Violent Women Theme Week – Page 3

The Real Mother Russia: Modernising Murder and Betrayal in ‘The Americans’

The ideological battle between the FBI and KGB is thus a gendered one, as the national characters of Uncle Sam and Mother Russia are pitted against each other on a more even world stage.

Elisabeth

This guest post by Dan Jordan appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Trigger warning for discussion of rape and torture.

The spy thriller achieved prominence in the early 1960s as a way to compensate for Western Imperial decline. Often featuring male, upper class agents travelling to exotic but foreboding countries with the use of up to date technology, defeating a foreign villain and exercising their heterosexual prowess over whatever damaged or naïve island nymphs they came across, these fantasies of colonial power achieved global appeal. This is nowhere more evident than the continued relevance and success of the James Bond films. Typically, the narrative follows Bond being somehow symbolically emasculated by M before eventually regaining his authority by crushing the plans of an unwieldy megalomaniac using the latest in spy tech and sexually dominating the Bond Girl. This pattern serves to ritualistically modernise the principally British but more broadly Western national character into a stylish, sadistic macho ideal to maintain a semblance of Imperial authority over increasingly independent countries.

The Americans alters such conventions in its setting of 1980s Washington, DC where American and Russian espionage operations in the post-Cold War race for advanced technology only ever results in a hollow stalemate or opportunities for petty revenge. Also, the influence of second wave feminism, interpreted in Bond as having freed women to choose their submission to men, is instead conceived as granting access to the requisite sexual agency and dominance of the spy thriller to women. The ideological battle between the FBI and KGB is thus a gendered one, as the national characters of Uncle Sam and Mother Russia are pitted against each other on a more even world stage.

The series centres on the lives of married, suburban travel agents Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell). Though better off than their parents, they still struggle to balance their commitments to their jobs and each other within the changing dynamics of family life. Receiving orders from their native Moscow to infiltrate, undermine and expose the rotten, oppressive soul of capitalism and build a power base for Western communism to flourish as deep cover agents for the Soviet “Directorate S” only complicates matters.

Family pic

As Philip grapples with maintaining loyalty to The Cause while enjoying the indulgences and privileges life in America grants him, Elizabeth remains committed to making socialists of their children Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Salati), using sex to leverage high ranking intelligence contacts and murdering just such contacts in a way that rejects their connection to her mission, her country and her true self.

At first refusing both protection and trust to remain independent and unknowable, Elizabeth’s lack of immunity to the strains of sexual deception and death dealing jeopardises her role as a representative of Mother Russia. Her failure to birth or sustain new revolutions and forge genuine connections with anyone besides Philip leaves her at odds with the mission she committed her life to. In this way, The Americans depicts initially validating, mature and self-sacrificing female violence as increasingly deadening and traumatic, removing the ability to be either a nurturing or controlling mother. However, this internal division is a necessary part of individuality outside the constant cycle of brinkmanship, betrayal and revenge.

Elizabeth’s ability to trust Philip as more than just her fellow agent is central in The Americans’ approach to violent women’s independence. At first, she sees their 15-year marriage as a necessary role play to maintain their cover before acknowledging that he genuinely values her and her choices. We are introduced to the Jennings as they bring Colonel Timoshev (David Vadom), an ex-Soviet defector, home in the trunk of their car having missed his deportation ferry. Awaiting further orders from The Centre, Elisabeth shatters the happy family surroundings by almost stabbing Philip when he tries to kiss her.

The root of Elizabeth’s distrust of Philip is developed later in the episode, as she confronts Timoshev for beating and sexually assaulting her in combat training, a reference to the mass rapes committed by the Red Army in Germany and Poland after the end of the Second World War. As Tymochev’s transport is continually delayed, Elizabeth uncuffs, fights and defeats him and prepares to cave his head in with a tire-iron to avenge herself. Before doing so, however, she accepts Timoshev’s dismissal of the rape as “a perk” of his position rather than a punishment for her inability to defend herself. As Elizabeth accepts that the experience was as much a part of the job as her family life is, Philip realises exactly what was done to her and kills Timoshev. Having himself considered defection because of the pleasure he gets from his American life, Philip chooses to reject the unchecked, unseen dominance of male authority he was otherwise committing to.

Showing he values Elizabeth’s choice more than a high ranking Soviet officer and that their relationship is more than a job to him, their status as husband and wife becomes more than a meaningless disguise for the first time. The Americans shows that trust does not infringe on the capability of women to avenge and empower themselves over past instances of violation and reduced status but is reliant upon treating choice as not only possible but valuable.

Sadly, Philip routinely fails to learn this lesson over the course of the first season. By constantly feeling the need to protect Elizabeth from the necessary risks and harm she experiences in the field, he becomes the main source of tension in their relationship. This split between the violent outside world and the Jennings’ house in turn sets up The Americans’ dynamic of false and genuine relationships. In episode five, Elizabeth disguises herself and seduces an FBI intelligence contractor (Eric McKay) to gain access to FBI radio car frequencies. Suddenly and non-consensually, he begins whipping her with a belt. After screaming, crying and begging him to stop, Elizabeth smiles as she stands and faces away from him. The scars she gained from the encounter have given her the visible leverage she needs to probe the contractor for the information she needs, validating her capability and commitment to suffering for The Cause.

When Philip sees the scars back at home and insists on getting revenge, Elizabeth chides him for trying to be her “daddy” and reminds him the violent acts committed against and by her are neither his responsibility nor do they impact on their personal relationship. Further invalidating personal relationships in the realm of counter-intelligence, Elizabeth is then tasked with killing faltering anti-ballistics contractor and KGB informant Adam Dorwin (Michael Countrymen). Having relied on the “friendship” of the head of the Russian embassy to avoid being turned by the FBI, his vulnerability after the death of his wife is comforted by a bullet in the head from Elizabeth. With this, The Americans establishes that genuine connection with the KGB or Elizabeth is unreliable because of their higher connection to Russia and the Communist project.

Elizabeth’s commitment to The Cause is also under-estimated by her and Philip’s KGB “handler” Claudia (Margo Martindale), an older and more experienced representative of Cold War Russia. Elizabeth’s ability to not let physical and emotional turmoil overrule her orders as Claudia eventually does marks her as the more modern and capable generation of Mother Russia. In episode six, Elizabeth is submitted to psychological torture by seemingly freelance counter-intelligence agents. Placed in a disused factory closet decorated with photographs of Paige and Henry, she is confronted by implicit threats being made against them and the falsity of her status as their “real” mother.

Before she is physically tortured in front of Philip, Claudia intervenes and reveals the whole ordeal was a test of their loyalty. The suggestion that her willingly receiving physical harm was the cut-off point for Claudia’s trust infuriates Elizabeth, who savagely beats and water-boards her handler. Inflicting on Claudia what she herself would’ve suffered for her mission, she rejects an older generation’s definition of mercy and, once more, her need for protection. As well, she reveals to Philip she had told The Centre about his considered defection, betraying his trust and invalidating his perceived duty to protect her simultaneously. Elisabeth’s willingness to be harmed, to hurt, kill and betray others for her country fulfill The Americans’ requirements of a true patriot.

Claudia disguises the wounds of her distrust

However, patriotism in The Americans infringes on the individuals ability to have their own lives and identities outside their ideological commitments, eventually justifying their need for revenge as the righteous will of their country. Elizabeth reaches this crossroad of identity once the head of Directorate S General Zhukov (Oleg Krupa) is assassinated by the FBI in episode 11. Ordered to end the escalation of violence by Claudia, Elizabeth instead abducts the US military colonel Richard Patterson (Paul Fitzgerald) who oversaw the operation that took the fatherly general away from her. Detailing the love she had for the general as she prepares to kills him, the colonel taunts her that living only to feed information to The Centre and undertake ideological revenge shows she doesn’t understand loving or being loved and has no basis for revenge.

After releasing the colonel, sacrificing her personal relationship with Zhukov and obeying her orders from Moscow once more, Elizabeth discovers this too was a manipulation by Claudia. By giving Elizabeth the colonel’s name and telling her not to go after him, Claudia attempted to prove Elizabeth’s lack of commitment to The Cause when she is damaged emotionally. Instead, Claudia avenges Zhukov herself by murdering the colonel in the season finale. The generational conflict between representatives of Mother Russia past and present is resolved as the jaded Claudia chooses her personal revenge for Zhukov over her commitment to orders and her agents. Elizabeth proves her connection to Russia is more genuine than Claudia and shows the role of Mother Russia in The Americans is based on repeated self-sacrifice.

Even as Elizabeth attempts to avoid becoming Claudia by committing to a trusting, genuine relationship with Philip to stave off a lifetime of trauma, loneliness and betrayal, the comfort they take in each other barely sustains them throughout season two. As Elizabeth recovers from a mortal gunshot wound, she loses influence and power in her home and work lives, forcing her to mould a new agent in the interim. Less willing to use sex to gain information and affronted that Paige is converting to Christianity rather than socialism in her early teens, Elizabeth channels her frustration into mentoring a young Nicaraguan communist named Lucia Chena (Aimee Carrero). On their first mission together in episode two, Elizabeth listens in as Lucia seduces a congressional aide (Nick Bailey) to reacclimatise to the demands of field work after her trauma.

After securing proof that America is training contra forces after Nicaraguan elections result in a communist victory, Lucia reluctantly agrees to kill the aide on Elizabeth’s order. Lucia now lives by Elizabeth’s demands and must imitate her to establish communism in Nicaragua, her own motherland. Elizabeth’s controlling influence here establishes an uneasy mix of handler and maternal roles, leaving the possibility for genuine connection with other women and new revolutions dependent on self-sacrifice once more.

Not long after, Lucia’s revolution falls to the cycle of revenge as she sets out to avenge her father and forces Elizabeth to sacrifice her role as a nurturer for The Cause. Blackmailing closeted gay military captain Andrew Larrick (Lee Tergesen) into giving them access to the contra training camp, Elizabeth attempts to regain her capability for violence and manipulation remains in the absence of sexual threat Larrick poses. Unfortunately, Lucia does not stop attempting to murder Larig for training soldiers who tortured her father to death. In episode eight, Elizabeth is given the ultimatum to kill Larrick and lose access to the camp or letting him kill Lucia in self-defence. Elizabeth lowers her gun and watches as he chokes her to death.

As Lucia fails to pragmatically sacrifice her emotions for her mission, Elizabeth must do it instead. Cracks of trauma begin to show at last, as Elizabeth cries alone in her dark house.

Even as Elizabeth’s “recovery” has resulted in a redoubling of trauma, loss and isolation while she loses control over her children’s development, the distractions of her work have led her biological daughter to adopt similar values to her own. Where forcing Paige to do rigorous housework in the middle of the night as Elizabeth did in Russia to learn maturity fails, allowing her to protest the American nuclear weapons programme succeeds in instilling a measure of socialist enterprise into Paige. Elisabeth, having rationalised her unquestioning loyalty to The Cause as adults “doing things that they don’t want to do” learns to support things Paige chooses for herself. Without the need for violence or manipulation that now inevitably result in revenge and betrayal, Elisabeth’s previously fake identity as Paige’s mother has delivered real change. As The Centre send out orders to begin training Paige as a KGB agent at the end of series two, Elisabeth is faced with the final choice of betraying her motherland or betraying her new found motherhood.

In The Americans, conventions of the spy thriller are altered by the context of its setting to create a crisis of gendered nationalism. As Elisabeth fights for the trust to sustain harm for her cause and remain independent over even the demands of her KGB handler, she becomes increasingly isolated and inhuman. In turn, her investment in genuine relationships limits her influence over her mature, ideological commitment to representing a modern, capable Mother Russia. Neither entirely nurturing or controlling, she slowly recognises the value of her own daughter’s independence as well as her own. In seasons to come, though, she may choose to sacrifice this as well.

Dan Jordan is an insightful, eclectic writer, aspiring media critic and University of Leicester Film and English graduate. Frequently submerged in new and classic movies, TV, video games, comics and criticism thereof, he still finds time to eat and sleep. Follow him on Twitter and at his regularly updated blog The Odd Review.

