Slumber Party Massacre came up while I was searching for female directors in the exploitation genre. Although it came off as yet another sensationalistic and gory 80s slasher, it stuck out, mainly due to its ridiculous title or the fact that most of the characters were female. Upon viewing it, what shocked me was not so much the gore and violence, but I was surprised by the clever humor, the funny characters, and most of all the incredibly veiled feminist satire.
Angel, a 1984 cult film, attempts to be both a melodrama about a teen hooker forced to face her life choices (as the trailer proclaims it “A Very Special Motion Picture”) and a very 80s crime thriller where a tough-talking street kid teams up with a cop to catch a killer, but the resulting film is a mess of clashing tones that seems more campy than hard-hitting.
For the uninitiated, Nikita was the often too realistic story of a drug-addicted young woman who finds herself in jail after a robbery gone horribly wrong. Most filmmakers would have ended there, a cautionary tale of the woman led down the wrong path who ends up punished for her sins. But Besson took the story further; this broken young woman gets turned into an assassin that is used by her government to kill. The killing takes its toll on her, but she values her life and freedom over the other option provided her: death. She meets a guy, falls in love, and at the end of the day Nikita turned out to not be the same story I was used to.
In terms of gender representations, both men and women are shown as the worst possible version of themselves. Barbra swings back and forth from being near catatonic and unable to communicate, to wild and hysterical. Ben even slaps her at one point to get her to snap out of her state. She is weak and unable to deal with the emotions of seeing her brother attacked. Barbra would have already been killed and reanimated were it not for the über masculine Ben to save her from the perils that lie outside.
Perhaps for the movie’s purposes, that doesn’t matter: the story seems to be far more driven by the desire to create an artistic film, rather than an intellectually/ethically/scientifically engaging narrative. The scientific aspect for example—the part of the film I found personally most engaging, that it is possible to tamper with the natural life-cycle, halting the aging process in its tracks—is touched upon but it seems, at least to me, to be more of a plot device for bringing Sarah into Miriam’s life than an attempt to explore an ethically challenging issue. The biology behind Miriam’s present state and the fate of her lovers is similarly irrelevant.
When the movie begins we’re introduced to Brad, a hero (Barry Bostiwck) and Janet, a heroine (Susan Sarandon), two straight-laced representations of the all-American, white middle class Christian boy and girl who are suddenly thrown into a den of loose morals and provocative dancing. At all turns, we’re blatantly reminded of their status as a proxy for a nice boy and a good girl, and it’s reinforced with every cliché possible.
Being set in the Valley in the 80s, the film portrays much of the vapidness and consumerism popular at the time, with two of the film’s songs, “Brand New Girl,” and “’Cause I’m a Blonde,” focusing on changing or criticizing women’s appearances. “’Cause I’m a Blonde” is purposely satirical, however, and really serves more to make fun of the blonde “Valley Girl” stereotype than to support it.
Populated by mostly male characters, The Big Lebowski is, to some extent, a tale of male friendship. Nevertheless, the cult comedy should never be interpreted and celebrated as exclusively a guy’s film. The Big Lebowski offers an amusing, subversive portrait of masculinity and features an excellent comic performance by one of the most gifted actresses working today. What’s more, it suggests that the future is matriarchal.
Consistently, then, femininity in men is dangerous. It may be actively dangerous, as in Uncle Monty, who assaults Marwood whilst in near-drag, or passively dangerous, in that it makes the feminine man a target for harassment, as in the lout at the pub who calls Marwood a perfumed ponce. Ultimately, it is dangerous because it marks the other, and to be other is to be in danger.
Most feminist criticism of Stephen King’s Carrie has focused on the male fear of powerful women that the author said inspired the film, with the anti-Carrie camp finding her death at the end to signify the defeat of the “monstrous feminine” and therefore a triumph of sexism. But Stephen King’s honesty about what inspired his 1973 book notwithstanding, Carrie is as much an articulation of a feminist nightmare as it is of a patriarchal one, with neither party coming out on top.
Birth of the Living Dead is Rob Kuhns’ documentary of the making of George Romero’s 1968 cult horror genre game-changer Night of the Living Dead. Bitch Flicks writers Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez discuss both the documentary (BOTLD) and the original film itself (NOTLD).
The ethics of the film are one thing, but it says a lot about the world of the movie that it’s able to go nearly two hours without a single important female character showing up on screen. There are no women cops, there are no women in the mob, there are only a couple of wives or passers-by or maybe a drug-addled girlfriend or two. But no one who matters. The acting characters in the film are all overwhelmingly and vocally male.
Even the ethos of the characters, that they will destroy that which is evil, but leave alone the pure and blameless, is inherently sexist. Because when they say pure and blameless, what they mean is the women and children. In this universe, women are not even people enough to do things wrong. We do not have enough agency even to commit evil.
On any dark and stormy night in the fall, it is a wonderful thing to curl up with a mug of mulled cider and watch Clue. The murder mystery based on the eponymous board game may have been a huge flop when it was released in 1985, but it has gained a passionate cult following in the last 28 years, probably due to its infinitely quotable dialogue and gleeful disregard for the pile of bodies amassed as the movie progresses – as well as being shown on cable about once every two hours.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched Fight Club. Every time I view it, I end up noticing something new. How did I miss that before? This time, Marla Singer (played by Helena Bonham Carter) captured my attention. What would the situations in the movie look like from her viewpoint?
The midwestern, puritanical values that American Gothic seems to represent so well win at the end of the film, and quite literally kill difference and sexual and gender subversion. While Riff Raff and Magenta go back to their home planet Transsexual, in the galaxy of Transylvania, Brad, Janet and Dr. Scott are left on the cold ground, crawling and writhing in their fishnets.
Here are some game-changing cult classics, divided into handy genre sections. And while we’re looking at the influence of these cult films, why not check out how they portray and treat women? Almost entirely coincidentally, they’re all from the ‘80s. What can I say? It was a culturally rich period.
So I asked Twitter the following question: “Who’s scarier: Jason or Jason’s mom?” Surprisingly, despite all the movies (12 in total) in which Jason is seen slashing throats and hanging victims, his mom (who’s only alive and running amok in the first film in 1980) is apparently considered the more horrifying killer. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Pamela. Not that I condone the gruesome murders of innocent people (of course not). But, unlike Jason, Pamela committed crimes of passion. Her crazy antics were actually revenge for her young son’s fatal drowning, which she felt was caused by the unjustifiable neglect of the camp counselors who failed to watch him (a longtime rumor has faulted the counselors for being too busy fornicating and not paying attention to Jason’s cries for help).
The Craft presents a lesson that coming-of-age films don’t typically make a point to show. A ballot is cast for prom queen or SAT prep sits on the horizon with college days looming, a girl must get a boy to like her, losing her virginity in the process. But this film is about serving the self—the craft of empowering oneself to surmount the archaic persecutions against women—taking back the threat of female power. But like a genie in a bottle that allows three wishes, this craft must be practiced and understood, respected completely before it can be outwardly used, or else it will perpetuate transgression.
Freaks (1932) is a true cult movie, one that’s ridden a rollercoaster of opprobrium and acclaim since its initial release. Tod Browning’s sideshow-set horror-romance destroyed his career (and several others), caused such disgust in early audiences that one woman (allegedly) miscarried, outraged critics and moral guardians, traumatized some of the performers who appeared in it, languished in obscurity after being banned for three decades, resurfaced on the exploitation circuit in the 1960s, and earned a spot in the National Film Registry archives in 1994 before enjoying its current status as a one-of-a-kind classic. It’s been repeated to the point of cliché, but Freaks, once seen, is never forgotten. Love it or hate it, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.
I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.
As my initiation into the worlds of sex and violence, many European horror films of the 1970s no doubt occupy a Freudian subspace of my psyche. Probably the Ur-example of this genre and its strange, ambivalent attitude toward women and sexuality is Dario Argento’s 1977 meisterwerk, Suspiria.
I found myself wondering about the designation of sexploitation. Female nudity in itself isn’t exploitative. Women fighting and women being abused are things that happen in prison. Are representations of women in these situations inherently exploitative, or are we conditioned to see women’s bodies and women’s actions and think: object? Certainly frame after frame of powerful, complex, awful and good, sympathetic and loathsome women has some kind of effect on the viewer. Since we are conditioned to only really consider the straight white male gaze as the norm, we see these movies as highly sexualized and exploitative.
On the surface, Sleepaway Camp isn’t much different than your average 1980s slasher movie. The comparisons to Friday the 13th can’t be ignored – Sleepaway’s Camp Arawak, much like Friday’s Camp Crystal Lake, is populated by horny teens looking for some summer lovin’, and is the site of a series of gruesome and mysterious murders that threaten to shut down the camp for the whole summer. But unlike Friday the 13th and other slasher films, the twist in Sleepaway Camp isn’t the identity of the murderer, and the final girl isn’t exactly who you’d expect.
Indeed, the social structure of Westerburg High School is unsettling to say the least. Teens there would rather commit actual suicide than “social suicide.” Their alienation from both reality and ethical values is mirrored not only in J.D., Veronica and the Heathers, but also in the rest of the students. Peer pressure and the dream of popularity result in the “Westerburg suicides,” causing a downright suicide craze. Their supposed actions gave the popular kids depth and humanity and made them more popular than ever. When an unpopular girl attempts to kill herself, the new Heather in charge asserts, “Just another case of a geek trying to imitate the popular people of the school and failing miserably.”
Indeed, the social structure of Westerburg High School is unsettling to say the least. Teens there would rather commit actual suicide than “social suicide.” Their alienation from both reality and ethical values is mirrored not only in J.D., Veronica and the Heathers, but also in the rest of the students. Peer pressure and the dream of popularity result in the “Westerburg suicides,” causing a downright suicide craze. Their supposed actions gave the popular kids depth and humanity and made them more popular than ever. When an unpopular girl attempts to kill herself, the new Heather in charge asserts, “Just another case of a geek trying to imitate the popular people of the school and failing miserably.”
If Heathers (1988) has taught us anything, it’s that “it is one thing to want somebody out of your life, it is another thing to serve them a wake-up cup full of liquid drainer.”
In one of the first and foremost films about the chronic struggle of queen bees versus wannabes, Veronica Sawyer is up against a ruthless trio of Heathers. Led by Heather Chandler, they are the most popular clique in school and, being their newest member, Veronica has already had enough – she longs to return to her “geekish” old friends. The three Heathers can be read to represent the uniformity of the queen bees as well as high school structures in general. As Veronica’s boyfriend J.D. argues, they function in much the same way everywhere: “Seven schools in seven states and the only thing different is my locker combination.” The popular girls seem to be interchangeable templates that, in addition, are the same in every school and, most importantly, every teen movie. But high school as a technicolor battleground has just taken on a new opponent.
Fed up with using her smarts “to decide what color gloss to wear,” Veronica is more self confident and not as obsequious as Heather Chandler’s other minions. Having a strong sense for right and wrong, she is reluctant to accept the regime of an individual adolescent in the social fabric of the school. In order to function as the blatant satire that it is, the film works with an array of cliché characters, yet it offers a remarkable complexity of female characters that transcends the “smart girl in need of a makeover vs. the popular airhead” shtick. Moreover, it blends juvenile delinquency with girlhood without making use of the “outrageous” John Waters style badass girl gang trope.
Channeling both James Dean and Jack Nicholson, J.D. remains the driving force behind the murderous madness. However, there is a certain darkness to Veronica’s character that wavers between desperation and spite and contrasts the teenage girl known from the works of John Hughes and the like. Whereas in the 1970s the cinematic image of (pre-)teen girls was defined by a more demonic form of terror in films like Carrie and The Exorcist, a more subtle kind of horror emerged in the decades to come: the everyday kind. Heathers has paved the way for films like Jawbreaker (1999) and Mean Girls (2004), as well as TV series like Gossip Girl (2007-2012), about a bunch of conniving high school girls with cruel intentions and relentless dress codes. We owe this in part to the Waters brothers, who have found a voice to express the fear and loathing popular high school girls can evoke without demonizing the feminine by its very nature. Incidentally, Daniel Waters (the writer of Heathers) and Mark Waters (director of Mean Girls) have recently teamed up for an upcoming film adaptation of the best-selling teenage fantasy novel Vampire Academy.
