Tag: Violence

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: The Final Girl Gone Wild: Post-Feminist Whiteness in ‘Scream 4’
 
Guest post written by Jeremy Cornelius. Warning: massive spoilers ahead!!

Wes Craven’s 1990s Scream trilogy completely rewrote the slasher genre in a postmodern meta-film. In March 2011, Scream 4 was released, ten years after Scream 3 was originally released, starring the original trio: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox-Arquette along with some new teen stars to apparently spur a new trilogy. Yet again, this film rewrites the genre, only this time the film plays with concepts of post-racial, post-feminist girl power by making Ghost Face a white sixteen-year-old girl, Sidney Prescott’s cousin Jill (played by Emma Roberts). Craven portrays Jill as the most violent and aggressive killer of any of the other serial killers in the Scream films. Jill kills mostly other white teenage girls (her best friends), a black police officer who is depicted in a racist fashion, and her own mother. Jill’s vitriolic aggression is fueled by her neoliberal pursuit of media fame and self-consciously performing the role of victim while veiling herself as the white-faced killer draped in a black shroud.

 
Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) in Scream 4
In the original 1996 Scream film, which Scream 4 constantly refers to and reconstructs, a masked killer known as Ghost Face begins terrorizing a predominantly white upper-middle class neighborhood in rural Woodsboro, California. Sidney is the sixteen-year-old protagonist, who is dating a boy named Billy. Her mother, Maureen Prescott, is mysteriously murdered one year before these serial murders and the film starts in Woodsboro. And Gail Weathers (Cox), a TV journalist, covered “last year’s hottest court case,” and the fame-obsessed Weathers is in the process of finishing up a book on the murders entitled, The Woodsboro Murders. Meanwhile, Deputy Dewey Riley (Arquette) is the bumbling deputy on a (usually) failed mission to look after Sidney. Dewey’s character is in the tradition of Craven’s depiction of the two bumbling cops in his first film, and commonly known exploitation flick, The Last House on the Left. Drew Barrymore has a brief cameo at the beginning of the first film (she was the original pick for the character of Sidney) and is the first victim. The unseen killer calls her as she is home alone about to watch a scary movie. After much stalker-esque dialogue between the killer and Barrymore, she is viciously stabbed and hung from a tree outside of her house, where she is left for her parents to discover her body, leading to the first chilling scream as the title comes across the screen.

Sidney is constantly stalked by the killer and becomes an attempted target in her house, but she eventually manages to stop him and take refuge in her room. Time passes and characters develop a little more before the final scene during a house party at Sidney’s schoolmate, Stu’s house. The killer attacks the kids at the party, and Sidney is left alive to confront, who she discovers, are two killers: her boyfriend Billy and his friend Stu. They confess to having raped and killed her mother one year before. Gail comes in and briefly deters the two killers from killing Sidney, but in the end Sidney manages to kill both of them, declaring, as her surviving friend Randy comments, “Be careful, they always come back for one last scare,” and just as Billy sits up surprisingly, Sidney shoots him in the head, and she states, “Not in my movie,” claiming the construction of the Final Girl as a place of productive empowerment for girls and violent defense against women-hating men.

Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in Scream 4

The gaze of Wes Craven’s Scream 4 intrudes on white girls’ domestic spaces. Technology facilitates the killer’s murderous rampage. The killer attempts to terrify them into panic and submission, but they resist this submission to fear such as in the first scene: two girls are alone in a house watching Stab 7 (a thinly veiled, meta-movie franchise with the Scream storyline within the Scream series). One girl goes upstairs because she hears a noise, but then prank calls her friend downstairs with the Ghost Face app on her iPhone. When she goes downstairs after the call is cut short and wanders around the house calling her friend’s name, she gets a call. Assuming her friends’ disappearance is her friend trying to get back at her for scaring her, she assuredly answers the phone, but the killer calls her on her iPhone and tries to scare her into terrified submission by saying, “you’re the dumb blonde with the big tits, whose part is about to be cut,” but she quickly retaliates with “I have a 180 IQ and a 4.0 GPA, asshole.” Of course, in the end, in the Scream tradition of the slasher theme, the killer prevails by stabbing the girl before the title of the film dramatically flashes onto the screen with the Swedish band The Sounds playing in the background. 
Carol Clover theorizes about gender in slasher films in her well-known book Men, Women, and Chainsaws and addresses the concept of masochistic gazing in horror films. Watching these films, though it could be read as sadistic to consume slasher films, are a mascochistic form of “perverse pleasure” through gazing and seeing what “should not” be seen. The audience can identify with the victim in the Scream films and feel the terror that they feel. The camera shows them reacting to the killer’s calls, and the audience sees and hears the same as the victim. So with every suspenseful moment for the character on screen, the audience feels the same emotion of fear. Carol Clover compares the affect of pornography to horror films, saying:

“Pornography thus engages directly (in pleasurable terms) what horror explores at one remove (in painful terms) and legitimate film at two or more.” 

