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Guest Writer Wednesday: On Sam Mendes’s Almost Feminist Revolutionary Road

Winslet and DiCaprio star in Revolutionary Road
Revolutionary Road (2008) is almost a feminist film. It also just falls short of being something more than the hackneyed anti-suburbia types of film Sam Mendes revels in making.
A couple, who once fell in love over common artistic dreams, pulls off to the side of a highway to engage in verbal combat, sparked by the kitschy play the wife has just acted in, that threatens to turn physical. Each blames the other.
April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) reflects on their life together throughout the next day. As she drags her metal trash cans to the curb to join the others aligned down both sides of their anything-but-revolutionary road, she recalls her real estate agent introducing her and her husband, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), to their future home, the typically perfect white suburban house. Later, as she looks through old photographs, a second flashback recalls a conversation with Frank where she told him he was the most interesting man she had ever met.
As April reminisces about the hopes of the past, Frank woos a secretary at his cliché-ridden office job in a sales department. He gets her drunk, uses her as a shrink to confess that he has turned into his father despite his best intentions, and—as you already have guessed—sleeps with her. When he returns home past dusk, April meets him with smiles, an enthusiastic apology, and a birthday cake with thirty lit candles. Frank cries as his wife and two children—one girl, one boy—sing to him.
At this point I thought to myself, à la SNL’s Seth Meyers and alum Amy Poehler, “Really? Really? Do we really need to see another suburbia-is-the-ninth-circle-of-hell film? Really?” Hadn’t Mad Men already taken this trite formula to its farcical limits? The irony has lost its whip; there’s no need to tell us that life on Revolutionary Road is the conservative fast lane to Hades. We’ve been wise to the parable for some time: American beauty is anything but.
When I saw Frank washing away his infidelities in the shower, I puked a little in my mouth.
But then something unexpected happened. Instead of Kevin Spacey throwing a plate against a wall and toking up with his teenage daughter’s boyfriend, April lays bare the message of films like American Beauty. Road becomes meta-cinematic when she tells Frank:

Well, I happen to think this (suburban life) is unrealistic. I think it’s unrealistic for a man with a fine mind to go on working like a dog year after year at a job he can’t stand, coming home to a place he can’t stand, to a wife who’s equally unable to stand the same things. You want to know the worst part? Our whole existence here is based on this great premise that we’re somehow very special and superior to the whole thing, and you know what I’ve realized…? We’re not! We’re just like everyone else. Look at us!  We’ve bought into the same ridiculous delusion. This idea that you have to resign from life and settle down the moment you have children. And we’ve been punishing each other for it.

With this piece of dialogue, a character within the film’s diegetic reality provides an accurate account of the predicament of the film’s starring couple…near the beginning of the film! Road replaces Beauty’s device of a dead male narrator who knows the foibles of his life only after it is over with a living, breathing, and INTELLIGENT female character who knows them and wants out before it’s too late. In a later scene, she tells one of their neighbors that she actually wants “in” to life, a nice reversal that equates suburban living with death, that favorite topic of anti-consumerist zombie films.
After some initial resistance, Frank agrees with April’s analysis and her diagnosis. They will move to Paris so that he may figure out what he wants to do with his life while she supports the family on secretary’s wages (thanks to France’s fairer treatment of women workers). Although such a plan seems anti-feminist on the surface, and one neighbor says as much upon hearing it, there is something liberating about it. Shots follow of April and Frank almost glowing with the prospect that they will soon be leaving the humdrum rhythms of Eisenhower America.
Of course, the best-laid plans of mice and couples often go awry, and the Wheelers fail to make it to Paris (I mused that their voyage would be cut short somewhere in the north Atlantic anyway). The Wheelers’ plans go awry when Frank comes up with a business slogan that impresses his higher-ups so much that they offer him a promotion. The irony is that Frank’s sudden show of corporate creativity only comes after he has convinced himself to leave. The mere thought of becoming a class traitor opens the wells of inspiration trapped inside him not a moment too late, which is so often the case, but a moment too early. The prospect of becoming a well-compensated company man leads him to waver on his early retirement. As if this were not enough, April discovers that she is pregnant with their third child. Although they convince each other that Paris is still in the cards, the odds seem stacked against them.
Here is where our co-heroes separate into their roles as protagonist and antagonist. I assert that Frank betrays April by buying into the “realist” narrative of his friends and colleagues, i.e. the American middle class. Notably, in the key scene where he dismisses Paris as a pipe dream, he responds to April’s proposal of an abortion like a Right-wing conservative. 
April, a normal woman, a normal sane mother doesn’t buy herself a piece of rubber tubing to give herself an abortion so she can go live out some goddamned fantasy.
He reduces her to a scolded child, the idea of moving to Paris now considered a “childish dream.” Frank promptly resumes fucking his secretary like the mad man that he has become (and unconsciously always was and desired to be despite himself).
The ensuing fight between the Wheelers parallels the one that opens the film with one significant difference: although they both recognize that Truth has just spake, only April refuses to ignore it. She no longer loves Frank precisely because he is no longer the man she married, the man who wanted more from life than a cookie-cutter existence, and she reaffirms this fact. Frank cannot handle the Truth, and does his best to defend against it. He speaks for April, putting words in her mouth that she cannot express because she no longer loves him. April has not grown cold to him because of his unfaithfulness with another woman—April sleeps with another man, too—but his infidelity to himself.
The film should end with the two most disturbing scenes of all.
First, Frank awakens to find April playing Stepford wife. She pauses from cooking breakfast when he enters the kitchen and apologizes, just as she does earlier in the film with the birthday cake and party, except this time her words sound eerily scripted. Because Frank no longer cares about Truth and desires only to live in bad faith, he plays along, a bit surprised but also pleasantly amused. When he leaves, one gets the sense that he has bought into the male-centric American Dream. One knows that April hasn’t.

The second scene finds April crying in front of her mirror after Frank has left. She makes a fitful call where she threatens to break down at any moment to the babysitter watching her kids to ask if she can prolong her duties. The egg yolks that the camera focused on her scrambling in the prior scene retroactively become a foreshadowing moment, as she methodically carries out the abortion. When she descends the stairs, the camera focuses on her unsteady feet. Her face is pale. She goes to the window. The sun shines upon her and she lets out a small smile. Then a drip of blood falls to the carpet. The camera pans back to show a pool of blood expanding on the back of her skirt. She slowly moves out of the frame to make a phone call, “I think I need an ambulance…Yes…One one five Revolutionary Road…”

A perfectly disturbing end, right? No! Mendes cannot help but steal the show from his now ex-wife. Instead of ending with a shot of the blood on the carpet—the blotch in suburbia that betrays it a violent, life-draining lie—and April voicing the title of the film offscreen, Mendes includes a coda, a series of short scenes that a) turn the film anti-feminist and b) reinstate the generic codes of the cinematic anti-suburbia tract. 
Instead of being left with a woman who may or may not be in critical condition, we learn that April dies, and her death acts as a sacrifice to return the men to normalcy. Frank moves to the city with his kids, thus finding some compromise between Paris and the American suburbs. The neighbor, who professed his unrequited love for April after she slept with him, becomes closer with his wife. We might brush these scenes against the grain to argue that they are the most feminist part of all because they show that female sacrifice undergirds the American Dream of the middle class, but they also inspire an unwarranted sympathy for Frank. The men are allowed to mourn almost as an act of contrition.
The final insult comes in the concluding scene where Mrs. Helen Givings (Kathy Bates) tells her husband about how the new couple who has moved into the Wheelers’ house seems perfect for their abode. When the husband reminds her that she said much the same when the Wheelers moved in, she claims that she always knew that something was not right about the Wheelers, showing us that she, too, continues to live in bad faith by refusing to treat her Truth-telling son as the normal one (and not the folks she sells houses to). In my vote for the platitudinous scene of the decade, the husband is shown turning down the volume on his hearing aid.