Frienemies
The effort of negotiating one’s position in high school’s bizarre pecking order is an anguish many teenagers face. The struggle is real. However, in the case of Veronica, it is not an outsider trying to make his or her way into the popular crowd but an insider trying to get out. “Are you a Heather?” J.D. asks Veronica as they first encounter. “No. I’m a Veronica”; she clearly distinguishes herself from the trio and later on explains, “I don’t really like my friends. It’s just like they’re people I work with and our job is being popular and shit.” Popularity came at a price for Veronica. She had to give up her true friends who, by Heathers-standards, are “the scum of the school.” Heather Chandler runs a tight ship. She considers conversing with the “geek squad” to be “social suicide” and forbids Veronica and her other minion Heathers to do so. Veronica feels oppressed and harbors thoughts of deadly revenge: “Tomorrow I’ll be kissing her aerobicised ass, but for tonight, let me dream of a world without Heather – a world where I am free.”
It becomes clear that, similarly to that of the Mean Girls, the Heathers’ friendship is merely a superficial camaraderie based on phony flattery and a feeling of superiority when it comes to fashion choices. And, of course, power.
Power Dangers
From the very start, J.D. takes control of Veronica and her decisions. She describes their unhealthy relationship in her diary, saying, “I’ve got no control over myself when I’m with J.D.” and concludes with, “Are we going to prom or to hell?”
Upon comprehending that her “teen angst bullshit has a body count,” she declares her “Bonnie and Clyde days” to be over and attempts to break up with J.D. As he explains to Veronica that this will not bring back the dead, she responds, “I am not trying to bring anyone back except maybe myself.” Clearly, she has had enough of being bullied by the Heathers as well as her boyfriend and wants to get back in touch with her true self. Moreover, Veronica is well aware of how the mean girl torch is merely being continuously passed on to the next queen bee. In a dream she realizes with distress that “tomorrow someone else is just gonna move into her place,” and, in a worried tone, adds, “That person could be me!”
Within the Heathers, it is Heather Chandler who’s boss. Just like hoop earrings are “Regina’s thing” in Mean Girls, wearing the color red is Heather Chandler’s thing. After her death, the next Heather takes her place and genuinely revels in wearing red. The red scrunchie that we see in the very first shot of the film is passed on from one queen bee to the next and when asked why she is “such a mega bitch,” the new head of the Heathers replies, “Because I can be.”
But as J.D. blackmails her, she goes from controller to controllee and it is once again him who is in charge. The film’s title song, “Que Sera,” stands in great contrast to J.D.’s urge to manipulate those around him and, essentially, “play god.” Eventually, he explains his plans to blow up the entire school by disputing the underlying problems within society itself, his argument being: “The only place different social types can genuinely get along is in heaven.” Basking in his outburst of mansplaining, J.D unmasks high school as a type of societal microcosm and blames it for his own issues as well as structural complications and hierarchies.
Indeed, the social structure of Westerburg High School is unsettling to say the least. Teens there would rather commit actual suicide than “social suicide.” Their alienation from both reality and ethical values is mirrored not only in J.D., Veronica and the Heathers, but also in the rest of the students. Peer pressure and the dream of popularity result in the “Westerburg suicides,” causing a downright suicide craze. Their supposed actions gave the popular kids depth and humanity and made them more popular than ever. When an unpopular girl attempts to kill herself, the new Heather in charge asserts, “Just another case of a geek trying to imitate the popular people of the school and failing miserably.”
In the end, we get a happy ending of the macabre kind. J.D. loses to Veronica’s bravery as she stands up to him and saves the school from a deathly massacre. It is a victory of fairness, feminism, and friendship. Veronica is the new queen bee. While it becomes clear that, on the whole, high school will remain a place dominated by “the cool crowd,” at least Veronica’s authority might allow for a more humane form of leadership.
Artemis Linhart is a freelance writer and film curator with a weakness for escapism.
On the surface, Sleepaway Camp isn’t much different than your average 1980s slasher movie. The comparisons to Friday the 13th can’t be ignored – Sleepaway’s Camp Arawak, much like Friday’s Camp Crystal Lake, is populated by horny teens looking for some summer lovin’, and is the site of a series of gruesome and mysterious murders that threaten to shut down the camp for the whole summer. But unlike Friday the 13th and other slasher films, the twist in Sleepaway Camp isn’t the identity of the murderer, and the final girl isn’t exactly who you’d expect.
This piece by Carrie Nelson previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on October 24, 2011 and is republished as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.
Sleepaway Camp (1983)
On the surface, Sleepaway Camp isn’t much different than your average 1980s slasher movie. The comparisons to Friday the 13th can’t be ignored – Sleepaway’s Camp Arawak, much like Friday’s Camp Crystal Lake, is populated by horny teens looking for some summer lovin’, and is the site of a series of gruesome and mysterious murders that threaten to shut down the camp for the whole summer. But unlike Friday the 13th and other slasher films, the twist in Sleepaway Camp isn’t the identity of the murderer, and the final girl isn’t exactly who you’d expect.
(Everything that follows contains significant spoilers. Read at your discretion.)
The protagonist of Sleepaway Camp is Angela, the lone survivor of a boating accident that killed her father and her brother, Peter. Years after the accident, her aunt Martha, with whom she now lives, sends her to Camp Arawak with her cousin Ricky. Angela is painfully shy and refuses to go near the water, which leads to the other campers tormenting her incessantly. Ricky’s quick to defend her, but the bullying is relentless. One by one, Angela’s tormenters are murdered in increasingly grotesque ways (the most disturbing involves a curling iron brutally entering a woman’s vagina).
So come the end of the film, when it’s revealed that Angela is the murderer, there’s no particular shock – after all, why wouldn’t she want to seek revenge on her tormentors? But the fact that Angela is the murderer isn’t the point, because when we find out she’s the murderer we see her naked, and it is revealed that she has a penis. We quickly learn through flashbacks that it was, in fact, Peter who survived the boat accident, and Aunt Martha decided to raise him as a girl. The ending is profoundly disturbing, not because Peter is a murderer or because he is a cross-dresser (because his female presentation is against his will, it isn’t accurate to call him transgender), but because he has been abused so deeply by his aunt and his peers that he can’t find a way to cope.
Unlike most slasher movies I’ve seen, I wasn’t horrified by Sleepaway Camp’s body count. Rather, I was horrified by the abuses that catalyze the murders. Peter survived the trauma of watching his father and sister die, only to be emotionally and physically abused by his aunt and forced to live as a woman. At camp, he’s terrified of the water, as it reminds him of the tragic loss of his family, and he’s unable to shower or change his clothes around his female bunkmates, as they might learn his secret. But rather than being understanding and supportive, the other campers harass Peter by forcibly throwing him into the water, verbally taunting him and ruining his chance to be romantically involved with someone who might truly care for him. Not to mention, at the start of camp, he is nearly molested by the lecherous head cook. Peter may be a murderer, but he is hardly villainous – the rest of the characters are the real villains, for allowing the bullying to transpire.
The problem, of course, is that the abuse of Peter isn’t the part that’s supposed to horrify us. The twist ending is set up to shock and disgust the audience, which is deeply transphobic. Tera at Sweet Perdition describes the problem with ending as follows:
But Angela’s not deceiving everybody because she’s a trans* person. She’s deceiving everybody because she’s a (fictional) trans* person created by cissexual filmmakers. As Drakyn points out, the trans* person who’s “fooling” us on purpose is a myth we cissexuals invented. Why? Because we are so focused on our own narrow experience of gender that we can’t imagine anything outside it. We take it for granted that everyone’s gender matches the sex they were born with. With this assumption in place, the only logical reason to change one’s gender is to lie to somebody.
The shock of Sleepaway Camp’s ending relies on the cissexist assumption that one’s biological sex and gender presentation must always match. A person with a mismatched sex and gender presentation is someone to be distrusted and feared. Though the audience has identified with Peter throughout the movie, we are meant to turn on him and fear him at the end, as he’s not only a murderer – he’s a deceiver as well. But, as Tera points out, the only deception is the one in the minds of cisgender viewers who assume that Peter’s sex and gender must align in a specific, proper way. Were this not the point that the filmmakers wanted to make, they would have revealed the twist slightly earlier in the film, allowing time for the viewer to digest the information and realize that Peter is still a human being. (This kind of twist is done effectively in The Crying Game, specifically because the twist is revealed midway through the film, and the audience watches characters cope and come to terms with the reveal in an honest, sensitive way. Such sensitivity is not displayed in Sleepaway Camp.)
And yet, despite its cissexism, Sleepaway Camp has some progressive moments. Most notably, the depiction of Angela and Peter’s parents, a gay male couple, is positive. In the opening scene, the parents appear loving and committed, and there’s even a flashback scene depicting the men engaging in romantic sexual relations. Considering how divisive gay parenting is in the 21st century, the fact that a mainstream film made nearly thirty years ago portrays gay parenting positively (if briefly) is certainly worthy of praise.
Sleepaway Camp is incredibly problematic, but beyond the surface-layer clichés and the shock value of the ending, it’s a fascinating and truly horrifying film. Particularly watching the film today, in an era where bullying is forcing young people to make terrifyingly destructive decisions, the abuses against Peter ring uncomfortably true. Peter encounters cruelty at every turn, emotionally scarring him until he can think of no other way to cope besides murder. Unlike horror movies in which teenagers are murdered as punishment for sexual activity, Sleepaway Camp murders teenagers for the torment they inflict on others. There’s a certain sweet justice in that sort of conclusion, but at the same time, it makes you wish the situations that bring on the murders hadn’t needed to happen at all.
Carrie Nelson was a Staff Writer for Gender Across Borders, an international feminist community and blog that she co-founded in 2009. She works as a grant writer for an LGBT nonprofit, and she is currently pursuing an MA in Media Studies at The New School.
I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.
As my initiation into the worlds of sex and violence, many European horror films of the 1970s no doubt occupy a Freudian subspace of my psyche. Probably the Ur-example of this genre and its strange, ambivalent attitude toward women and sexuality is Dario Argento’s 1977 meisterwerk, Suspiria.
This post by Staff Writer Max Thornton appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies. It was previously published as part of our theme week on Women and Gender in Foreign Films.
I started getting into film when I was a teenager. Growing up with daily power cuts, both scheduled and unscheduled, is not conducive to childhood as a cinephile, and anyway my parents did not consider film a “real” art like literature or music – I can vividly remember being forced, at age seven, to quit Video Club and join Chess Club instead, because my mother did not think that sitting around watching videos constituted a worthwhile extracurricular.
(I am still breathtakingly terrible at chess.)
So, partly as the cultivation of an indoor hobby in response to the unpleasant British climate, and partly as the world’s meagerest teenage rebellion, I started watching films. In particular, I sought out horror films, thanks to the friendly proprietor of our local video rental store (now sadly gone the way of all such places in the Netflix age), who would happily rent the bloodiest, goriest, most revolting 18-ratedmovies to an obviously-14-year-old me, always with a cheery, “Enjoy!”
Most of these.
I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.
As my initiation into the worlds of sex and violence, many European horror films of the 1970s no doubt occupy a Freudian subspace of my psyche. Probably the Ur-example of this genre and its strange, ambivalent attitude toward women and sexuality is Dario Argento’s 1977 meisterwerk, Suspiria.