The affect of terror and pleasure, though, seem to also be blurred when thinking about slasher films. Audiences are entertained by the desire to see violence that is unseen. They get a horrific glimpse into the pain inflicted between humans (mostly men killing women), but one productive element of the Scream series presents a productive feminist subversion of these elements of pleasure, pain, humor, and gender. Clover qualifies the commonly found surviving girl at the end of horror films in her essay, “His Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”:

“The image of a distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl.” 

And this position of the final girl in horror films is destabilized in Scream 4, as the final girl and masked killer are the same person. 

Kathleen Rowe Karlyn writes about the feminist potential in the first three Scream films in her book, Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers:

“According to the logic of realism, Scream might well be seen as endorsing violence in the hands of a teen girl. But when viewed in its cinematic context, the film, like the slasher genre in general, provides an opportunity to examine cultural and individual fantasies as they relate to gender and power.” 

The girl violence in the Scream films takes a new direction as Jill takes on the role of the killer and enacts violent murders against mostly white teenage girls, a black man, and her own mother in the film, symbolically, hyperbolically constructing post-feminist girl power gone horribly wrong. Jill’s performs a coy demeanor and unassaultive character at the beginning of the film, which is starkly contrasted after her unveiling to Sidney as the killer in the second to last scene of the film. She asserts her position as the “empowered” female remake of Billy as the killer and Sidney as the victim, saying “I don’t want to be like you. I want to become you,” right before she stabs Sidney, thinking she murders her. Jill then proceeds to stab herself, throw herself onto a glass coffee table (evocative of a scene out of Fight Club) as a way to bodily victimize herself. 

Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) in Scream 4
J. Jack Halberstam in his article, “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine,” describes the temptation wrapped up in the symbol of Apple products in relation to the creation myth. Halberstam discusses cybernetics’ relationship to gender and deconstructs the symbol of the Mac apple, and he claims,

“We recognize the Apple computer symbol, I think, as a clever icon for the digitalization of the creation myth [. . . ] The bite now represents the byte of information within a processing memory.” 

He discuses the temptation of biting into the forbidden fruit, which Eve does despite the prohibitions offered by God to her and Adam in Eden. Halberstam relates this Biblical story to the marketing of Apple products with the bitten apple logo on Apple products representing a capitalist seduction of consumer technology and information. Craven takes this concept one step further by having most every character in Scream 4 tote around some Apple product. The Ghost Face killer calls different characters on their iPhones before each murder. The killers use Apple technology to facilitate and capture the murders on film by using webcams to record each murder and post them onto their blog, reconstructing a do-it-yourself remake of the first Scream film within the sequel. The placement of Apple products throughout the film could be read as a synergistic business pursuit by the film makers, and in some ways, people probably were influenced to purchase a new iPhone after seeing this movie. The film also skillfully challenges the obsessive (mis)use of technology, and the Apple products, to use Halberstam’s analysis, symbolize capitalist seduction and female exploitation through violent murders. In “The Scream Trilogy: “Hyperpostmodernism” and the Late Nineties Teen Slasher” by Valerie Wee, she deconstructs the hyperpostmodernism in the Scream films:

“This shift to hyperpostmodernism was motivated by several factors: (1) the development of new media technologies such as cable, video, and an increasing range of digital media; (2) the emergence of a new teen demographic in the United States; and (3) the entertainment industries escalating commitment to cross-media promotional and marketing practices.” 

As Wee argues, the Scream franchise’s insistence on including new media, promotion, and adjusting to the “emergence of a new teen demographic” applies perfectly to Scream 4’s hyperpostmodernism as a next step in the evolution of the series.

