Tag: Uncategorized

Quote of the Day: Screenwriter/Director Callie Khouri Weighs In On How TV Is Friendlier to Women

Callie Khouri

In a recent interview with Salon, Academy Award-winner Callie Khouri weighed in on how TV seems to be more friendly to shows about women. Khouri (who wrote Thelma and Louise for that Oscar) is the writer and producer for ABC’s new musical drama Nashville.
Salon asked her about television telling women’s stories and Khouri responded with thoughts that articulate the difficulties in writing feature films about women (adding that “I don’t think any studio in a million years would make Thelma and Louise right now”), and how to properly write stories once you get the green light.

Salon: People who make TV also seem much more comfortable making shows for women than people making movies do.

Khouri: “Because you’re allowed. You’re allowed to make things for women on television and there’s not like … you don’t have to go through the humiliation of having made something directed at women. There it’s just accepted, whereas if it’s a feature, it’s like “So, talk to me about chick flicks.” … I just think it’s insulting that if there is something with women in it, it’s relegated to this kind of trash heap. It doesn’t matter what it is, how good it is, if there is emotion in it, it’s immediately going to be talked down to. And I’m obviously irritated by that. Probably all women are. Certainly a lot of women filmmakers are.…Anyway, I don’t want to just complain about features, but it does seem unduly hard given the number of women that exist in the world.”

On the show not being “about a catfight,” even though it starts out that way:

Khouri: “…You come at things from the place where everybody thinks they know everything about what they are seeing. And then you just slowly peel back the layers until you’ve got very complicated human beings with very different sets of problems, all of them doing something that’s impossibly hard to begin with and trying to make their place in this world. Watching two women go at it is boring. There are so many other shows where you can get that. I want it to be about something more than that.”

The depth and breadth of female characters on TV is stunning right now. Whether the female is the protagonist (Homeland, The Mindy Project, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, etc.) or females are strong supporting characters (Boardwalk Empire, Sons of Anarchy, etc.), women’s stories on TV are becoming much less of an anomaly.
Women on the big screen, however… well, we still see a distinct difference, as Khouri notes, between “chick flicks” and “Hollywood blockbusters.” This is why the Bechdel Test has to exist; it’s rare for a film to place value on women’s stories and anything that might, as Khouri says, have “emotion in it.” 
As she goes on to observe, to properly tell women’s stories you have to “slowly peel back the layers” after presenting the audience with a stereotype. Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to do in TV — the sheer time that TV writers have to lure audiences in with character development and storytelling.
It seems Hollywood’s two hours, more or less, just aren’t enough to properly “peel back the layers.”  Are women’s stories really that much more complicated than men’s? Or is the “otherness” of women just so ingrained that a writer would need a few hours to first deconstruct the stereotypes and cultural myths that the audience walks in with?
Whatever the case may be, Khouri is right. This double standard is “unduly hard given the number of women that exist in the world.” Their stories are being showcased in the private sphere of the home, but they just can’t seem to break through to the public big screen. It’s time for that to change.

—

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Quote of the Day: Screenwriter/Director Callie Khouri Weighs In On How TV Friendlier to Women

Callie Khouri

In a recent interview with Salon, Academy Award-winner Callie Khouri weighed in on how TV seems to be more friendly to shows about women. Khouri (who wrote Thelma and Louise for that Oscar) is the writer and producer for ABC’s new musical drama Nashville.
Salon asked her about television telling women’s stories and Khouri responded with thoughts that articulate the difficulties in writing feature films about women (adding that “I don’t think any studio in a million years would make Thelma and Louise right now”), and how to properly write stories once you get the green light.

Salon: People who make TV also seem much more comfortable making shows for women than people making movies do.

Khouri: “Because you’re allowed. You’re allowed to make things for women on television and there’s not like … you don’t have to go through the humiliation of having made something directed at women. There it’s just accepted, whereas if it’s a feature, it’s like “So, talk to me about chick flicks.” … I just think it’s insulting that if there is something with women in it, it’s relegated to this kind of trash heap. It doesn’t matter what it is, how good it is, if there is emotion in it, it’s immediately going to be talked down to. And I’m obviously irritated by that. Probably all women are. Certainly a lot of women filmmakers are.…Anyway, I don’t want to just complain about features, but it does seem unduly hard given the number of women that exist in the world.”

On the show not being “about a catfight,” even though it starts out that way:

Khouri: “…You come at things from the place where everybody thinks they know everything about what they are seeing. And then you just slowly peel back the layers until you’ve got very complicated human beings with very different sets of problems, all of them doing something that’s impossibly hard to begin with and trying to make their place in this world. Watching two women go at it is boring. There are so many other shows where you can get that. I want it to be about something more than that.”

The depth and breadth of female characters on TV is stunning right now. Whether the female is the protagonist (Homeland, The Mindy Project, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, etc.) or females are strong supporting characters (Boardwalk Empire, Sons of Anarchy, etc.), women’s stories on TV are becoming much less of an anomaly.
Women on the big screen, however… well, we still see a distinct difference, as Khouri notes, between “chick flicks” and “Hollywood blockbusters.” This is why the Bechdel Test has to exist; it’s rare for a film to place value on women’s stories and anything that might, as Khouri says, have “emotion in it.” 
As she goes on to observe, to properly tell women’s stories you have to “slowly peel back the layers” after presenting the audience with a stereotype. Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to do in TV — the sheer time that TV writers have to lure audiences in with character development and storytelling.
It seems Hollywood’s two hours, more or less, just aren’t enough to properly “peel back the layers.”  Are women’s stories really that much more complicated than men’s? Or is the “otherness” of women just so ingrained that a writer would need a few hours to first deconstruct the stereotypes and cultural myths that the audience walks in with?
Whatever the case may be, Khouri is right. This double standard is “unduly hard given the number of women that exist in the world.” Their stories are being showcased in the private sphere of the home, but they just can’t seem to break through to the public big screen. It’s time for that to change.

—

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

The Neeson Identity: What the Release of ‘The Grey’ Got Wrong About Men

This is a guest post by Margaret Howie.
With the release of Taken 2, Liam Neeson impersonations are all over the internet again. You’d think that we had all been starved of Neeson material, but it was only back in January that his Man vs. the Wild movie, The Grey was released. Along with it we got a PR campaign based largely around his qualities as a leading man, and some revealing media coverage about gender roles in cinema.
The trailer for The Grey ticked all the familiar wilderness survival story clichés, right up until one of the last shots. That was the sight of Neeson taping broken bottles to his fists for a head-on confrontation with a pack of wolves. Accompanying this enticing promise of Neeson taking on predators fist-first, the surrounding promotion promised even more from the movie. The Grey was going to be more than an action flick. It would be a profound examination of the state of modern man. Much of this argument centred on the casting of the Northern Irish actor, and the director’s insistence that his star represented something lacking from modern film: authentic masculinity. Eventually much of the discussion of The Grey turned into rants about maleness. It shows how depressingly quickly gender stereotypes can be recycled and reinforced in something as innocuous as movie promotion.
Liam Neeson in The Grey (2012). Beard. Check. Snow. Check. Y Chromosome. Check.
Post-Star Wars, Neeson has become best known for his display of clenched-jaw determination in the face of cinematic adversary. Almost twenty years since Schindler’s List, the audience has faith in his capabilities to release the Kraken, defeat terrorists, get his daughter back and punch out a wolf. Parodies of his line deliveries in 2008’s Taken and 2010’s Clash of the Titans continue to get uploaded to YouTube. With the release of The Grey there was another opportunity to salute his hard-boiled, reluctant-action-hero persona and reflect on how it fits in a survival film.
Directed by Joe Carnahan and co-starring Frank Grillo and Dermot Mulroney, The Grey is described by Open Road Films as the story of “an unruly group of oil-rig roughnecks when their plane crashes into the remote Alaskan wilderness. Battling mortal injuries and merciless weather, the survivors have only a few days to escape the icy elements – and a vicious pack of rogue wolves on the hunt.”
What goes without saying is that the group is all-male. What did go on to get said, across film blogs and in news reports, was that the men of this film were delivering something supposedly missing from the cultural diet. Gender quickly became one of the most-discussed themes of The Grey’s pre-release coverage. Both movie reporters and their interviewees worked lines about masculinity into the discussions. Soon an idea of Liam Neeson’s ‘maleness’ being some sort of scarce resource emerged. The subject was set up by Neeson’s particular popular culture position, the mostly male cast, the genre and the writer/director Carnahan’s strident views of the state of casting in Hollywood. Is there really a dearth of manliness in cinema? Or does Dermot Mulroney get it right when he complained that “all the f–king movies are about the girls”?
The wilderness survival movie tends to be a generically male construction. In December 2011, Collider reviewed the trailer and Matt Goldberg added, “I can’t remember the last time we saw a solid men-vs-wild movie [since The Edge].” But perhaps the title should have reminded him. Men vs. wild films have been coming out solidly, even if you only count ones with ‘The’ in the title. Since The Edge was released in 1997, The Hunted, The Missing, The Way Back, and The Donner Party have all provided stories of steely-eyed male protagonists facing down both the wilderness and the worst of human nature.
Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in The Edge. Beards. Snow. Wilderness. Etc.
In a ‘close read’ of the film, posted on the day of the film’s release, Movieline’s Jen Yamato asked whether The Grey was a “welcome return to masculine cinema.” This was explored through quotes from the cast and director. Actor Dermot Mulroney said, “I’ve made a lot of movies that had both men and women in them, a lot of movies that were dominated by the woman’s storyline. And in this case it was a very different experience making the movie and enjoying the movie, when it was completed, because of the fact that there are no women in it… It was like thank God, I get to do a movie with just guys.”
Cast member Frank Grillo said that “It’s tough being a man. It really is tough being a man.” His co-star Dallas Roberts was quoted as saying, “But that’s the problem with discussing modern masculinity, isn’t it, because you’re a moron as soon as you open your mouth and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Mulroney expanded on the subject of cinematic testosterone in another interview with Movieline. It went on to be posted under the headline “The Sweet Relief of Being in a Manly Movie Like The Grey.” His response to a question about representing ‘what it means to be a man’ in the film was:
“So you say this movie has some throwback qualities, or some old school manly-man qualities; that’s intentional… So, guilty as charged on that; if that’s something that needs to be brought back, then let’s bring it back. It seems like people are responding to that about this movie and to my mind there haven’t been enough of them. The pendulum swung the other way since I started in this business and there were men’s movies like whatever those Tom Cruise movies [were]”

He continues “…then all of a sudden Sigourney Weaver comes in the Alien and we have strong women, we have Working Girl, we have all this, we have Best Friend’s Wedding, and before you know it, all the f–king movies are about the girls!”