Suspiria poster
From its kickass score by prog-rockers Goblin to its borderline incomprehensible plot, I love damn near everything about Suspiria. For starters, it’s set in a ballet school, which is a direct line to my heart; and it features Udo Kier (UDO! KIER!); plus, it’s a strikingly female-dominated story. Argento says of the film: “there are only three men in it: one is blind, one can’t speak and the other is gay. It’s the women who have the power.” Which is such a problematic statement on so many levels, but let’s just focus on the undeniable fact that the film is mostly about women.
The film opens with American dancer Suzy Banyon (played by a young Jessica Harper – did you know she writes children’s books and has a cookery blog now??) arriving at a German airport on a rainy night. Pretty much the first thing we see is her repeated attempts to hail a taxi; her young face, rain- and wind-swept above the virginal whites of her clothes, expresses a vulnerability that will recur throughout the movie. Her big, frightened eyes peer out of the taxi at the gushing storm-drains, the phallic tree-trunks in the spooky woods, the bright red facade of the ballet school (on the subtly named Escher Strasse). Untoward goings-on, shockingly enough, are underfoot at the school, and Suzy soon finds herself completely out of her depth as things get steadily creepier.
Suzy and Sara, swimming.
What’s particularly interesting about Suspiria, especially in relation to the giallo genre as a whole, is its lack of nudity or overt sexuality. There’s a pretty good reason for this, as Argento explains:
To begin with, I imagined the story set in a children’s school, not of teens. I thought that it could be interesting that the school was for very young girls, eight, ten years old. This was the first version. The distributor strongly opposed this choice, and the film was made also with American money, from Fox, and they were against that too. So I changed the script and raised the girl’s age, but I kept a sort of childish attitude, so the characters behaved like children. The decor too… I used little tricks, for example the doors have the handles not at a normal height, but at face level, the height at which a child of 8 years old would find the handle. It gives the impression of dealing with children, even though they have adult bodies.
I don’t think it’s reading too much into the film to find some Freudian undertones in the whites and reds, in the repeated motif of water, in the pivotal role of irises. There is a strong fairy-tale quality to the film’s artifices, its primary colors, scenes awash in blue or red; the story of the young girl entering a world of danger and threat carries echoes of Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White – Bruno Bettelheim would surely have something to say about that.
Make no mistake, this is a pretty violent movie. There are some quite fantastically grotesque murders. Within the first fifteen minutes, we see a still-beating heart stabbed and a woman’s face split in two by plate glass. Throughout, the lily-white garments of the murdered women are streaked and splattered with bright red blood. We also get a revolting maggot infestation, some magnificently scary chase scenes, and a truly bonkers climactic sequence.
Red, the color of a very murdered woman.
And yet Suzy retains a sense of childlike innocence and vulnerability throughout, relating to her friends and teachers like the little girl she was originally written to be. It’s a very weird juxtaposition, and I think it crystallizes the strange combination of female empowerment and ingrained misogyny that characterizes classic European horror. What, in the end, are we to make of stories where women are both the brutally murdered corpses and the proactive investigators of the mystery; both the pure childlike heroine and the monstrous villain; both desexed and penetrated by sharp objects; both agents and victims?
It speaks volumes to the general lack of such female-dominated stories in our broader culture that I even find myself asking this question.
Freaks (1932) is a true cult movie, one that’s ridden a rollercoaster of opprobrium and acclaim since its initial release. Tod Browning’s sideshow-set horror-romance destroyed his career (and several others), caused such disgust in early audiences that one woman (allegedly) miscarried, outraged critics and moral guardians, traumatized some of the performers who appeared in it, languished in obscurity after being banned for three decades, resurfaced on the exploitation circuit in the 1960s, and earned a spot in the National Film Registry archives in 1994 before enjoying its current status as a one-of-a-kind classic. It’s been repeated to the point of cliché, but Freaks, once seen, is never forgotten. Love it or hate it, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Freaks poster
This guest post by Karina Wilson appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.
Cult movies are lightning in a bottle, a one-time only circumstance of story, director, cast, crew, location and budget that defies original intentions and transmutes into something unforgettable, unrepeatable, unsurpassable. Cult movies are accidental, born of a mismatch between the scenes filmmakers thought they were shooting, and what ended up in the can. Cult movies are magic, of a puckish sort, and we shouldn’t probe their mysteries too closely. They’re best regarded from a distance, after a significant amount of time has passed.
Freaks (1932) is a true cult movie, one that’s ridden a rollercoaster of opprobrium and acclaim since its initial release. Tod Browning’s sideshow-set horror-romance destroyed his career (and several others), caused such disgust in early audiences that one woman (allegedly) miscarried, outraged critics and moral guardians, traumatized some of the performers who appeared in it, languished in obscurity after being banned for three decades, resurfaced on the exploitation circuit in the 1960s, and earned a spot in the National Film Registry archives in 1994 before enjoying its current status as a one-of-a-kind classic. It’s been repeated to the point of cliché, but Freaks, once seen, is never forgotten. Love it or hate it, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Originally, Freaks wasn’t intended to achieve any of these feats. All MGM head honcho Irving Thalberg wanted was a box office hit, along the lines of Universal’s Dracula (1931), a movie that exploited the audience’s new-found appetite for the talking horror genre. So he called Tod Browning, Dracula‘s director, who’d had a run of success during the silent era working with Lon Chaney Sr., and asked the million-dollar question “What else have you got?”
Although “horror” wasn’t a label applied to film in the 1920s, Browning and Chaney’s collaborations dealt with mutilation, disfigurement, and the resulting heartbreak (see: The Phantom of the Opera and The Unknown), subjects dear to the hearts of those whose loved ones had returned home, scarred, from the war in France. Browning and Chaney had also worked together on box office sensation The Unholy Three, a macabre crime caper featuring the 3’ 3” tall circus performer, Harry Earles.
Earles enjoyed working in the movies but knew there weren’t many roles out there for actors his size. So he brought Browning’s attention to another short story by Unholy Three writer, Tod Robbins, Spurs, a mean little melodrama about a love triangle between a circus midget, a bareback rider, and her normal-sized lover. Browning had a carnival background (he ran away to join the circus when he was 16), loved the milieu, and, when MGM gave him carte blanche to direct a movie more horrifying than Dracula, he picked Freaks.
In those pre-television days, the circus sideshow ruled supreme as entertainment for the curious masses. Trumpeted as part edification, part education, the ‘Ten-In-One” tent showcased human oddities and provided a rare opportunity for those born with a difference to earn a living. People with all manner of abnormalities found a profitable home in the sideshow – armless, legless, eyeless, giant, dwarf, bearded, scaled, obese, skeletal. Some simply exhibited their unique bodies, others performed an act, introducing music, dance, stage magic or comedy into their routine; many earned good money and toured the globe. After auditioning the crème-de-la-crème of this international talent pool, Browning assembled his cast, the likes of which has never been seen on a movie screen before or since.
The cast of Freaks includes some bona fide female sideshow stars, women who projected glamorous images of considerable wattage despite being born different. They worked their way up through circuses and on the vaudeville circuit, often from a very early age. They viewed their divergence from the accepted norm as an opportunity to build a show business career, rather than as a debilitation. Self-sufficient, often with strings of admirers, they didn’t lead easy lives, but charted their own paths and lived to a respectable age. It’s difficult to imagine any of these performers working in the perfect-image-obsessed entertainment industry today.
Conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton had been working professionally in vaudeville since the age of three. Renowned for their beauty, fashion sense and musicianship as well as their dancing skills (they performed onstage with Bob Hope and Charlie Chaplin), they had recently received $100,000 damages and emancipation from their predatory managers (they later said they were “paupers living in practical slavery”) and their appearance in Freaks marked the beginning of their independent career.
Daisy and Violet Hilton
The “midget Mae West,” Daisy Earles (Frieda), along with her brother Harry and two equally short-statured sisters Tiny and Gracie, was part of the Doll Family, a popular act who toured with both the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circuses, and appeared in Laurel and Hardy films.
Martha Morris billed herself as “Martha The Armless Wonder” and was a featured attraction at Coney Island and in the traveling Freak City Show in the 1920s. She entertained rubes by writing and typing with her toes as dexterously as if they were fingers. Frances O’Connor’s stage name was “the Living Venus De Milo,” and she loved to pose in specially designed costumes that showed her entirely smooth and armless (there were not even stumps) torso, whilst impressing admirers with her coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking and sharp-shooting skills.
By contrast, the non-“freak” women (Cleopatra, the Peacock Of The Air” trapeze artist, and Venus, the animal trainer) are low profile. Myrna Loy supposedly begged not to play Venus, and, although mentioned in press releases, Jean Harlow failed to materialize as Cleopatra. Instead, Russian defector Olga Baclanova (a gifted physical actor who was struggling with the shift to talkies) got the villainess role, while hard-working contract player Leila Hyams was cast as Venus. Both women were regular Hollywood blondes, used to commanding the silent screen with the arch of an eyebrow or the flare of a nostril, but, at 36 and 27 respectively, they were aging out of leading roles and Freaks marked the last major stop on the Hollywood Express for both of them.
Given the luminaries in the cast, it’s not surprising that Freaks is a female-driven narrative, a deft illustration of Madame de Merteuil’s assertion in Dangerous Liaisons, that “When one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.” The plot is simple and universal: unrequited love, greed, jealousy, revenge.
The beautiful Cleopatra knows her co-worker, Hans, is in love with her, although she does not reciprocate the feeling. She enjoys making fun of him, much to the chagrin of his fiancée, Frieda. When Frieda lets slip that Hans has inherited a fortune, Cleopatra (egged on by her boyfriend, Hercules) persuades Hans to ditch Frieda and marry her. The other co-workers are suspicious of Cleopatra’s gold-digging motives but, if Hans is happy, they’re happy, and they all attend a celebratory wedding feast to welcome Cleopatra to the family. Unfortunately, Cleopatra sneers at their attempts to be friendly, and humiliates Hans, who collapses thanks to the alcohol she’s been forcing down him all evening – along with a dubious substance from a tiny black bottle. Frieda is furious. From that point on, Cleopatra is doomed. Frieda and the other co-workers close ranks around Hans to protect him from Cleopatra’s nefarious schemes and will do whatever it takes to keep him safe.
This is the type of run-of-the-mill romantic retribution played out every night of the week on today’s Lifetime network. We enjoy seeing the man-stealing hussy get her just desserts, while the wronged party is reunited with her one true love. In terms of pure plot, Freaks presents nothing we haven’t seen before. It creaks. It’s clumsy. It’s barely even a horror story. That’s the point. That’s why, 81 years later, Freaks still resonates as a progressive text. By rejecting fantasy, by refusing to use freaks to populate a fairy tale (as The Wizard of Oz would do seven years later), instead slotting them into a bog standard kitchen sink melodrama (albeit with a circus setting) Browning succeeds in making us see his characters as people first.
Much of Freaks’ power comes from the humdrum nature of the narrative, coupled with the easy familiarity of the early scenes. The first half of the screenplay deals with housekeeping, where the circus performers sleep (and who they sleep with), how they peg laundry out to dry, roll a cigarette, sip coffee, present a new baby to their friends. Dialogue takes the form of petty squabbles, between husband-to-be and conjoined fiancée, and performers discussing the mechanics of their acts. We’re forced to vacate our circus spectator headspace; there are no sequins or spotlights to direct our gaze. We quit gawking and embrace domesticity. It’s O.K. to be “one of us.”
One of us. One of us.
This makes the second half all the more disturbing. After breaking down their Otherness, establishing the freaks as friendly, ordinary beings, not at all threatening, pussycats in fact, Browning lets rip. These freaks – even infantilized pinheads like Zip and Pip – have teeth. Masterminded (we assume, although we never see her giving the orders) by the cherubic Frieda, the freaks enact justice. We’ve been encouraged to recognize their inner contentment and beauty. In the spirit of reciprocity, the freaks pull Cleopatra’s inner hideousness to the surface. Sideshow justice is done, and, within the movie’s running time of little over an hour, it’s all the more terrifying for its swiftness.