Road should resolutely not be framed as a film about all suburbanites remaining deaf to the truth of their existence, as Mendes’s grandiloquent closing sequence suggests. The film is resolutely not about everyone’s bad faith. One woman, in the great tradition of Ibsen’s Nora Helmer, remains faithful to reality in an unreal setting and demonstrates her sanity despite her insane husband and unfaithful director.

Kirk Boyle has previously contributed a Flick-Off of The Day the Earth Stood Still to Bitch Flicks.

Working Women in Film

Yesterday was Labor Day here in the U.S., and we wanted to highlight some films about working women.
When I sat down to write this post, I thought it would be relatively easy: brainstorm and research a list of movies about working women. But the more I searched, the more frustrating the list became. I kept coming across the same movies. These movies:
  1. 9 to 5
  2. Baby Boom
  3. Boomerang
  4. Broadcast News
  5. Clockwatchers
  6. The Devil Wears Prada
  7. Disclosure
  8. Erin Brockavich
  9. Frozen River
  10. His Girl Friday
  11. Julia
  12. Legally Blonde
  13. Mahogany
  14. Maid in Manhattan
  15. Marnie
  16. Mildred Pierce
  17. Network
  18. North Country
  19. The Proposal
  20. Secretary
  21. Silkwood
  22. The Ugly Truth
  23. Wendy and Lucy
  24. Woman of the Year
  25. Working Girl

A quick glance at the list and the most basic familiarity with the titles (which vary in decade and genre, and range from horribly anti-feminist to some of our personal favorites) reveals some disturbing trends:

The women featured in these films–the protagonists–are overwhelmingly white. Where are the women of color? 
Professions in which women work–every imaginable profession–aren’t widely represented. Most of the women here have Careers rather than Jobs, although the careers are heavily in the secretarial /assistant arena. In the newer films, the women who are working class, as Caryn James points out in Slate’s XXFactor,  are heavy on criminality. 
The Hollywood working-class heroine is usually a Norma Rae or Erin Brockovich, a reformer making a grand social gesture. The new indie films more authentically depict their characters’ workaday lives. That’s why it’s so disappointing to find them undermining their own heroines, reinforcing an assumption that should have been blasted away long ago—that the poor are morally suspect and quick to steal. 
Nobody gets ruder treatment than career women, who are routinely portrayed as bossy, uptight and utterly without personal lives. What they need, we’re supposed to think, is a man. But before they can get one, they must have a mortifying comeuppance.
These observations on my incomplete list lead me to a few questions:

How do we define “movies about working women?” First, I want differentiate movies that feature women who work from movies about working women. The former category could include almost any contemporary movie with a major female character. But, movies that are thematically about working women are a different, rarer thing. They question what it means to be a working woman in a culture that is both dependent upon and hostile to them.

How do we define “working woman?” A working woman is not a rare thing; nearly all women work. Women have professional careers and jobs of all sorts. There are lawyers, teachers, doctors, writers, police…the list is endless. Try to argue that a woman who cares for her children isn’t a working woman, even though, I suspect, many people tend to equate work with wage. How do we define work? What does our definition of work and its role in our lives mean for women? Does it mean something different for men? Do you think of yourself as a “worker?”

And a couple of possible conclusions:

Women of color who are workers don’t weigh heavily in the American cultural imagination. When women of color appear in films, they tend to be secondary characters in low-paying jobs. Rarely do we see movies about working women who happen to be women of color. Rarely have I seen it, at least, which may be a personal failing.
All in all, I’m not very happy with this list, and I’d love to enlist your help in making it more complete.

Readers, help out! What are some of your favorite movies about working women?

*Remember, we’re not just talking about movies that feature women who work, but ones that explore what it means to be a working woman.


UPDATE: Readers have contributed additional films to the list. Here they are so far (we’ll continue to add any films you suggest):


All About Eve
The Apartment
Cleo from 5 to 7
Dancer in the Dark
Easter Parade
Gypsy 
Mr. Mom
Places in the Heart
Showgirls
Sunshine Cleaning
Waitress
Winter’s Bone

Guest Post: Holy Hypocrisy: Couples Retreat

This guest post first appeared on the blog I Will Not Diet.
For years, we have lived in a society that requires the majority of its female actors to have ridiculously impeccable bodies if they want to get work while their male counterparts are allowed to age normally, adding a few pounds to their waistline every few years. In fact, it’s highly unusual to see male actors have to answer for their weight and—more often than not—only the opposite occurs.
Actor Faizon Love as Shane
There are NUMEROUS examples of this phenomenon—Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin, Dustin Hoffman, Vince Vaughn, Al Pacino, Robert Deniro, even the recently filled out Jimmy Smits. But you’d be hard-pressed to name five female actors who have put on the pounds and continued to work.
Yes, Meryl Streep is not as slim as she was thirty years ago, but she certainly doesn’t have a bulging stomach like these men do. Her stomach is, in fact, quite fit. And the fact that she’s as tall as she is and wears a size fourteen tells me that you probably can’t pinch more than an inch around her middle.
Not only is this phenomenon made obvious by looking at these actors, it’s also made obvious by considering the television shows and films in our cultural zeitgeist: Knocked Up, The Break-up, King of Queens, Still Standing, According to Jim, Seinfeld, Frasier, and the list goes on.
This issue has bothered me for quite some time, but it really came to a head for me when I saw Couples Retreat on video recently (a movie that is so inane, unfortunately, I can’t recommend it). And, as it turns out, there is a scene in this movie that perfectly embodies this double standard (while also failing Bechdel with a vengeance usually only reserved for movies with only one major female celebrity), and I want to talk more about that scene today—as well as illustrate it—because it is, in fact, so egregious.
If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about four couples that decide to go on an island retreat to improve their marriages. One of the couples is considering divorce, and their troubles are the original impetus for the trip (though later we find out that other couples are struggling in some way).
The group shot
What none of them know until they get there is that the resort where they are going is one that requires all of them to participate in a bunch of feel-good hocus pocus in order to bring some life back into their relationships.
And on the morning after their arrival, the first thing they are told to do on the beach is strip down to their underwear. I can’t remember the exact thinking about this, but it probably had something to do with needing to bare themselves to each other.
I knew all along that the women were in better shape than the men, but when they took their clothes off, I was simply astonished.
Davis, Akerman, and Bell
The women—Kristin Davis, Malin Akerman, Kristen Bell, and Kali Hawk (not pictured here)—are insanely gorgeous specimens, both buff enough to kick some serious cardio butt at the gym and beautiful enough to grace the cover of any magazine.
Bateman, Vaughn, and Favreau
But when the men—Jason Bateman, Vince Vaughn, John Favreau, and Faizon Love (not pictured here)—take off their clothes, they are all man boobs and beer guts. Even the thinnest of them—Bateman—reveals a surprisingly flabby middle.
Though I couldn’t find a picture that included the fourth couple, you can see that they also demonstrate the same double standard in this photo and clip from the movie:
Love and Hawk
It was at this moment—seeing these two diametrically opposed groups standing across from each other on an idyllic beach in paradise—that I realized there was something really wrong with the expectations we have for female celebrities. Sure, I always knew we held them to unrealistic expectations but never before had I seen such a clear picture of how hypocritical this double standard really is.
Simply put, in our society we are willing to let men look real and still be considered attractive but completely unwilling to make the same allowances for women.
I mean, my God, look at this picture of Kristin Davis:
Kristin Davis in lingerie
The woman is in her mid-forties (!!!!!), and she still has a body like a twenty-year-old!
That’s just not normal.
And if we don’t allow the women in our movies and on our television shows—in their thirties, forties, and fifties—to look normal or have even an iota of body fat, then how can we ever be happy with our own very real and imperfect bodies? How can we ever see a movie and feel good about ourselves again?
The answer is that we can’t, and until we stop these images from being hurled at us time and again—in our living rooms, magazines, and movie theatres—we stand no chance of accepting ourselves the way we are.
So I say we vote with our dollars and refuse to see movies that feature couples who are so poorly matched on a physical level.
It may take a while for Hollywood notice, but eventually they’ll get the hint.