Movieline’s headline presents The Grey as a ‘sweet relief’ to this abundance of girls, uncritically accepting Mulroney’s point and working it in to the appeal of the movie for audiences. This theme of the ‘masculine’ film continued to crop up in the promotional work surrounding the film’s release. Carnahan went on to frame his casting decisions around an idea of endangered manliness. The HuffPo blog Tribeca Film highlighted it in their interview with him, using the headline “Call of the Wild: Masculinity and Mother Nature in The Grey.” In the article, Carnahan talks about his cast, saying “They are unmistakably masculine as opposed to these vacuous kids in Hollywood right now…For The Grey, I was interested in a very specific kind of masculinity.”
He goes on to summon up this ‘very specific kind’ as embodied by Neeson through comparing him with Justin Bieber. Carnahan positions manliness in terms of dismissal and revulsion with the kind of ‘vacuous kids’ teenage Bieber apparently represents, and links credibility with age. The casting issue comes up again in The Daily Blam, where the writer Pietro Filipponi paraphrases his interview with Carnahan by saying “Casting…wasn’t as easy as you’d think” and quoting the director holding forth again on the seeming epidemic of “shirtless boys…with blank stares.” Filipponi suggests that “movie goers may scratch their collective heads wondering why other well known (and younger) actors weren’t selected for this film.”
In the Film School Rejects interview with Carnahan they discusses the “surprise” fact that younger actor Bradley Cooper (who is 37) was “almost” cast, and the interviewer Jack Giroux also brings up the idea that Carnahan’s “characters are usually very manly.”
The connection between Neeson’s casting (the director calls it the film’s “trump card”) and the “manly” aspect of his character is presented as a given. The contrast between younger Cooper and Neeson, who is 59, isn’t pressed, but in another interview with Moviehole the director continues to strongly connect his leading man with idealised masculinity. He says that “Liam embodied that much more easily than a younger actor would have” and commented on Neeson’s “strength and profundity as a man and as an actor.”
Discussions about The Grey and its portrayal of endangered masculinity originated in the movie blogosphere, but proved to be popular beyond it. When Joe Carnahan told film site Collider that Hollywood “premium on boys instead of men” and that films were “sorely lacking” in Neeson’s “ilk,” his quote was picked up by an entertainment news agency. The line came from a video interview with the director, who had been asked about the decision to cast his leading man. Talking about how “shirtless seventeen-year-olds” are being “passed off as a masculine form,” he goes on to say: “The reason that a guy like Liam, who’s nearly 60 years old, is having this resurgent kind of career swing is because we are sorely lacking in his ilk in this business right now.”
It garnered a decent amount of coverage, certainly more than most non-Tarantino director’s interviews are likely to, even in Oscar season. The quote was picked up by entertainment news agency Cover Media and was recycled on entertainment sites like ONTD and the UK’s Daily Express. Along with the jokes made about Neeson’s wolf-punching virility it became one of the underpinnings of The Grey’s online media coverage.
Magazine website Crushable reposted Carnahan’s quote under the headline “Liam Neeson Is Having a Career Resurgence Because He’s the Most Masculine Actor in Hollywood,” with writer Natalie Zutter concluding: “There are no men in Hollywood.” The same site emphasises Neeson’s skill set by creating a very manly paper doll of him in full action hero pose. He’s pictured surrounded by everyday items he can recycle into “the perfect weapons.” Same as, the writer points out, Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity – an actor and role not mentioned in her other article, probably because it dismantles the point that Zutter (and Carnahan himself) is making. 
Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity. Non-existent leading man.
Yahoo’s Shine blog used the line as a springboard to ask “Where Are Hollywood’s Manly Men?” Author Piper Weiss reiterates Carnahan’s idea of a “lack,” referring to Neeson as the “last of the man-hicans” and calling them “a dying breed if ever there was one.” Weiss goes on to list ten other prominent movie stars who fit this particular “breed.” It harks back to Carnahan’s stated desire for a “very different kind of masculinity,” a call for an essentialist gender role of some type that’s now, apparently, unfashionable and endangered. Ironically, eight of them are white, unintentionally reflecting one of the true shortages in Hollywood casting.
Writer Christian Toto, writing for the conservative Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog, used Neeson’s profile to write about “Why Masculinity Matters.” Comparing the profit of The Grey with Taylor Lautner-starring action film Abduction, Toto concludes that “the soon to be 60-year-old Neeson matters because he’s bringing something fresh to theatres, the sense of a fully capable alpha male who doesn’t regret taking decisive action.” How rare this ‘fully capable alpha male’ quality is, and how unique it makes Neeson’s appearance on screen, may appear inarguable when contrasted with the twenty-year-old Lautner’s box office disappointment.
However, Abduction opened up against two arguably manly films, Killer Elite and Moneyball, and only a couple of weeks away from several other testosterone-heavy storylines, Warrior, Drive, Courageous, and Real Steel. All of them featured flawed male leads, many of them (including Jason Statham, Clive Owen, Brad Pitt, and Hugh Jackman) old enough to be Lautner’s father. It also doesn’t take into account that Lautner’s film was beaten at the box office by a movie with negligible alpha-male qualities called Dolphin Tale.
Masculinity definitely does still matter, as the Women’s Media Centre study of gender representation [pdf] in U.S. media shows. It reported the distressing results of a 2012 report by Smith, Choueti & Gall on female representation in mainstream movies. The authors found that female characters made up just a third of the speaking roles in the top hundred grossing films of 2007, 2008, and 2009. Looking at ‘gender balance’ in these movies, where “the girls” contributed to around half of the characters, only one in six films qualified. In films, female leads are still the exception, never the rule, no matter how overwhelmed Dermot Mulroney feels.
Given this, it feels like an overstatement to hear all these announcements that cinema audiences will be shocked at seeing a cast of legal male adults, or even a star – Neeson – old enough to have fathered Bradley Cooper. Particularly considering that a writer who asked where the manly men are in Hollywood could then come up with ten prominent actors, like Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, who fit her misty-eyed description of manliness.
The popularity of Carnahan’s quote shows off the attraction of discussing a non-event like ‘disappearing masculinity.’ This argument makes out that The Grey is a special event, a chance for grown-ups – particularly men – to have a rare opportunity to see themselves onscreen. As well as being savvy PR, there’s almost an ideological challenge in this. The lurking subtextual suggestion is that if the audience does not front up, there will be less and less of the kind of gender ideal that Neeson has come to embody, with his daughter-rescuing, wolf-punching cragged good looks and air of tragic fortitude. Man vs. wolf is also man vs. box office, man vs. the empty calories of what Carnahan dismisses as “shirtless boys with…blank stares,” and by extension a dearth of movies with ‘male’ stories.
Comparing like-with-like, North American January cinema releases have in fact offered audiences plenty of films with central adult male leads facing difficult odds. The Grey was being released on the same weekend as the expanded release of 50-year-old George Clooney in The Descendents, and in a month with new films starring Dennis Quaid, Mark Wahlberg, Ralph Fiennes, and Ewan McGregor, all actors over forty. In January 2011, The Way Back was released, about seven men and one young woman walking 4000 miles to escape the Soviet gulags. In 2010 came the general American release of the Alp-climbing adventure film North Face. In 2009, instead of a survival epic there was Taken, the terrorist thriller that marked the beginning of the recreated Liam Neeson as action hero. In 2008 the most recent Rambo film came out, bringing back the renegade army vet to fight the Burmese military junta in the jungle. In 2007 Joe Carnahan’s mostly-male action film, Smokin’ Aces, was released – as was kidnapping thriller Alpha Dog, a suitable name for a movie where six of the seven top-billed actors were male. The year before that, January audiences were given the option of going to see Eight Below, another survival tale set in the Antarctic, starring two men and their pack of dogs.
Men dominate the blockbuster field, and the cult of youth is not as entrenched as Carnahan makes out. Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., Vin Diesel, Matt Damon, Nicholas Cage, and Will Smith all opened films among the top-grossing of 2011, and are all also on the far side of forty. Harrison Ford is over sixty, as is Sylvester Stallone, and soon movie theatres will see the return of Arnold Schwarzengger, born in 1947.
Willem Defoe in The Hunter. Beard. Snow. Raw masculinity. Rinse and repeat.
In 2012, while The Grey opened in theatres, a trailer for the new film The Hunter was released online. Instead of Man vs. wolf, this ‘The’ movie (starring 56-year-old Willem Defoe) is about Man vs. tiger. Linda Ge, writing for the comic book website Bleeding Cool, compared it to The Grey, adding that the Neeson film may be “paving the way for moviegoers to find their way to this similarly themed movie in their further search of more “bad ass with a beard takes on all predators’ stories.”
Movieline acknowledged this bad ass/beard/predator trope by looking back at The Edge. A few weeks after The Grey opened Nathan Pensky’s essay noted that “this genre is certainly well-trod territory” and comparing the protagonists of both films to Cast Away and Into the Wild. There’s no mention in the short article of how all these films are about men. For his part, Carnahan made a joke during the promotional cycle about what an all-female version of his film would consist of: “The movie would be 15 minutes long. They’d all agree on what to do, they’d walk out and live.”
Pensky, Ge, and Carnahan all made different statements that overlap at the same points of genre and gender. The Grey is part of a film release schedule that is heavily weighted to stories about men, and a popular trope that has become a representative for stories about the male condition. The presence of women would be so improbable that it becomes humorous, detracting from the key narrative tension – Man vs. [some predatory element of nature]. It doesn’t take much Hollywood savvy to guess how few actresses will be considered to play a ‘bad ass with a beard.’
Statistics and the deluge of similar films contradict this idea that we’re losing a masculine identity from cinema. Although the space from Justin Bieber to Liam Neeson via Bradley Cooper seems like a fairly narrow distance to cover, movies focussing on (white) adult men fit in very comfortably with the current cinematic landscape. Grizzled masculinity is so secure in popular culture it’s become a reliable punchline. With the release of The Grey’s trailer, there was a mini-meme phenomenon of lists like ‘What Should Liam Neeson Punch Next?,’ ‘10 Badass Adversaries Worthy of Fighting Liam Neeson’ and ‘10 Crazy Things Liam Neeson Should Fight Onscreen.’ Simon Pegg tweeted that: “If you do get into a fight, just say “Liam Neeson” as you throw a punch, your mittens will catch fire and your enemy’s life will fall off” and that after exposure to the actor’s presence “I was 78% better at fighting swarthy goons.”
Being able to talk about manliness had obvious appeal when it came to selling The Grey to audiences. The ‘toughness’ of being a man was exploited as the theme of the film, then toughness of casting a ‘man’s man’ sparked a ripple of discussion. It was a discussion with a hollow centre. No matter how few sensible adversaries would be willing to take on Liam Neeson, there is no upcoming shortage in films being made about him and his kind. Bad asses with beards are not going to make cinema’s endangered species list anytime soon.
———-
Margaret Howie cheerfully lives with her love of Robert Mitchum and her feminist sensibility in South London, watching and thinking about as many movies she can see.