Freaks still makes for startling viewing, and, even in these enlightened, CGI-weary times, challenges our expectations of the human form. We’re so used to seeing physical perfection as the standard, so conditioned to accept the narrowest definition of beauty, so ignorant of the spectrum of human shapes, that many frames of the movie seem like a slap in the face. Freaks stands as a reminder that, for all our talk about diversity and inclusiveness, we sideline performers with difference. Unless they are playing “grateful recipient of charity” or “pathetic victim” or “awkward dependent,” we’ve largely wiped them from our screens.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about Freaks is that the diverse human beings in this pre-Production Code picture take it for granted that they can go about their business, flirt, have relationships, express sexual desire and procreate without any hand-wringing, or guilt, or “professional intervention” (a la The Sessions) from the normals. They invite us to gaze upon them, not with pity, but as players with agency in a story as old as time. Although it’s often criticized for being exploitative (and the critics have a point), Freaks is still the only movie in over a century of cinema history to celebrate these characters so boldly on the big screen. Until someone steps up to the plate, Freaks remains a unique experience, my cult classic, lightning in a fascinatingly misshapen bottle.
Karina Wilson is a British writer and story consultant based in Los Angeles. She writes a regular column on horror fiction at Litreactor and can also be found at Horror Film History.
The Craft presents a lesson that coming-of-age films don’t typically make a point to show. A ballot is cast for prom queen or SAT prep sits on the horizon with college days looming, a girl must get a boy to like her, losing her virginity in the process. But this film is about serving the self—the craft of empowering oneself to surmount the archaic persecutions against women—taking back the threat of female power. But like a genie in a bottle that allows three wishes, this craft must be practiced and understood, respected completely before it can be outwardly used, or else it will perpetuate transgression.
The Craft poster
This guest post by Kim Hoffman appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.
There are countless teen films with themes that focus on the ways young females work with, and then eventually against each other, for the sake of a number of factors: their place in a social hierarchy, a jealous feeling, or in summation, an overall insecurity they are plagued with because they’re sixteen and they haven’t yet developed a sense of self-awareness outside of their high school cafeteria.
What I’ve always welcomed in The Craftwas the idea that a group of girls could be simultaneously contributing to the ongoing high school drama they’re faced with each day, while nurturing their powers on a higher plane that none of their peers could possibly grasp. Earth, air, fire and water—the four corners of the world, but incomplete without a fourth girl until character Sarah (Robin Tunney) begins attending her new Catholic high school and develops a friendship with the school witches.
The group needs a fourth to be complete.
In elementary school, slumber parties with girlfriends typically involved the game “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.” It was a bonding experience between us girls that didn’t quite mean we believed we could actually make one another float, or invoke a spirit to talk to us through a candle or the Ouija board, but perhaps that very hyper-adolescent female clout was a presence in itself, an ember growing hotter within us, if we dared pay attention. Boys in class picked me on—one called me “Casper” because I was so pale. I was living in Florida at the time and all of the other girls were tan and flirted with boys by dumbing themselves down. I didn’t subscribe to that diluted mindset. I was determined, even as a confused pre-pubescent girl with a deep shyness in me, to move to the beat of my own drums, however weird others thought I was.
The understood leader of this teenage coven in The Craft is Nancy (Fairuza Balk), a girl who stands up to the likes of other mean girls in teen drama history like the most cruel of Heathers or Rose McGowen’s unapologetic lipstick machine Courtney Shane in Jawbreaker. Next to Nancy are Bonnie (Neve Campbell) and Rochelle (Rachel True). Bonnie is scarred with terrible marks on her back, causing her to be shelled and quiet, uncomfortably covered up so no one can see her, fraught to feel beautiful. Rochelle, an African American athlete with a sweet and open disposition, puts up with torment from a girl named Laura Lizzie (Christine Taylor), a popular blonde who makes terrible racial slurs at her. Nancy and her mother live in a dilapidated trailer with her sickening and habitually abusive stepfather. There’s a feeling hanging in the air when Sarah begins to show signs of telekinetic power; the girls know their coven could be complete and that their powers joined could change everything they can’t currently control.
The coven is complete
After popular boy Chris (Skeet Ulrich) asks Sarah out on a date and she agrees, she’s angry to find out that the following Monday at school, a terrible rumor has been spread about her and Chris having sex on that date—despite the fact that they absolutely didn’t. As a result, the three other girls approach her with an idea, a spell. They cast a spell to make Chris do whatever Sarah says. And it works. He’s now following her around like a lost puppy, and Sarah’s slut-shaming rumors are put to rest. It’s a moment of reckoning, wherein a bad school rumor at the hands of a guy is twisted to his disadvantage, causing him to be the weak, demure one that he attributed to Sarah, banishing his ego and putting Sarah in power. But is it power for women, or is it power modeled after male dominance?
Now fueled with delight, greed and confidence, the coven is a complete dynamic troop, marching through the hallways in their Catholic school-girl uniforms, evoking a new brand of strength that makes their school mates fear them even more, which they love and welcome. Nancy’s face says, “Look at me, I dare you.” It’s the high point in the film for these girls, as they’ve joined their powers to reclaim their place, to restore their souls—but as quickly as that power is recognized, they begin to misuse it for revenge—a yin yang of dark and light that must bring chaos if used too recklessly.
The girls perform a healing spell on Bonnie, who only wishes for her scars to be gone. At her next doctor’s appointment, Bonnie, her mother and the doctors are stunned to find out that when they peel back her bandages, her back is completely healed. The next day at school, Bonnie walks in with a new outfit, a new attitude, and an outward vivaciousness that all can see. Of course, the boys take notice—but this is about Bonnie, for Bonnie, and no one else. Simultaneously, Rochelle is handling Laura Lizzie, who is still taunting her in the locker room. Over the course of a few days, Laura finds her hair is beginning to fall out in her hairbrush and in the shower—and it’s only becoming more and more atrocious. Finally, Nancy causes her stepfather to have a heart attack and die. She and her mother are left with a booming inheritance and can move out of the trailer into a swanky new high-rise condo.
The Smiths’ iconic “How Soon Is Now?” echoes in the background, and the girls, who call upon a deity named Manon, host a ritual in attempt to invoke the spirit within them. What they don’t realize is that Nancy has a plan to take Manon into herself completely, a dark power that the woman at the magick shop they frequently steal from knows is not the kind of magick that amateur witches should mess with without proper practice. The crone shop owner however recognizes Sarah is different from Nancy and the others, a consciousness that rises above the girls who have impulsive, quick-tempered intentions.
Inside the traditional current ofteen film subtext in which we root for the new girl/the odd girl out/the girl with the chance to teach something/the girl who has been influenced by the luster of a life she is told will make her more popular, Sarah must defeat the soul-sucking people who seek to make her an object. We root for her because we see what she can’t see yet, and we know that something terrible might have to take place in order for her to come to fully developed realizations that push her into making important choices. This isn’t about making an A; it’s about making sure you aren’t burned at the stake for your high school to witness.
The Craft presents a lesson that coming-of-age films don’t typically make a point to show. A ballot is cast for prom queen or SAT prep sits on the horizon with college days looming, a girl must get a boy to like her, losing her virginity in the process. But this filmis about serving the self—the craft of empowering oneself to surmount the archaic persecutions against women—taking back the threat of female power. But like a genie in a bottle that allows three wishes, this craft must be practiced and understood, respected completely before it can be outwardly used, or else it will perpetuate transgression.
The mystery of women, our cyclic connection to the moon, to medicine, math, written words—it has all been condemned and misappropriated as voodoo, black magick, devil worshipping, witch work. To many, witch means bitch. Bitch means witch. What is unconventional is evil. But ego is genderless, and it feeds a darker realm. The people who attack and target Sarah, Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle represent that gender-neutral aspect that aims to banish female power. The age that is dawning doesn’t require school texts and chalk boards. The real war taking place requires ritual books and goblets filled with blood and wine, you know—typical high school material.
However, Sarah’s spell eventually backfires when Chris tries raping her at a party because he will stop at nothing to be near her and can’t wrap his head around these feelings he can’t part with. Nancy saves Sarah by throwing Chris out of the window with her powers, and he is killed. Despite the harm he has caused, Sarah is mostly just scared of Nancy now. It’s a turning point in the film when the roles shift and the people against them are not the ones to be feared—it’s the girls themselves that have to come face to face with their own shadows.
Nancy
After Sarah tries casting a binding spell against Nancy to prevent her from causing harm against herself and others, the girls turn on Sarah. As a real life outcast who was banned from my own in-crowd group of girl friends in middle school, I see this as a blessing in disguise for girls who are meant for bigger things. It’s a calling of sorts—a low hanging cloud that beckons you away from cliques, from being another follower, from believing in something just because someone tells you its real. What about believing in you? Sarah has had the power all along—Nancy knew it. So she muddled Sarah down in the hopes she could overcome her and maintain what would only ever be a false sense of supremacy. All Queen Bees are only as strong as their weakest link; they can’t survive alone.
In the final act, Sarah and Nancy come head to head, Nancy filling up Sarah’s house with snakes and creepy crawlers, attempting to influence Sarah to commit suicide—the ultimate female betrayal in which Sarah’s death is the only means for Nancy to move forward. Motivated by life and a true sense of power that musters itself back to the surface, Sarah defeats Nancy and thereafter Nancy is sent to a mental hospital. We’re left with a few lingering feelings and questions. Most prominent is the feeling that good can defeat evil and that female power is strongest when the belief is in oneself, not what they’re told to follow. But what does this say about a coven of women? Can women work together without turning on each other? What factors would dispel women from competing over control and success? Is The Craft a lesson in the art of witchcraft, or is it a deeper lesson in the very real and everyday transformation we make from girls to women?
Kim Hoffman is a writer for AfterEllen.com and Curve Magazine. She currently keeps things weird in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter: @the_hoff.
So I asked Twitter the following question: “Who’s scarier: Jason or Jason’s mom?” Surprisingly, despite all the movies (12 in total) in which Jason is seen slashing throats and hanging victims, his mom (who’s only alive and running amok in the first film in 1980) is apparently considered the more horrifying killer. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Pamela. Not that I condone the gruesome murders of innocent people (of course not). But, unlike Jason, Pamela committed crimes of passion. Her crazy antics were actually revenge for her young son’s fatal drowning, which she felt was caused by the unjustifiable neglect of the camp counselors who failed to watch him (a longtime rumor has faulted the counselors for being too busy fornicating and not paying attention to Jason’s cries for help).
Friday the 13th
This guest post by Candice Frederick appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.
Raise your hand if you remember the chilling first Friday the 13th movie in which–spoiler alert–Jason Voorhees’ mom, Pamela, is the wild-eyed killer. Those final few moments when she, hobbling and bloody, is chasing down one of the Camp Crystal Lake camp counselors all over the grounds (to her impending death) are forever etched in my mind.
“I’m Mrs. Voorhees.”
So I asked Twitter the following question: “Who’s scarier: Jason or Jason’s mom?” Surprisingly, despite all the movies (12 in total) in which Jason is seen slashing throats and hanging victims, his mom (who’s only alive and running amok in the first film in 1980) is apparently considered the more horrifying killer. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Pamela. Not that I condone the gruesome murders of innocent people (of course not). But, unlike Jason, Pamela committed crimes of passion. Her crazy antics were actually revenge for her young son’s fatal drowning, which she felt was caused by the unjustifiable neglect of the camp counselors who failed to watch him (a longtime rumor has faulted the counselors for being too busy fornicating and not paying attention to Jason’s cries for help).