Nine Pretty Great Lesbian Vampire Movies

Almost unfailingly exploitative in its portrayal of queer women, this specific sub-genre of film stands alone in a few ways, not the least of which being that the vampires, while murderous and ultimately doomed, are powerful, lonely women, often living their lives outside of society’s rules.

This guest post by Sara Century appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Vampires. Lesbians. These two things are as intertwined as the stars and the sky, at least in popular fiction. The vampire lesbian sub-genre finds its basis in an unfinished poem by Coleridge 1797-ish, and continuing onward and up to the modern era with entries such as 2010 German film We Are the Night, and beyond. There are hundreds of lesbian vampire stories in the world, and very few of them deviate from the basic plot of the 1872 novella Carmilla by Joseph Le Fanu. You can just read that story and you’ll have the basic gist: lesbian vampire seduces straight woman, is murdered by men. If that sounds like a flimsy plot excuse for violence against women, that’s because that is 1,000 percent what it is. On the other hand, if there’s hundreds of anything, at least a few of them are bound to be good. I personally have a pretty strong love for lesbian vampire films, which, for better or worse, helped me to define my own images of sexuality as a young gay. Almost unfailingly exploitative in its portrayal of queer women, this specific sub-genre of film stands alone in a few ways, not the least of which being that the vampires, while murderous and ultimately doomed, are powerful, lonely women, often living their lives outside of society’s rules. And I love everything about that… except the part where they’re all mass murderers. When there is so little representation of powerful queer women in film, it becomes difficult to fully dismiss the few that exist, even if they are ultimately negative or problematic.

For all these reasons, I felt a need to compile a list of lesbian vampire films that impacted me in some way, or that I found particularly enjoyable to watch. Without further ado, my nine favorite lesbian vampire films.

9. The Moth Diaries – 2011

I liked this one. It’s a little meta, in that the girl is reading and narrating the short story Carmilla while in a movie based on the short story, Carmilla. If you can handle that, you’ll be pretty down with most of this film. There’s no organ music, which is a solid fail on the part of many films, but it’s from a female writer/director team, and I don’t think it gets enough props for being as enjoyable as it is. Lily Cole is impressively creepy as Ernessa, the Carmilla analog of the film. The main character Rebecca is immediately distrustful of Ernessa, but her friend Lucy (yep) falls under Ernessa’s sway. And so on, and so forth. There’s some pretty disturbing stuff in here: suicide features prominently in the story, the general lack of consent during sex scenes that you often see in lesbian vampire movies is definitely in there, and Rebecca makes out with her teacher, which freaks me out more than most of the rest of the movie. My critique would be that, as meta as the story gets, it never really resolves any of the questions it asks itself. There’s little in the way of socially relevent commentary here, which seems odd for a film that immediately opens a gaping hole in the fourth wall and then leaves it there for the entire course of the narrative. That said, I like this film’s self-awareness, and there’s definitely a few creepy moments that are worth the price of admission.

8. Blood and Roses – 1960

This movie makes a lot of “best of” lists, mostly because it was the first lesbian vampire film that explicitly expressed the queerness of its main character in no uncertain terms. We see a lot of what would ultimately become alternately beloved and maligned tropes of the genre: the love triangle, the arty dream sequence in the middle of the narrative, the bizarre similarity of a character to a portrait of a long-dead ancestor, and the sexually confused girlfriend character.

Our vampire Carmilla’s sexual agency, as well as her frustration, are equally compelling. She flirts with her crushes, and is upset by their rejection of her. She feeds on village girls after playing with them like a cat with a mouse. She is clearly doomed from the very moment she first appears onscreen, and yet, for all these reasons, she’s by far the most interesting character in the film.

What Blood and Roses said to me when I watched it as a young queer woman could be a much longer piece of writing, but, briefly, these images were among the first moments of queer visibility in North American cinema. As problematic as they are, they deserve analysis, and they deserve to be considered for their impact on both queer and straight audiences of their time. Besides all that, though, Blood and Roses is a campy and fun horror film from the 1960s, so if that sounds up your alley, definitely check it out.

7. Daughters of Darkness – 1971

In the 1970s, there was a fad in horror films where privileged, angry men with Beatles hair and snappy wardrobes were the main characters of pretty much every single movie. That’s going strong here, where the main character looks exactly like this:

Wowza. Anyway, the real main character is obviously not that guy, but this extremely fictionalized version of Elizabeth Bathory, at this point hundreds of years old, played by the wonderfully over-the-top Delphine Seyrig. Delphine has a respectable history in art house films of the 1970s, and worked with several of the best directors of her day. She seems to have great fun with the hypersexualized Bathory, and the whole film gets much more interesting when she shows up. The beginning of the movie is just the straight couple getting married and talking a lot, so bring on the lesbian vampires, my friends. Can I just say, as messed up as she is, Bathory is just shockingly beautiful through this whole movie. All of her outfits are the best outfits I have ever seen, and she is my style icon from here to eternity. Also perfectly fashionable, her vampire sidekick, whose simple style and bobbed hair are based on the glorious silent film star, Louise Brooks. I’m just letting you know, this movie rules. Persistent themes of the sexually aggressive and sadistic vampire focusing on the confused, flippant blonde woman are in full force here, and I would say this portrayal of the ancient and wicked lesbian vampire character is one of the more fascinating.

6. The Countess – 2009

This film is about Countess Elizabeth Bathory, widely considered to be one of the most sadistic mass murderers of all time. I say “considered to be” because, to be honest, nobody has the slightest damn idea what actually happened there. Was she a mass murderer? Probably? People were not keeping extensive records of this sort of thing in 1610, and, in fact destroyed all evidence of wrongdoing to prevent a scandal. She was of royal blood, and therefore never went to trial. What I’m saying is that all the information currently available surrounding this case is strongly based in rumor. Still, she is the person on whom much of Western World vampire mythology is based on, so if anyone has the right to be on a list about lesbian vampires, it’s the countess. The story follows the legends of what we believe to be true about her life, and carries us all the way through to her bitter end, with the entirely fictional subplot of a doomed affair with a younger man. I wasn’t personally that into the added love story of the film, but it definitely sets up some of the creepiest scenes in the whole movie, so I’ll allow it. This movie was done by Julie Delpy, who both directs and stars as Bathory, like a boss. Honestly, this film is just flat out better made than anything else on the list in concern to production values, budget, and acting skill, so if you’re into watching something less campy and more real, this is the one for you.

5. The Blood Spattered Bride – 1972

This movie starts with one of my least favorite opening scenes of all time, but if you can get through the weird rape fantasy that kicks it off, the feminist commentary actually gets really interesting as the movie goes along. The tale follows two newlyweds, Susan and her nameless husband, who exists not so much as a character, but as a representation of director Vincente Aranda’s perception of the fascist patriarchy. He comes across about as likeable as a fascist patriarchy, too, more or less crying a river every time his wife doesn’t respond to his aggressive sexual advances. A great portion of this film is Susan progressing through the story arc tropes of most major feminist characters of the 1970s: bride, to unhappy bride, to lesbian, to misandrist, to murderer. That said, honestly, I don’t really blame her, because she is literally married to the human embodiment of misogyny. As an audience member, you’ll find yourself rooting for this guy’s death pretty hard I think, so I can’t imagine what it’d be like to be married to him. She literally locks herself in a cage to get away from him, uses quotes from a book to tell him she hates him, and finally flies into a full-out screaming fit that, let’s be real, is not entirely unprovoked. So, when the dreamy and beautiful Carmilla shows up in a totally bizarre scene that I’m not even going to describe right now because you should just watch it, it’s obvious that Susan is about to get straight up seduced. When your options are “man you hate who borderline rapes you a lot” or “ghostly vampire with really pretty eyes that tells you to kill your legitimately terrible husband,” I guess I’d probably go with the latter, too. I mean, let’s be real, the third option of “get the Hell out of there” is the only real option, but if she did that, there’d be no movie, so spree of murder and terror with dreamy girlfriend it is. To the credit of the film, Susan is a very interesting character. She ultimately goes the really wrong direction with it, but her feminist theory begins in a good place. Societal loathing of queer women ultimately causes her to snap when she realizes that, as a lesbian, the world will punish her sexuality and turn her into a pariah. That is a totally legit concerns for 1972. Susan is by far the best and most interesting part of this film, which is otherwise mostly a campy horror film with unsettling moments of sexual violence and the familiar art house dreaminess of most of the films on this list.

4. The Hunger – 1983

The Hunger is one of the more famous entries in the lesbian vampire canon, so, if you’ve seen one movie on this list, the law of averages would imply that it’d be this one. The beginning of this movie finds David Bowie as John Blaylock and Catherine Deneuve as Miriam Blaylock in a goth club watching Bauhaus. They are vampires, swinger vampires. They pick up another Goth couple and kill them with a tiny blade kept inside the ankh (yes, ankh) Miriam keeps around her neck.

It. Is. Nine. Teen. Eighty. Three. As. Fuck. Right. Now.

There’s a lot of cool stuff in this movie. It’s really well shot, Catherine Deneuve is pretty much the greatest actor on the planet, the soundtrack rules, and David Bowie… just, David Bowie. This film also has one of the most famously great lesbian sex scenes in cinema history. Miriam and Susan Sarandon’s character, Dr. Sarah Roberts, hook up for the first time (only time? I don’t know) to the most lesbian song EVER, aka “The Flower Duet” from Léo Delibes’ opera Lakmé. “Sounds like a love song,” says Sarah. “Then I suppose that’s what it is,” says Miriam. You bet it is, Miriam! Moments later, those two are making out. Another slight alteration on the standard lesbian vampire tropes is that Dr. Roberts, the supposed victim of the film, is the one that initiates sex, here, rather than, as we so often see in film, the vampire preying on a human’s naiveté and weakness.

Sticking well within queer tropes, however, Miriam is honestly a real U-Haul vampire, and waits all of 10 seconds after John’s death before she tries to marry Sarah pretty much out of nowhere. We are talking about someone that has an eternity ahead of her that can’t even wait like a month after her husband’s “death” before she starts moving her girlfriend in. Which is cold as Hell, because they were married for something like 300 years. Well, I don’t want to spoil the twists and turns this story takes for y’all, so I guess I’ll cut myself off there, but, more or less, this movie is famous for a reason, and if you’re in the mood to watch a scary film that is just the most ’80s thing you’ve seen in your life, this is likely going to be your best option.

3. Nadja – 1994

I feel like this film gets overlooked by both the vampire crowd as well as the indie crowd, and it’s kind of a shame, since it has all the requirements of being a cult classic. There’s nothing particularly new in this film, but there’s a lot to like about it. The creepy vampire as played by Elina Lowensohn really sells the film. She’s one of my all time faves. The cinematography is really great, and the film looks just stunning in black and white. Especially interesting is the use of a child’s toy camera for some scenes, lending a simple, stylized perspective at key moments. There’s a lot of pretty amusing mid-90s, Generation X style soul-searching from the white, heterosexual couple at the center of the film, as well as some genuinely on point observations on the human condition from the impressively coherent vampires. As many of these films are products of their time, I must say that Nadja is about the most 1994 film you’re liable to watch in your life. Instead of the standard skintight dress fluttering softly in the wind, the female love interest of the vampire is wearing a straight up flannel shirt and jeans, and if she had slight stubble I would definitely mistake her for Kurt Cobain. At certain moments, the film looks and sounds a bit like a music video for a Portishead song, but the aesthetic is pulled off to perfection, and it really works. The overall stylishness of Nadja has only aged for the better in the two decades since its release.