Horror Week 2012: Gender Roles in ‘The Cabin in the Woods’

The Cabin in the Woods
A few months ago, the Joss Whedon-directed The Avengers was released, and there was much rejoicing. Fans seemed pleased. I saw it and enjoyed it, but I’m more obsessed with the OTHER Joss Whedon-directed film that came out this year. I loved The Cabin in the Woods and there are so many things I want to say about this movie, but for now I’m going to write about the interesting commentary on gender roles that was in the story.
WARNING: Spoilers ahead. Lots of them.
The Cabin in the Woods is more of commentary on horror films than a horror film in of itself, and the commentary comes to a head with the final scene, as the two survivors of the zombie attack confront the Director (played by Sigourney Weaver). She reveals that the five college students were selected to be killed as part of a ritual sacrifice to a group of ancient gods. Each student was meant to represent a different archetype: the Whore (Jules, played by Anna Hutchison), the Fool (Marty, played by Fran Kranz), the Athlete (Curt, played by Chris Hemsworth), the Scholar (Holden, played by Jesse Williams), and the Virgin (Dana, played by Kristen Connolly).
The five friends hear something in the basement.
Fans and critics have argued over the significance of the ancient gods and what they’re supposed to represent. I think the ancient gods are a metaphor for humanity’s deepest, darkest desires – the ugly side of human beings. This is why the final two survivors sit back and let the world end, instead of Dana killing Marty or Marty killing himself. As they say, if sacrificing people is the key to humanity’s survival, then maybe humanity doesn’t deserve to be saved. (I also think Joss really, really wanted to write at least one story where the world actually ends – there are only so many times that Buffy, Angel, Mal, or Echo can prevent the apocalypse before the writer gets bored.)
With that interpretation in mind, I started thinking about the five college students in The Cabin in the Woods and how their roles are defined by gender. The two women, Jules and Dana, are defined as The Whore and The Virgin – two opposite ends of the spectrum whose deaths are meant to serve as bookends for the others. The order of deaths is irrelevant except in the case of the women. Jules, as the corrupted Whore, has to die first, and Dana, the Virgin, has to die last, if she dies at all. As Hadley (Bradley Whitford) says, “The virgin death is optional as long as it’s last.” The female characters are defined only by their sexuality – nothing else about them really matters.
Dana (Kristen Connolly) will be very surprised to learn that she’s a virgin.
Still, the men don’t fare much better. Their prescribed roles are not based on how much sex they have and don’t have, but shoving them into the roles of The Athlete, The Scholar, and The Fool doesn’t give them much room to breathe, either. If you’re a woman, you can be the virgin or the whore. If you’re a man, you can be athletic or smart or funny. Complexity is not allowed.
What I find particularly interesting, though, is how the “puppeteers” (as Marty calls them) recognize that the five people they’ve selected for the sacrificed don’t easily fit into the prescribed archetypes.
Of the five, Holden is the closest to resembling his actual archetype. He’s able to calculate the distance in the gorge that Curt tries to jump on the motorcycle, and, well, he’s fairly quiet and wears glasses. He’s also ridiculously good-looking, which isn’t typical for the Scholar archetype, but other than that, he fits the role pretty well.
The athletic scholar (Jesse L. Williams) and the smart fool (Fran Kranz)
The same cannot be said for Curt and Jules. As Marty points out, “He’s a sociology major! When did he start pulling this alpha male bullshit?” The little we saw of Curt before the puppeteers started altering his personality was of a pretty intelligent young man who was nice to his friends. Similarly, Jules, a pre-med student, is a seemingly good friend who makes jokes with her boyfriend about anti-drug PSAs. But that won’t do – the puppeteers have to inject drugs into the air to make Curt more aggressive and alpha male, and they put cognition-lowering drugs in Jules’ hair dye to turn her into a dumb, overtly sexual blonde.
(On a side note, one of my favorite things about this movie is the moment where Jules comes onto Marty, calling him her old sweetheart, where he clarifies that they only made out one time. I completely expected a scene where Marty revealed his resentment towards the dumb whore who broke his heart and left him for the hot jock. Instead, Marty worried that this behavior was out of character for his good friends and seemed concerned for them. I really appreciated that Marty primarily saw Jules and Curt as his friends, and that once kissing Jules was such a non-issue for him.)
Curt (Chris Hemsworth) and Jules (Anna Hutchison) in happier times
Then there’s Dana, the so-called virgin – even though she slept with one of her professors, a fact that is mentioned in her first scene of the film. Dana’s behavior would probably be considered more “whorish” than Jules’s, as Dana is sleeping with a teacher and Jules is having sex within a monogamous relationship. But that doesn’t matter. Dana is still the virgin and Jules still the whore, because Dana is more quiet and subdued than Jules is, and American society thinks of virgins as quiet and subdued and sweet, and whores as brash and loud and more outgoing.
Finally, we have Marty, the Fool who is the first to understand that he and his friends are the victims of a conspiracy. In addition to being the most entertaining character of the five college students – because Fran Kranz is fantastic, even if he is playing a less creepy, more stoned version of Topher Brink in Dollhouse – he’s also the least subversive. Anyone exposed to a small amount of classical literature won’t be surprised to see the Fool as the smartest character of the group, which makes me feel like the puppeteers in The Cabin in the Woods all failed their English classes in high school. Still, he’s the one who throws the wrench in the plans to save the world by sacrificing a group of humans.
None of this analysis is new, but I brought it up because I want to return to my original point of the ancient gods representing our deepest, darkest desires. The ancient gods represent the ugliest traits of humanity – not only the lust for blood, but the need to categorize people into certain roles and to keep them there. We need to see men defined by one character trait and women defined by their sexual choices, and if these particular men and women don’t fit into the roles as we’ve prescribed them, we’ll make them fit. We’ll alter their personalities so they can easily fit into the Whore, the Scholar, the Athlete, the Fool, and the Virgin. And as we can see from the other countries’ failed attempt to appease the gods – including the Japanese tradition of unleashing one monster on a group of elementary school girls – this need to categorize into the Whore/Scholar/Athlete/Fool/Virgin is a uniquely American desire. The desires created by nature and nurture clash together in an ugly mix where we want to see these people killed one by one in a prescribed order.
Yeah, I really loved this movie.
The white board of monsters behind Richard Jenkins distinguishes between “witches” and “sexy witches.”
 
Lady T is a writer with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at www.theresabasile.com.

Horror Week 2012: The Nervous Wife: Horror Stereotype or Statement on American Masculinity?

orphan_ver3

This is a guest review by Tamara Winfrey Harris. Includes spoilers for Paranormal Activity (2007) and Orphan (2009).

There, outside the window, in the dark, are those eyes again. Yellow. Animal, but at the wrong height to be a coyote or fox–human height. And those amber, animal eyes are locked on hers. She slams shut the kitchen curtains and races to the living room window. The eyes are there, too, peering from the family’s wooded lot outside of town. Family. She thinks of her sleeping child down the hall and her heart beats faster. She shuts off the lights, hiding herself and her little girl from the gaze of whoever, whatever, is outside, and she dials the police. They arrive, lights flashing, just as her husband’s truck pulls into the driveway. They find nothing. The head cop chuckles, patting her on the shoulder, while looking at her husband, “Don’t worry. I think we just have a case of nervous wife here.”

Thank you, Paranormal Witness (Syfy, Wednesdays, 10 p.m. ET), for giving me a name for a ubiquitous horror trope. It goes like this: Woman begins to experience disturbing things. She shares this with her male partner (or other man), who responds by patronizing her, saying she is tired, silly, imagining things, nervous. It is only when the occurrences escalate and the male protagonist himself experiences something otherworldly that he will believe.

Call it The Nervous Wife, which is more concise than “women are super emotional, illogical and fearful and cannot be trusted.”

The Nervous Wife is a staple of the haunted house film genre, and now that paranormal shows are slowly taking over the small screen, it can be found there, too. In the first season of the FX channel’s American Horror Story, the character Vivien Harmon had to be committed and impregnated with a devil baby, and her teenage daughter dead and haunting the family abode, before her husband would believe that something spooky was going down.

Yes. Yes. I know. Science says ghosts and goblins and such don’t exist. True enough. It is natural for a body to be skeptical of supernatural claims. Would you believe it if you were told the portal to hell was in your laundry room? Likely not. The problem is that women in horror films are rarely, if ever, the skeptical ones. Logic is portrayed as a man thing. Little ladies are quick to believe the unbelievable. And to be frightened by it.

An example of this can be found in the horror juggernaut Paranormal Activity. In it, a young couple, Katie and Micah, live in a subdivision tract house that is plagued by threatening phenomena. Katie, who endured a brush with the supernatural as a child, is fearful and seeks relief from a psychic, who counsels that the best thing to do, until the home can be cleansed, is not to engage the spirit. In this instance, the male protagonist believes in the haunting; he does not, however, believe anyone’s advice on handling the problem. In a perfect illustration of male privilege and bullying in action, Micah dismisses the expert advice and laughs off Katie’s fear of an increasingly-menacing spirit. As his girlfriend becomes more frightened, Micah becomes more oblivious to her and her concerns. By the end of the film, their relationship feels uncomfortably emotionally abusive, with Katie withdrawing and Micah seemingly doing everything possible to provoke the thing that is terrorizing his mate.