Meanwhile, Jason, who is supposed to be dead, has been on an aimless bloody mission. He is maniacal in the true sense of the word–no trigger, no reasoning, just brutal killing sprees that seem to result only to keep his mother’s legacy alive. I always thought there was nothing scarier than a villain with no real motive. Because he can be coming for you, too. Why? Just because. You’d think his mother took care of all the culprits in the first movie. What’s left for Jason to do? He’s a terrifying, malicious machete-slinging corpse running around with mommy issues and no motive (cue disturbing Psycho score). This is who you should be most frightened of.
“Kill her, mommy. Kill her.”
Upon further research, I’ve learned a very interesting back story for Pamela. She got pregnant at 16, and was married to a reckless abuser who she ended up chopping into pieces while he slept. Carrying her unborn son, she burned down the house with her husband’s body still in it. Guys, this is what happened in The Burning Bed (which was released in 1984), and remember, you rooted for Farrah Fawcett’s character in that.
But back to Pamela. Jason was apparently born in June 1946. Pamela and her son moved into a house that was said to be haunted, but of course Pamela, being the boss she is, braved the rumor (and probably got an excellent deal on the mortgage). In the summer of 1957, she later got a job as a cook at the now notorious Camp Crystal Lake. Things were going fairly well for the mother-son pair until Jason drowned. No body was recovered, which means Pamela never got the closure she so needed. And no one was held accountable for Jason’s death. You can only imagine how that could affect someone. This is about the time that I think she started to lose her grip on reality, and began poisoning the water at the then shut-down camp to further delay its reopening. (Her son was killed there and no one seems to care. I mean, I get it.) She did, however, spend six months in a mental institution before she was rehired at the camp in 1958. But she still had that vendetta and understandably couldn’t get her son’s mysterious death out of her mind. Hence, she resorted to her bloodbath, for which she is most famous. This is about where I depart her pity train. I empathize with her because she truly became a broken woman with years of traumatic memories. But she really could have taken permanent residence at that mental institution; it might have saved many lives (and possibly prevented the Jason outbreak).
“My only son, Jason.”
Now that the antiheroes are having their moment in the spotlight, I have really been thinking about how some of our most dishonorable villains came to be. Pamela’s origin story is particularly intriguing as it inspired one of the most unnerving serial killers in cinematic history. So the next time someone asks you, “Who’s scarier: Jason or his mom?” how will you respond?
Here are some game-changing cult classics, divided into handy genre sections. And while we’re looking at the influence of these cult films, why not check out how they portray and treat women? Almost entirely coincidentally, they’re all from the ‘80s. What can I say? It was a culturally rich period.
What does it mean to change cinematic history? Is it The Wizard of Oz with its use of technicolor? Pulp Fiction with its refreshingly out-of-order timeline? Rashomon with its three POV’s? All of the above, and then some. Here are some game-changing cult classics, divided into handy genre sections. And while we’re looking at the influence of these cult films, why not check out how they portray and treat women? Almost entirely coincidentally, they’re all from the ‘80s. What can I say? It was a culturally rich period.
Film Noir: Blade Runner & Blue Velvet
Almost 70 years after its heydey, film noir is still a popular genre that continues to influence and revolutionize modern cinema. It’s everywhere — from the Keanu Reeves-helmed Matrix series to the femme fatale Black Widow in Joss Whedon’s blockbuster The Avengers. It’s touched many films over the last 70-odd years, including Blade Runner and Blue Velvet.
While at a first glance, Blade Runner seems like something of a misogynist film — two out of the film’s three major female characters die horribly violent and sexualized deaths — upon closer inspection, it reads more as a commentary on the outdated femme fatale trope. All three women in the film embody the femme fatale in some way — Pris convinces J.F. Sebastian to take her in with her sexuality and Zhora is able to disarm Deckard with her naked body before dressing in that infamous post-Star Wars metal bikini and clear rain coat.
Rachael, perhaps, fills the role to the fullest — acting as the morally questionable love interest. And though she’s the only one who makes it out of the film alive, she’s even treated to some violence at the hands of Deckard — their love scene is cringe-worthy: he throws her against the wall, bringing her almost to the point of tears, and orders her around in a sketchily S&M fashion.
While all of these strong women losing their agency to men may seem misogynist, we’re forgetting the setting: completely dystopic 2019. The mistreatment of women instead goes hand in hand with the mise en scéne: a world where a woman can fall through multiple plate glass windows after being brutally shot down in the street and no one bats an eye. Ridley Scott subverts the now-outdated femme fatale trope by making it a part of a post-apocalyptic world.
Blade Runner definitely made its mark on film history; it was one of the harbingers of the cyberpunk genre that emerged in the early 1980s. We can see its influences in everywhere from modern architecture to TV — in fact, it reportedly influenced the cult TV show Battlestar Galactica, and the architecture at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, most recently seen as Starfleet Academy in Star Trek Into Darkness. It was also notably listed as the second most influential visual effects films of all time — if you have an interest in photography or cinematography, you should definitely check this film out.
Blue Velvet, too, is a veritable can of worms when it comes to the treatment of women — it has some pretty serious virgin-whore dichotomy going on. Sandy and Dorothy? Blonde, cheerleader-adjacent daughter of the sheriff vs. French nightclub singer? Come on, Jeffery. However, unlike Blade Runner subverting femme fatale stereotypes all over the place, Blue Velvet has a decidedly more Freudian twist on its gender relationships. Dorothy/Frank/Jeffrey? It’s so creepily Oedipal and sado-masochistic that I don’t even want to go there. That’s not to say the film’s not worth watching; what it does with the concepts of voyeurism is fascinating, and of course, visually it’s spectacular.
Like Blade Runner, this was the work of an ultra-auteur, playing homage to a smorgasbord of genres. Noir, surrealism, horror? Check, check, and check. David Lynch’s famous cinematic style still has an influence on movies — the dreamy, nightmarish quality of his work is still majorly in play today. His famous and groundbreaking TV show Twin Peaks still has a huge influence as well — this mysterious TV show paved the way for shows like Lost and The X-Files.
And now for something completely different…
High School: Pretty in Pink & Heathers
Say what you will about Pretty in Pink — I still think Andie, played by Molly Ringwald, should have ended up with Duckie (Jon Cryer). I mean, that “Try a Little Tenderness” lip-sync? Pure gold. John Hughes’ oeuvre pretty much revolutionized the teen film genre. He was one of the first filmmakers to give the problems of teens actual weight. Instead of creating straight-up comedies and farces, his characters faced real problems, chief among them class. Pretty in Pink’s whole plot revolves around such issues — Andie’s dad has fallen into something of a depression after being left by his wife, and now Andie can barely get him out of bed, let alone to report to a real job. By treating teens like adults, Hughes created a crop of cult classics that teens and adults alike still enjoy nearly 30 years later.
Pretty in Pink was also somewhat ahead of its time in the Strong Female Character department, especially within its genre — Andie Walsh knows what she wants and she’s going to do her best to get it, no matter if she falters along the way. She lines up job interviews with for her dad, rebuffs her friend Duckie’s advances — she’s even not afraid to tell off the school’s resident asshole, Steff and she gets a lot of life advice from her awesome role model/friend/boss/fashion inspiration, Iona. She’s not the perfect character, but her authentic and genuine personality made her a role model to many young girls.
And what about the infamous Heathers? Sociopaths, nihilism, and bombs? Dark stuff. Released in 1988, this film is very much a contemporary of Pretty in Pink, and aside from being set in high schools, they’re about as different as two films could be. Heathers was interesting on many levels — the issues it dealt with in varying degrees of satire are still in play today. Plus, it featured a murderous anti-heroine, Winona Ryder, as Veronica Sawyer, who, at the end of the film, leaves her suicidal, sociopathic boyfriend to die, saving the whole school in the process.
What are your thoughts on the above films? What are some of your favorite cult films? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Marcela De Vivo is a freelance writer from Los Angeles and has written on a wide variety of topics from her favorite films to interior design tips. She loves watching her favorite female empowering films with her young daughter, Izzy, for a great girls’ only movie night and some much needed mom-and-daughter bonding time.
The midwestern, puritanical values that American Gothic seems to represent so well win at the end of the film, and quite literally kill difference and sexual and gender subversion. While Riff Raff and Magenta go back to their home planet Transsexual, in the galaxy of Transylvania, Brad, Janet and Dr. Scott are left on the cold ground, crawling and writhing in their fishnets.
The lips in the opening sequence–the biting action has sexual and fearful connotations.
Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.
The cult classic film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was based off a British play of the same name, was released in 1975. At that point in American history, audiences (young audiences especially) were eager to have their boundaries pushed and revel in the debauchery that Rocky Horrorprovided. Whether it was the after-glow of the sexual revolution of the 60s and early 70s or a preemptive strike back to still-noisy social conservativism, Rocky Horror dealt with issues of gender and sexuality in a way that can resonate with viewers almost 40 years later. Buried beneath the campy music and bustiers is strong commentary on religion, gender and sexual norms, social customs and puritanical morality.
After the opening sequence (in which the famous red lips–belonging to Patricia Quinn, who plays Magenta–lip sync to Richard O’Brien, who plays Riff Raff and wrote the original play and screenplay, singing “Science Fiction/Double Feature”), the first shot of the movie is a cross atop a church steeple. The camera pauses, making the audience absorb the contrast between a clearly sexual (and even fearful), disembodied mouth and Christianity.
As the camera pans down, a wedding party and guests burst through the doors of the church. Outside of the church doors, a solemn-looking Tim Curry appears as the pastor, and Quinn and O’Brien flank him in the style of the American Gothic painting by Grant Wood.
We will see this image again. It will never really leave us.
The actors who will appear later as Magenta and Riff Raff play American Gothic in the first scene at the church.
According to the Art Institute of Chicago, “American Gothic is an image that epitomizes the Puritan ethic and virtues that he [Wood] believed dignified the Midwestern character.” Puritanical “virtues” are on display in this opening sequence.
As American culture reminds us, when these virtues are imbedded in a society, often the only option for sexual expression is at the extremes of the virgin/whore dichotomy. Suppression and purity on one end of the spectrum, complete surrender to earthly pleasure, no matter the cost, on the other. These extremes are shown throughout the film.
As the wedding comes to an end (and after Janet, played by Susan Sarandon, has caught the bouquet), a car pulls up to take away the bride and groom. Sloppily written on the side of the car is, “Wait till tonight, she got hers now he’ll get his.” The heteronormativity of this scene is clear. Women (including Janet) are eager for marriage, men want to “get theirs” after the wedding is over. Janet’s boyfriend, Brad (Barry Bostwick), does quickly propose to her after they discuss marriage in the church cemetery as a storm brews overhead. A billboard with a heart and the motto “Denton – The Home of Happiness” looms above them. The marriage ritual and social expectations surrounding it are, on the surface, celebrated in this scene (“Dammit, Janet, I love you!” sings Brad as they rollick around the church). However, the symbolism of the cemetery, the pending storm, and the fact that the American Gothic characters are preparing the church for a funeral as they wheel in a casket is not lost on the discerning viewer.
The two set off on a road trip to announce their engagement to a professor they’d had in college (they met and fell in love in his class). On the way, as they drive through a thunderstorm while listening to Nixon’s resignation speech on the radio (perhaps a nod to moral failure), they blow a tire. They end up at a foreboding castle (one used in many “Hammer Horror” movies that Rocky Horror parodies), and motorcycles pass them on the road going to the same destination. Brad says of the biker with judgment, “Life’s pretty cheap for that type.” An “Enter at Your Own Risk” sign invites the couple into the castle grounds, and they do.
After Riff Raff lets them in, they’re quickly initiated into the party that’s being held–the “Annual Transylvanian Convention.” They stand, innocent and wide-eyed, as guests (all dressed in gender-neutral tuxedos) dance the “Time Warp” and thrust their pelvises. The American Gothic painting, as well as the Mona Lisa, both appear on the walls of the castle.
Riff Raff welcomes Brad and Janet to the castle; the American Gothic painting looms behind him.