2. Vampyros Lesbos – 1971

This is where I start to get emotional. Vampyros Lesbos features my favorite opening to a film probably ever, with a bizarre shot of the vampire accompanied by noise music as the credits roll, followed immediately by our hero, the vampiric Nadine Carody, doing an erotic dance in a mirror with herself. She kisses herself in the mirror while holding a candlebra, while a blond-haired mannequin watches her. Ultimately, the countess turns, and begins kissing the mannequin, while her future lover Linda Westinghouse looks on, as intrigued as her mustached boyfriend is uncomfortable. The whole time, one of my all-time favorite songs is playing, a dark, dreamy song with an irrestistably basic Hammond organ pre-recorded drumbeat and chilling yet seductive organ sounds. And that is how you start a movie, everyone. You now have my full attention. Vampyros Lesbos is honestly just a flawless victory. It’s over-the-top, set very much with a psychedelic backdrop, and Soledad Miranda is absolutely enchanting as the countess. The comparatively less interesting “girlfriend” character Linda Westinghouse is really great in this movie. Her acting is stilted, but it works perfectly for this agonized and hestitant character, who is as attracted as she is repelled by the beautiful vampire. What I’m getting at here is that Vampyros Lesbos is a great movie (greatest movie?), and well worth your time if you’re a horror fan, a lesbian fan, an art house fan, or basically anyone (who is over the age of 18). Yes, this film is just as exploitative to queer women as any other lesbian vampire movie, but if you just focus on the intriguing, mysterious countess and her compelling monolgues, the brilliant soundtrack, and the beautifully shot and haunting love scenes between Linda and Nadine, you’ll do OK.

1. Fascination – 1979

The No. 1 spot is a tie between Vampyros Lesbos and Fascination, because I definitely love both equally, but loving things equally is not how internet listicles work, so Fascination it is. I’ve seen dozens of lesbian vampire films, but there’s something about this one. It doesn’t just slightly deviate from the tropes, it starts with a weird premise, introduces multiple tropes, and then just goes completely off the rails with them, until it concludes on a note that could only be described as utterly bizarre. To me, adding art house weirdness to horror films just makes a good thing even better, so I find Fascination to be delightful, haunting, and aesthetically beautiful. The movies of Jean Rolin are often about vampires, definitely well within the realm of art house cinema, and always highly eroticized. Fascination in specific has a just bananas plot trajectory: it pretty much starts with a whole lot of lesbian sex, which then becomes straight sex, which then goes back to being lesbian sex. They’re kind of vampires, or not? One of the main characters terrorizes the countryside with a scythe, there’s a coven of witches, someone gets devoured alive… it is goddamned epic. I especially love the characters, despite how weird and evil they all are. I particularly love the character of Eva, who is very much a problematic favorite, in that pretty much every action she takes in the film ends with her committing murder at some point. The scenery is gorgeous, the cinematography is simple and beautiful, the actors seem like they’re having fun… it’s all in all a perfect 1970s horror film.

Sara Century is a multimedia performance artist, and you can follow her work at saracentury.wordpress.com.

Domestic Terrorism: Feminized Violence in ‘Misery’

Annie is a human being, dangerous not because of an evil supernatural force, but rather a severe and untreated mental illness. Although Annie is not given an official diagnosis in the film or the novel, an interview with a forensic psychologist on the special edition DVD characterizes her as displaying symptoms of several different conditions, including borderline personality disorder (BPD).

This guest post by Tessa Racked appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Content Note: This essay contains discussion of physical and emotional abuse.

Misery, directed by Rob Reiner, is the 1990 film adaptation of the 1987 Stephen King novel of the same name. The scenario is as chilling as it is simple: romance novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is saved from a car accident during a blizzard by Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). He is trapped in her house due to his injuries; she has an unhealthy obsession with his novels and violent temper. Paul’s latest novel, on the verge of being published, ends with the death of her favorite character, the titular Misery. Annie is widely considered Kathy Bates’ breakout role; she won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her portrayal, and Annie is listed as 17th on American Film Institute’s list of top 100 villains.

King has explicitly stated that Misery is about his personal battle against addiction: “Annie was my drug problem, and she was my number-one fan. God, she never wanted to leave,” he said in an interview with The Paris Review. It also expresses King’s frustration with his career, feeling trapped in the horror genre. (Similarly, the film adaptation was a departure genre-wise for Reiner, who had until this point made more comedic, sentimental fare like The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally…) The bulk of the story is the conflict between Paul, who wants to move on from writing the Misery series, and Annie, who forces Paul to languish in that stage of his life due to her unwavering fixation with both the series and her own idea of who he is as an author. A flashback scene between Paul and his agent (Lauren Bacall) foreshadows his ordeal, as he explains his decision to end his popular romance novel series by killing off the protagonist: “if I hadn’t gotten rid of her now, I would end up writing her forever.” Annie’s prison from which Paul must escape is her home; the violence she enacts is twisted versions of caregiving and romance. Not only is the antagonist of Misery a woman, but her modes of terror are coded distinctly as feminine.

Misery is a departure from much of King’s earlier work (and the resulting film adaptations), as it is not a work of speculative fiction. Annie is a human being, dangerous not because of an evil supernatural force, but rather a severe and untreated mental illness. Although Annie is not given an official diagnosis in the film or the novel, an interview with a forensic psychologist on the special edition DVD characterizes her as displaying symptoms of several different conditions, including borderline personality disorder (BPD). BPD is commonly thought of as a mental illness that primarily affects women, who make up 75 percent of the diagnoses in the United States. However, this trend may be caused by gender biases in the mental health field for various reasons; some symptoms of BPD are similarly feminized (eg. a frequent co-occurence with eating disorders), while others are considered “normal” male behavior and therefore more pathologized in women (eg. promiscuity).

Misery is not the only thriller that dramatizes symptoms of BPD to create a female antagonist who becomes obsessed with someone she desires and terrorizes that person with emotional outbursts and impulsive, violent behavior. Consider Alex (Glenn Close) in Fatal Attraction (the highest grossing film of 1987), Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in Single White Female, or Evelyn (Jessica Walter) in Play Misty for Me, all of whom have been described as having BPD. Although they resemble each other as far as the threat they present their films’ protagonists, Annie is a markedly different sort of woman; in her own words, she is “not a movie star type.” Her clothing is plain and modest. She is older and larger-bodied than the other female villains. One of her most memorable characteristics is her frequent use of bowdlerized profanity, such as “dirty birdy” and “cockadoodie.” She is a hopeless romantic, but in short, she lacks sex appeal. Annie is also different in that she is coded as working class and rural. She lives by herself on a farm. She pays tribute to Paul by naming her sow after the literary heroine he’s created. (Misery is one cute pig, to be fair, but her captive seems less than flattered.) Her idea of a fancy dinner is making meatloaf with SPAM added in, and she mispronounces Dom Perignon. She contrasts sharply with, for instance, Fatal Attraction’s Alex, a sophisticated book editor who lives in New York City. Unlike Alex, Annie isn’t positioned as an exciting temptress, or an embodied punishment for lustful transgression. Rather, she is a smothering maternal figure, forcing Paul into an arrested state of mediocrity as a creative and infantilizing him as the helpless prisoner in her guest bedroom.

Although Annie talks about Paul both as the object of her romantic love and her literary idol, their relationship as portrayed in the film more closely resembles that of a mother and child. In their first interaction, Annie extracts an unconscious Paul from the wreck of his car, administers CPR, and carries him back to her home. In the next scene, we meet Annie as she gently reassures Paul that she is his “number-one fan” and that he’s going to be all right. Annie giving Paul life, bringing him into her home, and reinforcing to him that she is there to care for him because she loves him more than anyone else is strikingly similar to a basic narrative of a woman giving birth. Even the way the audience sees who she is for the first time is through visual and auditory tropes often used to convey a newborn baby: the scene is shot from Paul’s point of view, initially blurry and echoing, then coming into focus and resting on a low angle shot of Annie’s face. These low angle shots of Annie from Paul’s point of view are a recurring image in the film, often used when she spiraling out in an angry rant that hints at (or culminates in) the violence she is capable of enacting.

Annie’s treatment of Paul is nothing short of abusive, but also reinforces the maternal quality of her control over him. The harmful aspects of her caregiving are one of the main sources of horror in the film. She proudly shows off her nursing skills through the homemade braces she’s fashioned for his broken legs, as the camera pans down the horrific sight of his severe injuries that would normally be covered by casts. An early suggestion of menace comes when she coyly admits that she made pilgrimages to the lodge where he was working on his latest novel and would stand under his window, as she shaves him with a straight razor: “Like a baby!” she pronounces upon finishing both her task and her description of stalking him. This scene is followed by our first glimpse of her temper. She chastises Paul for his use of profanity in the manuscript he has allowed her to read– his first novel outside of the Misery series to be published– and her indignancy quickly grows into anger. She yells and spills the soup she is holding. “Look what you made me do!” she cries, showing both a mother’s frustration with a child making a mess and an abuser’s displacement of blame for their own actions.

Although she seems to be a simple person at first, her awareness of the situation’s dynamic is made abundantly clear after she flies into a rage over Paul’s latest published work, Misery’s Child, in which the main character dies. Not only is she distraught over losing Misery, but she is angry at Paul for defying her perception of him as an ever-obliging font of “genius” romance novels, or, as she describes it, being a “lying old dirty birdy.” She just barely prevents herself from smashing an end table over Paul’s head. Instead, she wields his dependency, and the potential removal of her love and care, as a threat: “don’t even think about anybody coming for you… nobody knows you’re here, and you better hope nothing happens to me, because if I die, you die.” Annie’s violent mothering reaches its summit in the dramatic reveal of her past: Paul discovers, through a remarkably convenient scrapbook that she keeps in her living room, that her nursing career was fraught with the mysterious deaths of infants in her care.

Although Annie enacts her relationship with Paul through caregiving, she is motivated by romance. It is evident from her perspective that she sees their relationship as a budding love story: when she is calm, she often talks to him in a shy, girlish manner, in awe of his “genius.” Once she manages to coerce him into writing a satisfactory retcon of Misery’s death, she celebrates by blasting Liberace records, as she considers his music to be very romantic. The subsequent montage of Paul feverishly working on Misery’s Return is set to Liberace’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s dramatic “Piano Concerto Number 1.” Paul tries to escape by playing along with her, even suggesting they have a candlelit dinner together so that he will have an opportunity to drug her wineglass (which she clumsily knocks over during his toast, being unused to navigating a romantic setting like their dinner in the real world). After she murders the sheriff (Richard Farnsworth) investigating Paul’s disappearance, she informs her prisoner that their only option is a murder-suicide. However, she does so in rapturous tones, using language that could be lifted from a darker version of Paul’s own novels: “You and I are meant to be together forever. But now our time in this world must end.”

The relationship Annie wants to have with Paul is toxic, as it is based on her preventing him from growing/healing, from being his own person. She prevents him from physically walking away from her home, and she prevents him from professionally walking away from the Misery series. The infamous “hobbling” scene is a perfect illustration of how she objectifies Paul. Setting up the grisly procedure, she explains that it was how workers “in the early days of the Kimberley Diamond Mines” were punished for stealing, and how she will punish him for leaving his room. As she prepares to break his ankles with a sledgehammer, she blithely compares the victims of this procedure to cars and tells him that it’s “for the best,” dehumanizing him and denying the pain that she is about to put him through. The scene ends with the camera zooming in on her gazing down at the agonized Paul as she whispers, “God, I love you.”

In most horror films, the threat that the villain poses is annihilation: their aim is to maim and kill the protagonist. Annie’s goal is different. She too uses violence, but it is a tool that she wields to enforce a much different threat: inertia. She embodies this threat by adopting roles that are closely tied with femininity: she is the nurse who refuses to let her patient heal, the “mother” who prevents her “child” from gaining independence, the muse who forces her author to continue writing long after the story has concluded. The inability to grow is an obstacle that confronts people of all genders– after all, empowering women to transcend confining social roles is a ubiquitous concern among feminists– but Misery is an expression of this conflict as a potential threat that women pose men.

Recommended Reading:

“Borderline Personality Disorder- a Feminist Critique”

Tessa Racked lives in Chicago. They write essays about fat characters in cinema at Consistent Panda Bear Shape and make condensed observations about a variety of subjects @tessa_racked. Tessa celebrates the completion of every tweet with a cigarette and a glass of Dom Perignon.

The Rising “Tough” Women in AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ Season Five

This season seems to present a large change in representational issues by including complex characters of color that we actually know something about and care for, presenting the couple of Aaron and Eric from the Alexandria community and self-pronounced lesbian Tara, and doing away with the innate equation of vagina equals do the laundry while the men go kill all the zombies.