L-R: Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) and Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere) in Scream 4

The teenage girls in Scream 4 are constantly on their iPhones in the film and are connected to Ghost Face through their phones. In the first scene of the film, there is a comment made that there is now a Ghost Face app. for the iPhones so anyone can replicate the killer’s voice as a prank call to friends. Female bodies become fused with technology: they become as fused with it as it is their source of survival and simultaneously the killer’s invasion into their white middle-class spaces. Halberstam writes:

“The female cyborg, furthermore, exploits a traditionally masculine fear of the deceptiveness of appearances and calls into question the boundaries of human, animal, and machine precisely where they are most vulnerable — at the site of the female body.” 

Viewers disidentify with Jill and see the violent masochistic pleasure in watching Scream 4. This poses an interesting dilemma of white girl power manifesting in violence and aggression targeted against other white girls, black men, and mothers. Jill symbolizes the ultimate pursuit of individual identity and separation from her community. She manifests her rage and expectant media fame by slaughtering her friends, her mother, and others in her community to escape it. Jill embodies the ideology of post-feminism and exceedingly demonstrates her white neoliberal pursuit of a murderous “girl power” at the violent expense and exploitation of people in Scream 4. 
———-
Jeremy Cornelius, a queer feminist writer and aspiring women’s and gender studies academic making his way in Philadelphia. Common activities include zine making, obsessively watching b-horror movies on Netflix, dressing like a gay sailor from the 1920s, and writing about queer childhood (to take the phrase from J. Jack Halberstam and Kathryn Bond Stockton) and coming from the U.S. South. Common pen name for zines and social media accounts is Riot Robin because of the Robin (from Batman) tattoo on his left arm.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Stephanie‘s Picks:
Does Lena Dunham’s “Casual Racism” Matter? by Samhita Mukhopadhyay via Feministing
This Is Perfect and That Is Not Sarcasm by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville
Megan‘s Picks:
The Glamorous Lure of Hollywood Violence by Madeleine Gyory via Women’s Media Center
Remembering Phyllis Diller by Kelsey Wallace via Bitch Magazine Blog
Brenda Chapman on Writing Brave by Susan J. Morris via Women and Hollywood 
What have you been reading this week?? Tell us in the comments!

‘The Hunger Games’ Review in Conversation: Part 1 on Jennifer Lawrence, Female Protagonists, Body Image, Disability, Whitewashing, Hunger & Food

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games

Part 1 of the Review in Conversation on The Hunger Games.

Megan’s Take:
In a dystopian future, the nation of Panem stands where North America once existed. The government at the Capitol, which controls the country, mandates a girl and boy between the ages of 12 and 18 are selected by lottery in each of the 12 Districts as tributes to compete in a fight to the death called the Hunger Games aired on live television. 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers when her little sister Prim’s name is called. But in the Hunger Games, only one person can survive.

I devoured The Hunger Games trilogy, reading all 3 books in a matter of 2 days. Katniss descends from a line of strong literary female protagonists (Karana in Island of the Blue Dolphins, Miyax in Julie of the Wolves, Jo March in Little Women, Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, Meg Murray in A Wrinkle in Time, Hermione Granger in Harry Potter) for young adult readers. The story echoes themes in The Lottery, The Most Dangerous Game, Gladiator, 1984, Island of the Blue Dolphins and Battle Royale, yet forges a new path. The female-centric series’ haunting themes – poverty, war, sacrifice, love, starvation, media influence, government control, class difference, and economic inequity – riveted me. The books’ memorable characters lingered long after I closed the pages. I didn’t want to say goodbye. So my expectations for the film were high when I saw the midnight premiere.
Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss
While other female film franchises exist, no female-centric movies aside from Twilight, Bridesmaids and Mamma Mia have experienced this meteoric success. Some people pit Katniss and Bella against each other as if there isn’t room in this world for both. While I’m no fan of the Twilight Saga (I’ll admit it makes me want to gouge my eyes out), putting them in a dichotomy implies girls and women can only identify with either Katniss OR Bella, not both or neither. Thankfully, others question this comparison.