Molly McCaffrey teaches English and creative writing at Western Kentucky University. Her blog, I Will Not Diet, chronicles her effort to lose weight without unhealthy dieting and encourages readers to reject the notion that curvy women are not attractive. She has been nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in numerous magazines and books. She is also co-editor of the newly released Commutability: Stories about the Journey from Here to There. She previously contributed a post about the film Whip It for Bitch Flicks.


Movie Review: Inception

The plot of Inception is deceptively simple: a tale of corporate espionage sidetracked by a man’s obsession with his dead wife and complicated by groovy special effects and dream technology. As far as summer blockbusters and action/heist/corporate espionage movies go, it’s not bad. Once you get beyond the genuinely beautiful camera work and dizzying special effects, however, you’re not left with much.

One thing that really bothers me about the film–aside from its dull, lifeless, stereotypical, and utterly useless female characters (which I’ll get to in a moment)–is that nothing is at stake. Dom Cobb (Leo DiCaprio) and his team take on a big new job: one seemingly powerful businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), wants an idea planted into the mind of another powerful businessman, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). Specifically, Saito wants Fischer to believe that dear old dad’s dying wish was for him to break up the family business, so that, we assume, Saito wins the game of capitalism. Should the team go through with the profitable job? We aren’t supposed to care about the answer to this question or what is at stake in the plot.

It’s assumed that, of course we want Cobb to win because he’s really Leo, and, you see, Leo is talented but Troubled. What troubles him? You guessed it: a woman. A woman whose very name–Mal (played by Marion Cotillard, an immensely talented actress who’s wasted in this role)–literally means “bad.” Who or what will rescue Cobb/Leo from his troubles? You guessed it again: a woman. This time, it’s a woman whose very name–Ariadne (played by Ellen Page in a way that demands absolutely no commentary)–means “utterly pure,” and who is younger, asexual (a counter to Mal’s dangerous French sexuality) and without any backstory or past of her own to smudge the movie’s–and her own–focus on Cobb/Leo. So, it’s not a stretch here to say that Cobb needs a pure woman to escape the bad one. Virgin/whore stereotype, anyone?

SPOILER ALERT

So, what makes Mal so bad? In life, she was his faithful wife (for all we know) and mother of his two children. In the film, she’s not even a real woman, but a figment of Cobb’s imagination, haunting him with her suicide. (Note: For a better version of this story, see Tarkovsky’s Solaris, or the crappy Soderbergh adaptation starring George Clooney.) Her constant appearances threaten Cobb’s inception task, and while we can imagine a suicide haunting this hard-working man, we learn the much uglier truth later: while developing his theory of “inception,” Cobb used Mal as his first test subject–planting the idea in her mind that reality was not what she believed it to be. Now we have a main character who exacted extreme emotional violence on his wife, driving her kill herself–yet she’s the evil one.

What makes Ariadne so pure? It’s simple, really. We know she was a brilliant student of architecture, and…and…and…that’s it. The film needed an architectural dream space that wouldn’t be marred by trauma, or memory, or the like, so the natural choice would be for a computer program to design it, right? But a computer program couldn’t also counsel Cobb through the trauma of his wife’s suicide and, ultimately, coach him through killing her apparition. She is invested in getting through the job, as her life depends on it, but why does she give a damn about Cobb? Because she’s a woman architect, and women are nurturing creatures, right? So, we have a main character who exacted extreme emotional violence on his wife and threatens to kill his entire team through self-sabotage over guilt, but luckily he has one good woman to pull him through.

Is it possible to look differently at these two characters? Even if you read the movie as an allegory of filmmaking/storytelling, we’re still left with women who are sidekicks, and who serve merely as plot devices. Maria of The Hathor Legacy writes

Both Mal and Ariadne are symbols, not real characters, and I think this is reflected in the kinds of lines and characterization each is offered. In a movie where businessmen are dryly humorous, several million dollars are devoted to a man’s daddy-issues, and Dom’s nostalgic love for family is symbolized through a honey-heavy shot of golden light haloing his young moppets’ heads, the wooden-ness and flatness of the lines offered these characters is startlingly noticeable.

In other words, even if you refute the realism of the film and its characters, you’re still left with some major gender trouble. Is Cobb a sympathetic character? No. Do we want his big inception job to work? Don’t care. What I care about, for the purposes of this review, is that we have–yet again–a successful mainstream movie that relies on tired tropes of female characters.

Other interesting takes on Inception:

Guest Post: The Connection Between Sex and Money: Lizzie Borden’s WORKING GIRLS

Perhaps it was the unending coverage of Eliot Spitzer’s hooker shenanigans two years ago that reminded me of Lizzie Borden’s 1986 film Working Girls. I must have seen this for the first time in the late 1980s, when I was working in a video store and could rent any title for free. I avoided this one for a long time, as I thought that a film about female prostitutes wouldn’t particularly appeal to me; this was also just before hookers got Disneyfied in the form of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. But when I finally saw it, I was mesmerized. It has stayed in my mind since, though I did not actually see it again until quite recently. I’m happy to report that not only does the film hold up, but it is perhaps better in 2010 than it was in 1986.
Working Girls covers one day, late morning to evening, in a fairly upper-class New York City brothel, and is told largely through the eyes of Molly (played by the excellent Louise Smith), a Yale-educated lesbian whose African-American lover (who has a young daughter) doesn’t know what she’s doing for a living. Molly rides her bike through the streets of Manhattan after a cozy and domestic breakfast with her girlfriend and the child, and after parking her bike in one of the brothel’s rooms, dons a slinky but not slutty blue dress, applies makeup, and readies herself for the day’s work. She interrupts her colleague Gina (Marusia Zach) inserting a diaphragm; when asked why she doesn’t simply use a sponge or the pill, Gina replies, “I’m not screwing up my hormones for two shifts a week.” The work in question is depicted in a routine, definitely un-erotic fashion: the men who pay for Molly’s services are catalogues of ticks and fetishes and fantasies. One insists that Molly pretend to be blind so that he, the “doctor,” can cure her condition by taking her “virginity.” Another likes fairly standard bondage, while another gives her a wrapped package containing a beige shirt that Molly had admired on him the week before—he follows this gift by asking if he can see her “on the outside,” a request which Molly routinely turns down. The film admirably and somewhat bravely shows men with less-than-perfect bodies—in other words, normal men—and women whose breasts are not perky Playboy images, but real breasts: somewhat saggy, somewhat out of shape. The sex scenes sometimes have a startling pathos and poignancy: the men are all rather sad cases, either because they’re smarmy and arrogant, or because they’re painfully shy, inept, or so locked into their fantasies that they dare not reveal them to anyone they can’t pay. Particularly lovely is a moment where Molly coaches a very nervous guy about how to put his arm around his new girlfriend, how to kiss her, and how to know whether or not the time is right for sex. “What if she wants to have sex with me?” the man asks plaintively, and Molly’s kind and compassionate response highlights more than any other moment in the film the skill with which a prostitute makes her customers feel important—I truly can’t tell whether Molly actually likes this man or if it’s part of the act.
Far more interesting than the sex is what goes on between the sex. The brothel’s main room could be just another office: the girls have lunch, gossip, make fun of Lucy, their horrid boss (played with delirious bitchiness by Ellen McElduff), compare notes on the various “RGs” (regulars), talk about what their lives might have been and still could be. One of the girls is a college student, who has to leave her shift early, this being Thursday—she has a night class. The film’s feminist slant—the women are all strong in their own ways and have a competence and control in their work that is remarkably out of keeping with the image of prostitution as a slipshod and scattered profession—was probably something of a novelty for the mid-1980s, a time I remember of appalling backward conservatism. (Not that this time is much better, of course.) Working Girls is a time capsule in another sense: in a scene that is chilling in hindsight, a john refuses to wear a condom, and Gina informs him that this is okay, but that it will cost him extra—those were the early days, when AIDS was still a “gay disease.” But the true glory of the film is the way in which the mundane routines—again, this could be your standard office, and just as boring for its workers—are laid bare for the viewer: the procedures involving the phone, appointments (particularly whether or not the john is a “one”—one hour—or a “half”; he can “go” twice in a “one”), showers, towels, and the exchange of money. The girls are instructed to make sure that the customer is “completely comfortable”: in other words, naked, so that they’ll know he’s not a cop. Borden, who wrote the story and the screenplay, introduces a new employee, Mary (Helen Nicholas), so that Molly can show her around the house and teach her the ropes. There’s the standard pocketing of a little extra cash on the side, the standard faking of appointment lengths in the ledger, the standard smoking of pot when the boss lady’s gone. Lucy, the madam, appears midway through the film and again at the end, and is a gaudy tyrant and former prostitute herself, who is now the mistress of one of her own RGs (all of the other women in the house have slept with him too, declaring him “easy” to work with) and who yammers on incessantly about the panties she purchased that day, the ski trip she’s taking to Gstaad, and, above all, “class” and how the other girls don’t have it—all before getting taken out to be screwed by her former john at the Plaza Hotel. It’s reassuring to know that even a female pimp leaves something to be desired.
The film is very low-budget, and sounds as though it was looped in its entirety. But I find something very appealing in that mid-80s film stock in low-budget pictures—most 80s films feel too slick for my taste, and Working Girls has a tactile feel to it, a texture. It reminds me of the long conversations with my friend Brad in which we would wax rhapsodic about the glories of the graininess of 1970s film stock. Only a few films from the 80s have this feel: Working Girls is one; Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glancesand Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette are others. For want of a better phrase, this graininess, this texture, gives the viewer something to gnaw on, or something to cling to—you could slip and slide easily on most of the glitzy films of the decade. I’d actually hate to see Working Girls remastered, for the visual texture matches the subject matter. It’s a shame that Borden—who was born Linda Borden but changed her name to that of the axe-wielding figure of turn-of-the-century legend—who had directed the intense Born in Flames, about a futuristic socialist America, has vanished from the scene; after Working Girls she directed the flop Love Crimes with Sean Young, and since then has directed only a few episodes of soft-core programs like Red Shoe Diaries. American cinema needs in-your-face talent like Borden’s, at a time when films are more and more homogenized and user-friendly. Working Girls is anything but either.
Some might find the ending of Working Girls a bit predictable, but it gives the film a nice circular shape, and reinforces the film’s latent feminist intent, which is to show that these women are not stupid, not disease-ridden, not perverse. They have fallen into a profession that none of them can claim to enjoy, but one that they stay in from what might best be called a sense of inertia. “The two things I love most in life are sex and money,” says Lucy, in a rare moment of honesty. “I just never knew until much later they were connected.” Working Girls is probably the only film I’ve seen that explores that connection in a witty, sad, poignant, smart, raw, unglamorized, and surprisingly honest way.

Drew Patrick Shannon received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati, and currently teaches 19th and 20th century British literature at the College of Mount St. Joseph. He is at work on a novel and on a non-fiction book examining the diary of Virginia Woolf. A previous version of this post appeared on his blog, atleswoolf.

Guest Post: Deciphering Island Patriarchy: Finding Feminism in Lost

This guest post originally appeared at Girl with Pen!
With the 6th and final season upon us, will Lost finally zoom towards a feminist future? With the number of female characters dwindling and the simultaneous deification of hetero white males, can feminist Lost fans hope for a satisfying island conclusion?
Previous seasons have been a mixed bag on this count.
Lost has many strong female characters, many of whom I could easily see wearing a “This is what a feminist look like” t-shirt. As noted by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville, an admitted Lost junkie, “Generally, the female characters are more well-rounded than just about any other female characters on television, especially in ensemble casts.”
Lost has often presented ‘gender outside the box’ characters, suggesting being human is more important than being a masculine man or a feminine woman. After all, when you are fighting for your life, ‘doing gender right’ is hardly at the top of your priority list.
While Jack and Sawyer try to out-macho each other in their love triangle with Kate, neither hold entirely to the Rambo-man-in-jungle motif. As for the women, they just might be the strongest, bravest, wisest female characters to grace a major network screen since Cagney and Lacey.
Though the island is certainly patriarchal, one could make a strong case that male-rule is not such a good thing for (island) society. Kate or Juliet would be far better leaders than any of the island patriarchs (and as some episodes suggest, would make great co-leaders – what a feminist concept!)
McEwan, in her discussion with fellow Lost fanatic, Brad Reed of Sadly, No!, agrees, stating “the show looks increasingly to be making an oblique but advanced commentary about the patriarchy.” As she argues:
“The Lost fathers (Benry, Widmore, Paik, Shephard the Elder) are archetypical patriarchs-rich, powerful, well-educated, well-connected, straight, and white, with the exception of Mr. Paik, who’s in the ethnic majority of his country of residence. It is within the battle among these patriarchs that everyone else is caught; it is to their whims, and their arbitrary rules and preferences, that everyone else is subjected. That’s clearly framed as Not a Good Thing, which rather suggests a feminist critique of the patriarchy.”

