Teenage Girl – Bitch Flicks

This guest post by Julie Mills appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Turning 18 is a big deal for any teenager. It’s a huge milestone on the rough road to adulthood, a time of change and discovering one’s true self. For India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), it is so much more. Her whole world is about to be turned upside down.

Right from the beginning, Stoker pulls you into India’s own special microcosm, which is as captivating as it is haunting. This girl is highly intelligent, but introverted and socially awkward, and it is hinted that she has a mild autism spectrum disorder. She is playful and ever curious to feel, to experience, to know everything. She has been raised in a privileged, protective environment and is quiet, shy, and innocent–innocent as a baby predator before she has made her first kill.

India surrounded by her shoe collection. She gets a new pair every year for her birthday.

India has just lost her father, and the arrival of her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), who seems to appear out of nowhere and whom neither India nor her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) have ever met before, throws her life off balance even further.

Uncle Charlie is handsome, charming, and creepy as hell. He has “danger” written all over him, and Evelyn falls for him right away, seeing in him a younger version of her late husband. While expertly weaving his web of charms around his sister-in-law, Charlie also immediately starts to subtly influence his niece, deliberately provoking her and testing her reactions, following her every move with his piercing blue eyes. His moving in with India and her mother sets off a new dynamic that might have been a love triangle, but turns out to be more of a three-way power struggle.

A rare moment of intimacy between mother and daughter.

India’s relationship with her mother is distant at the best of times. In focusing all his attention on their daughter, India’s late father had severely neglected his wife Evelyn, who has turned lonely and bitter over the years. There is hardly a scene with her in it where she is not holding on to a glass of wine as if it were a lifeline. Her husband’s death might have finally provided an opportunity for the two women to bond, but their intense jealousy over Charlie threatens to drive them even further apart.

Stoker was Hollywood actor Wentworth Miller’s stunning debut as a script writer, as well as the first English-language work of South Korean director Chan-wook Park (Oldboy), which explains why in some places the film comes across as a little rough around the edges, but on the whole is fresh and highly intriguing. As with Tideland, Pan’s Labyrinth, or Hannah, to truly appreciate the story you must allow yourself to take on the lead character’s unique perspective, to lay aside your judgment and morality and simply enjoy the disturbing yet engrossing visual ride. Just don’t expect an orgy of violence or bloodbath as can be found in some of Park’s previous movies. This is a psychological thriller, not an action movie. The pace is slow, peeling away layer by layer of deceit and building the suspense gradually like a Hitchcock film (the name “Uncle Charlie” is actually a reference to Shadow of a Doubt).

Who knew how much sexual tension can be in a piano duet?

Among other portrayals of violent women, Stoker stands out because there aren’t many stories about female psychopaths around, and because India’s attraction to violence is closely intertwined with her budding sexuality. Her uncle’s imposing presence has awakened in her at the same time a lust for bloodshed and an intense sexual desire, and she promptly begins to experiment and seek out means with which to satisfy both.

What bothered me most about the story was the fact that in the beginning India is presented as passive like a stereotypical female, waiting and longing to be rescued. Apparently she has to rely on male assistance and guidance in order to discover and awaken her full potential. Her father had, not unlike the father of TV’s Dexter, been systematically grooming her all her life, training her to deal with any “bad” feelings by keeping her isolated and taking her hunting regularly, teaching her that “sometimes you need to do something bad to stop you from doing something worse.” And after his death his brother Charlie takes over, leading India in a completely different direction, but still exerting control over her.

This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, even in the story’s universe, because India’s dark urges are presented as an inherent part of her nature (her uncle mentions the two of them sharing the same blood), yet have remained inexplicably inert. If her violent impulses had been so strong as to warrant the long lasting control by her father, she wouldn’t have needed her uncle’s encouragement to be set free, and vice versa. In contrast, Charles had discovered his lust for killing on his own, when he was just a boy. Also, when her uncle gives India her first pair of high-heeled shoes that somehow instantly completes India’s transformation into womanhood, which feels like a weird variant of the makeover trope.

BAM.

Personally, for me the most gratifying parts are when India resists Charlie and questions what she has been told, even while she is becoming increasingly infatuated with him. She sets off to seek out her own answers, going through her late father’s things and uncovering dark secrets both her father and her uncle had been keeping from her. In the end, the student surpasses the teacher. India breaks free of her uncle’s control and acts out of her own volition, leaving her old life behind.

I would just love a sequel to this, to see the story escalate from here, preferably in the style of Natural Born Killers or The Devil’s Rejects. Unleashed, India is glorious. She is a true psychopath, hurting people and killing without remorse, simply for her own pleasure. She was neither forced to become violent to fight for survival, nor is she looking for retribution for something that has been done to her in the past. It’s just in her nature.

At first glance this appears to be a classical story about a dangerous predator seducing and corrupting the innocent. But maybe India was never innocent to begin with. Maybe she was simply inexperienced.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJWrXKoTpL0″]

Julie Mills is in the process of throwing away a perfectly fine, well-paying career to become a full-time writer. At the moment she is working on her first NaNoWriMo project, which is about a female serial killer. You can find her on Twitter @_Julie_M_

This guest post by Rachel Hock appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

Conventionally, horror films punish women for their sexuality. This is particularly evident in the slasher films of the 70s and 80s such as Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But the grandaddy of them all is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho. The classic suffered three sequels in the 80s and early 90s and an ill-received shot-for-shot-remake by Gus Van Sant in 1998. Most recently, proto-slasher Norman Bates has been reincarnated in the pre-Psycho A&E TV series Bates Motel.