There is often another feature of The Nervous Wife trope. Once the male protagonist (partner of The Nervous Wife) realizes a place is infested with spectres, he will not be cowed. Like a drunken dude bro outside the bar at 2 a.m., a dog protecting his territory, or Tom Petty–he won’t back down. He will rage. He will threaten to beat a demon’s ass. (The manly crew on The Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures is all about this method of posturing ghost busting, which makes them ripe for parody.) He will refuse to relocate. He will reject fear in favor of wrong-headed investigation. All this, even if it causes an escalation in dangerous activity or discomfort for his loved ones.
At first glance, the message is clear: Men are logical and brave protectors who do what needs to be done–even over the objections of lesser beings. Women, on the other hand, are emotional and fearful and need to be protected. But there is a twist. In most cases the female protagonist is proven right. And, as a result of his hubris and general assholery, the male protagonist sometimes meets a bad end, as in Paranormal Activity or Orphan, a horror/thriller where a doomed husband refuses to believe that his adopted child is really a murderous woman with hypopituitarism until he’s stuck on the end of her knife.

On Facebook, my buddy Barry pegged The Nervous Wife trope as “a statement against the traditional macho sexism of the American male.” Bravado, aggression and ignoring the needs of others is a losing approach–at least against the supernatural. I think he may be right, but The Nervous Wife trope is still troubling, even if it is a deserved jab at patriarchy.

The problem is that the trope, while weirdly subversive, is ultimately regressive. The aforementioned narratives all embrace rigid, traditional gender lines for male and female protagonists. They then reject masculinity as ultimately useless and harmful. But why are they so invested in base, simplistic and incomplete illustrations of masculinity and femininity in the first place? The women I know are far braver and more logical than their horror flick counterparts; the men more caring and thoughtful. And while I know Hollywood is not real life, I also know that it is possible to draw complex fictional characters that are not caricatures of their respective genders.

For once, I’d like to hear a horror husband respond to his wife’s concerns with “Let’s call the cops and check that out!” (because you are normally a really smart and level-headed woman and I trust your judgment), or a solicitous miss calm her demon-plagued boyfriend with a “Darling, you’ve been working too hard. Perhaps you’re just nervous.”

 

Tamara Winfrey Harris is a freelance writer living in the Indianapolis area. Her work focuses on race and gender, and their intersection with pop culture and politics. She is currently senior editor at Racialicious and a contributor to Clutch and Frugivore magazines. Tamara is working on her first book–a feminist exploration of black women and marriage, and the sexist and racist underpinnings of the “black marriage crisis” narrative.

Learn more about Tamara and her work at her website.

The Terror of Little Girls: Social Anxiety About Women in Horrifying Girlhood

Horror films have a long-standing tradition of commenting on the social fears and anxieties of their time.
Another universally recognized truth of horror is that scary children are terrifying–especially little girls.
While an analysis of “creepy children” in horror films usually proclaims that they are providing commentary on a loss of innocence, and it would make sense that a little girl is the “ultimate” in innocence, it can’t be that simple. We wouldn’t be so shaken to the core by possessed, haunted, violent little girls if we were simply supposed to be longing for innocent times of yesteryear.
Instead, these little girls embody society’s growing fears of female power and independence. Fearing a young girl is the antithesis of what we are taught–stories of missing, kidnapped or sexually abused girls (at least white girls) get far more news coverage and mass sympathy than stories of boy victims. Little girls are innocent victims and need protection.
In the Victorian era, the ideal female was supposed to be pale, fainting-prone and home-bound. Feminist literary icons Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar write about this nineteenth-century ideal in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women:

“At its most extreme, this nineteenth-century ideal of the frail, even sickly female ultimately led to the glorification of the dead or dying woman. The most fruitful subject for literature, announced the American romancer Edgar Allan Poe in 1846, is ‘the death… of a beautiful woman’… But while dead women were fascinating, dying girl-children were even more enthralling… These episodes seem to bring to the surface an extraordinary imperative that underlay much of the nineteenth-century ideology of femininity: in one way or another, woman must be ‘killed’ into passivity for her to acquiesce in what Rousseau and others considered her duty of self-abnegation ‘relative to men.'”

The feminine “ideal” (and its relation to literature) coincided with women beginning the long fight for suffrage and individual rights. It’s no surprise, then, that men wanted to symbolically kill off the woman so she could fulfill her ultimate passive role. There was something comforting about this to audiences.
Rhoda Penmark will not lose to a boy. Or anyone else.
Fast forward to the 1950s and 60s, and the modern horror genre as we know it emerged and began evolving into something that provided social commentary while playing on audiences’ deepest fears (the “other,” invasion, demonic possession, nuclear mutations and the end of the world).
We know that horror films have always been rife with puritanical punishment/reward for promiscuous women/virgins (the “Final Girl” trope), and violence toward women or women needing to be rescued are common themes. These themes comfort audiences, and confirm their need to keep women subjugated in their proper place. It’s no coincidence that the 50s and 60s were seeing sweeping social change in America (the Pill, changing divorce laws, resurgence of the ERA, a lead-up to Roe v. Wade).
Terrifying little girls also make their debut in this era. Their mere presence in these films spoke not only to audiences’ fears of children losing innocence, but also the intense fear that little girls–not yet even women–would have the power to overthrow men. These girl children of a generation of women beginning a new fight for rights were terrifying–these girls would grow up knowing they could have power.
The Bad Seed‘s Rhoda Penmark (played by Patty McCormack in the 1956 film), genetically predisposed to be a sociopath, murders a classmate and the janitor who suspects her. Her classmate–a boy–beats her in a penmanship contest, and she beats him to death with her tap shoes. A little girl, in competition with a boy, loses, and kills. While in the novel Rhoda gets away with her crimes, the Hays Code commanded that the film version “punished” her for her crimes and she’s struck by lightning. It’s revealed that Rhoda’s sociopathic tendencies come from her maternal grandmother, a serial killer. This notion of female murderous rage, passed down through generations and claiming boys/men as its victim, certainly reflects social fear at the time.
In 1968, Night of the Living Dead premiered on big screens and has been seen as commenting on racism/the Civil Rights movement, Cold War-era politics and critiquing America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. However, little Karen Cooper’s (Kyra Schon) iconic scene has long disturbed audiences the most. Infected by zombies, she eats her father and impales her mother with a trowel. A horror twist to an Oedipal tale, one could see Karen as living out the gravest fears of those against the women’s movement/second-wave feminism. Possessed by a demon, she eats her father (consumes the patriarchy) and kills her mother (overtaking her mother’s generation with masculine force).
Little Karen Cooper consumes patriarchy and overtakes her mother.
Five years later, Roe v. Wade had been decided (giving women the right to legal first-trimester abortions), the Pill was legal, no-fault divorce was more acceptable and women began flooding the workforce.
Meanwhile, on the big screen, sweet little Regan MacNeil–the daughter of an over-worked, atheist mother–becomes possessed by the devil.
The Exorcist was based on a novel, which itself was based on the exorcism case of a little boy. Of course, the novelist and filmmakers wanted audiences to be disturbed and terrified, so the sex of the possessed protagonist changed (would it be as unsettling if it was a little boy?).
Chris MacNeil, Regan’s mother, goes to great lengths to help her daughter, and resorts to Catholicism when all else has failed. Regan reacts violently to religious symbols, lashes out and kills priests, speaks in a masculine voice and masturbates with a crucifix. This certainly isn’t simply a “demonic possession” horror film, especially since it was written and made into a film at the height of the fight for women’s rights (the Catholic church being an adamant foe to reproductive rights). Only after Regan releases her demon, which possesses a priest (who flings himself out of a window to commit suicide), does she regain her innocence and girlhood.
Tied and bound, Regan haunts and kills men, and reacts violently to religious images.
What her mother and her culture are embracing–atheism, working women, reproductive rights, sexual aggressiveness–can be seen as the “demons” that overcome the innocent girl and kill men (and traditional religion).
These films are have terrified audiences for decades, and for good reason. The musical scores, the direction, the jarring and shocking images–however, they also play to society’s deepest fears about women and feminism. For little girls to be possessed is the ultimate fall.
In 1980, The Shining was released. Yet another film adaptation of a novel (Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of Stephen King’s novel), this film contains two of the creepiest little girls in film history–the Grady girls. The Shining shines a light on crises of masculinity. Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, is a recovering alcoholic who has hurt his son, Danny, in the past. When he takes his wife, Wendy, and son with him to be caretakers of a hotel over a winter, his descent into madness quickly begins. Danny has telepathic abilities, and sees and experiences the hotel’s violent past. As he rides his Big Wheel through the hotel, he stops when he sees two little girls begging him to “Come play with us Danny. Forever.” These girls–dead daughters of Grady, a previous caretaker who killed his family and himself–are trying to pull Danny into their world. Danny sees images of them murdered brutally, and flees in fear. Meanwhile, Jack is struggling with his alcoholism, violence and lack of control of himself and his sensitive wife and child. When he sees Grady, Grady advises him:

“My girls, sir, they didn’t care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of matches, and tried to burn it down. But I ‘corrected’ them sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I ‘corrected’ her.”

Danny is confronted with the horror of what men are capable of.
In this aftermath of the women’s movement, Jack (a weak man, resistant to authority) is being haunted and guided by a forceful, dominating masculinity of the past. He’s stuck between the two worlds, and succumbs to violent, domineering alcoholism.
But he loses. Wendy and Danny win.
While his predecessor succeeded in “correcting” his wife and daughters, that time has past.
Here, the flashing memories of the ghosts of the past are terrifying. The Grady girls provide a look into what it is to be “corrected” and dominated.
“Come play with us Danny,” the girls beg, haunting him with the realities of masculine force and dominance.
Starting with the late-70s and 80s slasher films (and the growing Religious Right/Moral Majority in politics), the “Final Girl” reigned supreme, and the promiscuous young woman would perish first. Masculinity (characterized with “monstrous” violence and strength) and femininity became natural enemies. These fights on the big screen mirrored the fights in reality. The Equal Rights Amendment was pushed out of favor and was never ratified, and a growing surge of conservatism and family values began dominating American rhetoric.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, we see a resurgence of the terrifying little girl. This time, she is serving as a warning to single/working/independent/adoptive mothers.
In The Ring (the 2002 American adaptation of a 1998 Japanese film), Rachel Keller (played by Naomi Watts) is a  journalist and a single mother. She unknowingly risks her son and his father’s lives by showing them a cursed videotape. A critic noted:

“If she had never entered the public sphere and viewed the cassette in the first place, she would not have inadvertently caused Noah’s death, nor would she have to potentially cause the death of another. Rachel would, perhaps, have been better off staying at home.”