However, as the two hour season premiere revealed, one of the strongest female leads, Juliet, is dead. Kate is still rocking the strong-woman action, yet the fact remains that “We’re just about out of female characters to root for” (as Cara of Feministe points out).
This slow decrease in female characters means that a show that had more males to begin with has become decidedly testosterone weighted. Moreover, the (white) males left are being deified with Jabob/Lock/Richard/Ben all seemingly having godlike powers. This turn is all the more frustrating given that supposedly Kate was initially conceived as the island leader. Alas, as reported by Jill at Feministe, “execs thought that people wouldn’t watch the show if a chick was in charge, so they gave that role to Jack and turned Kate into one corner of a love triangle.” Grrrr.
The 30-minute season recap that aired last week kept implying women viewers are wooed by the romantic motifs that dominate many of the narrative arcs. Apparently ABC is unaware that women are interested in more things than romance (and shirtless hotties).
Sometimes the writers seem oblivious to the fact that women are more than man-seeking baby-making machines, too. Season five was particularly dire in this vein. Drawing on the Freudian ‘baby as penis replacement’ motif, Kate was depicted as trying to repair the loss of Sawyer with baby Aaron. (For more on this line of argument, go here.)
Yet, overall, Kate is arguably one of the smartest, most daring female characters to lead a contemporary mega-hit television series. Her back-story ain’t bad either – she was on that doomed flight as a result of fighting back against her mother’s abusive partner. And, though Juliet sometimes seems more focused on her various Romeos than on other matters, she heroically detonated the bomb that launched us into season six. Who knows, maybe this final season will launch us into some sort of feminist utopia led by Eloise Hawking or Rousseau. At the very least, let’s hope it doesn’t culminate with Kate all happily married and duly domesticated!
Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. She previously contributed posts about The United States of Tara and Nurse Jackie.

Guest Post: Nurse Jackie as Feminist Id?

This guest post also appears at Professor, What If… and the Ms. Magazine blog.
In the second-season premiere of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie, a feminist id was on full display. According to Mr. Penis Envy, Sigmund Freud, who published The Ego and the Id in 1923, the id acts according to the “pleasure principle,” seeking to avoid pain and experience pleasure with no thought to consequence.
While Jackie (Edie Falco), a hospital emergency-room nurse, does seem aware of consequences (she hides her drug addiction), she in large part functions according to id impulses. According to Freud, the id is ruled by libido, sexual and otherwise, cannot take “no” for an answer and is represented as infantile. It wants what it wants when it wants it. All of which is true of Jackie Peyton.
But, what makes Jackie’s id feminist? While it might seem contradictory to claim that the unthinking part of the self can have feminist tendencies, Jackie’s pleasure-seeking self can be read as a reaction to the confines of the patriarchal world. As a nurse (and a woman), she is supposed to be selfless and outward-directed, nurturing and caring. Who cares about her chronic pain and 24-hour work/life demands? Her feminist id responds “F you” to the nurturing/suffering paradigm, and she ingests drugs to numb the pain of daily life.
In this episode, Jackie’s feminist id refuses to bend over backwards to ameliorate her rather annoying daughter, Grace, while the family is on a beach excursion. She rejects the “super-mom” role, instead rolling her eyes and voicing frustration. Then, when two young men partake in sexist “I’d tap that” banter, she shoves one of them down and storms off. Her husband warns them “Don’t fuck with her,” voicing the “don’t mess with me” aura Jackie exudes most of the time. That’s an aura that women are not supposed to have but, as the scene indicates, her husband can literally voice.
Jackie’s id also ignores her lover Eddie’s texts–why should she have to placate him just because he can’t get over his jealous response to discovering she is married? The show’s representation of him as seeking vengeance because “his woman” is “taken” can be read as a feminist critique of the ownership model of love. If he were angry at the betrayal, that would be one thing, but he is angry that she is not his alone–to which feminist-id Jackie says “F you, dude.”
Her shenanigans with Coop, the doctor who’s enamored with her, also have a feminist pleasure principle at their core. How fun is it that she takes down this ego-inflated ninny and yet he remains hopelessly infatuated? Our super-ego might feel her teasing kisses and sharp barbs are cruel, but our own ids cheer as Jackie skewers Coop’s self-important bravado.
Even the flourish that closes the episode, her delivery of cake for a family dinner, can be read as a feminist id response. Not only is she saying no to all the rules about what and how one should eat, she is again refusing to live up to wife/mother ideals. Perhaps this is a veiled response to husband Kevin’s recent declaration that she is such a great wife because she cooks him breakfast even when she is exhausted.
More generally, id-Jackie reveals that sexual desire is overly regulated and refuses to buy into “you can only love and have sex with one person at a time” paradigm. She proves that the “just say no” response is unrealistic, that our drugs–be they cake, sex or morphine–sometimes are the only things allowing us a tenuous grip on our capacity to be functional beings.
I agree with The Feminist Spectator, that this series is “smart and morally, emotionally and ethically complicated.” We may not be able to fully embrace Jackie’s id behavior, but we can certainly recognize what drives it. And, as Michelle Dean notes at Bitch, “All of the female characters on the show spend considerable time satisfying the Bechdel test–women, speaking to women, about subjects other than men.” These characters offer subtle and provocative critiques of the privilege/oppression matrix, revealing that, given the regulatory practices of society, it’s surprising we are not all popping pills like candy.
I hope that during the rest of this season, Jackie, a wonderful feminist id, will have her cake and eat it too.
Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate. She previously contributed a post about The United States of Tara.

Movie Review: American Violet

American Violet is a small victory of a movie.
American Violet tells the true story of an African American mother of four girls arrested and falsely accused of selling crack cocaine. Set in a fictional Texas town with the 2000 presidential election as a fitting backdrop of confusion and corruption, we see Dee Roberts fight–with the help of ACLU lawyers–to clear her name and the names of other innocent people arrested in a broad sweep that day.
Newcomer Nicole Beharie gives a powerful performance as Dee, and the supporting cast, including  Alfre Woodard as Dee’s mother, and Tim Blake Nelson and Malcolm Barrett as lawyers for the ACLU, do an equally good job. There are good guys, bad guys, and everyone in between in American Violet.
It’s impossible to not love Dee–a beautiful woman, a kind and patient mother, a hard worker, and a caring friend. Her temper gets the best of her once in the film, but she’s protecting her children from their alcoholic father and his accused child molester girlfriend, and can hardly be faulted for it. I’m inclined to think the movie tries too hard to make her character likable. In contrast, Dee’s friend and neighbor Gladys–who is not  a conventionally attractive woman, and does not have four adorable children trailing her–is a compelling and empathetic character, but the film completely drops the ball, even failing to credit the actor who plays her. Gladys is Dee’s inspiration for continuing to fight the DA even after her charges are dropped (because Gladys took a plea deal, while Dee would not), but we don’t get to explore Gladys or her situation. I’m curious as to why she’s part of the story, but not really allowed to be a character in the film. While the movie is about Dee, I would’ve liked to get to know Gladys a bit.

The film treats Dee with respect. We learn that her four children have three different fathers, but her private life is mostly kept private. When the DA questions Dee about “how many men she’s had sex with by the age of 24,” her lawyers quickly step in to remind them–and us–that a woman’s character is not to be judged by her sexual history. This was a refreshing moment in the film, when even in so-called women’s films, slut-shaming is regular and almost perfunctory. In another moment of the film, we see testimony from the DA’s ex-wife and daughter, and it’s the daughter’s mocking of her own father’s (racist) slut-shaming that ultimately brings him down. (An ironic and uncomfortable twist is that while Dee’s private life is off limits, the DA’s private life is the strongest testimony against him.)