PBS art commentator Sister Wendy Beckett says, “You can recycle the Mona Lisa any way you like. Back to front, upside down, it remains instantly recognizable. That’s the ultimate compliment and it’s been paid to Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Somehow it seems to speak to the American psyche, though what it actually says isn’t as simple as it might seem.” The coyness of these particular works of art mirror what lies beneath TheRocky Horror Picture Show.
Brad and Janet are visibly uncomfortable in this world (it seems “unhealthy,” Janet says). They, and the audience, which has seen the action from their naïve perspective, are then introduced to Dr. Frank-N-Furter, played by Curry. The camera pans up his fishnet-clad legs, reminiscent of the gratuitous male gaze present in so many other films. However, this time the object of that gaze is a “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania,” as he introduces himself in song.
Dr. Frank-N-Furter introduces himself to Brad and Janet.
He invites the couple up to his lab to “see what’s on the slab.” They are stripped to their underwear by Riff Raff and Magenta (“We’ll play along for now,” says Brad). On their way up to the lab, Janet asks Magenta if Frank-N-Furter is her husband. She laughs, and Riff Raff exclaims that he’ll probably never marry (again, marriage is slighted). Frank-N-Furter has changed into a scrubs-style dress (with a pink triangle on the chest) in the lab. He flirts with Brad, calling him a “force of manhood, so dominant,” and Janet begins to giggle and seem less uncomfortable in this new setting. Being stripped of their clothes leaves them almost naked and vulnerable, yet opens them up to sexual possibilities that explore gender and dominance.
Frank-N-Furter, seated, flanked by (from left) Columbia, Magenta and Riff Raff–all of whom he as used for his gain.
Frank-N-Furter announces that “My beautiful creature is destined to be born!” and the references to Frankenstein throughout the film thus far are fully realized. He climbs above the tank that is holding his “creature,” and drops in rainbow-colored liquid, leaving the creature awash in the rainbow. (In 1975, the rainbow flag had not yet been formally adopted as the LGBT banner, but rainbow flags were commonly used for similar liberal causes starting as early as the late 1960s.)
After his creature is born–a muscular, blonde, tan god–Frank-N-Furter ogles and gawks at his creation, chasing and crawling after him, scrambling to even kiss his foot. Rocky (his creature) doesn’t seem interested at all, as he sings about feeling the sword of Damocles above him. As history (and science fiction, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) has repeatedly shown us, when we create a system in which others are to be subservient–whether via imperialism, slavery or patriarchy–the outcome is only good for those in power, and even then the reward is short-lived.
But for now, Frank-N-Furter appears to be getting his way (after ridding himself of Eddie, played by Meat Loaf, who we find out was an ex-lover of Frank-N-Furter and Columbia, played by Little Nell). Masculinity is magnified in this scene as Frank-N-Furter sings about making Rocky a “man” through intense physical workouts and bodybuilding routines, and Eddie’s display of hyped-up violent masculinity (motorcycle, leather jacket, rock and roll). But who is the dominant one in these relationships? Frank-N-Furter, in his fishnets and heels. As heteronormative as the opening scene of the film was, at this point almost all of the lines have been or are beginning to be subverted and blurred.
Frank-N-Furter and Rocky walk out of the lab arm in arm as the wedding march plays and his guests shower them with confetti. The curtain is drawn as they embrace, and the audience expects that they will consummate this “marriage” immediately.
In the middle of the night, Rocky escapes the wrath of Riff Raff and Magenta (he has chains on his ankles as he attempts to flee).
Janet and Brad have been put in separate rooms, of course, so they may retain their pre-marital chastity.
While his creation attempts to escape, Frank-N-Furter visits Janet. He acts like he’s Brad, and she welcomes his embrace and sexual advances. When she figures out it is Frank-N-Furter, she kicks him off: “I was saving myself!” she cried out. After a moment of rough persuasion, she lies back. “Promise you won’t tell Brad?” she says, and laughs as Frank-N-Furter descends upon her.
Afterward, “Janet” visits Brad, and he also welcomes the embrace until he realizes it’s Frank-N-Furter. The scene plays out exactly as it does with Janet–persistent refusal and then “You promise you won’t tell?” Again, Frank-N-Furter moves downward on Brad.
These scenes are poignant in that they are exactly the same–from the strict puritanical refusal to the “secretive” consent to the oral sex act itself–yet the sex of the participants is fluid. Frank-N-Furter is on top, but he’s adamant that the two give themselves “over to pleasure,” which he delivers.
(It’s also worth noting that during the sex scenes others in the house–Riff Raff, Magenta and Columbia–can watch via monitors that display live feed from the rooms. Voyeurism isn’t off-limits, either. Like most issues in this film, there is vast gray area in regard to consent that we are challenged to think about.)
By the next morning, Janet is crying and feeling immense guilt about betraying Brad. However, she happens upon a monitor showing him smoking a cigarette on the edge of his bed, which Frank-N-Furter is lying in. She then spots the injured Rocky, and tends to him. He touches her hand, and she smiles a smile that indicates she has found within herself power and passion.
Janet then bursts into her climactic song, “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me,” a sex-positive female power anthem if there ever was one. She decries her years of avoiding “heavy petting,” since she thought it would only lead to “trouble and seat wetting.” While the narrator says that Janet was “its slave,” it’s more clear that she is sexually dominant in this scene.
After a lustful night with Frank-N-Furter, Janet embraces her sexuality with Rocky (she places his hands on her breasts).
Even in her critique of the woman’s stray curl in American Gothic, Sister Wendy senses something beyond the surface: “Some see the stray curl at the nape of her neck as related to the snake plant in the background, each one symbolizing a sharp-tongued ‘old maid.’ Sister Wendy sees in the curl, however, a sign that she is not as repressed as her buttoned-up exterior might indicate.” Nothing is quite as it seems.
After a cannibalistic dinner (insert corny pun about Meat Loaf here), everything seems to be falling apart. Eddie’s uncle–the Dr. Scott who Janet and Brad were trying to visit in the first place–comes to the castle (he’s both looking for his nephew and doing research on alien life forms). Dr. Frank-N-Furter, seeing everything he’s built to serve himself revolt (Riff Raff, the “handyman,” and Magenta, the “domestic,” are getting antsy to leave to go home to Transsexual; Columbia screams at him for just taking from people–first her, then Eddie, then Rocky, etc.–and Rocky isn’t working out as he planned), clings on to whatever power he can. He mocks Janet and her sexual inadequacy–“Your apple pie don’t taste too nice”–and turns all except for Riff Raff and Magenta into stone via his Medusa switch (the mythology echoing that of Damocles’s sword and what happens when one demands too much).
“It’s not easy having a good time,” Frank-N-Furter laments.
The floor show that follows is a spectacle of gender-bending and sexuality. The stone figures are “de-Medusafied” one by one, and all are wearing kabuki face makeup and Frank-N-Furter-style fishnets, heels, garters and bustiers. They each sing a stanza exploring their current state of drug dependence, uncontrolled libido and freedom in “Rose Tint My World.”
Columbia, Rocky, Janet and Brad have all reawakened in Frank-N-Furter’s gender-bending image for the floor show.
As Frank-N-Furter begins “Don’t Dream It, Be It,” he asks, “Whatever happened to Fay Wray? / That delicate satin draped frame / As it clung to her thigh, how I started to cry / Cause I wanted to be dressed just the same…” Here we see him stripped of his over-exaggerated power as he indicates that he struggled with gender, presumably when he was young. He’s been searching for how and where he fits, and “absolute pleasure” and “sins of the flesh” have been where he looked for fulfillment.
Frank-N-Furter jumps into an on-stage pool, and shot from above he’s floating on a life saver between God and man in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. The religious imagery present in the opening scenes is re-visited here, inviting the audience to consider the juxtaposition of “giving in to absolute pleasure” and the church, which is the very institution that dictates much of what we consider gender and sexual norms.
Frank-N-Furter floats in the pool, meticulously placed above Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.
Janet, Brad, Rocky and Columbia all jump into the pool, and as they lustfully sing “Don’t dream it, be it,” there is a wet conglomeration of fishnets, limbs, tongues and strokes in the pool over the image of the Creation. Janet breathlessly sings, “God bless Lili St. Cyr.” She’s embracing her newfound sexuality by referencing a burlesque dancer/stripper/lingerie designer from the 1940s and 50s.
In the midst of this dream-like pseudo-orgy, Magenta and Riff Raff violently storm into the room. Dressed in other-worldly attire (yet gender-neutral), Riff Raff is holding a pitchfork-like weapon (American Gothic, of course), and threatens Frank-N-Furter and the group. “Your lifestyle is too extreme,” Riff Raff scolds, and says he’s subverting the power and will now be the master. For all of this time, Riff Raff and Magenta have been the “help,” and saw the need for an uprising. This also supports the subversive power roles within the film. Also worth noting is that Riff Raff and Magenta are lovers and brother and sister (the American Gothic painting is said to feature a brother and sister or father and daughter, not a husband and wife like many viewers imagine). Relationships, and our expectations and discomfort levels throughout, are meant to be examined.
Riff Raff and Magenta appear again as a futuristic American Gothic; his laser pitchfork will kill those whose “lifestyle” is too extreme.
Riff Raff proceeds to kill Columbia and Frank-N-Furter with his laser pitchfork. Rocky is more difficult to kill, and while he cries and mourns over Frank-N-Furter, he throws him on his back and tries to climb the RKO radio tower on stage. Frank-N-Furter so badly wanted to feel like Fay Wray in his life, and he finally got to after he died. However, Rocky’s plan doesn’t work and the two fall backward into the pool, buried in the very source of life.
The midwestern, puritanical values that American Gothic seems to represent so well win at the end of the film, and quite literally kill difference and sexual and gender subversion. While Riff Raff and Magenta go back to their home planet Transsexual, in the galaxy of Transylvania, Brad, Janet and Dr. Scott are left on the cold ground, crawling and writhing in their fishnets.
The narrator closes the film with the words: “And crawling, on the planet’s face, some insects, called the human race. Lost in time, and lost in space… and meaning.”
We are, the narrator suggests, quite meaningless in our earthly struggles. We blindly grasp on to expectations and norms, whether it be social constructs, gender or sexuality, and if we wander outside of those norms it will very well ruin us because of the deeply ingrained expectations we have in regard to these issues of morality.
Of course, we aren’t supposed to walk away from a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show feeling utterly meaningless. O’Brien himself self-identifies as transgender, and has been outspoken about how society should not “dictate” gender roles. He said in a recent interview, “If society allowed you to grow up feeling it was normal to be what you are, there wouldn’t be a problem. I don’t think the term ‘transvestite’ or ‘transsexual’ would exist: you’d just be another human being.” He also has said, in terms of Rocky Horror’s significance, “Well in our western world, England, Australia and the United States etc, there are still strongholds of dinosaur thinking. But, you know, I am a trans myself and I know it’s easier for me now. I can be wherever I want, whatever I want and however I want. And I suppose to some extent, a very small extent, my attitudes in Rocky Horror have helped make the climate a little warmer for people who have been marginalised, so that’s definitely not a bad thing.”
No it’s not. And for all its campy fun, great music and dance moves (and how ironic that the Time Warp lives on at wedding receptions across America), The Rocky Horror Picture Show also provides forceful commentary on religion, gender roles, sexual agency, control and the foreboding power that the pitchfork of puritanism holds over us all still.
A version of this appeared at Bitch Flicks on Sept. 26, 2012.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched Fight Club. Every time I view it, I end up noticing something new. How did I miss that before? This time, Marla Singer (played by Helena Bonham Carter) captured my attention. What would the situations in the movie look like from her viewpoint?
This guest post by Jen Thorpe appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.