I thought the movie was fantastic. I often lament the lack of strong female protagonists in film. We desperately need more characters like Katniss on-screen. A skilled archer, Katniss is smart, stubborn, brave, abrasive and self-reliant. She not only fights for her own survival; she’s compelled to protect her family. Living in the most impoverished neighborhood in the poorest of the 12 Districts, Katniss is the resourceful breadwinner, illegally hunting for food to feed her family. She’s a surrogate mother to her sister Prim and even her own traumatized mother, grief-stricken over the death of her daughters’ father. Despite her tough exterior, she possesses a vulnerability. What makes Katniss unique is that she “feels empathy when nobody else does.” She’s compelled to defend others, even her competition.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss

Jennifer Lawrence’s powerful performance as the “Girl on Fire” has been lauded by critics. And rightfully so. She’s stunning, perfectly conveying strength, rage, fear, and vulnerability through her body language, a flick of her eyes, never needing to utter a single word. She trained in archery, free running, yoga, climbing and combat. Regarding Lawrence’s casting as Katniss, director Gary Ross, moved by her powerful audition, called it “the easiest casting decision” of his life. Author Collins also fully supported Lawrence as Katniss. 
The casting call, however, wanted an “underfed but strong” actor, and was limited only to “Caucasian” women. What. The. Fuck. I mean really, Hollywood?? No, women of color could even audition?! Collins describes Katniss’ appearance in the book as olive skinned with black hair. Hello…that could be tons of female actors of color! Why the hell must she be white?! You’re going to exclude young women of color and, on top of that, you only want malnourished-looking women?! Yes, starvation is a vital issue in the series. But in the book, Katniss says she possesses lean muscles from hunting. 
Lawrence is receiving an assload of toxic bodysnarking from the misogynisitc media. The NY Times’ Mahnola Dargis claimed “her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission,”Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy commented on her “lingering baby fat,” Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells accuses Lawrence of being “big-boned” and “seems too big for Hutcherson” as male romantic partners should at least be as tall as their female counterparts (heaven forbid a woman is bigger or taller than her love interest…gasp!). The media constantly tells women we must be skinny. This toxicity destroys women’s body image.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss
Amber’s Take:
I agree with all your comments on Katniss being a strong female protagonist, and what a relief it is for a franchise fronted by a young woman to win the box office (as of this writing) four weeks in a row. Although the Twilight comparisons irk me, too, they almost seem inevitable, as so few big Hollywood releases have featured female protagonists. As with so many Hollywood franchises, however, this one takes a small step forward: a strong young woman is in the lead, but she is whitewashed to “play it safe” with the viewing public. Although the film is set in—and was filmed in–modern-day Appalachia, I see no reason why the lead needed to be “Caucasian.”
I have to talk about the “body snarking,” because while I would never call Jennifer Lawrence “too big” to play Katniss, she is older than Katniss. The 17-year-old Lawrence who starred in Winter’s Bone would have been a more convincing 16-year-old Katniss than the actor at age 21. Women in their 20s playing teenagers certainly isn’t a new thing (how many times have you watched a movie or TV show and noticed twenty-somethings playing high school students?), but the tendency for this to happen does create unrealistic expectations for teenage girls and conflate girlhood with womanhood. I think this problem will only become more apparent in the following two films of the series, too.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss

Much has been said about Lawrence’s body, but I’m not really interested in analyzing it—the incessant discussion of female bodies is part of the problem. What I do want to discuss is the film’s handling of food and hunger (a conversation I think many people are sincerely trying to have who end up derailing into critiques of Lawrence’s body). Everyone in District 12 is hungry, including Katniss. Winning the Hunger Games isn’t just about surviving; it’s also about bringing extra food home to your district—especially important for the poorer areas. The Capitol uses hunger as a political tool—a fact that doesn’t come through clearly enough in the movie. (An anecdote: The person who saw the movie with me didn’t understand why it was called The Hunger Games.)

In the book, Katniss eats and enjoys the plentiful food provided to her in the lead up to the game. She finds a particular lamb stew rich and delicious and she enjoys eating it until she’s full. For a girl who’s been hungry much of her life, the food available on that train trip would be irresistible. Yet in the movie, Katniss seems uninterested, even immune to the lavish spread. Is there a reason Katniss can’t enjoy a hearty stew to fortify herself for the impending game?  This de-emphasis of food changes the character of the story dramatically. Remember the moment when Gale presents a roll to Katniss in the woods and she exclaims “Is this real?!” and they break the roll to enjoy together? The berries Katniss and Peeta threaten to eat in their Romeo-and-Juliet-style sabotage of the game? The story of nourishment and consumption takes a major hit when the movie doesn’t permit Katniss to eat and enjoy food and, for me, this might trump whatever positive body-image message might be implied by the decision to cast Lawrence without regard to the “underfed” description in the casting call, and without regard to her adult status.