American Violet is the kind of movie I don’t like to criticize, because it’s a movie interested in Doing Good. It’s a sincere film, it addresses real-life social problems, it has a heroine we root for and get to see achieve a victory, despite the odds. And, it’s enjoyable to watch. Doing Good movies rarely achieve blockbuster status; they typically don’t have large budgets, stars, or major marketing campaigns. Doing Good movies are the kinds of movies we wish the public, at large, would see. However, films that expose social ills tend to suffer from cliched characters, predictable narratives, and overly simplified stories. American Violet–despite its powerful performances—doesn’t escape these problems.

There are a couple of troubling things about the film. First, its creators have a background in documentary filmmaking, and their dramatic attempts were stilted (I’ll expound upon this point in the following paragraphs). Second, while I appreciate the surprise change of direction in the film–criminal charges against Dee are dropped, and the dramatic focus becomes her lawsuit against the racist DA–attacking a single DA for racism leaves the system intact. Yes, I realize this was a true story, but the filmmakers’ choice to dramatize this specific case–reportedly after they heard the story on NPR–feels a bit suspect to me. Texas law was changed as a result of Dee’s case (previously, a tip from a single informant was enough for an arrest), but the system itself seemed enforced; the “one bad apple”–the racist DA–abused the law, and was reprimanded. However, the DA remained in his position and was re-elected by voters who, in this district, weren’t particularly bothered by his racially-motivated policies. There was a real sense of ambivalence in Dee’s victory–a monetary settlement for her and the others wrongly accused, and a personal victory, but barely a scratch on the system. Perhaps the film’s inability to create great drama reflects our society’s inability to really change the system. We want the system to change. But the best we can get–in film or life–are small (yet not insignificant) steps in the right direction.
In light of the Senate’s recently passed legislation to reduce, not rectify, the mandatory minimum sentencing discrepancy for crack cocaine possession, we see a drug policy that is racist to the core. In the United States, possession of five grams of crack cocaine carries a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years, while it takes 100 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence. According to the NAACP,

Everyone seems to agree that crack cocaine use is higher among Caucasians than any other group:  most authorities estimate that more than 66% of those who use crack cocaine are white.  Yet in 2006, 82% of those convicted and sentenced under federal crack cocaine laws were African American.  When you add in Hispanics, the percentage climbs to above 96%.  Since enactment of this law, the 100 to 1 ratio has had a devastating and disproportionate impact on the African American and Hispanic communities. 

The mandatory minimum sentencing law was enacted in 1986 under false beliefs about crack cocaine, and its results have been devastating. Instead of equalizing the penalty, however, the Senate agreed to make it less worse: reduce the discrepancy from 100:1 to 18:1.
The facts about US sentencing laws are a bit beside the point in relation to American Violet; in the case of the film, the women we focus on are innocent. Police found no drugs or evidence of drug possession, distribution, or use. The filmmakers’ true interests here were legal in nature, though, and the characters in the film felt, at times, like tools for exploring the law. The specific laws on trial in the film are the now-defunct Texas single-informant law, the Clinton-era financial incentive to law enforcement agencies based on the number of drug convictions per county, and the rules surrounding and use of the plea bargain. While in jail, Dee learns that she can take a plea bargain to have her sentence suspended and return home to her children, or she can fight the allegations with her court-appointed attorney–who essentially tells her she’d be crazy not to take the plea. Before seeing this film, I never really thought about plea bargains–who cuts these deals and who ultimately benefits from them. In films we typically see the plea bargain used by people guilty of a crime to bring down the more-guilty parties involved. The issue felt like a minor point in the film, but in the end we see how invested in exposing the corrupt nature of the plea bargain the film really is. Ninety percent of the US prison population accepted a plea bargain, 95% never saw a jury, and the US has the world’s largest prison population. It’s a shame that the most shocking and dramatic moment of the film appeared in the end screen of statistics.
In this case, neither the DA nor the tactics really were impacted; what we get is Dee’s personal victory, which is still powerful and important. Not only was her arrest record expunged, but the other innocent people who were arrested with her also had their records expunged–meaning they could remain in their homes, apply for a job without fear of a background check, and not have to live with a false arrest haunting them.

Ultimately, I liked this film, and encourage others to see it. I do feel ambivalence about it, and am a little disappointed in some of the choices made, but do think it’s a strong, woman-centered film.

Watch a preview of American Violet and learn more about the film here. Leave your thoughts about the film–and any links to reviews or discussions you’ve read–in the comments.

The Roundup: Lady Gaga’s "Telephone" featuring Beyoncé

We don’t usually talk about music videos here at Bitch Flicks, but for Lady Gaga we’ll make an exception. With the release of her nearly 10-minute long music video, the blogosphere lit up. Here’s a sampling of what we found regarding Gaga & Beyoncé, feminism, trans-phobia, exploitation, ironic product placement, female empowerment, the prison of pop music, and the like. Enjoy!
Survey Third Wave communities and one descriptive phrase keeps coming up over and over again regarding Lady Gaga—badass. In such spaces, no higher compliment could ever be paid than that. When so many women feel that their voices are routinely stifled or that they’ve been conditioned to stay silent while men talk first and act first, young feminists understandably find something courageous and enviable about women, particularly women their own age, who force the world to accept them on their own terms. Furthermore, Lady Gaga’s music videos in particular have directly, though a bit clumsily at times, taken on questions of same-sex attraction between women and done so in terms that are far closer to the way it actually exists in reality. The pure fantasy and grotesque parody of lesbianism, itself a construct clearly adopted by men, is at least pushed to the background of her work rather than set forth as the truth.
The first three minutes are lost on me and left me confused, offended, and too pissed of to appreciate the next few minutes. Had the video started when the song started, I might (might) have been able to stomach the rest of the prison scenes. However, after the objectification, glamorizing of lesbian fetishism, and excessive girl-on-girl violence I was too pissed to rationalize sitting through the first dance routine, which could have just as well been the Pussycat Dolls (whom Gaga has written for in the past). Feminist Gaga fans can try to justify this as another example of how she subversively turns what we usually find hot into something that leaves a nasty taste in our mouths and therefore makes a statement, but if any other artist (particularly any male artist) incorporated this much objectification and violence against women we would be outraged. Is it any different just because it’s a woman, or because it’s specifically Gaga?
Noah Michelson interviews Heather Cassils, Gaga’s prison yard girlfriend for Out.com:
What do you think about the new breed of younger pop stars — and some have accused Gaga of this — who claim bisexuality or a kind of pansexuality in an effort to use queer culture for their own personal gains?
That’s been going on since the dawn of time. Elvis stole from African American music. Everybody’s constantly riffing — Madonna stole voguing from poor, disenfranchised black drag queens in Harlem. This isn’t a new concept. I think there’s more reverence with regard to Lady Gaga as she’s obviously educated herself in her trajectory with visual arts practices and the stuff that she’s doing isn’t light stuff. It’s difficult when they’re making millions of dollars and placating to the masses — it’s tricky to maintain that, but I think she tries. And even including someone like me is a part of that. The thing that was kind of interesting was that in between takes I was getting kind of annoyed because the camera guys were really kind of drooling and talking about “girl-on-girl action” and I said, “What about boy-on-girl action?” And she turned to me and said “Oh. Do you identify as male?” [Laughs] And I said, “Well, probably more than you do.” And she said “I’ll be sure to tell people that.” We just had this abstracted conversation about gender in the middle of this shoot, which I thought was really weird and pretty interesting: A) that she would take the time and B) that she would even ask me about that.