Our core group of survivors in The Walking Dead season five

This guest post by Brooke Bennett appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

The Walking Dead has long been plagued with criticism in relation to its portrayals of gender roles (for example, see both of Megan Kearns’s posts and Rebecca Cohen’s). in addition to relegating characters of color to the background at best, killing them to further the plot surround the white characters at worst. Further, queer characters have been completely absent within the show’s first four seasons, though some have suggested that the relationship between Andrea and Michonne during season three can be read as implicitly queer. That being said, season five is very different. In summary, season five finds our group of survivors escaping from the cannibalistic community of Terminus (thanks to Carol), attempting to survive on the road, then finally coming across the community of Alexandria, which seems to be extremely well off (and not full of cannibals thankfully). This season seems to present a large change in representational issues by including complex characters of color that we actually know something about and care for, presenting the couple of Aaron and Eric from the Alexandria community and self-pronounced lesbian Tara, and doing away with the innate equation of vagina equals do the laundry while the men go kill all the zombies. All of these areas of increasingly representation are extremely important in any examination of the show, but this post will dive deeper into the specific portrayal of the “tough” women of season five.

Michonne and Carol as “tough women” in The Walking Dead season five

Carol and Michonne are definitely some of the most intriguing (and my favorite) characters during season five of The Walking Dead. First off, thinking about Carol during season one to how she has completely changed over the last five years of the show is striking. In the beginning, she was in an abusive relationship with soon-dead husband Ed. Upon his death, as Megan Kearns points out, she becomes reliant on Daryl as the group searches for her daughter, Sophia, in the second season. The third season, once again, shows Carol (and some of the other women, especially Beth) as relegated to doing all the boring domestic chores and taking care of Rick’s new daughter Judith after Lori dies in season three. Season four presents a more active role for Carol, but season five is the most crucial to her character development. In season five, Carol constructs a persona of herself for the Alexandria community, acting like she is some innocent, helpless upper-class suburban housewife. She even tells Deanna, the leader of Alexandria, that she “really didn’t have much to offer” to Rick’s group, which is obviously not true because she’s the reason they all escaped Terminus without becoming someone’s dinner.

Carol and femininity as masquerade

One of my absolute favorite scenes of season five is when Daryl is sitting on the porch of one of the fancy houses while Carol walks outside all made-up in her housewife outfit. Daryl scoffs and tells her, “You look ridiculous.” To us this is hilarious because we agree with Daryl; we know she is not this housewife type character any longer. Carol intelligently masquerades as this feminine role in order to make those in Alexandria purposely underestimate her. In essence, this dynamic also seems to point out how gender is something we do – it’s a performative activity that we have to continuously work at because it’s a socially constructed idea. Carol performs this weak embodiment of women in order to be able to sneak around the community and do as she wishes. At one point Carol even remarks to Rick, “You know what’s great about this place? I get to be invisible again.” Carol challenges the innateness of gender by not only being a extremely strong, capable female survivor, but also by masquerading as the opposite find of woman she has become now.

On the other hand, Michonne has evolved greatly as a character as well. When she was introduced in season three, Michonne was largely unresponsive to other people and seemed very confrontational. Problematically, Michonne is used as an object of trade in relation to Rick and the Governor – the Governor claims he will leave Rick and his group alone if he gives him Michonne, which Rick actually tells Merle (of all the characters, of course the most overtly racist character is chosen) to go through with this. As the show continues into season four, Michonne emerges with actual dialogue (about time) and, once again, demonstrates how she is arguably the toughest character of the entire group. We finally learn more about her backstory – she apparently has lost a child due to the zombie apocalypse which is, significantly, similar to Carol as well (I’ll return to this connection in a bit). Michonne consistently tries to convince Rick that they need to find a new community or start their own; they cannot survive by living on the road anymore. This obviously rational thinking is invoked continuously in season five, and is in stark comparison to Rick’s questionable, impulsive choices throughout season five.

Sword-wielding badass, Michonne

One of Michonne’s most crucial scenes in season five surrounds an episode later on, when the group is in Alexandria. Significantly, Deanna (the leader of Alexandria) gives both Michonne and Rick the job of constable – they are responsible for enforcing order. Obviously, Rick has always had this role both in the post-apocalypse and in his professional career choice as a cop before the apocalypse. On the other hand, Michonne being given this role provides an alternative mode of leadership, one which looks increasingly more appealing as Rick seems to be losing his ability to lead responsibly and effectively. After Carol tells Rick that she knows Pete is abusing Jessie (a married couple within Alexandria), and likely their young child Sam, Rick immediately wants to kill Pete, no questions asked. This is certainly motivated by the obvious attraction Rick has to Jessie; he’s reacting to his feelings for her and need to save the damsel in distress, hoping to make her his own. Rick and Pete end up in a physical fight that pours out into the street, with a large part of Alexandria coming to watch and attempt to break it up, which is ultimately done by Deanna. Rick, who seems to be very distraught and hysterical, yells back at Deanna and the other residents, faces bloodied, that they are not going to survive if they don’t change the way they do things.

Hysterical Rick after beating up Pete

This is probably good advice, but Rick somehow thinks that this is an excuse to go against what the society’s leader, Deanna, has told him to do (not kill Pete). Either way, Rick goes on a rant yet again about how they are all doomed and he isn’t just going to sit by and watch this community fall apart, but, in mid-sentence, Michonne comes in and hits Rick over the head, knocking him unconscious, and ending the episode. Unlike Rick, Michonne knows what he says to be true but doesn’t go about changing the group via violence and rash decision-making. Michonne is, by far, the better leader of the two. In her constable uniform, she knocks Rick out, powerfully making the connection between her embodiment of moral law enforcement that is completely in opposition with Rick’s way of doing things.

Michonne after knocking out Rick

Overall, Carol and Michonne provide the most compelling roles of “tough” women within season five of The Walking Dead. As I mentioned earlier, both women had experienced the loss of a child because of the zombie apocalypse, which deserves further analysis as it complicates their role of powerful women characters within the show. Over the show, both Carol and Michonne are presented as being a sort of maternal figure for other children. For Carol this is seen in her relationship with Lizzie and Micah, whereas Michonne is presented this way with Carl when she helps him get the family picture so that Judith will know what Lori looks like.

Michonne as maternal figure for Carl

Carol as maternal figure for Lizzie and Micah

Interestingly, tough women being shown as maternal figures is a common theme in female-centered action narratives. For example, in Kill Bill, The Bride is a brutal, unstoppable character as she takes revenge upon those who tried to kill her. Yet, in Kill Bill: Vol. 2 she finds out that her child is alive, thus reasserting her role as mother. This can be read as reminding The Bride that she can be as tough as she wants, but at the end of the day she is still biologically female and her duties should/need to revolve around the realm of domesticity. Since Carol and Michonne are presented as maternal figures within The Walking Dead, this can complicate a reading of their toughness as being completely empowering since we are reminded of their biological femaleness. Yet, Carol’s gender performance in season five would seem to argue that gender is more socially constructed than anything. In the end, the action heroines of The Walking Dead, like other “tough” heroine narratives in film and television, cannot be taken as completely, 100 percent empowering just because the women are able to take care of themselves and display how they can totally kick some ass.

Sasha and Rosita during season five of The Walking Dead

Any discussion of strong women in season five would be mistaken not to mention Rosita and Sasha. Unfortunately, these two characters are underexplored (along with Tara, as well) at this point, though they are portrayed as being strong like Michonne and Carol are. Sasha, as Rick even comments when the group reaches Alexandria, is the best shooter, leading her to get the job of being on watch and shooting zombies from a sniper tower. Rosita originally was shown being completely oversexualized when we first met her. She worn tiny shorts and a tiny top, showing off her body, and also consistently had pig tails. For the action heroine, this fetishistic presentation is super common – think Lara Croft in Tomb Raider or Alice and Jill in the Resident Evil franchise.

Oversexualized Rosita in The Walking Dead

Oversexualized Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) in Tomb Raider

Thankfully, when the group gets to Alexandria this trope is reversed, and Rosita finally wears dons a reasonable clothing choice for the zombie apocalypse and no longer wears girlish ponytails. Other than serving a minimal role is Abraham’s sidekick, Rosita doesn’t seem to do anything else within the show. On the other hand, Sasha is a somewhat more developed character, especially in her relationship with her brother, Tyreese, and in her romantic relationship with Bob, who both die within season five – Sasha gets a pretty emotionally tough hand during the fifth season. Like Michonne, Sasha also makes some more rational and intelligent, in comparison to Rick, comments to the group. When at the welcoming dinner party, some residents ask Sasha what her favorite meal is because it would just be awful if they cooked her something else. She responds, “that is what you worry about?!” in utter shock as to the hierarchy of their priorities. Of course, Sasha is much more realistic and doesn’t buy into this cookie-cutter “fake” community of Alexandria, with its $800,000 homes (as Deanna mentions to Rick) and no longer existent lifestyle it symbolizes.

Overall, I hope Rosita and Sasha will continue to be explored an developed as season six (which just premiered Sunday, October 11 this year) progresses, alongside Tara who is also a very underutilized character within The Walking Dead. Additionally, it will be interesting to see who becomes the authoritative power in Alexandria, as the return of Morgan in the season five finale further complicates Rick’s role as authoritative leader, or the “Ricktatorship” as some critics have put it. Either way, I’m excited to see where the development of these awesome, ass-kicking tough women goes in the episodes to come.

Brooke Bennett is an undergraduate student and honors candidate majoring in English at the University of Arkansas. Her academic work revolves around horror in film and television, with an emphasis on feminist media studies, especially looking into The Walking Dead. When not in school, Brooke binge watches horror movies on Netflix and hopes to be a popular culture critic and academic in the future.

Violence and Morality in ‘The 100’

This act of mercy killing is the first of many moments when Clarke is forced to be violent for the good of others. It not only prompts an important change within herself – she loses her idealistic ways – but it prompts a change in the group dynamics. After this moment, Clarke begins to pull away from the co-leadership she and Bellamy had operated in and moves toward becoming the sole leader of the delinquents.

This guest post by Esther Nassaris appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

We see violence on screen a lot. In fact, some would argue we’ve become desensitised to it. And in a way I think that’s true. After all, a lot of the time it is used solely for shock value, something to make the audience gasp during sweeps week. Or in the case of women, a vile way to sexualise a character further and to feed into the male gaze. Yet violence on The 100 isn’t like that. It’s ingrained in the plot because of the world the show is set in, not thrown in to shock or titillate. It’s explored in an intelligent and thought provoking way. In short, it’s one of the many things that The 100 is doing right.

The premise of the show was brilliant from day one and from the moment one of the leads, Wells (Eli Goree), was killed off in episode 3 “Earth Kills” I knew that this show was different. The show picks up 97 years after a nuclear war is thought to have destroyed all life on earth. The rest of humanity survives on a massive space station, known as The Ark. Yet when resources run low and systems begin to fail they send a group of 100 expendable juvenile delinquents to Earth to see if the land is survivable. The delinquents quickly find out that they are not alone on Earth, and from day one have to fight to survive. In the futuristic world of The 100, discrimination has become a non-issue. The only way to differentiate between people is what clan you’re part of. Everything else just simply doesn’t matter. It’s the shows modern approach to gender, race, and sexuality that allows us a wealth of well-written women who encompass violence in different ways.

Like many sci-fi shows, The 100 is no stranger to violence; however, its relationship with it is complex and ever-changing. As Clarke (Eliza Taylor) is the protagonist of the show, we first consider violence from her perspective. Clarke is initially seen as a more idealistic character, hesitant to use violence and more likely to resist the use of force. This is shown through her immediate disagreements with Bellamy (Bob Morley) when he becomes a leader of the delinquents in a very Lord of the Flies-esque way. However, when one of the delinquents is critically injured in episode 3 “Earth Kills” and begs Bellamy to kill him, Clarke is the one to do it. This act of mercy killing is the first of many moments when Clarke is forced to be violent for the good of others. It not only prompts an important change within herself – she loses her idealistic ways – but it prompts a change in the group dynamics. After this moment, Clarke begins to pull away from the co-leadership she and Bellamy had operated in and moves toward becoming the sole leader of the delinquents.