Bates Motel is both prequel and reboot. Set in the present day, it depicts Norman’s violent psychosexual development. Norman’s formative years are alluded to in Hitchcock’s film – an uncomfortable codependency with his mother – but the show’s creators have free reign to imagine what happened to Norman Bates to make him Norman Bates.

The iconic shower scene from 'Psycho' — The iconic shower scene from *Psycho*

To put it lightly, there is plenty of fodder for a discussion of what is wrong with Bates Motel when viewed through a feminist lens. The series is garish in its use of sexual violence. There are instances of rape, sex slavery, and, as in its source material, women being punished for having sex. Even when there are consensual sex scenes, the narrative purpose is usually to forward the story or character arc of a male character. (Bitch Flicks writer Amanda Rodriguez explores the rape scene in the first episode of the series and its implications in her post “Rape Culture, Trigger, Warnings, and Bates Motel.”)

However, there exists an antidote of sorts in the character of Emma Decody (Olivia Cooke) – a 17-year-old with cystic fibrosis. In a show where sex is conflated with violence, male desire, and death, Emma is an oasis of sex positivity, female desire, and life.

Emma Decody played by Olivia Cooke — Emma Decody (played by Olivia Cooke)

After being friend-zoned (if you’ll excuse the expression) by Norman (Freddie Highmore) in favor of troubled popular girl Bradley (Nicola Peltz) in the first season, the second season presents a new love interest for Emma – small-time pot dealer Gunner (Keenan Tracey). When the beach-side memorial that Emma plans for ill-fated Bradley turns into a kegger, Emma gets drunk and asks Gunner to “make bad choices” with her.

What does it mean for Emma to want to “make bad choices”? By “bad choices,” she means doing those things that adults pretend teenagers don’t do: sex, drinking, and drugs. She is a level-headed character with good judgment and prone to doing the right thing; she is a Good Girl. For Emma to want to get a little bit wild, the valuable emphasis is on “choices.” The “bad” is coy and ironic. She doesn’t want to do bad things, she wants to make bad choices, or rather, she wants to make choices. She wants agency.

Drunk on the beach in this episode, Emma tells Gunner, “We’re not dead, OK. So we should live. But we’re going to die, y’know?” For her, with a stated life expectancy of 27, agency – and sexual agency in particular – is very much tied to the act of living.

Emma wakes up at the Bates Motel, which is more than can be said for its more famous occupant, who never made it out of the shower.

The next episode finds Emma waking up in Gunner’s bed the next morning, unsure what had transpired the night before. When she finally confronts him to ask if they had sex, she is relieved to find out that they did not. (Gunner’s response – “Not that I didn’t want to sleep with you, just I prefer when the girls are conscious. Besides, if we did sleep together, you’d remember.” – makes me wince. He’s a real charmer, this one. But at Emma’s age I would have eaten it up.) Emma does in fact want to have sex with Gunner, which he senses, so later he finds her to ask her why her reaction was one of relief. “I was relieved because it would have been my first time,” she reveals.

Despite his preference for girls who are conscious, it escapes him that having sex with a blotto Emma would have been rape. Although she does not recognize this directly, she does indicate that the significance of her first time having sex is not derived from antiquated and romanticized notions of virginity and purity. Her first time is important to her because having sex is proof of being alive: “Just think how much pressure people put on their first time knowing that they’re going to have like a million more. Mine could be my only time, so I just, I want to make it count. Or at least be something I can actually remember.” Her life has been given an expiration date, and she’s more than halfway there. Having sex, and having the opportunity to consent to it, is literally a vital experience.

Emma asks Norma for advice. "I tried googling it, but what I read just scared me." — Emma asks Norma for advice. “I tried Googling it, but what I read just scared me.”

But sex isn’t merely symbolic for Emma. She wants to have sex. As Gabrielle Moss points out in a piece for Bitch Magazine about Bob’s Burgers‘ Tina Belcher, “the teenage girls of TV are typically portrayed as only capable of responding to sexual overtures – with varying degrees of disinterest, disgust, or enthusiasm, sure, but their sexuality almost exclusively exists in response to the overtures of male characters.” Emma doesn’t entirely break this mold. She waits for Gunner to make the moves. But just because she doesn’t take action first doesn’t mean that she isn’t an active participant. In anticipation of a date with Gunner, Emma asks Norman’s mother Norma (Vera Farmiga) what it’s like having sex for the first time. Emma confides, “There’s someone that I met and every time I’m with him that’s pretty much all I think about.” By thinking about and preparing for sex, she is represented as being in control of her sexuality.

And so Emma and Gunner have sex. They laugh and joke together as they undress and it seems every bit as lovely as Emma had hoped it would be. She is not punished for it. In fact, nothing comes of her tryst with Gunner. (In the next episode she does have a scary experience jumping off of a rope swing into a river, but there is nothing to suggest that this would not have happened if she had not had sex.) The other characters are unaffected. The plotline stands independently; Emma’s sexuality remains her own.

Does Bates Motel deserve a pat on the back and a job-well-done for including one positive representation of female sexuality? Not really. But a character like Emma in a show like Bates Motel is worth paying attention to.

Rachel Hock is a theater producer and arts administrator in Boston. She received a BA in English from the University of Rochester in 2009, and dreams of someday going to grad school to continue studying film theory and racking up student debt. She tweets mostly about food and TV at @RachelCraves

Tag: Teenage Girl

‘Stoker’–Family Secrets, Frozen Bodies, and Female Orgasms

Room for One: A Positive Representation of Female Sexuality on ‘Bates Motel’