Ms. Magazine Blog “Is Lady Gaga a Feminist or Isn’t She?” by Noelle Williams:

Her art provides a running commentary on gender, sexuality and beauty. There are hints of David Bowie, Prince and Madonna in the way she plays with sexuality, but while Gaga acknowledges these similarities she wants it to be clear she is something entirely her own. With her deliberate juxtaposition of conventional platinum blonde beauty and fashionably ugly costumes, she toys with conventional rules of attractiveness. Half of her appeal throughout 2009 seemed to be the question of whether or not she was pretty, whether or not people felt comfortable liking her. “I am not sexy in the way Britney Spears is sexy,” Gaga is quoted in the bio, “I just don’t have the same ideas about sexuality that I want to portray. I have a very specific aesthetic–androgyny.”
Replete with references to films like Caged Heat, Kill Bill, Thelma and Louise, and heaped with nods to golden age sexploitation from Russ Meyer flics to Betty Page pin ups to busty comic book heroines like Wonder Woman (H/T Lisa Duggan and Sam Icklow for IDing some of these for me), Telephone is a high femme pastiche of mini-epic proportions.

The plot is straightforward: thrown into “prison for bitches,” Gaga is bailed out by co-star Beyoncé (in a telling reversal of the usual hierarchy between white and black), and the two then set of on a mission of vengeance against Beyoncé’s boorish beau, played by male model/singer/actor Tyrese. But this bare summary belies the profusion of signifiers strewn across the surfaces of this visual feast of a video. To attempt to account for them all (crowdsource project anyone?) would leave any critic floundering on the shoals of interpretation. So I’ll just focus on one, ahem, prime signifier: Lady Gaga’s penis.

The video is peppered with both real (e.g. Miracle Whip, Wonder Bread, Polaroid, Chanel, Diet Coke, Virgin, Plenty of Fish) and fake products (e.g. Poison TV, Double-Breasted Drive-Thru, CookNKill Recipes). This combination of real and fake allows the video to both enjoy the benefits of product placement, and parody the enterprise in the same swoop. Once again, we’re dealing, I think, with a carnivalesque aesthetic, or a type of conceptualist art that parodies by displaying too loudly or too blatantly that which is being mocked. The comfortably familiar form is being used to market poison, and at the same time its used to promote Polaroid. Gaga’s having her cake and eating it too.
In this entire video, as well as, “Bad Romance” and “Paparazzi,” Gaga reverses this gaze in a variety of ways. She refuses the male heterosexual narrative as the only way to see the world, and presents her views in a decidedly “feminine gaze” or at least a gaze that does not abide by male standards. Women’s bodies are not present in “Telephone” for male pleasure, they do not progress a male storyline, nor are women defeated for male purposes of sex or domestication. Women are not “othered.” In some ways, the bodies seen here are for female pleasure, sexual perhaps, or at least aiding in seeing women in positions of power, both as prisoners and prison guards. Women are in control, even in prison and outside of it. Gaga and Beyoncé’s emotions, ideas, and selves drive the story of the music video, not men’s. Women are central, not peripheral, they are the main autonomous actors in control of their destinies. Even as we see women in traditionally powerless situations, in prison, as diner wage workers, or as objectified bodies for male consumption, these positions are problemitized, and their meanings changed. When we see women in these places, we do not get the impression that they are mere tools of the patriarchy. They have agency, they have will, and they are not the “other.” We get a unique and visually appealing story from women’s perspectives, ideals, and world view that is so lacking in today’s media.
10 Hidden Surprises in Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” Video

Gudbuy t’jane’s “Lady Gaga sets the record straight:

As a trans woman, she mostly caught my attention due to the transphobic and intersex-phobic rumours about her being either trans or intersex. While these rumours were typically a product of living in a transphobic and transmisogynist culture, Lady Gaga’s response was one of gender and genital essentialism, stating that her vagina was offended by the claims. 

To me, the absurdity of that mismatch is part of the point: incredible frivolity combined with serious issues. People go to clubs and complain about reception while prisoners cannot get a proper phone connection and are strip-searched for no other reason than the guards’ prurient interests all the time. Outside of a Lady Gaga video, however, it usually isn’t the same people who have a dance party and are abused in prison (at least not simultaneously), nor do the dance parties (which occur at the same time as mass murder) usually happen at the crime scene.

By collapsing the distance between these events, “Telephone” points to the absurdity of a world in which people dance even though they are aware that other people are suffering, an awareness intensified by the very medium for which “Telephone” was created.
Thus begins the epic dance break—celebrating a new America. An America that steers away from gender constructs. An America where you don’t have to wear pants! Lady Gaga is the modern-day Wonder Woman—a DC Comics superheroine created in the early ’40s and regarded as the model of the feminist movement. Created by Dr. William Marston, Wonder Woman is an Amazon princess sent to earth to assist America in the war effort. Called upon by the goddess Aphrodite, Wonder Woman was “created as a distinctly feminist role model whose mission was to bring the Amazon ideals of love, peace, and sexual equality to ‘a world torn by the hatred of men.” However, Wonder Woman loses her powers if a man binds together her trademark bracelets, and she’s commonly depicted as being chained by male villains and having to break free of their power and control. We see these details referenced through Gaga’s chained-getup in the prison sequence, and in the Wonder Bread appearance.

Fox News reaction:

Gaga’s relationship with feminism is uneasy and uncertain, not unlike my own, and even as she has more recently copped to being “a little bit of a feminist” after a long period of rejecting the term, her work seems more inclined toward interrogating and challenging culture, sexism, and exploitation without necessarily overtly condemning it. This video is no exception, dabbling as it does in lesbian undertones combined with a monstrous revenge fantasy and mass murder literally draped in American flags, and concluding with the infamous Thelma & Louise hand-clasp which serves as a forceful barring-of-the-door against the meddling of trifiling men who’d seek to break our terrifying yet compelling heroines apart. The visuals are riddled with sex from beginning to end, but it’s complicated sex, a queer romp dressed up in straight drag. The lingering shot on Beyoncé’s cleavage is so unabashed as to be uncomfortable, which is insane considering the amount of women’s cleavage media serves up on a daily basis, but like the product placement, we are accustomed to it being more subtle. The overtness here renders our standard voyeurism into something downright embarrassing. The prison-yard makeout-sequence is likewise skewed and queerified, as it shows a lesbian hookup that would be of great appeal to straight men if only it involved two women with larger breasts and more traditionally-feminine presentations; instead we see Gaga paired with a decidedly butch partner, whilst surrounded by fellow inmates representing a diversity of genders, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities.
The Bitch Magazine discussion:
Kelsey: so she went to jail for murdering that guy and it was supposed to be a statement about celebrity and fame and now she is sort of doing the same thing but starting in “fame jail” where there are lots of hot lesbians
Kjerstin: so she’s sort of addressing the intersex rumor, but as one blogger at gudbuytjane pointed out, is it transmysoginistic to be like “see, no dick!”
Andi: That’s definitely what I thought. Maybe she wants to start it up again?
Kjerstin: it also happens so early in the video
Kelsey: she has been so intentionally vague about the intersex thing, I’m surprised she’d address it like this (or maybe I’m not)
Kjerstin: it’s extra shocking
Kelsey: but yeah, like gudbuytjane said, it’s like “Oh thank God she doesn’t have a dick now I can relax”