As a leader Clarke swiftly becomes a much more pragmatic character, understanding that violence is a necessary part of life on the ground. In episode 7 “Contents Under Pressure” we can already see the change in her character as she authorises the use of violence against an enemy clan member. And while she is hesitant at first, she allows it to happen once she realises that it’s necessary to gain the information that she requires. Although she isn’t the one to directly inflict the violence, as a leader of her people it is her that is directly responsible for the actions of her people. While this is a more calculated version of the violence that Clarke has adopted, we see a more instinctual version in episode 11 “The Calm.” While captured by the Grounders, in a desperate attempt to escape Clarke brutally attacks and kills her guard. In this moment violence is clearly the resourceful thing to do. It is a sign of intelligence and strength of character that Clarke not only recognises that she must act quickly, but that she has the ability to do so.

As a sharp juxtaposition to Clarke, we have Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos). An outsider from day one, Octavia is the first to adapt to the harsh way of life on the ground and is the first to transition into the Grounder clan. This is mainly because of her early acceptance of violence. While Clarke is a master of the calculated and strategic violence; Octavia is a front line kind of fighter. Yet even when Octavia finds her way into the Grounder clan we still see her as an outsider. The 100 plays with the idea that this type of violence isn’t appropriate for femaleness. It makes us challenge our own perceptions. If women are unable to be so powerfully violent, then why does Octavia thrive this way? It’s a very typical male role, and thus The 100 subverts expectations of traditional gender roles.

The Grounders offer the audience yet another viewpoint into violent women. As survivors of the nuclear war, The Grounders have adapted into a survival first way of living. In episode 11 “The Calm” we see that violence is taught from a young age when Anya’s (Dichen Lachman) second is a young girl. Violence is intrinsic for them. They know no other way. In the midst of their fight for survival, concepts of gender, sexuality, and race have largely fallen away. This allows many of the Grounder leaders to be women. Most notably Commander Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey), who leads the Grounder clans. However like the Sky People do, we initially distrust the Grounders. We see them as an enemy, and their way of living barbaric and ruthless. While Clarke has some clear reservations about making the harsh decisions to kill or torture, Lexa makes them without questioning it. She knows when these methods are necessary. It is interesting to consider if perhaps this is why some people dislike the character. It is harder to accept a violent woman who is completely committed to these acts. There’s no softening of the blow for the audience. This is who she is and these are the harsh actions that she will not hesitate to make.

As the stakes are raised in season 2, the level of violence also increases and thus morality becomes an even more prominent question on the show. It’s not just the characters that are left wondering whether their choices were right, the viewer is forced to ask the same question. Would we go to such a dark and brutal place? Could we? Often times when you watch a show or a film in which violence is a main theme, there’s a clear right and wrong, a good and evil. We don’t feel bad rooting for someone who’s inflicting so much damage because we know they’re on the good side. But violence on The 100 is presented in a morally grey area. Most importantly, there’s never a separate type of violence for men and women. When Clarke kills hundreds of people to save less than 50 of her own it doesn’t take away from her femininity. It doesn’t make her a masculine character. In fact gender is not taken into account. It makes her a good leader, and perhaps a flawed person, but never any less female.

Esther Nassaris is a Media and Communication student at Glasgow Caledonian University who is passionate about all things television, feminism, and pop culture. She spends most of her time either writing about, or watching television, and would like to become an entertainment journalist. Find her on twitter at @EstNas or blogging on https://tvforfeminists.wordpress.com/

Emotional Violence, Kink, and ‘The Duke of Burgundy’

Cynthia and Evelyn together

This guest post by Rushaa Louise Hamid appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Note: The best viewing of The Duke of Burgundy is without any prior knowledge. Spoilers are contained throughout this piece.

Lesbian relationships in film often carry the burden of limited storytelling which focuses on coming out stories, pregnancy, affairs, and/or death. Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy has none of these traits. Rather it is a universal story about love and the ways in which we can be undone by it, exploring the emotional violence that can be carried by a relationship. Most importantly, unlike another film that shall not be named, The Duke of Burgundy highlights this as a failure of communication, not as an evil of kink itself. Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) is neglectful, Cynthia is avoidant (Sidse Babett Knudsen), and these are aspects that can be found in all relationships.

In much of feminist literature from the past, kink is seen an act driven by patriarchy, with submissive women reproducing their oppressions in the bedroom and capitulating to gendered norms of women as silent and subservient. Even nowadays as the tide gradually changes, there is still a large amount of ire reserved for those who practice BDSM. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes in 2012, “When young women become instinctively assertive and free of gender constrictions, their liberty threatens the ‘natural’ order. So they have to be reminded of their place, taught they can never be good enough and must relearn submission.” Thus it is often hard to find films which explore serious issues in BDSM relationships without casting the assumption that the protagonists themselves are dis-empowered or damaged in some way.

The Duke of Burgundy in contrast demonstrates that submissive desires are not necessarily borne out of an instinct to please men and that acting in a role with limited power does not mean that a women actually has limited power in the relationship. In fact whilst the physical aspects of subservience we see in the film are consensual and empowering for Evelyn, it is Cynthia (the Domme) who suffers from emotional violence as both she and Evelyn accept the subordination of Cynthia’s own personal desires. This can sometimes be hard to recognise as quite as extreme as it is – indeed, in looking through reviews the level of the emotional conflict present is not addressed, instead viewed simply as lesbian love story with a kinky flair. In part this is perhaps due to the expectation that women perform the trope of martyr for love. The film though clearly presents that it is not the adopted role itself that determines the power balance within a relationship, but rather it comes about through the care of the individuals themselves.

The opening scene clouds this perception, deliberately obscuring who we can “root for.” We first see Evelyn approach the house, where she is aggressively greeted by a cold and cruel Cynthia. She is made to scrub floors and massage feet, eventually making an easily fixable mistake that results in the punishment of having her mouth urinated in. Without background information we assume that Evelyn is meek, and conforming to the past feminist conception of the submissive woman, and that Cynthia is controlled and sadistic. We are unsure throughout the scene of the degree of consent that is present. This is similar to the set-up for Secretary – of which The Duke of Burgundy has occasionally been described as the lesbian version of – where Mr. Grey belittles Lee before the two of them develop a romantic relationship; expectations have been put in place that this film will continue the cinematic trend of cold dominants learning to love. Yet once the scene cuts we see the two characters in bed together, Cynthia removing her wig and wanting to know if her performance was “too cold.”

Evelyn

We then get the opportunity to see the role-play from Cynthia’s perspective. We see her nervously preparing by guzzling water and frantically trying to memorise handwritten cards on which Evelyn has laid out every detail of the scene she wishes to enact. We see her struggling to maintain her icy composure, and suffering through back pain as she tries to maintain an upright posture. The violence is an illusion. Like the titular butterfly, Cynthia is mistaken for one type of person but is actually a completely different one.

In essence the film frames the physical act of “violence” and domination/submission as a representation of love and devotion; it is what the characters do because they want to share intimacy. This contrasts with the truer emotional violence – first with Evelyn’s increasing push of her kinks, wilfully ignoring the growing distress of Cynthia, then later with Cynthia’s violation of Evelyn’s safeword. Cynthia throughout takes on a “traditional” feminine obligation to provide support on things she is not comfortable with for love at the detriment of herself, suffering through the emotional trauma of a partner who increasingly ignores all her needs.

There are no men in this realm – everyone, down to the background characters (and even mannequins), are women. This is an interesting set-up, since even in this women-only world Cynthia cannot escape a gendered expectation of taking on the emotional burden of a relationship. On top of this, by divorcing the relationship from heterosexual narratives Strickland is allowing for more focus on Cynthia’s struggle as a dominant role-player since the character does not have to live up to the audience’s stereotype of the hyper-sexualised and commanding masculine ideal.

In a key scene, the emotional care of Cynthia contrasts with the selfishness of Evelyn. “Are you sure you’re going to be OK?” Cynthia asks having shut the heavy lid of the truck containing Evelyn tied up inside for the night. The silence panics her and so again she questions and is responded to with a sharp “Yes!” Cynthia’s legitimate need for a simple word of reassurance aren’t considered valid by her partner – instead there is an anger that Cynthia would dare break the fantasy role that Evelyn has placed her in.

Cynthia

Consent is a key aspect of BDSM, and is not just “no means no” or “yes means yes” but much more fluid and active – it requires partners to consider situations in which their lover might not feel comfortable or be physically able to speak out and so paying careful attention to body language is key. Evelyn is the true inflicter of violence in The Duke of Burgundy by ignoring these signs. If she was presented as a dominant man these acts of control would seem overt – pressuring her lover into a particular type of sexual activity, pressuring her lover to act in a particular way, pressuring her lover to dress in a particular way, ignoring her lover’s discomfort, using “I wasn’t getting what I wanted” to justify seeking things outside the relationship, and pressuring her to perform despite physical injury. Though Cynthia is making these choices too, she is also motivated by a fear that she will be abandoned if she refuses. Only in the end when Evelyn realises the sheer level of strain she has put her partner through (following Cynthia’s breakdown) does Cynthia get that reassurance that her no’s will not lead to Evelyn leaving her. Evelyn relies on Cynthia’s devotional love to continue to be egocentric and aggressive and ignores her responsibility to check in on her lover’s well-being.

In contrast to this slow drip of pressure from Evelyn, Cynthia expresses emotional violence all at once, choosing to violate their safeword on Evelyn’s birthday. The scene is aggressive and uncomfortable to sit through – by continuing through Evelyn’s cry of “pinastri” she has dragged Evelyn into a realm where her explicit consent no longer matters. Evelyn goes from a woman in charge of her sexuality to an object to be acted on, voiceless. “If only pinastri could make all our troubles go away,” Cynthia says as she presses onto her lover’s face, as if the only way the relationship can ever work is if one person is always suffering. Unfortunately this major violation is never addressed again in the film.

It is perhaps one of the best merits of The Duke of Burgundy that the resolution does not provide an escape from the duty to provide for love – rightly compromise is portrayed as an essential part of a relationship, and shifting the balance to entirely favour Cynthia would just leave the two cycling through the same mistakes and feelings of frustration. Though it is left ambiguous, with the closing scene featuring Cynthia back in her Domme persona, there is an element of confidence that these characters have learnt a little more about supporting each other. In Strickland’s world the true emotional violence is not defined as doing something you don’t want to do, but rather feeling trapped and ignored and unloved when doing something you have no interest in; it is about intent more than action. When Evelyn can grow and recognise the pain that she causes and Cynthia can articulate her needs they create a more tender relationship that can include the roles that each are willing to perform for the other, without carrying the emotional pain.

Rushaa Louise Hamid is a writer-for-hire normally located in London, UK. She enjoys politics, the issues of identity, and perfecting her Dalek impression. You can find her @thesecondrussia or more of her writing over at rulohamid.wordpress.com.

‘Salt’: A Refreshing Genderless Lens

This guest post by Cameron Airen appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Violent films with a female at their center tend to be viewed differently than violent films with a male lead. When a woman is in this role, it’s controversial. When a man is in the same type of role, it’s a part of who he is as a human being. We’ve become numb to the violence that men engage in onscreen. As a result, we don’t criticize it like we do when a woman is engaging in it. Also, female leads in violent films are usually represented differently than male leads in the same type of film. Because we are more accepting of violent films with male leads than with female leads, she needs to be constructed differently. Usually it’s her sex appeal that makes her more tolerable to conduct violence, fetishizing her in order to justify her acts. Or her sexual power is her weapon and she succeeds at getting what she wants with it. Or, she’s guided by a male partner almost the entire way through who seems to somehow “know the way” and it’s often the “right way.” She wouldn’t succeed without him. Somehow, we are unable to see her as an independent, powerful being just by her human self-without a man, without needing to be sexy, without needing to give sex in order to have more power.

The film Salt (2010) takes a different approach.