Marla smoking
Fight Club was released in 1999. It has some spectacular quotes, a great deal of violence, and an awesome cast. When people write about this movie, they tend to focus on the Narrator (played by Edward Norton) and Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) and the connection between the two.
I’m going to assume that everyone reading this has already seen the movie. For those who haven’t, be warned, there will be spoilers here.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched Fight Club. Every time I view it, I end up noticing something new. How did I miss that before? This time, Marla Singer (played by Helena Bonham Carter) captured my attention. What would the situations in the movie look like from her viewpoint?
Perhaps the easiest way to describe Marla would be to do it from a chronological viewpoint. There is a scene where Marla and Tyler have just finished having loud and vigorous sex. The two are lying on the bed, with satisfied looks on their faces, when Marla reveals something incredibly shocking about her past.
“My God, I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.”
She says: “My God.I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.” Let that sink in for a second. Grade school (or Elementary school) typically has students that are in kindergarten through fifth or sixth grade. That means that Marla could not have been more than eleven years old when she had a very active sexual experience of the type that she was now having with Tyler.
In the movie, nothing more is said about it. She would have been well below the legal age of consent. It is clear she was raped. Most people don’t go from being a complete virgin directly to having the type of sex that Tyler and Marla had in Fight Club. I worry that she was sexually abused when she was even younger than eleven, and that the abuse continued for years.
Marla shares what would be, for most people, an incredibly difficult and traumatic childhood experience, as if it were normal. She doesn’t seem to be trying to shock Tyler. There is no need for her to do so – she already had his full attention at the moment. Instead, it seems like she is trying to give Tyler an incredibly awkward compliment on his skills in bed.
As an adult, Marla spends every night attending self-help groups for diseases that she doesn’t have. She walks into a room filled with people who are dying from cancer while smoking a cigarette. Marla doesn’t just sit there; she actually participates in whatever therapeutic situation the group chooses to do. It is as though she is daring someone to confront her, to call her a liar, to notice her.
People who are emotionally healthy do not spend every night in the basement of a church in an attempt to cope with a disease that they do not actually have. But, Marla isn’t emotionally healthy. On some level, she realizes that she is damaged and needs help. Unfortunately, she has no idea how to reach out for the help she needs.
She had to have noticed that there was a guy who was also showing up at the same self-help groups that she was. She doesn’t know his name because these groups are anonymous. The two stare across the room at each other, but never speak.
One day, the guy walks up to Marla and begins a conversation with her. Finally, someone reached out to her! Someone wants to talk to her – maybe about why they both feel the need to go to all these self-help groups. The two accidentally end up as each other’s partner at the self-help group for testicular cancer.
Tyler and Marla at the testicular cancer group
Somehow, they actually share a moment together. This, despite the fact that this guy is trying to convince Marla to go away – to stop going to the groups. The testicular cancer group ends with two partners sharing their feelings, hugging each other, and crying.
How long had it been since somebody hugged Marla? She, and the guy whose name she doesn’t even know yet, actually share something meaningful about how they feel, deep down inside. For a few, brief, seconds, they speak from their hearts.
Narrator: When people think you’re dying, they really, really listen to you, instead of just…
Marla Singer: instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.
I believe that brief conversation is what made Marla become interested in him. This, despite the fact that he follows her after the self-help group ends and reiterates that he never wants to see her again. This guy insists that they split up the self-help groups between the two of them so he won’t have to be in the same room with her. That must have really hurt Marla.
The first time I watched Fight Club, that scene amused me. Two people, both of whom are physically healthy, are fighting over diseases that they want to have. “No, I want cancer!” It’s preposterous.
Look a little closer, and there is so much more going on. Marla is angry at him. She fights with him about which self-help groups she gets, and which he gets, the entire conversation. It’s like she is trying to hold on to them because being there gives her something she is not finding in her life.
The two walk into a laundromat, yelling and screaming at each other. Everyone in the place had to have taken notice of them. They probably looked like a couple who was having the type of fight that ends with a breakup.
Marla walks directly over to the dryers, and pulls out more than one load of jeans. She bundles them up in her arms and leaves the laundromat, still yelling. At first glance, it looks like she must have put her laundry in the dryer before the self-help group, and was going back to pick up her clothes. No one else in the laundromat seems to think anything is amiss.
But then, she walks into a shop and sells all of the jeans. This shocks the guy (whose name she still doesn’t know), so he asks if she is selling her clothes. Meanwhile, the woman behind the counter is assessing the value of the jeans. Yes, Marla insists, I am selling my clothes.
Here’s the thing, though. Does Marla ever wear jeans? Those aren’t her clothes! She brazenly marched into the laundromat and stole them, with complete confidence that she would get away with it. I think this is how Marla makes money. She never once, in the entire movie, talks about having a job.
Yet, she does, somehow, have an apartment. The electricity works, and so does the phone. Perhaps Marla is an incredibly talented “fence.”
By the time Marla is done selling the jeans, she, and the guy whose name she doesn’t know, have sorted out who will be attending which self-help group. He obviously doesn’t want anything to do with her. Marla basically throws herself into traffic. She crosses a busy street, as vehicles honk, without slowing down. This is the first clue we get that Marla is suicidal.
She stops somewhere in the middle of the street, turns around, and asks the guy his name. He stayed on the curb (as most people would do). Viewers do not get to hear his answer, but we later discover he told Marla his name was Tyler Durden.
This is significant. You’ve seen the movie, so you are well aware that the narrator and Tyler Durden are the same person. Or, rather, Tyler is a second personality who is sharing the same body with the Narrator. Marla doesn’t have any way to realize this. To her – he was always Tyler Durden.
Eventually, Marla notices that Tyler stopped going to the self-help groups that he fought so hard for. Instead of just letting him go, Marla decides to reach out to him. She calls him on the phone, out of the blue, and tells him that she has “a stomachful of Xanax.” It is a desperate attempt to get his attention. It also isn’t fake; she really did take too many pills.
She wraps the phone cord around her throat as she talks to Tyler, wondering aloud if he would hear her death rattle from over the phone. At the same time, she insists this is not a real suicide attempt – it’s one of those “cries for help.”
Long story short, Tyler goes to Marla’s apartment and knocks on the door. She pulls him inside, and it is clear she truly has taken way too many Xanax. The two leave the apartment together shortly before an emergency crew storms down the hallway. They pass by Tyler and Marla, as they ask where the apartment they are looking for is located.
Tyler and Marla run away together. All the while, she is screaming to the emergency crew about the woman who lives in the apartment they are trying to enter. I cannot recall her exact words, but it is to the effect that they shouldn’t try to bother saving her. That woman is a lost cause, a waste. Marla is literally shouting about how much she hates herself – shortly after attempting suicide.
This is the state she is in when Tyler takes her back to the run-down house he is squatting in. She sits on the dirty floor, drugged almost beyond comprehension, as she tells him that he will have to keep her up all night. He does, by having loud and vigorous sex with her. Once again, Marla is not in a state where she is able to give consent.
The next morning, Marla wakes up, puts her clothes back on, and goes downstairs. Tyler sits at the kitchen table, and seems shocked that she is still here. He kicks her out. From her viewpoint, he saved her life, had sex with her all night long, and now… wants nothing to do with her.
Someone loved this dress intensely, for just one night… and then threw it away.
Marla makes several attempts to connect with Tyler anyway. One time, she arrives at his house wearing a bridesmaids dress that she got at a thrift store for one dollar. She notes that someone loved that dress, intensely, for just one night… and then threw it away. Again, she is talking about herself. Tyler is not able to pick up on it, and rejects her after she starts touching him.
After Marla leaves, Tyler appears and talks to the Narrator about her. Tyler says that the Narrator has some “fucked up friends,” and describes Marla as “limber.” The Narrator’s alternate personality is able to identify that Marla is a train wreck, while, at the same time, implying that she is interesting to have sex with.
Time passes, and Marla stays away from Tyler. One night, she takes the bus and arrives at the house he lives in. To her shock, there are tons of guys in the yard, and in the house. The air smells badly, and Tyler looks upset.
He tells Marla that Tyler is not here. Imagine, having the guy you are (more or less) dating tell you that he isn’t there. He’s standing right in front of you! She must think he is messing with her head, and she storms off to get back on the bus.
Toward the end of the movie, the Narrator finally figures out that he is Tyler Durden. He does some fact checking, travels around, and puts it all together. Now, it’s his turn to call Marla, from out of the blue. He insists that she say his name – and she does – Tyler Durden. After that, he hangs up the phone.
Marla and Tyler sort of breakup. Marla meets him in a restaurant, where he insists that she must leave town. Of course, the person in front of her is the Narrator, not Tyler. Even so, Marla says that he is just too messed up and she’s “done.” She takes the money he’s been trying to give her, says she won’t pay it back (“consider it asshole tax”) and gets on the bus.
Holding hands while the world come tumbling down
The scene that begins the movie is the same one that ends it. This time, Tyler’s army have kidnapped Marla and are bringing her, kicking and screaming, to Tyler. The two hold hands as they share the perfect view of the buildings around them blowing up and crumbling. That image is Marla’s entire life. She has always been searching for one, small, meaningful connection with someone, who will be there when the world falls apart.
Jen Thorpe is a freelance writer, podcaster, and gamer. She is the cofounder of the No Market website (nomarket.org) and writes for it frequently on a wide variety of topics and subjects. You can keep up with everything she does by following her @queenofhaiku.
On any dark and stormy night in the fall, it is a wonderful thing to curl up with a mug of mulled cider and watch Clue. The murder mystery based on the eponymous board game may have been a huge flop when it was released in 1985, but it has gained a passionate cult following in the last 28 years, probably due to its infinitely quotable dialogue and gleeful disregard for the pile of bodies amassed as the movie progresses – as well as being shown on cable about once every two hours.
Movie poster for Clue
This guest post by Erin K. O’Neill appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.
Six strangers gather in a New England mansion for a mysterious dinner party. It is revealed that their host is blackmailing them all, but then the tale darkens. First the host is murdered, and then the cook and the maid – and to make a long story short…
Too late!
On any dark and stormy night in the fall, it is a wonderful thing to curl up with a mug of mulled cider and watch Clue. The murder mystery based on the eponymous board game may have been a huge flop when it was released in 1985, but it has gained a passionate cult following in the last 28 years, probably due to its infinitely quotable dialogue and gleeful disregard for the pile of bodies amassed as the movie progresses – as well as being shown on cable about once every two hours.
Mrs. Peacock
I seriously love Clue. It’s my favorite board game and one of my favorite movies, and has been since one of my friends sat me down and made me watch it one Halloween a long time ago. It’s bawdy and brash and downright hilarious, especially if you have a taste for farcical whodunits.
In order to help you understand whether or not Clue passes the Bechdel Test, I shall need to take you through the criteria of the test, step by step.
1. Does the movie have two named women in it?
There are five women characters who have names in Clue.
Mrs. Peacock, the hysterical senator’s wife.
Mrs. White, the widow of a nuclear physicist.
Miss Scarlett, Madam of a Washington D.C. brothel.
Yvette, the maid and Miss Scarlett’s former employee.
Mrs. Ho, the cook. While being listed in the credits as “The Cook,” in one of the first scenes in the movie Wadsworth calls her by her name.
In fact, in the entire movie only one female character doesn’t have a name, and that’s the Singing Telegram Girl.
And so, Clue passes the first step in the Bechdel Test.
2. Do these women talk to each other?
Absolutely. Clue is an ensemble movie with a mile-a-minute dialogue – and more one-liners than I care to count. So, here are a few of my favorite exchanges:
Miss Scarlet: Maybe there is life after death.
Mrs. White: Life after death is as improbable as sex after marriage!
Mrs. White: Maybe he wasn’t dead.
Professor Plum: He was!
Mrs. White: We should’ve made sure.
Mrs. Peacock: How? By cutting his head off, I suppose.
Mrs. White: That was uncalled for!