Megan’s Take:
I didn’t really have a problem with Lawrence being older than Katniss. Although I totally agree about the concern for girls “conflating girlhood with womanhood.” But I suppose it didn’t bother me so much because Katniss is never sexualized. She cares about archery, not what she’s wearing. While Katniss receives a pageant-style makeover, so do the male tributes. While it hints at it, I just wish the movie had conveyed the book’s satire of toxic beauty standards.
I could NOT agree more with you on the themes of hunger and food or rather how they’re severely diminished almost to the point of erasure in the film. As a feminist vegan, I’m passionate about food justice and our relationship with food. Food and hunger are vital themes in the trilogy. Food is used as a reward while withholding food a punishment wielded as a weapon against Panem’s citizens. While the movie hints at these themes through the Capitol’s citizens’ garish costumes versus District 12’s simple garb or the lavishness of food at the Capitol, it doesn’t fully capture the book’s themes of food justice, food shortages, hunger and class inequities.

Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket and Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen
It’s rare to see an impoverished protagonist and a film contend with economic inequities. Even within the impoverished District 12, there are class distinctions. In the book, Katniss tells Peeta he doesn’t understand her desire to not owe anyone anything because he’s not from the Seam, the poorest neighborhood in District 12. The reason Gale had his name in the Reaping 42 times was so he could obtain more rations for his family. Katniss continually describes food and she always gorges herself like she’ll never eat again…because she doesn’t know if she will. 
Jennifer Lawrence and Amandla Stenberg as Rue

I too didn’t understand the de-emphasis of food and hunger. In reality, 1 in 6 children suffer from hunger. And I too loved Collins’ descriptions of food, like Katniss relishing her favorite nourishing lamb (dislike) stew with dried plums (yum!) and the sweetness of hot chocolate touching her lips for the first time. And of course there was the continual symbol of bread — the warm and fragrant bread accompanied by Prim’s cheese Katniss eats with Gale, or Peeta’s burned bread that saves her life years earlier, or District 11 sending Katniss a loaf of bread for her alliance with Rue (who was from District 11) as a symbol of solidarity and quiet revolution, which the film eliminates, showing the citizens (many of whom are people of color) rioting instead. 

Society equates food with morality — healthy food is good, decadent food sinful. While eating should be a sensual experience, through diet ads the media constantly tells us that women shouldn’t enjoy food. Food is constantly a threat to women’s bodies and we must resist its seductive allure. That’s why it was so refreshing to read Katniss’ delight in savoring food.
Beyond nourishment, I saw hunger serving as a metaphor for consumption — consumption of merchandise and media with its gravitational pull of reality TV and celeb culture. To eliminate the message of food, hunger and consumption dilutes its powerful message.
Speaking of parts eliminated from the book, I was disappointed the film eliminated the leads’ disabilities. In the book, Katniss loses her hearing, becoming deaf in one ear, and Peeta has his leg amputated. The movie hints at her hearing loss with sound effects but doesn’t actually address it. People often say that losing their hearing would be the end of the world but Katniss must adapt as a hunter and survive. It’s also a powerful message that in the book the Capitol “fixes” people’s disabilities without their consent. Sadly, it says even more that the film erases disabilities altogether. The fact that a movie can’t have a disabled protagonist or a disabled love interest is pathetic.
Amber’s Take:
The film really diminished a lot of powerful themes and messages from the book, and I couldn’t agree more with you about minimizing injury, or what equates to erasure of disability. Ironic that the book has the Capitol “fixing” disability, but the film itself erases it–making the filmmakers the Capitol. We — the viewers — are already in the uncomfortable position of watching the Games much like the Capitol citizens (something else the film minimizes, I think).

In a way, it’s funny that we haven’t really talked about violence, and how — in order to get a PG-13 rating — the film sanitized violence. The books are intended for a Young Adult audience, but are filled with brutal murders. The movie is, too, and I think we could see the de-emphasis of violence as either positive or negative: Positive in that the movie doesn’t glorify violence, or depict it graphically (which movies do too much of in general), but bad in that the movie isn’t as dark or complex as it could have been. While I realize that a filmmaker must make difficult choices when adapting a book (series), every choice made about The Hunger Gamesmade it safer — and more likely to not put off, offend, or disturb mainstream viewers. In essence, making it a successful blockbuster.