In many ways, Salt is the action film that feminists have dreamed of. Its female lead character, played by Angelina Jolie, does not depend on her being female. What Salt does well is eliminate gender from its focus. Most action films with a female lead are clearly marked by gender. Instead of her character being motivated by experiences that have happened to her because she’s a woman (like in Thelma and Louise or Kill Bill), she’s driven by non-gendered circumstances. In fact, Salt is never once referred to as being a woman/female in the film. She is only referred to as “Salt” or a spy. Whereas, in other films like Kill Bill, she is known as The Bride and is committed to take revenge based on what happened with her wedding and an unborn child. The Bride’s character, experiences, and revenge is all about gender. Even though the lead in Salt was originally meant for Tom Cruise and the film was slightly changed for a female, Salt isn’t characterized by gender. Salt crosses all kinds of gender lines, including going as a “male” disguise, towards the end of the film, to kill the president of the United States. Since Salt’s character isn’t motivated or marked by gender in a way that fuels the story, any gender could easily play her.

Despite its plot holes, Salt is a solid action film. Evelyn Salt is a CIA officer accused of being a Russian spy. One of the most interesting points of the film is how ambiguous her character is. We don’t know whose side she’s on and whether we should root for her or not. While the plot is confusing, it’s refreshing to have a female action lead whose intentions are ambiguous, as we are starting to see onscreen more today.

Salt has some of the best violent scenes seen in an action film. After Salt has been accused of being a Russian spy, she tries to escape the CIA building. Her colleagues try to trap her but she makes a bomb to blow down the doors and runs away. Have we ever seen a woman make a bomb in a film before? This might be a first for women in film and it’s no surprise that Jolie is the one to instigate it. Not only is Salt’s action unrestricted by a female lead but Jolie performed her own stunts.

After Salt escapes and scales a tall apartment building, she gets cornered by the CIA and jumps off of an overpass onto a moving semi truck driving on the highway. The film’s already frenetic pace ratchets up another notch and actually gets even better when Salt meets up with Orlov, the Russian man who trained her. At a barge, Orlov has her husband killed right in front of her eyes by her Russian comrades. Salt has to hide her tears and emotions so that her comrades don’t suspect her as being a traitor. Later, when alone with Orlov, she makes no hesitation in killing him with a broken liquor bottle, then goes on to wipe out the rest of the men on crew with a machine gun and hand grenades. Salt doesn’t stop there. She lets herself get arrested after appearing to kill the Russian president. Handcuffed in the back of a police car, she knocks out the officers next to her, then tasers the driver and tries to steer the car. At this point, we have no idea why Salt let herself get caught, but the action scenes keep you at the edge of your seat.

One of the best scenes in Salt is after Salt is placed in handcuffs once again, and is being escorted out of the White House up a flight of stairs. Winter, her colleague who betrayed her and orchestrated her husband’s kidnapping, is waiting for her at the top of the stairs with a pair of scissors in hand. When she approaches him, Salt manages to wrap her handcuffs around Winter’s neck as her body jumps over the stair railing and chokes him to death. The way she fearlessly snatches Winter’s neck with her chain and lets her body dangle from the top of a staircase with her face bloody from fighting Winter is a creative and incredible scene that I’ve never seen in a film before.

One of the more interesting parts that the film lacks is a sex scene. We don’t once see Jolie in her underwear or naked. In fact, she is fully clothed the entire time except in the very beginning scene when she’s being tortured in a non-sexual way. As much as I wanted to see a sex scene with Jolie, I was happy that the film didn’t actually have one. When do we ever not see a hot, steamy scene with the beautiful and sexy, Jolie? This film somehow got away with it and it’s a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t her sexuality that saved her. Typically, a woman is identified by her “sex,” but in Salt, she is simply a human being. Sexual or not, we don’t know. But, her “sex/gender” makes no difference and is not a signifying factor of her character or action. We rarely see a woman kick ass without sexualizing her in some way. It’s great when women can be sexual beings and kick ass onscreen, but they tend to be oversexualized in a way that guides their character.

My biggest criticism with Salt is that it lacks diversity. Even though there is a female lead and a main Black male character (who doesn’t get killed), the rest of the main cast is white and male. There are barely any other women in Salt besides Jolie. Sometimes, we think that diversity is achieved simply by having a female lead even if the rest of the cast is male. But, this is false, and it would have been an even better film if there were more women in it. What Salt succeeds in is by having a mostly genderless lens in terms of the main character, and not defining her by sex. Salt is a refreshing action film with a female lead who has some serious violent scenes that will make one hunger for more.

Cameron Airen is a queer feminist with a M.A. in Anthropology and Social Change. When she’s not getting her fix from watching women in violent action films, Cameron is working on creating a (mostly) vegan cookbook. She resides in Berkeley, Calif. You can follow her on Twitter @cameronairen.

‘Hard Candy’: The Razor Blade Hidden in an Apple-Cheeked Confection

Hogtying and drugging Jeff is only the tip of Hayley’s sadistic iceberg: over the course of the next several hours, she subjects him to a series of tortures more at home in Guantanamo Bay than a sleepy suburban neighborhood, including spraying his screaming mouth with chemicals, temporarily suffocating him with cellophane, and attacking him with a taser in the shower.

This guest post by Emma Kat Richardson appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Even around Halloween time, Hollywood doesn’t hand out movies like Hard Candy all that often. It’s a difficult morsel to swallow, and, despite the presence of adorably teenaged Ellen Page peering meekly from the cast list, not the slightest bit sugary – indeed, much of the exposition is skin-crawling enough to make the hardiest of trick-or-treaters lose their appetites. And yet, beneath its decidedly gruff exterior (understatement of the year, perhaps?) lies the timeless tale of a boy and a girl. But in this case, he’s a man merely masquerading as a responsible adult, and she’s a girl wearing the wiles of a woman in order to achieve a purpose much more sinister than the initial set up would lead one to believe.

Just five minutes into the film, and you’d think it was easy to ascertain the obvious villain: Patrick Wilson, playing a 30-something photographer named Jeff, seduces Page’s 14-year-old Hayley Stark through an online chat window, with the practiced precision of a well-equipped Internet predator. The two agree to meet at a coffee shop, where awkward flirtations quickly lead them back to Jeff’s house. Feeling sick to your stomach yet? You should be, but not because Hayley is dangling on the precipice of statistical tragedy. No, she’s far from being some helpless victim, as Jeff quickly learns when he finds himself waking up in a state of confusion, limbs bound to an office chair as Hayley gleefully rummages through his drawers and cabinets. “You know how they tell us pretty young things not to drink anything we haven’t mixed ourselves? That’s good advice…. for anyone.” Touche. Seems like the only thing more humiliating that being exposed as a pedophile is to be outwitted by the expected target of one’s predatory efforts. Hogtying and drugging Jeff is only the tip of Hayley’s sadistic iceberg: over the course of the next several hours, she subjects him to a series of tortures more at home in Guantanamo Bay than a sleepy suburban neighborhood, including spraying his screaming mouth with chemicals, temporarily suffocating him with cellophane, and attacking him with a taser in the shower.

May December, or murder and dismember?

But Hayley’s plan isn’t merely to make Jeff suffer the consequences of what he might have intended for her. She’s on a mission to find out what happened to Donna Mauer, a local teenager who’s gone missing. Did Jeff have something to do with it? He lives in a house decorated with near-naked pictures pubescent models; he brought Hayley back home and let her drink copious amounts of alcohol while stripping. Most tellingly of all, he has a picture of Donna locked away in a hidden safe, beneath a decorative living room rock garden. Poor Donna likely fell into a trap from which very few victims of sexual violence manage to emerge unscathed, and Hayley is determined to see that justice is served, no matter what lengths she’s forced to go to in Jeff’s kidnapping and torture.

And speaking of torture, do we need to get into detail about the castration scene? Yup, Hayley is so committed to defanging this predator (to use a rather pointed analogy) that she rigs up a makeshift operating table, lashes an unconscious Jeff down to it, and proceeds to undergo such a wicked game of psychological fuckery, it’s hard to know who to keep rooting for. The scene itself is exquisitely shot – all agonizing closeups and angles designed to elicit maximum proxy discomfort. The dialogue exchanged between the two principle actors is a mastery in cat and mouse tension; best of all is when Hayley draws a brilliant comparison between Jeff’s forthcoming mutilation and the anguish suffered by the victims of rape and abuse on a daily basis. Do your friends know? Do your neighbors know? Who can tell just by looking at you that you’ve been subjected to the most vile sort of personal attack?

Should have just signed up for Ashley Madison.

It’s perhaps this sentiment that best exemplifies what sets Hayley’s violent tactics apart from the intent of her would-be attacker. While it’s safe to say her methods are probably too extreme for the To Catch a Predator crowd, her purpose is – on paper, at least – a noble one. You get the sense that she’s adequately prepared for taking down every neighborhood scumbag that slimes his way into her chatroom; there’s more than subtle indication that she’s done all of this before. For a kid not even in high school yet, she sure knows her way around a taser. It’s disturbing, but in a way that renders the viewer in a challenging state of narrative confusion. Indeed, one of very best elements to Hard Candy is that the primary action sequences make it almost impossible to sympathize with one protagonist over another. Even the most strident of feminists probably can’t help but shudder at Jeff’s predicament – sure, he seems to be a major sleeze-ball, but does Hayley really have to go to these lengths just to make him pay for crimes she can’t confirm that he committed?

In the end, one is forced to conclude that Hard Candy is no easy cinematic meal to digest. It’s a gripping, challenging, often-exceedingly painful film to take in. But like Hayley herself, the movie’s genius lies in its ability to construct so much thought-provoking narrative with so little in the way of material tools. Shot for less than a million dollars, the sets are simple, the cast consists mainly of just Page and Wilson (Sandra Oh, who gets top billing alongside the two principle actors, appears in just one fleeting scene). It’s rare to see a story accomplish such a lasting impression with a decidedly minimalist approach. Page’s performance is a hurricane of emotions; she’s the perfect foil to Wilson’s doughy and desperate Jeff, who probably wished he’d kept his freaky tendencies limited to just porn. If Hayley Stark is a prime example of a violent woman, than she represents the very strongest in lashing out to evade victimhood. She is the anger that lives inside us all when we are harmed or abused. As she declares to a defeated Jeff in the film’s climactic scene: “I am every little girl you ever watched, touched, hurt, screwed, killed.”

Emma Kat Richardson is a Detroit native and freelance writer living in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in xoJane.com, Bitch, Alternative Press, LaughSpin.com, Real Detroit Weekly, 944, and Bust.com. She’s enough of a comedy nerd and cat lady to have named her Maine Coon Michael Ian Cat. Follow her on twitter: @emmakat.

The Violent Vagina: The Real Horror Behind the ‘Teeth’

It’s a conundrum, one that Dawn faces head (or vagina) on. She is forced to confront these opposing views, and her body reacts the only way it knows how, it bites the penis of society, it castrates the men that want to turn her into something she doesn’t want to be: a sexual young woman.

I get the imagery, but this movie poster doesn’t really have a horror vibe to it.

This guest post by Belle Artiquez appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Teeth (2007) is a horror film that was directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein based on the story of a young girl who finds out she has teeth inside her vagina. Mind blowing stuff, I know. It was not a good movie, it was not even a good story, in fact it was quite the opposite and anybody who has seen it will tell you that it was pretty much one of the worst movies ever. However, I’m one of those people who may hate watching a movie, may even feel bored during it, but will talk about it for months after if the correct themes are there. Teeth is one of those movies, and I’m still under the assumption that many people, myself included for a while, took away from the film something that was irrelevant, we missed the point, we missed the real issues the film was exploring, even if it was done in a very, very bad way.

Dawn, a young virginal, religious girl wishes to stay just that for as long as possible–society rejoices, she is following the rules! She meets a young man at her abstinence group and although he agrees to wait with her, on a romantic date with woodlands and waterfalls he ends up forcing himself on her because she’s still “pure.” Thus begins the sexual assaults literally thrown at the young Dawn. It is during this first forced sexual encounter with a boy she felt safe with that she realizes, to her and his horror, that she has teeth inside her vagina, that literally bite off the boy/rapist’s penis. We get a glimpse of his ripped-off genitals (and it’s not the only time we see gory, bloody castrated penis), so while this movie isn’t directed toward the male gaze in a conventional way (we never see Dawn’s naked body) it might be done in a horrific way.

