughter, and the rest of the townsfolk) finds satisfying and valuable. This is a very different portrayal of the consequences of teenage motherhood.
Although coming from money and privilege, Lorelai left behind the trust fund life when she had Rory at 16. She rejected her parent’s assistance, refused to marry Rory’s dad, and struck out on her own. This further soured Lorelai’s already poor relationship with her own mother, Emily Gilmore, but has not led to Lorelai being a “Bad Mother.” There are many factors that allow for this, including racial, geographic, cultural, class, etc. For example, as a young white woman with the cultural capital of high class status, Lorelai is able to dodge stereotypes and the accompanying discrimination that a young woman of colour and/or low socioeconomic standing might face. This is an unspoken advantage that may allow viewers to accept Lorelai as a successful single mother. However, I still believe that the representation of Lorelai as a mother who has done a great job raising a child without the aid of huge financial resources or a masculine figure is a major plus for the show. And of course her position as a single mother remains difficult. In fact, the impetus of the show is that the lack of financial resources for Rory’s schooling brings all three generations of Gilmores back together, because Lorelai asks her parents to help pay for Rory’s elite education and in exchange her parents re-enter her life.
Movie night with the Gilmore Girls
Rory and Lorelai have a very complex relationship. Rory is occasionally mothering Lorelai, but it is never a permanent role. Superior experience is always on Lorelai’s side and she is able to act as mentor to Rory as she grows up. Lorelai doesn’t always advise her in the most conventional ways, but I would argue that she rarely verges into juvenile territory while parenting. Her temperament is youthful, while Rory’s is much more mature for her age, but they remain a mother/daughter team, and a best friendship. Again, this sort of bond is rare. I think that it’s valuable for a show on a network aimed at young people (WB and then CW) to contain positive relationships between parent and child.
In the first season, they deal with questions of how Lorelai can date as a mother, and how she can share the space that she has carved out for herself and Rory with a romantic partner. This is an important question, and one that is realistically complicated (of course, it’s also made unreasonably complicated by the necessary hijinks of television). Lorelai and Rory are given scenes where they discuss their needs, desires and challenges. Furthermore, Lorelai is accepted as a sexual being who can also be a good mother. I would call that a win.
What is arguably more common on television is the relationship between Lorelai and her mother, Emily Gilmore. Many rants and screaming matches are conducted between them, as their relationship appears based in constant misunderstandings. However, despite estrangement and resentment, the relationship between Emily and Lorelai is arguably never unsalvageable. No one can really write off this bond, because Emily and/or Lorelai occasionally show that they do indeed care for and value one another.
Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop)
Emily is first seen as a stereotypical suffocating, judgmental, harpy of an older mother, except when she becomes vulnerable and shows that she works hard to keep up appearances. She is bedridden when Lorelai runs away, she attends her granddaughter’s 16th birthday despite hurt feelings, and most of all, she is concerned that she might lose her family. She is far more complex than the typical older woman caricature and Kelly Bishop does a fantastic job with the role. Viewers can potentially sympathize with Emily’s ideals (often a product of her time and upbringing) and her feelings of exclusion from her daughter and granddaughter’s lives, even if they can’t identify with her strategies for keeping them close. At the same time, fans can also understand why Lorelai ran from the privileged life that she had grown up with, as well as the difficulties that accompanied that choice.
Arguably Emily was a type of lone parent, as Lorelai’s father was a typical career man who barely had time to put down the paper or end the conference call for meals. Although Emily was privileged to have a number of servants and nannies at her disposal, the fathering provided by Mr. Gilmore appears to have been very limited. As the most involved parent by far, Emily’s mothering has not fostered an obvious bond, showing that this connection is not inevitable. What Rory and Lorelai have takes work and is very special. It’s not a natural given.
The show allows for an exploration of motherhood from a variety of angles. An important aspect is the interplay between the daughter and mother roles. Throughout its many seasons, all three Gilmore women are placed in daughter and mothering roles. For example, in one scene in the first season, Rory is missing after a dance and Emily accuses Lorelai of raising a child as wild and irresponsible as herself. Lorelai defends Rory and says that she trusts her daughter, acting as a daughter herself in a situation with her mother. However, when Emily leaves and a contrite Rory appears, Lorelai acts as the mother terrified for her missing child and admonishes Rory. The transition between daughter and mother happens in a few minutes and it’s not only beautifully acted, but also representative of the dual(+) roles that many mothers play. You are never just a mother. You are also a daughter, whether or not your mother is always present. You parent with a history as a child. It’s a fantastic scene and shows part of the complexity of a mother’s role.
Three generations of Gilmore Girls
The interactions between Emily, Lorelai and Rory Gilmore make the show Gilmore Girls a unique offering. Rarely do popular shows for young people focus on the relationships between generations of women, or the role (and challenges) of contemporary mothering. Race and class issues abound in the show, which should be unpacked, but as a forum for understanding some aspects of mothering and honouring mother/daughter bonds, Gilmore Girls is fantastic.
Megan Ryland is currently completing her BA, focusing on politics, women and gender. She writes about feminism, body image, and media analysis on her blog, http://beautyvsbeast.wordpress.com. She also releases the weekly show Hello City! Culture Cast, a Vancouver-based podcast that reviews movies, theatre, concerts and more.