Stay tuned for the next part of the Review in Conversation on The Hunger Games, in which we’ll discuss race in the world of the film, female relationships, and that love triangle.

Amber Leab is a Co-Founder and Contributing Editor to Bitch Flicks. 

Megan Kearns is a Bitch Flicks Contributor and Founder of The Opinioness of the World.

Top 10 of 2011: Movie Preview of ‘Horrible Bosses’

Everyone loves/hates a Top 10 list, right? We thought we’d kick off 2012 with our top posts of 2011, with the only criteria being page views. (Tough to argue with that!) Stay tuned all week as we count to #1, with a few honorable mentions thrown in for good measure. 
2011 was our best year yet, and we have you readers and guest contributors to thank for that!
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At number 10, we have a guest post from the incomparable Melissa McEwan, founder and manager of the award-winning political and cultural group blog Shakesville, who had a few things to say about the trailer for Horrible Bosses.
[Trigger warning for rape “humor,” fat hatred, sexual assault, violence.]

“Tool Boss” Colin Farrell tells “Disrespected Employee” Jason Sudeikis, “We’ve got to trim some of the fat around here.” Sudeikis says, “What?!” to which Farrell replies, “I want you to fire the fat people.”
“Maneater Boss” Jennifer Aniston, who is a dentist, suggests to “Harassed Employee” Charlie Day that they have sex on top of an unconscious female patient. “Let’s use her like a bed,” she says, to which Day exclaims in response, “That’s crossing the line!”
“Psycho Boss” Kevin Spacey tells “Abused Employee” Jason Bateman, “I own you, you little runt,” to which Bateman sheepishly replies, “Thank you.”
Editors note: We later ran a review of Horrible Bosses by guest writers Kirk Boyle and Byron Bailey. You can read that here.

Movie Preview: Horrible Bosses

This guest post by Melissa McEwan also appears at her blog Shakesville. 

[Trigger warning for rape “humor,” fat hatred, sexual assault, violence.]

Deeky texted me last night after he saw a new TV spot for the previously discussed upcoming film Horrible Bosses, in which murder and sexual assault are central “comedic” themes. This spot ran during a primetime re-run of NCIS.

“Tool Boss” Colin Farrell tells “Disrespected Employee” Jason Sudeikis, “We’ve got to trim some of the fat around here.” Sudeikis says, “What?!” to which Farrell replies, “I want you to fire the fat people.”

“Maneater Boss” Jennifer Aniston, who is a dentist, suggests to “Harassed Employee” Charlie Day that they have sex on top of an unconscious female patient. “Let’s use her like a bed,” she says, to which Day exclaims in response, “That’s crossing the line!”

“Psycho Boss” Kevin Spacey tells “Abused Employee” Jason Bateman, “I own you, you little runt,” to which Bateman sheepishly replies, “Thank you.”

At a bar, with “murder consultant” Jaime Foxx, one of them says, “I guess we’re just gonna be miserable for the rest of our lives,” and Foxx offers, “Why don’t you kill each other’s bosses?” Sudeikis says, “That’s actually a good idea.”

Montage of someone flying out the window of a highrise building; the three men in a car spinning out of control; police cars with sirens blaring.

Cut to Sudeikis and Bateman walking down the street together, evidently discussing the murder plan. “I can’t go to jail,” Sudeikis says. “Look at me, I’ll get raped like crazy.”

“I’d get raped just as much as you would, Kurt,” says Bateman, in a sort of hurt voice because rape is totes a compliment.

“No, no—I know you would,” Sudeikis reassures him.

Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes.

And, no, the fact that it is a prison rape joke between men does not make it funny. There is nothing funny about prison rape.

Call Time Warner and let them know that you don’t think rape jokes, especially rape jokes that suggest rape is a fucking compliment, are funny.

If you’re on Twitter, you can tweet directly at Warner Brothers Pictures: @WBPictures.

Melissa McEwan is the founder and manager of the award-winning political and cultural group blog Shakesville, which she launched as Shakespeare’s Sister in October 2004 because George Bush was pissing her off. In addition to running Shakesville, she also contributes to The Guardian‘s Comment is Free America and AlterNet. Melissa graduated from Loyola University Chicago with degrees in Sociology and Cultural Anthropology, with an emphasis on the political marginalization of gender-based groups. An active feminist and LGBTQI advocate, she has worked as a concept development and brand consultant and now writes full-time.