Something new for the male gaze to enjoy…

Already I’m seeing a lot of messages and themes that are incredibly familiar. To start we have society’s golden girl, the girl that wants to wait, wants to be virtuous and good and clean so that when the right man comes along he won’t feel like he’s gotten soiled goods (I write gritting my own teeth…pun totally intended). Then we have sexual themes thrown at her; she is hit by the very thing that asked her to stay clean, virginal. She is forced to be sexual. She is inundated with sexual activity, as are all women who walk the earth–we are bombarded with images of sexualized women in underwear, in TV and magazine advertisements, in film and music videos, these are telling us that this is what society wants, sexual women. But we know that society also wants us to be virginal women to save ourselves. It’s a conundrum, one that Dawn faces head (or vagina) on. She is forced to confront these opposing views, and her body reacts the only way it knows how, it bites the penis of society, it castrates the men that want to turn her into something she doesn’t want to be: a sexual young woman.

I know, seeing your vagina for the first time can be bizarre, especially if there’s teeth in there, but I promise–you will get over it.

Not only is Dawn violated by a little boy who thought he was man enough to get some from a girl who actively told him she wouldn’t give him anything, she is also abused by her gynecologist, a healthcare professional who is far from professional. During this scene I felt extremely uncomfortable, it was too…familiar. Dawn seeks medical advice about her vaginal teeth, telling the doctor that she thinks ‘there might be something weird going on’ and I’m only going to assume that it was her first visit (she’s a virgin remember) so probably felt a wave of emotions from fear to pure horror at what was going to happen. Many first visits for women are filled with these emotions. But when her doctor takes his gloves off and continues to mess around down there, things really get weird and the wonderful doctor ends up having his fingers bitten off (serves him right too). Now, I’m not going to say this was exactly like my first experience with a gynecologist, far from it, however, it was equally as uncomfortable, and to this day I feel like something was amiss. I was nervous,very very nervous. I was literally a ball of emotions, on my own, and I’m only going to assume the male doctor noticed this because instead of offering a female nurse, or even trying to make me feel less exposed, he called in two female nurses to literally hold my legs open as he examined me, with no blanket, no comfort, just a horrifying shame that has been with me since that day (over a decade ago). So I understand why that scene was so horrific for me and not other people who laughed their way through it, but this only serves to prove that women are capable of understanding the discomfort of the plot, of the numerous sexual assaults Dawn faces, the reaction she has to her own body (hating and simultaneously fearing it) and then her final understanding that she has to own it, be in control of it and her sexuality. She has to have agency in her violent vagina because she knows how powerful it is.

If only we all had her power, and yes it pretty much is a super power!

She arrives, shaken and terrified after her gyno visit at a boys house, she takes a bath and comes out to find that said boy has lit around a hundred candles, stuck on ridiculous music and is waiting expectantly for sex. She is still shaken (who can blame her?) so he offers her a pill and wine to relax, or drug her. She assumes he has her best interest at heart so accepts, I know right? More fool her..but I did say it was a terrible movie. It gets even worse as this encounter unfolds. She falls asleep/unconscious only to wake and find him fondling her breasts, and although he asks her for consent and she tells him not to stop she is still under the influence of drugs and alcohol so cannot legally give consent. They have sex. He ‘conquers’ her, becomes the ‘hero’ (his words!) and gets to keep his penis. The next morning things don’t go so smooth, during consensual sex he answers the phone still inside her (big mistake) and begins to gloat and brag about it. His penis meets the same fate as the previous two men and he ends up being not quite the conquering hero he first thought, he will be stroking this male ego no longer.

I honestly don’t know why there’s a crunch, but again, bad movie.

From here Dawn eventually rids herself of her abstinence ring; if society wants a sexual girl they were going to get one, but only on her terms. If men are going to force it, they’re going to lose it, simple as that. The male fear of powerful vaginas really takes on a whole new meaning with this film; it portrays the many anxieties men and the patriarchy have where women are concerned. If women start to realize their inherent power, their violent vagina’s, then some men fear they will be cut down, castrated because of it. The fear lies within the notion that both sexes cannot have equal control. He will take (think virginity), she will give, not the other way around. That’s the dynamic society is used to, so a horror within the film is also connected to the fact that men fear the vagina and its power, they fear what will happen to them and their masculinity if the vagina (women) acknowledges its own power. The film blatantly gives shots of castrated male genitals, bloodied, and disgusting (I’m not a gore fan), and while many men will feel a kind of sympathy pain for the characters (who are rapists by the way), and apologise for showing it in blogs because the writer too felt a pain when posting it, I’m left wondering why women are expected to watch rape in film and TV and not feel the same? Because let’s be honest, it’s not everyday that we see mutilated male genitals, but the violent rape of a women which portrays the same kind of genital pain…yeah that’s pretty common. But for some reason neither of these things represent the same pain.

Dawn indeed does end up using her violent vagina as a tool of revenge and protection for other women. She actively engages with men whose intentions are not good just so she can castrate them in order to protect the future women these men would harm. She totally owns it, she takes on the violent nature of her unique vagina and uses it for good.

Now that’s the face of a woman who is owning her sexuality, even if it is a violent one!

Teeth was categorized as a feminist horror film, and I can see why many people didn’t quite agree with that–Dawn is sexually assaulted a lot, she is not in control of her own sexual behaviour (for most of the movie) and she certainly isn’t a feminist herself; I don’t think the literal biting off of men’s penises constitutes as feminist film. However, her having to come to terms with a part of herself that society both worships and fears is quite the feminist argument. One that rings true to nearly every woman on the planet. On the surface though this film just seems like a crude horror that involves a deadly vagina, a violent, razor sharp vagina. But maybe the horror of this film lies somewhere in the messages it portrays; maybe the real horror is the shit this poor girl, who just wanted to play by the rules, has to put up with on a daily basis, and as such, what women everywhere have little option but to just deal with, from the constant sexualization of women in every aspect of society, the slut shaming, the butt grabs instead of handshakes, the boob stares instead of eye contact, the cat-calling and street harassment, to the flat out sexual assault, the (not at all) blurred lines of consent, the daily beating down of women for having vaginas and showing some skin. Maybe that was the true horror of this movie and not the fact that a girl who endured all of this had the ability to cut some men down with the very thing they thought they had control of and a right to: her violent and powerful vagina.

Don’t they all…

Belle Artiquez graduated from film and literature studies in Dublin and since has continued her analysis and critique of film, TV, and literature (mainly in the area of gender politics and representations) as well as cultural and societal critiques on such blog spots as Hubpages and WordPress.

“It is not fitting for her to be so manly and terrifying”: Catharsis and Female Chaos in Pasolini’s ‘Medea’

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film ‘Medea’ was created in the aftermath of Italian fascism, another masculine cult of personal self-sacrifice in the interests of the state. Utilizing the operatic charisma of the legendary Maria Callas in a non-singing role, he harnesses the pitiless woman as an agent of chaos, rebelling against the dictates of the masculine state that urges her husband to discard her, in favor of a politically advantageous match.

This post by Brigit McCone appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Discussing Greek tragedy, the philosopher Aristotle calls for women, being “of lesser character,” to be given a fitting representations on stage that conform to his society’s ideas of typical womanliness, “for it is possible for a woman to be manly in character, but it is not fitting for her to be so manly or terrifying” (Poetics, 1454a). Ancient Athens was a democracy of free men, where slaves and women were silenced. Its epic tragedies were written and acted by men alone, though they might wear the mask of women. Why then, in a society that considered women to be lesser in character and unfitting of “manliness,” should there be so many examples of fierce and violent womanhood on its stage? Aeschylus had the murderous Clytemnestra, Sophocles the pitiless Elektra, and Euripides produced the infanticidal Medea as well as hoards of murderous Bacchae, female followers of Dionysos who tore The Bacchae‘s hero limb from limb. The answer, perhaps, lies in the role of men in Ancient Athens, who were expected to reject emotionalism in favor of logic, and sacrifice their personal interests in favor of the state. The women of Greek tragedy are powerful, therefore, not because women were powerful in real life, but because these fictionalized characters were powerfully and cathartically voicing the emotional and personal causes that the male spectators had been encouraged to suppress in themselves. Female chaos is male catharsis. To our eyes, the violent uprisings of women like Clytemnestra, Elektra or Medea might well seem “manly and terrifying,” but they equally rise up against the self-sacrificing duty to the state and the rationalizing art of “reason” that Athenian men had been trained to consider manly. The male spectator gets cathartic release through the woman’s chaotic voicing of emotional rage and personal vendetta, but can disown it as a feature of her femininity. The woman, in turn, becomes the negative space of male self-image, not an image in her own right.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea was created in the aftermath of Italian fascism, another masculine cult of personal self-sacrifice in the interests of the state. Utilizing the operatic charisma of the legendary Maria Callas in a non-singing role, he harnesses the pitiless woman as an agent of chaos, rebelling against the dictates of the masculine state that urges her husband to discard her, in favor of a politically advantageous match. Killing his hopes of heirs by murdering her own sons to spite their father, as well as killing his bride and her father, the King of Corinth, Medea murders Jason’s future in punishment for his disregard of her feminine powers as high priestess of a barbarian nature cult. In Euripides’ original, a chorus of women who identified with Medea’s pain, while being horrified by the bloodiness of her revenge, helped to give her context as an emblem of the rage of suppressed and discarded women under Ancient Athenian patriarchy. Pasolini instead delves into the original myth to offer a portrait of Medea’s barbarian homeland and its values as an agricultural society close to the old gods. Opening with the boy Jason being told that he is not the son of Chiron, his centaur foster father, Jason by is initiated by the centaur into a tangled mythology that defines his destiny to recover the golden fleece from distant lands, as a symbol of eternal nature of “power and order.” The centaur gives an enigmatic warning: “The day Nature seems natural to you, it means the end.” A warning to curb his own natural impulses, or to avoid taking the “natural submissiveness” of woman for granted? Jason is alerted that the word is not “naturally” so, but the creation of fickle gods who hate as much as love. With his training by the mythical Old Centaur in the isolation of nature, he is more equipped to negotiate the wild values of Medea than men raised in the city. Yet he is guided in adulthood by a desecrated New Centaur, who takes the form of an clothed man and preaches that the gods are dead. It is when he seeks to assume his place in the city, upon his return, that he will lose his respect for Medea’s primeval power, earning the hate of the high priestess and, perhaps, of her gods.

The two Chirons

Medea is introduced in close-up, face enigmatically blank, as she is surrounded both by cricket-chirping nature and by the droning chant of ritual human sacrifice. Her willingness to sacrifice human life is therefore linked to the pitilessness of Nature, that is the flipside of its nurture. Embodying values of nature and barbarism in woman, and political ambition in man, is a rather traditional gendering, but the Medea myth is unusual in showing the woman triumphant as cruel Nature reigning supreme, rather than destroyed as punishment for her “unnatural” violence. The day Nature seems natural to you, it means the end. Feeding corn with the blood of the sacrificial victim and bidding him be “reborn with the seed” can also be read as Pasolini’s allowing his barbarians to echo the symbolically cannibal sacrament and resurrection narrative by which the faithful wed themselves to the Roman Catholic church. Medea’s hands are ritually chained before she prays, representing her weddedness to the order of her society. She collapses at the sight of Jason. In this highly stylized interpretation, not a word needs to pass between them to convince Medea to rob the fleece, or to brutally dismember her own brother with an axe to distract her pursuers. Her violence is unmotivated, except by the logic of myth or ritual human sacrifice, for that is the binding logic of her world.