Single motherhood has often been the driving force behind horror plots.
In her investigation into the video, she discovers the twisted, dark past of the video’s subject, Samara, a young girl who started life troubled (her birthmother tried to drown her). She was adopted by a couple, but her adoptive mother suffered from visions and haunting events due to Samara’s powers. They attempted to institutionalize Samara, but eventually the adoptive mother drowns her in a well after Samara cannot be cured of her psychosis. Her adoptive father, Rachel finds, locked Samara in an attic of their barn, and Samara left a clue of the well’s location behind wallpaper. (Bitch Flicks ran an excellent analysis of the yellow wallpaper and the themes of women’s stories in The Ring.)
Samara’s life was punctuated by drowning, which has throughout history been a way for women to commit suicide or be killed (symbolizing both the suffocation of women’s roles and the return to the life-giving waters that women are often associated with). While Rachel “saves” Samara’s corpse and gives her a proper burial, Samara didn’t want that. She rejected Rachel’s motherhood and infects Rachel’s son. Rachel–in her attempts to mother–cannot seem to win.
Rachel “saves” Samara from her watery grave, but she still cannot succeed.
The ambiguous ending suggests that Rachel may indeed save her son, but will have to harm another to do so. This idea of motherly self-sacrifice portrays the one way that Rachel–single, working mother Rachel–can redeem herself. However, the parallel narrative of the dangers of silencing and “locking up” women is loud and clear.
And in 2009’s Orphan, Esther is a violent, overtly sexual orphan from Russia who is adopted by an American family. Esther is “not nearly as innocent as she claims to be,” says the IMDB description. This story certainly plays on the fear of the “other” in adopted little girls (much like The Ring) and how that is realized in the mothers. In this film, Esther is actually an adult “trapped” in a child’s body. The clash of a childish yet adult female (as culturally, little girls are somehow expected to embody adult sexuality and yet be innocent and naïve) again reiterates this fear of little girls with unnatural and unnerving power. The drowning death of Esther, as her adoptive mother and sister flee, shows that Esther must be killed to be subdued. The power of mother is highlighted, yet the film still plays on cultural fears of mothering through international adoptions and the deep, disturbing duality of childhood and adulthood that girls are supposed to embody.
Like Samara, Esther is a deeply disturbed daughter, capable of  demonic violence.
In the last 60 years, American culture has seen remarkable change and resistance to that change. Horror films–which portray the very core of society’s fears and anxieties–have reflected the fears of women’s social movements through the faces of terrifying little girls.
While nineteenth-century literature comforted audiences with the trope of a dead, beautiful woman, thus making her passive and frail (of course, we still do this), twentieth and twenty-first century horror films force audiences to come face to face with murderous, demonic, murdered and psychotic little girls to parallel fears of women having economic, reproductive, parenting and marital (or single) power.
Little girls are supposed to be the epitome of all we hold dear–innocent, sweet, submissive and gentle. The Victorian Cult of Girlhood and Womanhood bleeds into the twenty-first century anti-feminist movements, and these qualities are still revered.
Horror films hold a mirror up to these ideals, distorting the images and terrifying viewers in the process. The terror that society feels while looking at these little girls echoes the terror it feels when confronted with changing gender norms and female power.

—

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Horror Week 2012: A Brief Feministory of Zombie Cinema

I spent my teen years hopelessly addicted to zombie movies. No matter how poorly made, no matter how artistically worthless, no matter how nasty and exploitative, if the movie had zombies in it, I would watch. The first thing I bought with the first paycheck from my first job at seventeen was Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema.
In 2006, it was indeed more or less complete, but a LOT of zombie movies have been made since then.

I should state upfront that I hold no truck with narrow, exclusionary definitions of “zombie.” To me, the zombie is a very broad church: if somebody has ever called it a zombie, it’s a zombie. The Deadites of Evil Dead? Zombies. The Somnambulist in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari? A zombie. The Dead Men of Dunharrow? Zombies. (Don’t even try that 28 Days Later “infected” crap with me. Those are most definitely zombies, and you should trust me on this because I probably know more about zombie cinema than you.) (Unless you’re Jamie Russell, in which case thank you for stopping by, sir, and I love your book, and I wrote a paper about Zombie Jesus if you’d like to read it?)
As well as being a zombie aficionado, I spent my teen years deep in confusion and denial about sexuality and gender – and these two things are perhaps not unrelated. Vampires and werewolves are explicitly sexual and very gendered, but my movie monster of choice erases sex and gender entirely by its very nature. There are no alluring seductions, no monthly cycles, no explosions of pent-up masculine rage in the zombie: only a creeping sameness and inevitability, all social categories dissolved into nothingness, all physical difference literally consumed in the nightmarish Eucharist of undead cannibalism.
Of course, this erasure of sex and gender does not mean that sex and gender are not explored in zombie films. On the contrary, there are some very interesting things going on, as we shall see in our whirlwind tour of the Three Eras of Zombie Cinema.
Stage One: The Pre-Romero Era
The early stage of zombie cinema is the least popular (and it is also my strongest ammunition in the fight against the purists who insist that only the Romero flavor of zombie – the dead, resurrected, flesh-eating variety – counts as a true zombie). For the first 35 years of its onscreen existence, the zombie didn’t eat anybody’s flesh. Instead, a zombie – first seen in 1932 Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie – was a mindless slave resuscitated by voodoo.
The words “voodoo,” “1932,” and “slave” all in the same sentence like that has probably alerted you to the most striking fact about these early zombie films, which is that they are hella racist. In White Zombie, Bela Lugosi plays a Haitian voodoo master who conspires with a plantation owner to zombify a white woman. I Walked With A Zombie (1943) and Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966) also draw on Haitian voodoo and slave plantations. Per Russell’s thoughtful postcolonial reading of these films, they play on colonial fears of white enslavement and Afro-Caribbean magical powers. In all three movies, the great threat posed by the zombies and their voodoo master is the enslavement of a young white woman.
I Walked With A Zombie: SO MUCH horrendous racial and sexual imagery in one little screencap.

In these early films, white women exist primarily to be threatened by a monster with a subtext of sexual violence, suggesting the racist narrative of predatory, animalistic black men preying on lily-white women. It’s pretty stomach-churning to watch, even if it’s fascinating fodder for students of gender, race, colonialism, and the cinema. Luckily, in 1968 zombies were revitalized, and their race and gender aspects completely transformed, by one remarkable movie.
Stage Two: The Golden Age
In Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s most obvious innovation was actually cribbed from the Richard Matheson novella I Am Legend (in which the undead bloodsuckers are actually identified as vampires, though often read as zombies). Like their literary predecessors, Romero’s shuffling reanimated corpses fed on the living. The association of zombies with Haitian voodoo, slavery, and colonialism was jettisoned, and pop culture hasn’t looked back.
Calling this period the golden age is almost entirely a matter of personal preference, but good lord are there some terrific zombie films from the 1970s. Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead is the undisputed masterpiece of the era, but there are some wonderful movies from all across Europe: the Spanish Blind Dead series, Lucio Fulci‘s giallo gorefests in Italy (especially the splendid The Beyond), French film The Grapes of Death, the underrated and transnational The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue…
But it was Night of the Living Dead that set the tone for these movies, both in terms of the unremitting bleakness and in the heightened consciousness of social issues. Romero has always claimed that his choice of African-American actor Duane Jones for protagonist Ben was color-blind casting, but his own subsequent filmography displays a clear concern for class and race issues. The role of gender in golden-age zombie films is subtler, but no less present. One of the more shocking moments in NotLD is the reveal of the little zombie girl chomping on her dead father and murdering her own mother. The message is clear: the zombie apocalypse breaks down all social categories. The mother-child bond, so often inviolable in Hollywood, is broken in the most violent way imaginable. A little girl, the archetype of innocence, enacts the violence. Social roles cannot possibly hold in the face of the undead threat; in the end, the zombie makes equals of us all.
No wonder I am terrified of preteens.
Stage Three: The Great Comeback
The eighties and nineties saw a proliferation of slasher flicks, while the zombie fell out of favor. Russell ascribes the zombie resurgence of the past decade to the 2002 double-whammy of 28 Days Later and the video game Resident Evil. Before long, Dawn of the Dead was remade, while Shaun of the Dead gave the genre a simultaneous shot in the arm as the first self-styled “RomZomCom.” By the middle of the decade, zombies were well and truly mainstream.
It’s a curious fact, explored by Carol J. Clover in Men, Women, and Chain Saws, that lowbrow genre fare can sometimes push the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable by mainstream Hollywood standards. Arguably, the mainstreaming of zombies has actually defanged some of their ability to make interesting commentary on gender.
For example, the largely entertaining and in some ways surprisingly innovative 2009 zom-com Zombielandends with its previously strong, capable female characters screaming on an amusement park ride, needing to be rescued by the male protagonist. While 1970s zombie films didn’t exactly lack delicate fainting ladies, there was an overall thematic sense that the rising of the dead renders categories such as gender roles ontologically insignificant. A film like Zombieland manages to use the zombie apocalypse to actually enforce gender stereotypes. Similarly, I rage-quit AMC’s The Walking Dead after one season, in part based on a scene where the female characters had a discussion along the lines of, “Well, the apocalypse has hit; better revert to traditional gender roles, ’cause cavemen!!”
I still love zombies deeply. I love the wish-fulfillment aspect of imagining yourself as the last brave outpost of survival against the onslaught, creating your own beleaguered little society when this one collapses. I love the multiplicity of symbolic potential in the zombie, the seemingly endless variety of fears for which it can stand: the inevitability of death; infiltration of human-seeming replicants or pod people; fear of brainwashing or enslavement; loss of all particularity or individuality; uprising of the faceless proletariat; the revenge of Gaia; communism; enforced conformity; being overwhelmed by whatever force it is that you fear most (feminism or kyriarchy or theocracy or secularism or or or…). 
 
But I’m experiencing burnout. I don’t enjoy seeing such a rich, challenging, bleak, existential symbol stripped of all its nuance to cater to the same old reductive Hollywood tropes and narratives. I’m sick of the mainstream cultural attitude toward gender and social roles, and I am very sick of seeing things I love harnessed to serve this attitude.
It makes me want to eat somebody’s brains! Which is a thing invented in Return of the Living Dead in 1985.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

‘Pitch Perfect’ and Third-Wave Feminism

Written by Leigh Kolb

Social movements are not without their problems. America’s second- and third-wave feminists (the mothers from the 60s and 70s and their literal and figurative daughters, who have come to age in the 80s, 90s and 2000s) have often appeared to be at odds with one another, and even within themselves. Even though the “women’s movement” is often marketed as a monolith in our culture, it is far from that.