Miss Scarlet: What was he like?
Mrs. White: He was always a rather stupidly optimistic man. I mean, I’m afraid it came as a great shock to him when he died, but, he was found dead at home. His head had been cut off, and so had his, uh… you *know.*
[Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, and Mr. Green cross legs]
Mrs. White: I had been out all evening at the movies.
Miss Scarlet: Do you miss him?
Mrs. White: Well, it’s a matter of life after death. Now that he’s dead, I have a life.
And so, Clue passes the second step in the Bechdel Test.
Miss Scarlett
3. Do the women talk to each other about something besides a man?
The third leg of the Bechdel Test is often the one movies fail – while there are often women characters, how often do they not speak of men? And Clue has some integral issues with the plot and structure that would make it difficult to pass this leg of the test.
For one, the movie is an ensemble with a male butler at the center. Wadsworth, throughout the film, controls the action and guides the other players through the plot – he holds all the cards and asks all the questions. Furthermore, it’s a murder mystery where the first and most crucial victim, Mr. Boddy, is a man. Much of the dialogue, even if it’s about murder, is about a man.
And finally, Mrs. Peacock, Mrs. White and Miss Scarlett are all being blackmailed for actions that entirely have to do with men: Mrs. Peacock for accepting bribes for her husband’s senate vote; Mrs. White for allegedly killing her husband (and possibly at least one of her previous husbands too); and Miss Scarlett for running a house of ill repute that caters to men. This means that even when the women are discussing their histories and their motivations, the topic of conversation is men.
In the dinner scene, Mrs. Peacock tries to start conversation by asking the other women about their husbands and asking the men about their careers. It’s a telling moment, which could perhaps be forgiven by the film’s setting in 1954, which reveals how narrow topics of conversation for women can be. Even in 1954, they could have discussed Abstract Expressionism, or thematically, the McCarthy hearings on the House Committee of Un-American Activities. After all, communism is just a red herring.
I’ve seen Clue, well, let’s just say a lot. And, I had to rewatch the film three times but also scour a copy of the shooting script to find any dialogue where two women talk about something besides a man. As far as I can tell, it happened twice:
Miss Scarlett: Would you like to see these Yvette? They might shock you.
Yvette: No, thank you. I am a lady.
Miss Scarlett: And how do you know what sort of pictures they are if you’re such a lady?
Mrs. Peacock: Uh, is there a little girl’s room in the hall?
Yvette: Oui oui, Madame.
[points]
Mrs. Peacock: No, I just want to powder my nose.
Yep. The second instance is a pun on peeing.
Yvette
Are these two, three-line exchanges enough to pass the Bechdel Test? There appears to be much debate about this leg of the test. Some critics claim that in order to pass, the women must speak to each other for more than 60 seconds, or that there must be some depth to the conversations. Since the original comic makes no such distinction and states that the two women must simply talk to each other about non-men related topics, I would argue that their two bits of dialogue meet the criteria.
And so, Clue passes the third step in the Bechdel Test, by the skin of its teeth.
Erin K. O’Neill is an award-winning writer, photographer, and visual editor currently located in her hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. A devotee of literature, photography, existentialism, and all things Australian, Erin also watches too much television on DVD and Netflix. Follow her on Twitter, @ekoneill.
The ethics of the film are one thing, but it says a lot about the world of the movie that it’s able to go nearly two hours without a single important female character showing up on screen. There are no women cops, there are no women in the mob, there are only a couple of wives or passers-by or maybe a drug-addled girlfriend or two. But no one who matters. The acting characters in the film are all overwhelmingly and vocally male.
Even the ethos of the characters, that they will destroy that which is evil, but leave alone the pure and blameless, is inherently sexist. Because when they say pure and blameless, what they mean is the women and children. In this universe, women are not even people enough to do things wrong. We do not have enough agency even to commit evil.
This guest review by Deborah Pless appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.
I fell in love with Boondock Saints the summer that I turned sixteen, about four days before I went off to live and work at a Christian summer camp for eight weeks – a torturously long time when you’ve just fallen in love with the most profane and violent movie possible. I was told that I shouldn’t watch it, that I couldn’t watch it, because it was too violent, too swear-y, too much for my faint little heart to take. I told them to eff themselves and watched it anyway. And I fell in love instantly.
It was a long lasting love affair too. I had the poster hanging above my bed, I still own a copy on DVD, and I saw that film so many times that I could recite it in real time as my college roommate watched in horror. I even went to see the sequel. In theaters. On purpose.
But it wasn’t until last year, when I started to write out a list of my all-time favorite movies that I realized something important: I might love Boondock Saints, but it doesn’t love me back. Or, specifically, it doesn’t love my gender. That was when the romance started to fade.
To back up a little, Boondock Saints is a cult shoot-em-up film released in 1999 and written and directed by Troy Duffy. It stars Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus as the McManus twins, two good old Irish boys living in South Boston who receive a message from God to go kill gangsters. Which they then proceed to do with alarming vigor and good humor. They’re pursued by Agent Smecker, played by Willem DeFoe, and helped by good friend Rocco, played by David Della Rocco.
Also, Billy Connolly turns up as a terrifying hit man known only as “Il Duce,” and Dot-Marie Jones makes a brief cameo as Rosengurtle Baumgartner, who kicks one of the boys in the crotch. But I digress.
The film is weird and violent and profane, like I said. The basic premise, that Connor (Flanery) and Murphy (Reedus) are on a holy mission to rid the world of evil is both strange and deeply non-Biblical, but there is a thrill to it that makes you want to believe. The plot kicks off when the boys are involved in a bar fight with two enforcers for the Russian mob. After the fight, the mobsters go track down our heroes and try to finish the job, but Connor and Murphy get the drop on them (literally), and kill the two men.
Agent Smecker is then called out to figure out what the hell happened. Smecker, who is inarguably DeFoe’s best and most interesting character to date, deduces the exact events effortlessly and is proven right when the two boys show up at the police station, turn themselves in, and claim self-defense.
The story would end right there if during the night spent in jail, the two men didn’t receive a vision from God. A mission, you might say, that calls them to “Destroy that which is evil, so that which is good may flourish.” This all tracks in with a sermon shown in the beginning of the film that cites the murder of Kitty Genovese as a sign that good men must do something to stop evil from spreading. All well and good, but I’m not sure the priest was calling for mass murder.
Which is precisely what happens. Connor and Murphy start picking off members of the Russian and Italian mobs, with a little help from their friend Rocco, a low-level numbers runner. They get so good at it, in fact, that Smecker is at a complete loss and the mob is running scared. It all comes to a climax when they try to take out the Don of the Italian mob in Boston, get captured, and come face to face with the man hired to kill them – Il Duce. Except Il Duce is actually their father, and the men happily reunite to go off and kill another day.
Like I said, it’s a weird, violent movie.
There are, in all honestly, a lot of things worth discussing with Boondock Saints, from the way it is one hundred and ten percent a white, male fantasy of justice and badassery, to the fact that it’s so Biblically inaccurate as to be kind of painful, to Agent Smecker as one of the most interesting gay characters to grace the silver screen, to the fact that it’s honestly just a very strange story, chock full of coincidences and arguably terrible writing that somehow becomes awesome instead of cliché. But let’s focus in for a minute on what turned me off of it. Let’s talk about the ladies.
Or, rather, let’s talk about the lack of them. In point of fact, the women of Boondock Saints are most notable by their absence. I can count the number of named female characters on one hand, and none of those characters appear in more than two scenes. That’s actually a false representation as well, because only one of them appears in more than one scene at all. Of all of the female characters in the film, not a single one receives more screentime than the scenes of Agent Smecker in drag toward the end of the film.
That is bad enough in and of itself, but there is also the actual characters to consider. Of the female characters shown or mentioned, one is an unnamed stripper (who, ironically, is the most visible woman in the film, appearing in two whole scenes), two are junkies and sluts (according to Rocco), and one is Rosengurtle Baumgartner, an avowed lesbian who we are supposed to laugh at for taking offense to one of Connor’s jokes. She kicks him in the nuts. He deserves it.
There are two more women of note in the story, but both had their stories cut down in the final version of the film and appear mostly in the deleted scenes on the DVD. One is Connor and Murphy’s mother, who calls them to wish them a happy birthday, and the other is a nice girl outside the courtroom who gives the news cameras a completely convincing and not at all ridiculous explanation of why she is perfectly fine having seen someone shot to death right in front of her moments before.
Like I said, that’s pretty much it. There’s a waitress, a nun in a hospital, an Italian grandmother, and a female news reporter, but I genuinely struggle to think of any more female characters. At all. In the entire movie. It would seem that in the world of Boondock Saints, women are not just irrelevant to the narrative, but also virtually invisible. They just don’t seem to exist.
I suppose it makes sense, given that the film is a white, male power fantasy. Connor and Murphy are the ultimate slacker heroes, the guys we’re supposed to want to be. They have no formal education, but somehow happen to know about six languages fluently. They seem perfectly content living on the fringes of society, because tough guys don’t need furniture or shower curtains or functioning plumbing, I guess. They’re religious, but in the cool way. They don’t have to learn how to use guns, or find out where to buy weaponry, or even struggle as they assume their mission. They just effortlessly seem to know what they need to do and then do it. No fuss, no muss. Without a second of training they are the two most proficient hit men ever to grace the streets of Boston.
It’s a fantasy, and you can see why it would be intoxicating. They’re good at what they do. They’re cool. What they do is unassailably (within the context of the movie universe) right. They get to shoot people and have fun and laugh with their friends, and it’s fine because it’s all justified by God. They don’t kill women or children, so it must be okay, right?
Well, no.
The ethics of the film are one thing, but it says a lot about the world of the movie that it’s able to go nearly two hours without a single important female character showing up on screen. There are no women cops, there are no women in the mob, there are only a couple of wives or passers-by or maybe a drug-addled girlfriend or two. But no one who matters. The acting characters in the film are all overwhelmingly and vocally male.
Even the ethos of the characters, that they will destroy that which is evil, but leave alone the pure and blameless, is inherently sexist. Because when they say pure and blameless, what they mean is the women and children. In this universe, women are not even people enough to do things wrong. We do not have enough agency even to commit evil.
But here’s the problem. I know all of this, and yet I still like the movie. I mean, I’m not in love with it anymore. The scales have lifted off my eyes, and I can see it for what it is – a bloated, self-aggrandizing, violent ode to vigilantism – but I still enjoy it.
How?
I think ultimately it comes down to something deeper. Something about how it took me eight years to realize that the movie was toxic for women. I genuinely did not expect this story, or really any story like it, to include women. I naturally didn’t even think to look for a female character to relate to, because it inherently assumed there wouldn’t be one.
Troy Duffy, aware of the criticism he received for this first film, included a major female character in the execrable sequel, Boondock Saints: All Saints Day. In it, Agent Smecker is gone and in his stead we have Agent Bloom (Julie Benz). But this is just another stunt meant to show how “progressive” and “totally not sexist” Duffy is. Bloom is relegated to a backseat role, and shown to be yet another innocent in the world. She’s a badass lady cop, but actually just a scared little girl who needs to be protected. And if she happens to fulfill a couple of fantasies about women in power suits and heels while she’s at it, then so much the better.
I wish I could tell sixteen-year-old me not to bother with this movie, that I should, for once, listen to my friends and back away slowly, but I don’t think I would, even if I were given the chance. Because as much as I now can see this movie for the sexist doggerel it is, it still has a place in my heart. It was the movie that taught me how much fun schlock flicks could be, the one that showed me that a movie doesn’t have to be good to be fun, and the movie that introduced me to one of my all time best friends. I wouldn’t take it back.
But I still wish it didn’t make me feel so gross inside.
Deborah Pless runs Kiss My Wonder Woman and works as a youth advocate in Western Washington. You can follow her on twitter, just as long as you like feminist rants and an obsession with superheroes.