In an interview with Carson Daly on LA’s 97.1 AMP radio, Gaga remarked that the video’s concept revolves around a critical look at the inundation of media in our modern lives and the sort of brainwashing the mass marketing of everything from tampons to pop artists to fast food creates when it tells us what to think. This makes me want to ask you girls some study questions: Is Lady Gaga trapped in a prison of what pop music is expected to be? Is that why she is so determined to escape? Is her “punishment” for being an independent woman — represented in the extreme by killing her sadistic boyfriend — a metaphor for being stuck behind the bars of what the record labels demand of their cookie-cutter pop artists? But wait a second, there are hot lesbians in prison. Is being sent to a jail full of sexy women a reward for ditching some man she didn’t really want? Where is the intersection of queerness, prison culture and femininity? Is homosexuality a behavior, an all-encompassing identity, or a complicated blend of both? So many layers here, like peel-and-eat lingerie (did I just say that?)
Because if there’s one thing that we’ve seen a thousand times over the past few decades, it’s old-style sexism dressed up as new-style irony. Does the fact that Gaga seems to be winking knowingly at the camera as she dances in a bikini make the vision any less predictable, any less boring, any less reminiscent of sexist video after sexist video that you’ve seen in the past few years? Nope. It’s a disappointment from someone who seems to be popping with so many ideas. Gaga will do something great, I’m sure. But this isn’t it.

If you find/have written any interesting Gaga-analysis related to “Telephone,” leave your links in the comments!

Guest Post: Tara is Better Not United

 
This guest post also appears at Professor, What If… and the Ms. Magazine blog.

As I began watching the second-season premiere of the Showtime series The United States of Tara, I eagerly ask what I always do before an episode starts: “Which ‘alter’ will it be this time?”

Alas, to my dismay, the show’s bubbly focus on a recovered Tara Gregson (Toni Collette) meant that the “alters”–alternate personalities of this 21st century Sybil–were gone, thrown out like the unwanted clothing ceremoniously dumped into a charity bin in the show opener. Instead, we have happy, functioning Tara, and an upbeat musical soundtrack trying to manipulate us to believe that, indeed, all is well in the Tara-verse.

But we soon learn that Tara as one person, no longer suffering from dissociative identity disorder, is not nearly as fun or interesting as she is as five different people. Instead, the “true Tara” now displays some of the most annoying traits of all five of her alters.

She incorporates her Alice-esque alter by donning a 50s-style apron and throwing herself into a dinner party with the neighborhood’s token gay couple. She speaks her mind Buck-style (Buck was a beer-swigging male alter) when a neighbor commits suicide, bragging “The lady with all the personalities is not the most fucked up person on the block.” After the dinner party, her T-proclivities (that was the teenaged alter) come out, and she performs a manic Bollywood number, ending with provocative thrusting in her hubby’s face. Her sister Charmaine assures her new beau that Tara has not actually “transitioned” into the other personality, indicating that perhaps it would be better if she did, while Tara’s husband Max is visibly worried that the new “sane” Tara might be more insane than before.

Given the show’s emphasis on the self as performative, and on the impossibility of performing to societal standards (especially if one is female), this suggestion that Tara’s recovery may not be a step forward is intriguing. Though the show reveals all the difficulties Tara’s disorder causes for her and her family, it also seems to be indicating that the real problem is a society that expects us to perform in very particular, stable and normative ways. These regulatory ideals are so oppressive that we either bind ourselves into limited roles (i.e., Alice-the-50s-housewife) or run the risk of being seen as “crazy”–as “normal” Tara is when she laughs too loud, makes a suicide joke or has too much fun at a dinner party.

The show’s underlying critique of such normative ideals, and the relatively freeing notion of embracing the self as performance, is evident in other characters as well. Marshall, Tara’s closeted gay son, tries hard to be serious, smart and talented, but finds that flaunting his identity by sitting at the “gay-ble”–the school lunch table where gays and their allies sit–is a welcome relief, and results in him joining a campaign at his school aimed to raise queer visibility.

Charmaine, Tara’s sister, struggles with regulatory norms in choosing between a relationship with traditional hunk Neil vs. unattractive and vertically challenged Nick, who is personality-privileged and emotionally supportive. Charmaine tried to follow normative requirements in the past by augmenting her breasts to please her then-husband, a choice that resulted in lopsided and off-center nipples. Now that she has had these “corrected,” she seems to believe she can do better than short, balding Nick.

The character of Tara’s teenaged daughter Kate has thus far been largely challenged around the regulation of her sexuality, as indicated with Tara’s concern that she was not able to “micromanage her daughter’s vagina.” Kate’s struggles with a creepy boss and an abusive boyfriend expose a society populated by males wishing for similar micro-managing power.

Max appears to be the character least affected by social norms. He doesn’t seem to care that his wife is far from typical, worrying only about her health and happiness rather than what others think. He does not condemn or regulate his son’s sexuality nor attempt to micromanage his daughter. If any character seems too good to be true, it’s him. This is perhaps why Max is a bit empty as a character: a sort of dad/husband placeholder who comes off as boring and conventional in a cast of otherwise entertaining family members.

While Robert Abele laments at L.A. Weekly that “United States of Tara plays like surface feminism with an added gloss of snark and a bewilderingly blah sentimentality,” I would counter that the snark is integral to the feminist critique the show enacts. The snark reveals that our “normal” selves are “blah,” and thus we should embrace those aspects of our identity that subvert regulatory norms lest we end up living in a world full of bores.

Diablo Cody, the show’s creator, readily admits that she asks of everything she writes, “How am I going to sneak my subversive feminist message into this?” With Tara, she sneaks in this message beautifully, conveying that societal ideals–be they a stable self, heterosexuality or conventional attractiveness–do not an exciting world (or episode) make.

Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate.

Movie Preview: Bluebeard

Written and directed by Catherine Breillat, Bluebeard (Barbe Bleue) likely explores the same themes that Angela Carter highlighted in her retelling, “The Bloody Chamber.” Read the original fairy tale by Charles Perrault here and Angela Carter’s version here.

Variety‘s Leslie Felperin:

Having built a career on provocative, sexually explicit yet cerebral fare (“Romance,” “Sex Is Comedy”), Catherine Breillat shocked auds with her 2007 period piece, “The Last Mistress,” because it was not all that shocking. Now the Gallic helmer’s latest, “Bluebeard,” features considerable blood but no sex. This offbeat but compelling take on the tale, arguably the first serial-killer yarn, emphasizes sisterly bonds but still gets to the original story’s heart of mysterious darkness with impressive results. 

The New York Times‘ Manhola Dargis:

In “Bluebeard,” a sly rethink of the freakily morbid fairy tale, the filmmaker Catherine Breillat makes the case that once-upon-a-time stories never end. Divided into two parallel narratives — one focuses on Bluebeard and his dangerously curious wife, while the other involves two little girls in the modern era revisiting the tale — the movie is at once direct, complex and peculiar. It isn’t at all surprising that Ms. Breillat, a singular French filmmaker with strong, often unorthodox views on women and men and sex and power, would have been interested in a troubling tale about the perils of disobedient wives. Ms. Breillat never behaves.

You can watch the trailer here.