Pitch Perfect, a new musical comedy, is about the all-female a cappella group the Barden Bellas, who are vying for respect among their peers and for the title of best college a cappella group in the nation at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella. The core problem for them (besides the vomiting–we’ll get to that in a minute) is that they are stuck in the past. While other groups are showing off creative arrangements and flashy dance choreography, the Bellas have rigid movements, dress like stewardesses and only sing “classics” from the 80s and 90s (“The Sign,” “Eternal Flame,” and “Turn the Beat Around” is their standard set list). The Bellas are also uniform in their looks and body types–light-skinned and thin.

The original Bellas are uniform in appearance and skin tone.

As the two matriarchs of the group–Chloe (Brittany Snow) and Aubrey (Anna Camp)–recruit young women to audition at the back-to-school activities fair, Aubrey makes it clear that they are looking for women with “bikini-perfect bodies.” Chloe responds quietly with “How about we just get good singers?” Thus begins the Bellas’ journey into a new world filled with women of color, overweight women, “alternative” brunettes with lots of eyeliner and lesbians.

Aubrey remains steadfast in her traditionalism until almost the bitter end. Her insistence on the value of tradition, and how it’s always been and how they’ve always looked, could represent second-wave feminism, which was criticized for its lack of inclusion for women of color and lesbians.

The protagonist in the film, Beca (Anna Kendrick), desperately wants to be in LA to be a DJ, but is stuck at Barden University because her father is a professor there and she has a free ride (we’ll get to that in a minute, too). She represents third-wave feminism, which has been criticized for a lack of female camaraderie and a disregard for the past.

Beca as the “alternative” girl (black nail polish is a dead giveaway).


Pitch Perfect, on its surface (and even mostly below the surface), is a fun female-centered comedy with good music. It’s clearly co-produced by a woman (Hollywood feminist Elizabeth Banks) and written by a woman (30 Rock and The New Girl’s Kay Cannon). However, a feminist reading of the film suggests that far below the surface, viewers can take the plot of the film as an allegory of second- and third-wave feminism in America. 

The new members of the Bellas see early on that they have no chance of winning with their old routine. They learn it, they go through the motions, but it simply doesn’t work. Aubrey stands firm in the old choreography–she becomes more and more uncomfortable with the concept of changing their form, no matter how “tired” it is.

When the group arrives at their first competition of the season, the commentators (Gail, played by Banks, and John, played by John Michael Higgins) comment on their looks. “This does not look like the fresh-faced nubile Bellas…” John says. They are “refreshing, yet displeasing to the eye,”says Gail. (The interplay between these two judges provides some great one-liners throughout the film.)

John and Gail provide funny, and poignant, Christopher Guest-style play-by-plays.


The Bellas get on stage and perform the same, tired routine. Toward the end, however, Fat Amy (yes, we’ll get to that in a minute) shakes things up during her “Turn the Beat Around” solo, ripping off her jacket and growl-singing the once demure lines. The audiences and the judges love it, and they manage to place. At regionals, Beca sees the audience getting bored and injects some mash-up vocals toward the end of their set (“Titanium,” a bullet-proof anthem that weaves its way throughout the film). The audience enjoys it, but Aubrey is enraged and kicks her out.

The group suffers, but they have to pull it together because they need to perform at nationals after another team was disqualified. Beca comes back, and tells the fractured group, “I’ve never been one of those girls who had a lot of friends who were girls–now I do, and it’s pretty cool.” Aubrey hands Beca the reigns, and they perform Beca’s own mash-up of modern and older songs. She has been turned on, at first reluctantly, to The Breakfast Club by her love interest, Jesse, and includes “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” by Simple Minds, and also includes tween anthem “Party in the U.S.A.” Notably, Fat Amy interjects a line from “Turn the Beat Around” at the climax of their set.

The women have collaborated, and evolved. They’ve kept their individualism, and been frank about their desires and motivations. They dress differently, and they sing new music. However, they don’t leave the past in the dark, and become better and closer when they decide to move forward. At the end, they’re not dressed like one another, they don’t look the same, and they win (on stage and off).

As with the social movement, the film isn’t without its problematic aspects, which ultimately speak to the current state of feminism in our culture.

Gross-out humor: The Bellas are humiliated on the national stage at the beginning of the film when Aubrey projectile vomits on the stage and audience. Later, during the Bellas’ “let it all out” moment that brought them back together, Aubrey does it again. One member gets pushed into it, and makes a snow angel in it. Is this necessary? Was there no other way to symbolize Aubrey’s anal, yet out of control, nature? These scenes felt exactly like the gross-out scenes in Bridesmaids, which were written in by Judd Apatow to appeal to the male viewer. Women, at this point, surely have proven that they’re funny, and that women’s stories can be universally entertaining. OK, maybe we’re not there yet, but the only way into the boys’ club doesn’t have to be to play exactly like them. It’s not a matter of being prude, it’s simply a matter of these scenes–Pitch Perfect‘s vomit or Bridesmaids‘s diarrhea–feeling utterly out of place in the films. What could be more appropriate, and Pitch Perfect does enter into this territory, are jokes about gynecological visits or Gail’s college group, which was called the “Menstrual Cycles.” 

Fathers as idols: Yet again, we have multiple narratives of influential fathers and absent mothers. Beca’s father is the most prominent, as he is a literature professor at BU. Beca is surly and angsty toward him, and references her “stepmonster” and his divorce from her mother, yet doesn’t talk about her mother. Even when she goes to her father during spring break and they bond over tea, it’s all about him. He visits her in her dorm room more than once, which feels awkward, and clearly controls her future (bargaining with her that he’ll send her to LA after one year at BU). Aubrey, in the transformative scene where the Bellas bond, says that “My father always said, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, pack your bags.'” The two characters who most clearly represent the old and the new, in regard to the feminist movement allegory, are driven and inspired/controlled by their fathers. This trope is relentless with female protagonists–fathers are almost always more visible and more important than the characters’ mothers. This consistent story line makes sense if we examine opportunities for men and women in the decades leading up to these young women’s formative years. Girls are taught they can be anything, and too often it’s the man of the house who is represented as powerful, in work and at play. They are who are to be emulated in this culture.

Fat Amy is a star performer on stage and off.

Fat acceptance: Fat Amy (played by the the amazing Rebel Wilson) introduces herself as Fat Amy to Chloe and Aubrey at the activities fair so “twig bitches like you don’t do it behind my back.” Although jokes are made about her size (by her and by others), Amy has solos, sex and friends. Her body is used for comedy, as is the fat body of the male sidekick of the college’s a cappella organizer. It’s still acceptable in our culture to demonize and discriminate against people who are overweight (or use them as comic relief). Amy’s character skewered that with humor (while also reaffirming it), but audiences seem really happy to see a woman of size on screen. While these casting decisions provide great fodder for entertainment writers (and who doesn’t love clever word play: “In a sea of size-0 starlets, Wilson has the confidence of a performer twice her age and half her size”). While some coverage is obviously cringe-worthy at best and fat-shaming at worst, reviewers (and certainly feminists) are embracing this representation. Even if representation is problematic, or has “mixed messages,” it’s representing reality. Would it be believable to have a fat woman on screen and no one comment on it? Unfortunately, we’re not at that point yet.


Race issues: From early on in the film, the portrayal of Asian women is problematic. Beca’s roommate is Korean, and tinkers with a bonsai tree while quietly, solemnly glaring at Beca. She only opens up when around her Korean peers (although she does seem to warm to Beca toward the end of the film). She scowls one evening, “The white girl is back,” when Beca gets back to her room. The Bellas also have a Korean member, who is awkward, speaks in a muted whisper (and when she is audible she’s saying strange things) and only really opens up during their last number. There’s no clear defense for these character portrayals, but they do seem to line up with what’s happening in the greater world of entertainment and feminist conversations even in 2012. Visit the comments section on a feminist blog defending Girls (or simply read about the show’s problematic history). Too often the face of third-wave feminism–especially the early 20s crowd–is white and privileged. This is in lock step with second-wave feminism, which caused a rift with women of color (Alice Walker claimed the title “womanism” because of this), and even first-wave feminism, when early suffragists used racism to further their cause. It was a problem then, and it’s a problem now.


Sex and sexuality: When Beca first arrives on campus, she’s handed an “official BU rape whistle” by a perky upperclassman. She warns, “Don’t blow it unless it’s actually happening!” While many reviewers found this joke tasteless, the audience can’t help but think that it’s supposed to be startling and tasteless. We’re supposed to think, “That’s insane,” and then immediately think about how “legitimate rape” has been a talking point and male legislators have had to re-write laws to change “rape” to “forcible rape.” Instead of just being offensive, that joke has the possibility of satirizing how we are discussing rape on a wide scale.
The “original” Bellas have a rule that no Bella can be romantically involved with a Treblemaker (their all-male rival group). This strict sexual gatekeeping causes them to lose members at the beginning, but Beca speaks out against the rules and continues to fraternize with Jesse (a Treblemaker). The two don’t embrace and kiss until the end, but it’s another traditional rule broken. Women don’t want male legislators policing their bodies, but they also don’t want other women doing so either (in the name of tradition and virtue, or competition with men).
The group has one member who frequently makes jokes about her sexual exploits (“dude’s a hunter,” she says of her vagina, adapting to the double standard of being a stud) and wears revealing clothing and dances provocatively. She is not punished for this, and doesn’t have to change. Even Chloe is seen showering with a young man at the beginning of the film, with no judgment.
The Bellas’ token lesbian, a black woman, is whispered about and assumed to be gay. When they are all bonding toward the end of the film, they have a moment of honesty, when the members admit to secrets about themselves. Her secret isn’t that she’s gay, but that she has a gambling problem (that started after she and her girlfriend broke up, she says cavalierly, as it’s revealed that this ex-girlfriend is also a Bella). No big deal. Even if there were whispers at first, she didn’t find that to be part of her identity worth hiding. The joke about her sexuality was ultimately on the rest of the women.