Crossing the water to the world of Greece, where the gods are dead, Medea wanders wildly in a state of spiritual catastrophe such as Jason had experienced when swapping the magical Old Centaur for the desecrated New. Medea vainly seeks “foundation” in this new world, pleading to hear the voices of Earth, Sun, grass and stone, just as Jason recognizes that the golden fleece has been drained of its power when taken to a foreign land without true faith, where promises are broken. In some degree, the ritual sacrifice of her sons is therefore Medea’s only way to restore her sacrificial power as priestess, more than a simple act of petty vengeance against her unfaithful husband. Imagining herself restored to her faith as granddaughter of the sun, Medea performs her violence in her old priestess robes with a smile of exultation at her empowerment, mingled with tears because “woman is a weak creature who cries easily.” She thus uses society’s expectations of woman’s weeping weakness as a mask to hide the gruesome seriousness of her real purpose. Medea’s power recalls those societies where the masculine power of kings and warlords existed in balance with the feminine power of a priestess class, such as the Akkadian state which gave us the world’s first recorded author, Sumeria’s high priestess Enheduanna. Women like Enheduanna are examples that can be cited to argue that the “ancient world” of a woman like Medea had channels of specifically feminine spiritual power lost in Judaeo-Christian traditions. In these older traditions, according to Pasolini’s vision, nurture and sacrifice are integrally linked, joined in the figure of the loving yet murderous woman who embraces with her eyes open and her knife ready. Medea’s violence may disturb us, but she serves as a warning that woman’s nature should not be coded by man’s convenience, nor ever taken for granted. The day Nature seems natural to you, it means the end.

[youtube_sc url=” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATQ_Qi5Pzrw”]

Brigit McCone loves Maria Callas but isn’t that into opera. Go figure. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and wondering what was so great about that Onassis guy.

‘High Tension’: Rethinking Female Sexuality and Subjectivity Through Violence

Rather than pander to the male gaze, Aja decides to reject these scopophilic pleasures in favour of championing female subjectivity, but he also chooses to reject heteronormativity by having the lesbian desires of Marie drive the plot of the film. Interestingly, it is these desires and subjective experiences that both initiate the use of violence and intensify the representation of violence throughout.

This guest post by Laura Minor appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Named one of TIME magazine’s “10 most ridiculously violent films” [1], Alexandre Aja’s 2003 slasher High Tension (originally titled Haute Tension) is a visceral delight, a horrific spectacle of generic excess. Yet with the film’s synopsis describing the leading character, Marie, as a “beautiful young Frenchwoman,” High Tension could have easily been seen in GQ’s article “The 25 Sexiest Violent Women in Film” [2]. Rather than pander to the male gaze, Aja decides to reject these scopophilic pleasures in favour of championing female subjectivity, but he also chooses to reject heteronormativity by having the lesbian desires of Marie drive the plot of the film. Interestingly, it is these desires and subjective experiences that both initiate the use of violence and intensify the representation of violence throughout.

Before examining the film’s treatment of gender, sexuality and violence, however, its basic narrative needs to be understood. High Tension revolves around Marie (Cécile De France) and Alex (Maïwenn Besco), two college students who travel to Alex’s parents’ farmhouse in the French countryside so that they can relax and study in peace. After arriving at the farmhouse and settling down for the night, Marie begins masturbating in bed, presumably fantasising about Alex after she inadvertently spies on her in the shower. The killer arrives simultaneously and begins brutally massacring Alex’s family without reason. He then abducts Alex after blinding her, and Marie consequently emerges as the Final Girl, the protagonist who must save the day. What ensues is a cat-and-mouse chase, with the killer eventually hunting down Marie for the archetypal finale – a one-on-one confrontation between the protagonist and antagonist. However, when Marie ends the killer’s life, it is revealed that she is in fact the killer, thereby rupturing the classical protagonist/antagonist relationship.

Aja’s ending has received strong, negative criticism for its twist, but the purpose of this ending is to not merely shock. Of course, if we read it through a conservative lens, then Marie’s transgressions serve to maintain and perpetuate heterosexist discourse, as the lesbian protagonist is revealed to be the monster; she is the outsider who has destroyed the nuclear family. Indeed according to Harry M. Benshoff,

both movie monsters and homosexuals have existed chiefly in shadowy closets and when they do emerge from these proscribed places into the sunlit world they cause panic and fear. Their closets uphold and reinforce binaries of gender and sexuality that structure Western thought. To create a broad analogy, monster is to “normality” as homosexual is to heterosexual [3].

While this has been true for past representations, Marie’s psychotic creation of “Le Tueur” (meaning “The Killer” in English) complicates the idea that she is the tangible monster. This unnamed, unidentifiable man is the one who has committed cinematic sadism, and although the monster is a manifestation of Marie’s latent desires, he also personifies the fear and anger she feels about her own sexuality. This is implied at the beginning of the film through dialogue and lighting – when Marie and Alex arrive at the farmhouse, Alex tells Marie she’ll “end up an old maid” because of her lack of interest in men. Understandably, Marie reacts with dejection. Her face is deliberately shadowed by the darkness outside as she solemnly says “Don’t start with that”. Indeed though subtle, it is obvious that Alex’s ingrained, societal beliefs have affected her deeply, the feeling that she is an outcast, that she should settle down and find a nice husband. To have her best friend and love interest speak in such a way does not excuse murder (that much is obvious), but it could explain why Marie constructs an individual that represents heteronormativity (a white, heterosexual middle-aged man) committing these violent acts instead.

This fabricated part of her psyche, in some ways, conforms to Halberstam’s notion of “imagined violence,” which is defined as “the fantasy of unsanctioned eruptions of aggression” [4]. More specifically, Halberstam argues that “imagined violence does not advocate lesbian or female aggression but it might complicate an assumed relationship between women and passivity or feminism and pacifism” [4]. To imagine the possibility of female violence is to create a new source of pleasure for women, as resistance on-screen is a reaction against gender/sexuality-based prejudices. High Tension, however, takes this level of imagination to a disturbed and distorted level, as Marie/Le Tueur brutally kill an innocent family. Yet it could be argued that this (fe)male violence symbolises Marie’s anger, or more specifically, Marie’s inability to control the rage she feels about heteronormativity upholding “traditional family values” (these being strictly defined gender roles and heterosexuality). After all, she cannot control this part of her consciousness, as she desires to kill this part of her consciousness and rescue Alex.

The “imagined violence” against the heteronormative male within is a significant, internal battle that culminates in Marie defeating Le Tueur with a fence post covered in barbed wire. She uses this aggressive, phallic symbol to “challenge powerful white heterosexual masculinity and create a cultural coalition of postmodern terror” [4], the most significant aspect of “imagined violence.” Of course, such a reading is not so simple in a film that constructs a schizophrenic narrative and a schizophrenic character, but High Tension is aware of its supposed inconsistencies, which again can be seen in its ending. Before Le Tueur’s death, he wields his chainsaw in an attempt to kill Alex, only for his weapon to be replaced by Marie’s sweet and soft kiss. The act of (fe)male violence and gentleness in this scene unifies the binaries of masculinity and femininity, and therefore complicates the definitions of monstrousness and gender. For this reason, as Joshua Cohen has argued, High Tension “poses somewhat of a problem for the critic interested in allocating monstrosity into a neatly defined category such as masculine or feminine. Rather, High Tension requires a spectator whom assumes that gender is a subject that transcends the limitations of binary oppositions” [5].

Indeed because Aja has forced us to intimately identify with Marie and then Alex via specific camerawork, these acts of violence are intensified, but so are subtle character movements. The final scene is particularly significant in this regard; when Marie is in a psychiatric hospital, Alex watches her through a one-way mirror and extends her hand to the screen, almost as if she is visiting a lover in prison. Here we are forced to identify with Alex as the camera slowly follows her hand, and when she asks a doctor whether Marie can see her through the mirror, it is clear that she is also asking this question for us, the extra-diegetic spectators. Marie answers this question soon after. No, she cannot see Alex, she can sense her, and by extension she can sense the audience. Her face beams with delight as she opens her arms in a sudden forceful yet loving gesture, and the camera lurches back in horror with Alex, thus forcing us as spectators to mimic these movements. The jerky, violent actions of Marie are therefore ambiguous. Whilst we are initially drawn to her by the placement of Alex’s hand, we are then pushed away by her affection/violence. Perhaps it would be reading too much into the ending to view Alex’s hand gesture as an act of repressed sexuality, but it is interesting that Alex, now the audience surrogate, is both drawn to and disgusted by Marie’s affectionate/violent disposition. In this regard, High Tension offers no concrete resolution as to how we should view the protagonist. Instead, it offers multiple readings of gender, sexuality, and violence that typify our contemporary, heterogeneous culture. Indeed despite the monstrous actions of Marie, underneath the surface, Alex and the audience know that she cannot be simplistically defined – it is why we have returned to her at the hospital.

Overall, to define High Tension as conservative would be problematic, as we would have to ignore the ways in which it has transcended stereotypical ideals of gender and sexuality through acts of violence, whether these acts be blatant (such as the aggressive methods of murder) or subtle (such as the sudden erratic movements of Marie). It is certainly clear that the narrative does not advocate male or familial genocide as a strategy for achieving women’s emancipation. If anything, the film seeks to place itself in-between the rich, textured spaces of female subjectivity and identity, spaces that are not always straightforward, rational or prototypical.

Footnotes

[1] Sanburn, Josh. “Top 10 Ridiculously Violent Movies.” TIME., September 2, 2010. http://entertainment.time.com/2010/09/03/top-10-ridiculously-violent-movies/.

[2] “The 25 Sexiest Violent Women in Film”. GQ., June 30, 2009. http://www.gq.com/gallery/list-sexy-women-movies-violent-angelina-jolie-halle-berry-jessica-alba-slideshow.

[3] Benshoff, Harry M (1997). Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

[4] Halberstam, Judith (1993). ‘Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representations of Rage and Resistance’. Social Text 37, pp.187-201.

[5] Cohen, Joshua. ‘‘’Will You Still Love Me in the Morning?’: Gender Representation and Monstrosity in Alexandre Aja’s High Tension.” Fear, Horror, and Terror, 2^nd Global Conference. Oxford: United Kingdom, 2008. Print.

Laura Minor is currently undertaking a Master’s in Film and Television Studies. She runs a blog at lrjdmnr.wordpress.com where she discusses feminist media studies, film/television aesthetics and genre theory.

Call For Writers: Violent Women

In the month of Halloween, we’ll be examining tropes of women and violence. There are many permutations of violent women throughout history and throughout genres. What is the connection between femaleness and violence? Why do we sometimes accept some types of violent women but not others? What do these value judgments say about our society?

Our theme week for October 2015 will be Violent Women.

In the month of Halloween, we’ll aptly be examining tropes of women and violence. There are many permutations of violent women throughout history and throughout genres. In many cases, the viewer experiences the violence of female characters as empowering. Revenge and self-defense are frequent motivations for violence, which are often coded as justified, and audiences can bathe in the cathartic violence of Kill Bill‘s Beatrix Kiddo (aka The Bride) taking vengeance on her rapist and those who betrayed her and left her for dead. We can cheer on Ripley in Aliens or Laurie Strode in Halloween because they are acting from the basic animal instinct of self-preservation.

Many women glory in the model presented by the physically capable, self-assured women of sci-fi and action genres like pre-apocalypse soldier and mother Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and secret agent extraordinaire Mallory Kane in Haywire. Films like these give women the opportunity to revel in strong female bodies and in women who take charge.

Sometimes, though, violent women are coded as frightening and unknowable. They violate cultural mores. They cannot be contained within society and must, therefore, be destroyed. The eponymous heroine of Carrie is a young, timid woman who comes of age and finds enormous power inside herself, but such a power cannot be controlled or understood; it has no other choice but to obliterate itself. The film Monster, represents Aileen Wuornos, a real-life woman who had every hard luck in life, as a woman who takes revenge too far until she’s an out-of-control serial killer who must be executed. On the other hand, through the desperate and violent shenanigans of its heroines, Thelma & Louise accuses the world itself of being an ill-equipped place for women who refuse to play by rules that only subjugate them.

What is the connection between femaleness and violence? Why do we sometimes accept some types of violent women but not others? What do these value judgments say about our society?

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, Oct. 23, by midnight.

Carrie

Under the Skin

Foxfire

The Matrix

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Ginger Snaps

Basic Instinct

Foxy Brown

Battlestar Galactica

I Spit on Your Grave

The Exorcist

Underworld

American Horror Story

Game of Thrones

Hard Candy

Duke of Burgundy

Haywire

The 100

Jennifer’s Body

Single White Female

Misery

Mad Max: Fury Road

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Halloween

Alien

Sin City

Batman Returns

La Femme Nakita

Planet Terror

Aliens

Gone Girl

Friday the 13th

Kill Bill

Monster

Mommy Dearest

Thelma & Louise

Audition