As the Bellas wow the crowd at the finals, John says, surprised, “I would never expect it from an all-female group!” Gail responds, “Well, you are a misogynist at heart.” Even with its problems, Pitch Perfect ends on a note of women’s power. John gets put in his place, and while the all-male Treblemakers don’t win, they’re all working together at the beginning of the next school year. 

There are always tensions between generations, and when these generations are women who have essentially been at battle for rights and representation for hundreds–really thousands–of years, there are not going to be perfect transitions and easy paths.

Eight years ago, Bitch magazine co-founder Lisa Jarvis wrote a piece for Ms. entitled, “The End of Feminism’s Third Wave” (adapted from a speech she’d given to the National Women’s Studies Association). She adeptly breaks down the dichotomy of second- and third-wave, and argues that the “master narratives” are largely false, and no one can seem to focus on the similarities. She says:
The rap goes something like this: Older women drained their movement of sexuality; younger women are uncritically sexualized. Older women won’t recognize the importance of pop culture; younger women are obsessed with media representation. Older women have too narrow a definition of what makes a feminist issue; younger women are scattered and don’t know what’s important.Stodgy versus frivolous. Won’t share power versus spoiled and ignorant.

The Bellas at the end break out and win.

There are many similarities, though. And while Pitch Perfect isn’t perfect, it is not tone-deaf to feminism’s struggles, problems and potential. It passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors, and even challenges the idea of masculinity (Jesse’s roommate gushes about the Treblemakers, “That’s what being a man is all about”). The Bellas ultimately win because they blend the old with the new, and allow themselves to move past their guarded individualism and work together. At the end, the women of color get a strong voice, and Aubrey embraces the changes (and Fat Amy proudly sings, “Can you feel the passion?”).

Jarvis goes on:
We may not all agree on exactly what it looks like or how to get it. We should never expect to agree. Feminism has always thrived on and grown from internal discussions and disagreements. Our many different and often opposing perspectives are what push us forward… I want to see these internal disagreements continue. I want to see as much wrangling over them as ever. But I want them articulated accurately. And that means recognizing the generational divide for what it is — an illusion.

Jarvis’s words ring true for the larger feminist movement in 2012, and for what allows the Bellas to win the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella at Lincoln Center. 

What feminism needs now is for everyone to get on stage.



—

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Female Sexuality in Polley’s Disappointing ‘Take This Waltz’

This small, Canadian romantic indie film starring Seth Rogen, Michelle Williams and Luke Kirby and directed by Sarah Polley seems like it should a moving and insightful film about relationships (much like Michelle Williams earlier movie, Blue Valentine, was). However, despite its female centered love triangle, the film offers little of interest.

If you were to read the synopsis of this film on IMDB it would tell you that “A happily married woman falls for the artist across the street,” a pretty uninformative summary since it’s apparent from the first scene that Margot is unhappy and struggling in her marriage.  The film follows Margot (Michelle Williams) as a slightly off-kilter aspiring writer married to chicken cookbook-writer Lou (Seth Rogen). Margot meets Daniel (Luke Kirby) while doing research for a pamphlet she’s writing and then again on the plane, only to discover that he lives on the same street as her. And so begins their romance, full of clichéd significant looks and fevered whispers, as they get lost in the forbidden.

Unfortunately, my two sentence synopsis was far more interesting than the movie itself, since much of the movie was long shots of Williams looking confused and depressed and Rogen acting oblivious.  The music was a particularly pretentious brand of lackluster indie and on the whole, the film just felt like it was trying too hard to be profound.

In reality, the best parts of the film came from Margot’s interaction with her sister in law, Geraldine or the brilliant Sarah Silverman. Silverman’s character is a recovering alcoholic who, at the end of the film, offers one of the two best lines in the film, “Life has a gap in it, it just does, but you can’t go crazy trying to fill it.” (She’s also a part of a legitimately funny scene involving the incredible world of water aerobics, I tried to find a clip of it online, but alas, I failed).

It’s after the water aerobics scene when we get the second best line of the film, delivered by a naked older woman in the women’s locker room (a great scene by Polley that doesn’t shy away from the normally unsightly issue of aging and women’s bodies—read more about it here); Margot is wistfully considering the merits of “something new” with Geraldine and the woman smiles wisely and replies “New things become old.”

There was a subplot of the film that had some potential as well had it been developed a bit more, in particular the issue of Margot’s sexuality. It’s obvious that Margot and Lou are not the most sexually active of couples since we see Margot attempt to seduce Lou several times, only to be rejected in favor of his cooking. While the lack of sex doesn’t seem to especially bother him, it could be argued that one of the reasons Margot continues to seek after Daniel is the promise of sexual discovery that he offers her. At one point in the film, there is a montage of Daniel and Margot having sex  (it sounds spicy, but really, don’t get excited) where it becomes apparent that Margot is finally able to explore that part of herself; the premise was interesting and one that I think many women can identify with, however I think it could have been fleshed out a little more.

I wanted this film to be good; the trailer was interesting, all of the actors are talented, and Polley is a promising new director (and you know how Bitch Flicks feels about new female directors). While there were good moments and unique ideas being toyed with, the film was, in reality, a lukewarm portrayal of a good topic; in short, I was bored most of the time. 

**Cross posted from Not Another Wave

—

Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and it’s intersection, however she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.

Counterreading ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’

Reality television has never held much appeal for me. I get plenty of reality in reality, thanks – I like my TV fictional. Besides, hasn’t the last decade or more of respectable journalism assured me, in the shrillest possible tones, that reality TV is the very lowest form of entertainment, positively reveling in the filth of humanity’s worst, most voyeuristic excesses: a Coliseum for the digital age?
SATIRE!!!1111!1
Even without watching it myself, I’ve become less and less comfortable with the traditional critiques of reality TV as I’ve sharpened my critical apparatus. For a start, it seems predicated on the notion of a hierarchy of art, the assumption that some forms of entertainment are somehow innately higher or better than others. It’s a terribly condescending form of knee-jerk moralizing.And if you don’t ever watch it, it’s a bit presumptuous to be judgmental about the whole genre.
I’ve tried to stay in the moral middle ground, having no real opinion on reality TV other than that it’s not for me. I’d likely have continued my reality-TV-free existence, had it not been for this excellent piece at the incomparable Womanist Musings.
Renee and Sparky watched TLC’s infamous Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, the reality show about six-year-old beauty pageant contestant Alana and her working-class Georgia family, and their reaction was not necessarily what you’d expect. They make many terrific points about how repugnant the show is as a piece of television, how it “other[s the family] at every turn,” but they also offer an invaluable counterreading. They like this family – the four daughters aged between six and seventeen, the quiet father figure, and heroic matriarch June – and they’ll continue to like them, no matter what the show’s structure seems to want us to think.
I love them all, but “Pumpkin” is my favorite.
If you consume entertainment and have any conscience at all, you are a practiced counterreader. You have to be, if you’re going to stand up to the hateful kyriarchal bullshit with which 21st-century westerners are bombarded every minute of the day. All responsible entertainment consumption requires a risk assessment, weighing the potential value to be gained against the potential harm to be done, and everybody’s evaluation is slightly different. For one person, well-rounded white female characters but no characters of color is worth the trade-off; for another, it simply isn’t. And sometimes performing an adequate counterreading requires you to marshal all your critical resources.
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is not a text that welcomes counterreadings with open arms. Operating well within the established format of reality television, it utilizes an arsenal of techniques – both subtle and not so much – to impel voyeurism. TLC makes it very, very easy to sneer at and judge Honey Boo Boo and her family. You have to work quite hard to counteract this compulsion. You really have to be on the critical ball the whole time. And is that okay?
All summer the debate has raged as to whether, or to what extent, the show is exploitative. Having watched all of it inside of a week, I’m still undecided. There are moments when June and the girls express a self-awareness and a confidence that has me cheering them to the skies, sure that their assertions of not caring what people think of them are sincere. At times, though – especially when outsiders arebrought in to interact with the family, an etiquette teacher or a pedicurist, and get all flustered and shocked by them – the whole thing seems enormously exploitative and gross.
It’s this indeterminacy, this openness to a multiplicity of different interpretations, that has the national conversation about Honey Boo Boo going so fiercely. As Time’s James Poniewozik observes:
…overall, she has a kind of sassy sweetness to her. In the second episode, she gets a pet teacup pig as consolation for losing a pageant and decides to dress him as a girl, which she says will make him gay. The ensuing argument with her older sister is both ridiculous and oddly wise in a 6-year-old way: “It’s not gonna be gay.” “Yes it is, because we’re making it a girl pig! And it’s actually a boy pig!” “O.K., but it’s not gonna be gay.” “It can if it wants to. You can’t tell that pig what to do.”
You can’t tell that pig what to do. See, you can look at that scene, like you can most of Honey Boo Boo, several ways. You can laugh at the intensity of Alana’s conviction that she’s right. You can tut-tut at the gender-role signals this pageant girl must be getting to conclude that you can “make” someone or something gay by dressing it in girl clothes. But you can also see something kind of remarkable in it: a little country girl, whatever confusion and misinformation she has in her mind, fervently arguing a teacup pig’s right to determine its own sexual identity.
AWWW
There are plenty of other interesting aspects of this show (Salon considers the race angle; Slate tackles the class issue), but the two that can’t be ignored are the gender dynamic and the class factor. The gender dynamic is pretty glorious: five strong, opinionated women who love each other deeply and don’t take anyone’s shit. They do what they want to do, they look how they want to look, and they are happy. Dare I suggest that one of the reasons the country’s spent its summer in thrall to these people is that we just don’t see women like this in our scripted entertainment?
Of course, it’s rare to see poor white people portrayed sympathetically on US TV at all. My understanding of class in the US is much less nuanced than my understanding of the British class system, but I’m aware of this country’s distaste for its own working poor. “Rednecks” appear in the media as rapists, as racists, as the butt of jokes and the object of revulsion. Voyeurism and disgust motivate hate-watching in our culture to an obscene degree, and that is why I think it’s important to perform a counterreading, to celebrate this family and refuse to let your responses be dictated by classism and hatred. If you want to be truly horrified by your fellow humans, check outthe comments on this Gawker article (I hope you have a strong stomach). To me, this is the aspect of Honey Boo Boo that’s truly awful – not a happy family letting a camera crew into their lives in exchange for some money they surely need, but the legions of haters who judge Honey Boo Boo and her family to be less human, less worthy of dignity and respect for their life choices, than themselves.
The family certainly does not reciprocate that sentiment. Even in the throes of labor agony, when asked, “Do you recommend to anybody else to get pregnant at 17?”, oldest daughter Anna replies, “Do whatever you want to do.” She just refuses to tell anyone else what to do with their body or their life. The rest of America – from legislators to judgmental internet commenters – could learn something from her.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Presidential Debate Update: Where Are the Women(‘s Issues)?

The first presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama

The first presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney was much less intriguing than every pundit and media ogler alike was hoping for. We wanted zingers and gaffes, but had to settle for the mildly miffed, but embarrassingly unassertive, Jim Lehrer. The NewsHour host may have gotten memed even more than the candidates since the debate. But, sorry Big Bird, even an outraged PBS isn’t that interesting.

Yes, many media followers, long for the days of primary debates when tom-foolery and missteps abounded. Those were the days when follow-up commentary was bountiful and hilarious. The Ricks, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich may have outraged feminists, but damn they made our job of dissecting dickery easy.

Yes, the debate was “wonky” but all three men involved didn’t seem keen on bringing up the social issues that have been driving political discourse this year.

So, we feminist bloggers have to talk about what wasn’t talked about. And, frankly, there’s only so much fascination I can draw up from between the lines. Women’s health was not just glanced over, but completely ignored. And that was a disappointment – not for gossip’s sake, but because our candidates should be representing these issues as valuable. No, women’s health and reproductive rights should not be categorized as a distracting issue, but should be recognized as fundamentally intertwined with the issues determining the health of our country.

See, our candidates seem to consider economic and health care issues separate from social issues. But, marginalized folks understand via experience that they are not. Moderate Romney and Moderate Obama both stuck to taxes and the role of government while referencing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Dodd-Frank but not addressing how social issues are connected.

Discounting social issues and focusing on the “real” issues like the economy misses the point that these issues are not exclusive. No, the economy is not more real than women trying to cover the costs of their health insurance while looking for work in a bad economy.

The ACA makes it illegal for insurance companies to discriminate among genders when providing coverage. And it makes contraception more easily accessible. It basically stops allowing the practice of treating men as the generic sex – as in; people should get good coverage for the same costs regardless of gender and/or sex. This is a pretty important aspect of the ACA that was not looked at during the debate.

So we can hope that we see these discussions happen in upcoming debates. Hopefully our candidates and moderators don’t shy away from these issues. Candy Crowley, we’re looking to you. 

‘Carousel’: A Fairytale Screen Adaptation of the 2012 Republican Anti-Woman Agenda

Movie poster for Carousel

I loved this film. When I was 13 or so.

Re-watching it this week—for the purpose of writing about how much I admired the way it handled domestic violence issues (in 1956, no less)—I realized my 13-year-old self understood jack shit about misogyny in film, and she certainly didn’t understand what constitutes successfully raising awareness about violence against women.
The only thing I can think to say about Carousel now, as a 34-year-old woman who’s been both a witness to and a victim of physical abuse at the hands of men, isn’t just that I’m appalled by its sexism or the blasé nature in which it deals with physical abuse (I am), but that I’m seriously freaked out by how a movie musical from sixty years ago manages to feel like a fairytale screen adaptation of the 2012 Republican anti-woman agenda.

A film written, directed, and produced in 1956 will obviously echo the cultural climate of the 1950s, and during that time, rigid gender roles permeated; primarily, men were the breadwinners, and women were the homemakers. And advertisements like this existed:

Women can work outside the home now without the universe exploding (thanks, bros!), but that doesn’t mean we don’t still regularly deal with nonsense I mean gang rape fantasy advertisements like this: 

We’ve come a long way, baby? I don’t fucking think so. But I’ll get back to that. 
First of all, the plot: Billy Bigelow is a barker (a person who tries to attract patrons) at a carousel, and all the ladies love him, including Mrs. Mullin, the carousel owner. Billy catches the eye of the young, pretty Julie Jordan and helps her onto the carousel like she’s a child, and then stands next to her the whole time, staring at her like a fucking serial killer. The jealous Mrs. Mullin kicks out Julie and her friend Carrie, and when Julie argues about being treated unfairly, Mrs. Mullin slut-shames her for a supposed indiscretion with Billy. The indiscretion? Julie let Billy put his arm around her waist. Floozy! 

Billy and Julie in Carousel
Billy appears out of nowhere to defend Julie, and as a result, Mrs. Mullin fires him. In one of the most offensive moments in the film, Billy smacks Mrs. Mullin on the ass and says, “Go on, then, git,” as if she were an animal.

Carrie decides to go home (they have a curfew because apparently being a woman and being a child are the same thing in 1956), but Julie refuses—even though she knows it’ll mean getting fired from her job as a mill worker—because she wants to spend time with this older man whom she knows nothing about, except that he wants to bum money from her; that he’s a womanizer; and that he keeps asking “aren’t you scared of me?” like he’s offended that she isn’t. (Man up, Bigelow!)

This is a movie musical, though, so within the next five seconds Julie and Billy sing a song about love. I’m not going to pretend I don’t love this song.



They get married. Billy can’t (or won’t) find work, so they live off Julie’s aunt. Billy—because he’s so distraught and self-loathing about his inability to find employment—physically abuses Julie (off-screen), but he admits he did it because “we would argue, and she’d be right.” Well then!

Billy basically ignores her for the entire rest of the film in favor of hanging out with his criminal friend Jigger (WTF) until Julie tells Billy she’s pregnant, at which point he caresses her arms and stomach as he helps her walk up like five steps because oh my god delicate flower carrying his spawn.

I laughed in horror at the spawn-song soliloquy that follows; it perfectly encapsulates the creepy gender constraints of 2012 I mean 1956:


“His mother can teach him the way to behave, but she won’t make a sissy out of him. Not him! Not my boy! Not Bill! Bill … my boy Bill; I will see that he’s named after me, I will. My boy, Bill! He’ll be tall and tough as a tree, will Bill!”
The song continues in the same ridiculous fashion, with Billy listing off all the shit His Boy Bill might do when he gets older (e.g. hammering spikes, ferrying a boat, hauling a scow along a canal, becoming a heavyweight champ, or, if that doesn’t work out, maybe becoming the President of the United States, duh). But then, Billy’s all—“Wait a minute! Could it be? What the hell! What if he is a girl?” Actual lyrics.

Let the horror get more horrifying.

Listen. “You can have fun with a son, but you gotta be a father to a girl.” Got it? And this girl, she’ll have ribbons in her hair, and she’ll be pink and white as peaches and cream! We don’t experience the pleasure of hearing about what Peaches and Cream Girl will do with her life, but we definitely get an earful about 1) her looks and 2) all the things Daddy needs to do before her arrival. Suddenly—at the mere prospect of raising a girl child instead of a boy child—Daddy goes all Male Provider on our asses.


Let me not forget to mention this end of the song creep-out moment: “Dozens of boys pursue her. Many a likely lad does what he can to woo her from her faithful dad. She has a few pink and white young fellers of two or three, but my little girl gets hungry every night, and she comes home to me!” What is this—a song from one of those 100% unacceptable for obvious reasons father-daughter purity balls? (That lovely little tradition started as recently as 1998, by the way.)


In the end, Billy dies by falling on his own knife (seriously, fail) when he and Jigger try to steal money from a rich dude. After his death, he passes on to some makeshift Heaven-type situation where he polishes fake plastic stars for all of eternity, and for some reason, the owners of Heaven allow him to return to Earth for a day in order to help Julie and his daughter feel less horrible about him having been an overall shitty husband and criminal. Yay.


By this point, his daughter Louise is fifteen years old. Upon his return to Earth, Billy finds Louise dancing on the beach and, after he realizes everyone keeps making fun of her because of his robbery attempt, he tries to cheer her up—by giving her one of the fake plastic stars he stole (ha ha ha theft again) from Heaven.


But Louise refuses to take it! Because who the fuck is this dude!


And what does she get for refusing a gift from a random man who showed up out of nowhere? A slap on the hand. Literally. The same man who physically abused his wife when he was alive somehow walks out of Heaven and slaps the shit out of his daughter within the first ten minutes of meeting her for the first time. That isn’t even the worst of it.


The worst of it?

She runs inside to tell her mother that a strange man on the beach slapped her—but—but—it didn’t feel like a slap, she says; it felt like a kiss.

Awwwww, that’s sweet, right? Nope! Not for a fucking second. Let me tell you why.


I started this piece by talking about how my thirteen-year-old girl self remembered Carousel as a happy musical that shed light on a bad man who hit his wife. I remembered, too, that he died, but I remembered it as a punishment of sorts, a repercussion caused by living life as an abusive dickface who treated women like absolute shit. I didn’t care about his death. His death felt like a consequence of bad behavior to me, and in a way, it is—stealing money from someone at knifepoint is probably wrong, for the most part, heh. But the ultimate message of Carousel (that I somehow glommed onto as a teenager) isn’t saying to men: “Don’t abuse women, or else.” It’s saying something closer to: “SEE WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T MAN UP AND SUPPORT YOUR WOMEN, YOU LAZY BUMS?”


It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of “failing” as a man. It’s oh-so-1956. It’s oh-so-2012.

We’re living in an age in which women’s basic rights—specifically the right to bodily autonomy, including safe and legal access to abortion—keep coming under fire by conservative Republicans and unfortunately aren’t more than half-assedly defended by supposed “progressive” Democrats, either. Further, the arguments against abortion and reproductive rights center around this lie that it’s all about Stopping the Murder of Innocent, Yet-To-Be Born Infants.

Bullshit.

The abortion debate (and now the access to birth control debate—for fuck’s sake!) exists because we live in a culture that time warped to, or possibly never actually left, 1956. Women are still fighting for basic human rights—in 2012—because power-hungry, neo-conservative bullies can’t stop jerking off to the fantasy of living out the rest of their lives in Carousel-Land.

That’s why re-watching this harmless little musical made me absolutely cringe.

It’s a film with dizzying dance sequences and well-known musical numbers to be sure, but it’s also a film in which women are valued and treated with respect only while pregnant, and who are otherwise disregarded, objectified, slut-shamed, abused, or infantilized, and who are expected to accept the actions of the men around them without judgment, regardless of the harm those actions may cause. And there you have it, readers: the 2012 G.O.P. Platform. 

Now let’s all cry together: