2013 Golden Globes Week: The Roundup

Cecil B. DeMille Award: presented to Jodie Foster

“Cecil B. DeMille Award Recipient Jodie Foster: Credibility Over Celebrity” by Robin Hitchcock




Lincoln: nominated for Best Picture, Drama; Best Director, Steven Spielberg; Best Actor, Drama, Daniel Day-Lewis; Best Supporting Actress, Sally Field; Best Supporting Actor, Tommy Lee Jones; Best Screenplay, Tony Kushner; Best Original Score, John Williams

“In Praise of Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln” by Robin Hitchcock


Les Misérables: nominated for Best Picture, Musical or Comedy; Best Actor, Musical or Comedy, Hugh Jackman; Best Supporting Actress, Anne Hathaway; Best Original Song, “Suddenly”

Les Misérables: The Feminism Behind the Barricades” by Leigh Kolb

“Extreme Weight Loss for Roles Is Not ‘Required’ and Not Praiseworthy” by Robin Hitchcock

Les Misérables: Sex Trafficking & Fantine as a Symbol for Women’s Oppression” by Megan Kearns


Hitchcock: nominated for Best Actress, Drama, Helen Mirren

“Too Many Hitchcocks” by Robin Hitchcock


The Sessions: nominated for Best Actor, Drama, John Hawkes; Best Supporting Actress, Helen Hunt

“On Sex, Disability, and Helen Hunt in The Sessions by Stephanie Rogers


The Master: nominated for Best Actor, Drama, Joaquin Phoenix; Best Supporting Actress, Amy Adams; Best Supporting Actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman

The Master: A Movie About White Dudes Talking About Stuff” by Stephanie Rogers


Hope Springs: nominated for Best Actress, Musical or Comedy, Meryl Streep

“Can Hope Springs Launch a New Era of Smart, Accessible Movies About Women?” by Molly McCaffrey


Cloud Atlas: nominated for Best Original Score, Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimet, and Reinhold Heil

Cloud Atlas Loses Audience” by Erin Fenner


The Hunger Games: nominated for Best Original Song, “Safe and Sound”

“‘I’m Not Very Good at Making People Like Me’: Why The Hunger Games‘ Katniss Everdeen Is One of the Most Important Heroes in Modern Culture” by Molly McCaffrey

The Hunger Games Review in Conversation: On Jennifer Lawrence, Female Protagonists, Body Image, Disability, Whitewashing, Hunger & Food” by Megan Kearns and Amber Leab

“The Princess Archetype in the Movies” by Laura A. Shamas


Skyfall: nominated for Best Original Song, “Skyfall”

Skyfall: It’s M’s World, Bond Just Lives in It” by Margaret Howie

“The Sun (Never) Sets on the British Empire: The Neocolonialism of Skyfall by Max Thornton


Brave: nominated for Best Animated Feature

“The Princess Archetype in the Movies” by Laura A. Shamas

“Will Brave‘s Warrior Princess Marida Usher In a New Kind of Role Model for Girls?” by Megan Kearns

“Why I’m Excited About Pixar’s Brave & Its Kick-Ass Female Protagonist … Even If She Is Another Princess” by Megan Kearns


Wreck-It Ralph: nominated for Best Animated Feature

Wreck-It Ralph Is Flawed, But Still Pretty Feminist” by Myrna Waldron


Anna Karenina: nominated for Best Original Score, Dario Marianelli

Anna Karenina, and the Tragedy of Being a Woman in the Wrong Era” by Erin Fenner


Django Unchained: nominated for Best Picture, Drama; Best Director, Quentin Tarantino; Best Supporting Actor, Leonardo DiCaprio; Best Supporting Actor, Christoph Waltz; Best Screenplay, Quentin Tarantino

“The Power of Narrative in Django Unchained by Leigh Kolb

“From a Bride with a Hanzo Sword to a Damsel in Distress: Did Quentin Tarantino’s Feminism Take a Step Backwards in Django Unchained?” by Tracy Bealer


Girls: nominated for Best Television Show, Comedy or Musical; Best Actress, Television Comedy or Musical, Lena Dunham

Girls and Sex and the City Both Handle Abortion With Humor” by Megan Kearns

“Lena Dunham’s HBO Series Girls Preview: Why I Can’t Wait to Watch” by Megan Kearns


Modern Family: nominated for Best Television Show, Comedy or Musical; Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television, Sofia Vergara; Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television, Eric Stonestreet

“‘Pregnancy Brain’ in Sitcoms” by Lady T

“2011 Emmy Analysis” by Amber Leab


Breaking Bad: nominated for Best Television Show, Drama; Best Actor, Television Drama, Bryan Cranston

“Seeking the Alpha in Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy by Rachel Redfern

“‘Yo Bitch’: The Complicated Feminism of Breaking Bad by Leigh Kolb


Boardwalk Empire: nominated for Best Television Show, Drama; Best Actor, Television Drama, Steve Buscemi

Boardwalk Empire: Margaret Thompson, Margaret Sanger, and the Cultural Commentary of Historical Fiction” by Leigh Kolb

“Max’s Field Guide to Returning Fall TV Shows” by Max Thornton

Boardwalk Empire by Amanda ReCupido


Downton Abbey: nominated for Best Television Show, Drama; Best Actress, Television Drama, Michelle Dockery; Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television, Maggie Smith

“A Gilded Cage: A Feminist Critique of the Downton Abbey Christmas Special” by Amanda Civitello


Homeland: nominated for Best Television Show, Drama; Best Actress, Television Drama, Claire Danes; Best Actor, Television Drama, Damian Lewis; Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television, Mandy Patinkin

“The Best of 2012 (I Think)” by Rachel Redfern

Homeland‘s Carrie Mathison” by Cali Loria

Homeland‘s Carrie Mathison: A Pulsing Beat of Jazz and ‘Crazy Genius'” by Leigh Kolb


Mad Men: nominated for Best Actor, Television Drama, Jon Hamm

“Emmy Week 2011: Mad Men Week Roundup” [includes links to 9 pieces written about Mad Men]

Mad Men and The War on Women, 1.0″ by Diana Fakhouri


New Girl: nominated for Best Actress, Television Comedy or Musical, Zooey Deschanel; Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television, Max Greenfield

“Why I’ve Fallen in Love with New Girl by Lady T


30 Rock: nominated for Best Actress, Television Comedy or Musical, Tina Fey; Best Actor, Television Comedy or Musical, Alec Baldwin

“Max’s Field Guide to Returning Fall TV Shows” by Max Thornton

“The Casual Feminism of 30 Rock by Peggy Cooke

“Liz Lemon: The ‘Every Woman’ of Prime Time” by Lisa Mathews

“Jane Krakowski and the Dedicated Ignorance of Jenna Maroney” by Kyle Sanders


VEEP: nominated for Best Actress, Television Comedy or Musical, Julia Louis-Dreyfus

“Political Humor and Humanity in HBO’s VEEP by Rachel Redfern


Parks and Recreation: nominated for Best Actress, Television Comedy or Musical, Amy Poehler

“Why We Need Leslie Knope and What Her Election on Parks and Rec Means for Women and Girls” by Megan Kearns

“Max’s Field Guide to Returning Fall TV Shows” by Max Thornton

“Ann Perkins and Me: It’s Complicated” by Peggy Cooke

“I Want to Establish the Ron Swanson Scholarship in Women’s Studies” by Amanda Krauss

Parks and Recreation Seasons 1 & 2″ by Amber Leab

“Leslie Knope” by Diane Shipley


Louie: nominated for Best Actor, Television Comedy or Musical, Louis C.K.

“Listening and the Art of Good Storytelling in Louis C.K.’s Louie by Leigh Kolb


The Girl: nominated for Best Miniseries or Television Movie; Best Actress in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television, Sienna Miller; Best Actor in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television, Toby Jones

“Too Many Hitchcocks” by Robin Hitchcock



Argo: nominated for Best Picture, Drama; Best Director, Ben Affleck; Best Supporting Actor, Alan Arkin; Best Screenplay, Chris Terrio; Best Original Score, Alexandre Desplat

“Does Argo Suffer from a Woman Problem and Iranian Stereotypes?” by Megan Kearns


Moonrise Kingdom: nominated for Best Picture, Musical or Comedy

“An Open Letter to Owen Wilson Regarding Moonrise Kingdom by Molly McCaffrey


The Deep Blue Sea: nominated for Best Actress, Drama, Rachel Weisz

The Deep Blue Sea by Eli Lewy


The Big Bang Theory: nominated for Best Television Show, Comedy or Musical; Best Actor, Television Comedy or Musical, Jim Parsons

“The Evolution of The Big Bang Theory by Rachel Redfern

“Big Bang Bust” by Melissa McEwan


Zero Dark Thirty: nominated for Best Picture, Drama; Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow; Best Actress, Drama, Jessica Chastain; Best Screenplay, Mark Boal

“Jessica Chastain’s Performance Propels the Exquisitely Sharp But Aloof Zero Dark Thirty by Candice Frederick

‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Raises Questions On Gender and Torture, Provides No Easy Answers by Megan Kearns


The Newsroom: nominated for Best Television Show, Drama; Best Actor, Television Drama, Jeff Daniels

The Newsroom: Misogyny 2.0″ by Leigh Kolb


Sherlock: nominated for Best Actor in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television, Benedict Cumberbatch

“‘I Misbehave’: A Character Analysis of Irene Adler from BBC’s Sherlockby Amanda Rodriguez


The Impossible: nominated for Best Actress, Drama, Naomi Watts

“It’s ‘Impossible’ Not to See the White-Centric Point of View” by Lady T


 
Silver Linings Playbook: nominated for Best Picture, Musical or Comedy; Best Actor, Musical or Comedy, Bradley Cooper; Best Actress, Musical or Comedy, Jennifer Lawrence; Best Screenplay, David O. Russell

Silver Linings Playbook, or, As I Like to Call It: fuckyeahjenniferlawrence” by Stephanie Rogers


‘Silver Linings Playbook,’ or, As I Like to Call It: FuckYeahJenniferLawrence

Movie poster for Silver Linings Playbook
Written by Stephanie Rogers

It went down like this: My sister and I were visiting my mom for Thanksgiving in the tiny but lovely and water-surrounded town of Solomons, Maryland. This was like a four-day adventure, and after spending one day eating, another day sleeping and watching football (don’t judge me), and another day accidentally setting off the entire alarm system at the college where my mom teaches Labor Studies, we thought … why not take a break from almost getting arrested and see a movie?

I wanted to see Life of Pi, mainly because it was right down the street, and the next closest movie theater was a two-hour drive, or, as my mom likes to say, “It’ll only take us 45 minutes to get there.” That’s apparently code for two hours. But my sister was all, “I want to see Silver Linings Playbook because Bradley Cooper!” And I was all, “I don’t even know what that is!” And she was all, “You get to see whatever you want all the time because you live in New York and never hang out with anybody and have no life!” And I was all, “Fine, Asshole. Fine.” So that’s how I ended up bitterly walking into a movie theater after seething in a car for two hours to see a movie starring one of those bros from ApatowEtcetera. I didn’t expect much.
But OMG!
(I have no idea why I’m writing this review like a 34-year-old 14-year-old, but this is how it’s going down, and I can’t stop it.) 

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook
If my sister had merely said, “That chick from Winter’s Bone is in it,” I would’ve been all, “You had me at Bone,” and we could’ve avoided a two-hour passive-aggressive insult-fest loosely refereed by my mom, who should really know the difference between 45 minutes and two hours by now, so don’t feel bad for her.
Look, Bradley Cooper isn’t The Worst. I kind of liked him in Limitless, and I could probably write a feminist analysis of Wedding Crashers if I felt like intellectually torturing myself for a minute, and The Hangover movies aren’t real (they fucking aren’t), and he did help out Sydney Bristow on a few episodes of Alias, so I’ll give the guy a break for all those things, but mainly for asking Sean Penn a question on Inside the Actors’ Studio in like 1992.

Tell me that’s not adorable.
But, who cares about Bradley Cooper when Jennifer Lawrence exists. I mean. Right? Winter’s Bone. The Hunger Games. And yes, say it with me: Silver Linings Playbook.
God I loved this movie. I’m not sure I know exactly why yet, or how it managed to incorporate elements of Dirty Dancing, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Goodfellas, He’s Just Not That Into You, Rain Man, and Rudy into one cohesive-ish film that seems to both celebrate and critique the embarrassing clichés inherent in each of those movies, but I know I loved it. I know Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper will deservedly get Oscar nods for their performances, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Best Picture Nomination bestowed upon it. I know the film felt—as most do these days—occasionally problematic in its representations of gender, but I also know that I left this particular film giving way less of a fuck about those problems than I normally do. That isn’t to say I’m letting it off the hook for its failures; I’m just saying let me love it for a minute. 

Jacki Weaver and Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook
Here’s the premise: Bradley Cooper plays Pat. He gets committed to a mental hospital for eight months after he brutally attacks the man who’s sleeping with his wife (Nikki). He gets diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He gets out. He moves in with his parents because Nikki left him and got a restraining order against him. He tries to get his illness under control in the hopes that Nikki will take him back. Because his married friends Ronnie and Veronica (Nikki’s friend) realize that the probability of Nikki taking him back is, like, no, they decide to introduce him to Veronica’s sister. Enter Tiffany aka fuckyeahjenniferlawrence.
Lawrence plays Tiffany, a young woman whose husband died unexpectedly the previous year (and we don’t find out the details of his death until a heart-wrenching scene toward the end of the film). I worried at first that Tiffany might veer into Manic Pixie I-must-save-this-dude-from-himself-so-hard territory, but that doesn’t entirely happen. What prevents it from happening? Tiffany is a depressed, lonely mess herself, and she’s in just as much need of “saving” as every other character. The film doesn’t name a specific mental illness for her, but we know she takes medication and “goes to a lot of therapy,” as some dude warns (read: SHE’S CRAZY). 

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook
One could write a full-length book about whether this film accurately portrays mental illness or if it relies too heavily on conventional on-screen mental illness stereotypes. Most reviews I’ve read tend to focus on the fact that Silver Linings Playbook at least attempts to depict the strains mental illness places on the sufferer’s interpersonal relationships. (I will say, for the record, that Pat does start taking his meds once he realizes he needs them to manage his bipolar disorder, and he also consistently goes to therapy. I don’t understand how so many reviewers keep missing this, as it’s a pretty significant argument against the idea that Silver Linings pushes some kind of superficial, new age-y pop psychology agenda that promotes “the power of positive thinking” as the exclusive treatment for mental illness. It does not do that.)
What it does do, though, is take a subtle jab at the cult of masculinity in America. The conflicts in the film are often caused by male anger and aggression, and several scenes even conclude with male violence—like when Pat’s rage fit with his dad (DeNiro) leads him to (albeit accidentally) hit his mother in the face, or when he throws a book through a window because he hates the ending, or when he gets arrested for intervening in a brawl at a football game. The film makes it perfectly clear that this style of hyper masculine conflict resolution ain’t getting anybody anywhere. Pat begins to succeed and really change in Silver Linings only when he agrees to take his meds and become Tiffany’s partner in a local dance contest—and it doesn’t get less traditionally masculine than the phrase “local dance contest.” 

Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook
But, like Helen Hunt in The Sessions, it’s Jennifer Lawrence who grounds this film. Her performance as the emotionally disturbed Tiffany could’ve easily turned into a parody of women with depression (hi!), and the often absurdist nature of Silver Linings certainly lays a foundation for that. Tiffany never goes there, though. She fights to stay above ground, by dancing, by trying to forge a connection with Pat, and, as the film clearly indicates early on, by experimenting with medications to treat her (unnamed) illness.
Yes, she sleeps around. Yes, she manipulates Pat into entering the dance competition (eventually telling him a big ol’ horrible lie about Nikki). Yes, she buddies up with Pat’s over-nurturing mom (an excellent Jacki Weaver) to get information about Pat’s jogging routes so she can track him down—most of Pat and Tiffany’s initial conversations take place during exercise, ha.
And I didn’t love a lot of that. 

Jacki Weaver and Robert DeNiro in Silver Linings Playbook
I understood it, though, and even within the lack of believability at times, the emotions driving Tiffany’s decisions rang true for me. Who hasn’t been lonely and desperate to connect with another person? Who hasn’t made questionable choices in order to do that? I want to see those women on screen, women who I get to adore and despise, who make me feel uneasy and ecstatic, who I’m rooting both for and against. Why? Because I get to see dudes like that on screen all the time. We don’t expect our dude heroes to be perfect, and we shouldn’t expect it of our women heroes either. Where’s the fun—or truth—in that?
(Let me add, though, that I did not like the fact that Pat’s wife Nikki, who we see exactly one time in the movie, acts as nothing more than a vehicle to move the plot forward. Can we do away with that fucking women in refrigerators trope already?) 

Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro in Silver Linings Playbook
True story: I’m mentally ill. That’s probably the worst transition in the history of anything ever written, so I’mma just ignore it and keep on going. I’ve struggled with bipolar II for the past fifteen years, and I spent a good portion of that time undiagnosed (which is much scarier than the actual, very stigmatized diagnosis). Perhaps that’s one reason I loved the movie so much. The director, David O’Russell, mentions in an interview that his son is bipolar, so his desire to make the film stemmed from personal experience. That comes through wonderfully, in the actors’ performances especially, but also in the tragic comedy of it all. Silver Linings Playbook reminded me of one long obligatory party, with every mentally ill member of my family trying to interact with one another without snapping.
There might be fights, accusations, and the occasional horrific anxiety attack, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t understanding and love.

Gender & Food Week: Extreme Weight Loss for Roles is not "Required" and not Praiseworthy

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables
This post written by Robin Hitchcock previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on November 16, 2012 and was cross-posted at Women and Hollywood.

Kale and dust. Hummus and radishes. Two squares of dried oatmeal paste a day.

If you recognize any of these phrases, then you’ve probably been hit by the Anne Hathaway starvation-diet-for-her-craft marketing blitz.

In the unlikely event that you haven’t heard about this already, I’ll catch you up: Anne Hathaway, slim to begin with and already leaned down to catsuit size for The Dark Knight Rises, lost 25 pounds to more realistically inhabit the role of starving-and-dying-of-tuberculosis Fantine in the upcoming movie musical Les Misérables. Actors forcing dramatic body weight changes for roles is nothing new and nothing unique (see the similar-yet-tellingly-different coverage of Matthew McConaughey’s weight loss to play an AIDS sufferer in The Dallas Buyers Club), but Hathaway’s weight loss has become The Story of the production of Les Mis: a subject of endless discussion on celebrity gossip sites, the talk show circuit, and the cover story in the December issue of Vogue magazine.
Why is a skinny person getting skinnier garnering so much media fascination? Are hummus and radishes so much more fascinating than Les Mis director Tom Hooper’s decision to have the actors sing live for the cameras? And even if we insist on reducing an actress to her physical appearance, couldn’t we just talk some more about Anne Hathaway chopping off all her hair? 
When discussing her weight loss with Entertainment Tonight’s Mark Steins, Hathaway says, “It’s what is required. It doesn’t matter if it’s hard.”
“Required”? Really?
This makes two gigantic assumptions: 1) That physical frailty is necessary to properly play the character Fantine.
Patti LuPone as Fantine, 1985 London production
Randy Graff as Fantine, 1987 Broadway production
Sierra Boggess as Fantine, current West End production
An assumption I think it is fair to reject: these women are slender, but not emaciated, and they are able to play the character convincingly.
But let’s give Hathaway the benefit of the doubt and say the intimacy of a filmed adaptation requires more stringent realism when it comes to Fantine’s body size. This still assumes that the actor actually losing weight is the only way to portray her extreme physical condition.
Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Skinny Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger
Yeah, nope.
So let’s be clear: Anne Hathaway’s extreme weight loss for Les Mis was in no way required.  But while it is artistically a wash; as a career choice, it was clearly a good move.  The film benefits from all this attention, and Hathaway enjoys the “she so devoted to her craft” kudos that often translate into statuettes.
But it is bad for women, and bad for our culture. More diet talk, more body talk, perpetuation of the myth that weight loss is a noble pursuit and merely a matter of dedication.  Voluntary adoption of disordered eating is not praiseworthy. These types of body transformations are not artistically necessary, and certainly not “required.” So let’s hope actors stop endangering their health for roles. We can suspend our disbelief over a few dozen pounds.

———-
Robin Hitchcock (no relation to the Master of Suspense) is a Bitch Flicks weekly contributor. In May 2012, she reluctantly left her home of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to move to Cape Town, South Africa with her husband. Robin is a Contributing Editor foLeWeekley.co.za, a weekly guide of things to do in Cape Town. You can also find her writing at the mostly-dormant feminist pop-culture blog The Double R Diner and her personal blog HitchDied.com.

Weeky Feminist Film Question: What are Your Favorite Women-Centric Movies From the 80s?

Called the Decade of Greed, everything was bigger in the 80s. Excess reigned supreme. Big hair, big shoulder pads, leg warmers and off the shoulder sweatshirts. Cabbage Patch Kids, Rubik’s Cube, MTV. So we asked you to tell us: what are your favorite women-centric films of the 80s? Some of these mad us laugh, some made us cry. And still others — replete with badass heroines — helped shape how we wanted to envision ourselves.

——

9 to 5
Aliens
Bagdad Cafe
Beaches
Born in Flames
Camille Claudel
Charli
Coal Miner’s Daughter
The Color Purple
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
Crimes of the Heart
Desperately Seeking Susan
Dirty Dancing
Flashdance
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
Hannah and her Sisters
Heathers
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing
The Journey of Natty Gann
Labyrinth
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains
The Legend of Billie Jean
The Little Mermaid
Moonstruck
Mystic Pizza
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Pretty in Pink
The Secret of NIMH
Sex, Lies & Videotape
She’s Gotta Have It
Silkwood
Steel Magnolias
Sweetie
Teen Witch
The Terminator
Terms of Endearment
When Harry Met Sally…
Working Girl

Are your favorite female-centric 80s movies on the list? Tell us in the comments!
——

Each week we tweet a new question and then post your answers on our site each Friday! To participate, just follow us on Twitter at @BitchFlicks and use the Twitter hashtag #feministfilm.

Extreme Weight Loss for Roles is not "Required" and not Praiseworthy

Cross-posted at Women and Hollywood.

Kale and dust. Hummus and radishes. Two squares of dried oatmeal paste a day.

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables
If you recognize any of these phrases, then you’ve probably been hit by the Anne Hathaway starvation-diet-for-her-craft marketing blitz.
In the unlikely event that you haven’t heard about this already, I’ll catch you up: Anne Hathaway, slim to begin with and already leaned down to catsuit size for The Dark Knight Rises, lost 25 pounds to more realistically inhabit the role of starving-and-dying-of-tuberculosis Fantine in the upcoming movie musical Les Misérables. Actors forcing dramatic body weight changes for roles is nothing new and nothing unique (see the similar-yet-tellingly-different coverage of Matthew McConaughey’s weight loss to play an AIDS sufferer in The Dallas Buyers Club), but Hathaway’s weight loss has become The Story of the production of Les Mis: a subject of endless discussion on celebrity gossip sites, the talk show circuit, and the cover story in the December issue of Vogue magazine.
Why is a skinny person getting skinnier garnering so much media fascination? Are hummus and radishes so much more fascinating than Les Mis director Tom Hooper’s decision to have the actors sing live for the cameras? And even if we insist on reducing an actress to her physical appearance, couldn’t we just talk some more about Anne Hathaway chopping off all her hair? 
When discussing her weight loss with Entertainment Tonight’s Mark Steins, Hathaway says, “It’s what is required. It doesn’t matter if it’s hard.”
“Required”? Really?
This makes two gigantic assumptions: 1) That physical frailty is necessary to properly play the character Fantine.
Patti LuPone as Fantine, 1985 London production
Randy Graff as Fantine, 1987 Broadway production
Sierra Boggess as Fantine, current West End production
An assumption I think it is fair to reject: these women are slender, but not emaciated, and they are able to play the character convincingly.
But let’s give Hathaway the benefit of the doubt and say the intimacy of a filmed adaptation requires more stringent realism when it comes to Fantine’s body size. This still assumes that the actor actually losing weight is the only way to portray her extreme physical condition.
Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Skinny Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger
Yeah, nope.
So let’s be clear: Anne Hathaway’s extreme weight loss for Les Mis was in no way required.  But while it is artistically a wash; as a career choice, it was clearly a good move.  The film benefits from all this attention, and Hathaway enjoys the “she so devoted to her craft” kudos that often translate into statuettes.
But it is bad for women, and bad for our culture. More diet talk, more body talk, perpetuation of the myth that weight loss is a noble pursuit and merely a matter of dedication.  Voluntary adoption of disordered eating is not praiseworthy. These types of body transformations are not artistically necessary, and certainly not “required.” So let’s hope actors stop endangering their health for roles. We can suspend our disbelief over a few dozen pounds.

Horror Week 2012: The Roundup

The Final Girl Gone Wild: Post-Feminist Whiteness in ‘Scream 4’ by Jeremy Cornelius

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

As well as being a zombie aficionado, I spent my teen years deep in confusion and denial about sexuality and gender – and these two things are perhaps not unrelated. Vampires and werewolves are explicitly sexual and very gendered, but my movie monster of choice erases sex and gender entirely by its very nature. There are no alluring seductions, no monthly cycles, no explosions of pent-up masculine rage in the zombie: only a creeping sameness and inevitability, all social categories dissolved into nothingness, all physical difference literally consumed in the nightmarish Eucharist of undead cannibalism. Of course, this erasure of sex and gender does not mean that sex and gender are not explored in zombie films. On the contrary, there are some very interesting things going on, as we shall see in our whirlwind tour of the Three Eras of Zombie Cinema.

Not only is Kristen (Liv Tyler) the film’s protagonist, she’s a woman who is not presented as a helpless idiot…It is Kristin who loads the shotgun after James confesses he’d lied about going hunting with his father and doesn’t know how to work it. Ultimately, James fires the gun, but by loading it Kristin proves she isn’t an incompetent damsel-in-distress. Throughout the film she strives to fight back…The Final Girl phenomenon is problematic because it is predicated on society’s sexist notion that women are the weaker sex. But scream time results in screen time, and while watching a movie like ‘The Strangers,’ with whom is the viewer being asked to identify? The masked maniac? Or the woman frantic to survive? (Hint: it’s not the maniac.)

The Failure of the Male Gaze in ‘The Vampire Lovers’ by Lauren Chance

In both the novella and The Vampire Lovers, Carmilla (Ingrid Pitt) exclusively stalks female victims, showing little interest in the male characters as anything other than fodder or a means to an end; Ingrid Pitt’s Carmilla never looks quite as comfortable with the lone male in the film she interacts with in a sexual manner as she does with the various women she seduces and bites…indeed the appreciation of Carmilla is seen in the faces of the female characters and it is with tentative exploration that they approach the mysterious woman.

‘Absentia’ Showcases Terror, Strong Female Characters and Sisterhood by Deirdre Crimmins

While I could continue on about the remarkable characterization of Callie and Tricia, it saddens me a little bit that strong non-sexualized female characters in horror films are such a unique phenomenon. While there are plenty of ass-kicking final women in slasher films, and many smart lady doctors who help stop the spread of a zombie outbreak, it is rare to feature a realistic female friendship, or a complicated sibling rivalry, in a horror film. Both Callie and Tricia are attractive, but that is not why they are there. The purpose that they are serving goes so far beyond their gender and their bodies that the contrast to other horror vixens seems like night and day. And neither of them plays the victim, or the unnaturally stoic heroine. They are both complex, and with long histories that they carry with themselves, and impact their judgments.
ELLEN RIPLEY (Aliens): This is perhaps the only scary movie where the villain (a 7-foot alien) was actually slightly intimidated by the intended victim, in this case a female lieutenant trapped on board an alien-infested ship. If she was ever frightened by the aliens, Ripley rarely showed it. As one of the only women on the ship, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) often swooped down to save her fellow male shipmates from becoming dinner for the aliens without hardly breaking a sweat. This is why we love her.
The central pleasure of Jennifer’s Body — the confusing love Needy feels for Jennifer, and the trouble she takes to clarify that feeling, and act on it (revenging Chip), then act on it again (revenging pre-demon Jennifer) — might be precisely what turned off male reviewers. For all the promise of eye candy going in, this is a story about young women negotiating the horrors of the adolescent-to-adult obstacle course with some dignity, loyalty, and social conscience intact. The infamous male gaze has to work harder to appropriate a film told from the p.o.v. of cute but bookish, shy but self-respecting Needy, whose closest bond is, and might ever be, her friend Jennifer.
When Moira is not around a living straight man, a target for that sexuality, she is an old woman displaying a damaged eye where she was shot. She is presented as completely lacking in sexual attractiveness — not only in appearance but in demeanour as well. Her sexual nature is reserved for straight men…Moira does get to be seen as a tragic figure for this. We see her pain and her loss when her mother dies in a nursing home. We get to see her fear and frustration over trying to be free from the house and having her plans thwarted. We get to see her pain and anger in the face of Constance’s constant taunting and needling of her, still holding a grudge for her husband’s infidelity. But in all these instances we’re expected to sympathise with the older Moira — the good Moira, the non-threatening Moira and, tellingly, the non-sexual Moira. Sexual Moira is not a person to be pitied or a person due sympathy or who feels pain.

For those who haven’t read the comics (like me), Michonne…seems to be a strong, powerful, complex character. She’s clever since she uses two incapacitated walkers to hide from other zombies. She appears to be a fierce and fearless survivor. But what’s even more exciting is that she’s a woman of color. Yet I’m skeptical as the show hasn’t done a great job portraying gender so far…I’m sorry, did the zombiepocalypse also signal a rip in the fabric of time where The Walking Dead characters now live in fucking 1955?! So Lori, women shouldn’t be “playing” with guns or hunting for food or protecting the camp. Nope. Women are only good for domestic duties like cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. Leave the tough stuff to the men. Silly me for forgetting. Thank god Andrea told Lori and her bullshit off…While blaming it on Lori’s “irrational behavior” due to her pregnancy and “going through a lot of stuff” (um, aren’t they all?), writer/creator Robert Kirkman ultimately defends this exchange and the show’s depiction of traditional gender roles…Why must we constantly see a rearticulation of sexist gender stereotypes?…Why is everyone on the show struggling to maintain white male patriarchy??

The Stepfather (the 1987 version) is not like most slasher films; it is a uniquely feminist horror film. Carol J. Clover’s theory of the “final girl,” the trope in horror cinema that leaves one unique girl as the sole survivor, is brilliant and generally accurate. But our heroine, Stephanie, is not like other final girls. For one, she is one of the ONLY girls in the film. The film is full of empty, impotent signifiers of male power: the male lieutenant, the male therapist, the male high school teacher, the male hero/amateur detective, the male reporter and, of course, Stephanie’s dead father. More importantly, throughout the duration of this film no women are killed. Let me repeat that: NO women are killed. It may not be obvious to some viewers, but it is strikingly obvious to me, a feminist who loves horror films. When the film opens, Jerry (or Henry Morrison, his identity before Jerry) has already killed his previous family, which we know contained a wife and at least one daughter, but during the film only men are slaughtered. They are men who attempt to rescue Stephanie and her mother Susan, but the only person who actually rescues Stephanie is Stephanie.
Instead, these little girls embody society’s growing fears of female power and independence. Fearing a young girl is the antithesis of what we are taught — stories of missing, kidnapped or sexually abused girls (at least white girls) get far more news coverage and mass sympathy than stories of boy victims. Little girls are innocent victims and need protection…Their mere presence in these films spoke not only to audiences’ fears of children losing innocence, but also the intense fear that little girls — not yet even women–would have the power to overthrow men. These girl children of a generation of women beginning a new fight for rights were terrifying — these girls would grow up knowing they could have power.
Call it The Nervous Wife, which is more concise than “women are super emotional, illogical and fearful and cannot be trusted.” The Nervous Wife is a staple of the haunted house film genre, and now that paranormal shows are slowly taking over the small screen, it can be found there, too. In the first season of the FX channel’s American Horror Story, the character Vivien Harmon had to be committed and impregnated with a devil baby, and her teenage daughter dead and haunting the family abode, before her husband would believe that something spooky was going down. Yes. Yes. I know. Science says ghosts and goblins and such don’t exist. True enough. It is natural for a body to be skeptical of supernatural claims. Would you believe it if you were told the portal to hell was in your laundry room? Likely not. The problem is that women in horror films are rarely, if ever, the skeptical ones. Logic is portrayed as a man thing. Little ladies are quick to believe the unbelievable. And to be frightened by it.
But really, I think that the guys who made this film have no idea what kind of culture they are feeding into. I think that V/H/S is a horror film, not because it is well-made, or clever, or scary, but because these are the stories we expect to hear. Girls are murderous. Girls are sluts. Girls won’t give it up. Girls can’t be trusted. Girls are victims. Girls. Are. The. Worst. Those girls? They’re even worse than those guys. But you know what, guys who made this film? When you feed into this culture, when you populate your brains and ours with these images, with these narratives, you make it more and more likely that the only option girls have when date raped, when stuck in a loveless marriage, when victimized, when traumatized is to strike out. To strike back.
I started thinking about the five college students in The Cabin in the Woods and how their roles ar e defined by gender. The two women, Jules and Dana, are defined as The Whore and The Virgin – two opposite ends of the spectrum whose deaths are meant to serve as bookends for the others. The order of deaths is irrelevant except in the case of the women. Jules, as the corrupted Whore, has to die first, and Dana, the Virgin, has to die last, if she dies at all. As Hadley (Bradley Whitford) says, “The virgin death is optional as long as it’s last.” The female characters are defined only by their sexuality – nothing else about them really matters. Still, the men don’t fare much better…What I find particularly interesting, though, is how the “puppeteers” (as Marty calls them) recognize that the five people they’ve selected for the sacrificed don’t easily fit into the prescribed archetypes.
[Bexy Bennett]: Strong women don’t necessarily need to be role models, though. I certainly wouldn’t want my children to raise the headless horseman from the dead to exact revenge for previous injustices, but I can admire Lady Van Tassel’s forbearance – she and her sister are left alone, as children, in the Western Woods, yet she ensures their survival and raises herself to a position of some importance in the village. Of course her motives are questionable but does that diminish her strength?
[Amanda Civitello]: Given the way that the other lead female character is portrayed, I have the impression that it’s a deliberate editorial decision to make the one strong female character into the antithesis of a role model. The audience is meant to identify – or if not identify, at least feel for – sweet Katrina Van Tassel, who does all she can to save the man she loves. But Katrina isn’t nearly as well-rounded a character as Lady Van Tassel. She’s more of a generic type of filler than anything else; to compensate for the lack of development of Katrina’s character, it’s as if they wanted to ensure that Lady Van Tassel would be so offensive and so off-putting that they made her into something bordering on a monstrous caricature.
The horror genre has a tradition of terrorizing women, of chasing them through the woods and attackingthem in houses. It also has a tradition of The Final Girl, a trope that is simultaneously empowering and reductive: the only survivor is a virginal woman who wields a phallic weapon and destroys the monster. The ‘Paranormal Activity’ trilogy features a different kind of Final Girl: she doesn’t kill the monster — she becomes it.
Ableist and sexist stereotypes of women and mental illness abound in horror movies and TV (American Horror Story, Orphan, Gothika, Nightmare on Elm Street 3, The Ring and Misery)…Society polices women’s appearances, language and behavior. We can’t let the ladies get out of control. Who knows what could happen??? Calling a woman “crazy,” doubting not only her veracity but her very sanity, is offensive. It’s also an attempt to control women, demean them and strip them of their power. Women with mental illness are often silenced, invisible from the media aside from victims or villains in horror. When we do see them on-screen, they instill fear as they are depicted as violent, volatile and uncontrollable…The “crazy bitch” trope and label — in both pop culture and reality — silences and dismisses women while simultaneously shaming and stigmatizing women living with mental illness.
Without a doubt, the movie is doing many exciting, transgressive things. I find particularly important the way the audience is analogous with “the gods” because we are the ones demanding these elaborate, repetitive sacrifices that push people into these stereotypical roles. It’s not only an indictment of the horror genre but of the voyeuristic spectatorship that perpetuates these horror tropes. However, I expected more from the feminist powerhouse team that created Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I find myself wishing Marty had been cast as a woman, and the two women, the fool and the non-virgin virgin, would be the pair of survivors who finally say “no more” to a horror genre that dismembers, kills, and punishes them for being women.
The woman’s scream has been an essential part of horror. Women play a fundamental role in horror films – possibly more than other genres. Women function as a foil. They are wrought by terror. They scream the way we, in the theater, want to…The problem is that we are still dealing with an either-or sort of situation. Women can be preternaturally courageous and stoic. Or, they can be spastic screeching machines that fall to pieces.
And while my confession at the start of this remains the same, upon closer inspection, I realized that Leslie Vernon’s treatment of women is left to be desired. While there is a lot of discussion about empowering the survivor girl to become a strong woman, it is described from a mocking male’s perspective. One scene in particular especially rubbing me the wrong way, in which Leslie discusses with Taylor how the faux survivor girl, Kelly, will imminently end up at an old shed to find a weapon. He describes her choice of weapon as “empowering herself with cock.” The axes, sledgehammers, and other long handled devices purposely phallic.
Horror films are commonly seen as one of the most sexist film genres; utilizing the voyeuristic male gaze, objectifying the female body, and reveling in helpless women being victimized. I am not discounting these claims, but horror has the potential to be more than that: films which subvert the genre’s sexism and incorporate strong, distinct female characters do exist.

Horror Week 2012: A Brief Feministory of Zombie Cinema

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

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

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

Weekly Feminist Film Question: What Are Your Favorite Movie Moments Between Women?

While there are a lot of great female-fronted films, there aren’t nearly enough that showcase mothers and daughters, sisters bonding and female friendships. So last week we asked: What are your favorite movie moments between women? Here’s what you told us!

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Beaches — “Most of ‘Beaches’ Barbara Hershey and Bette Midler so good in those roles.”

Bridesmaids — “The competing bridal shower toasts scene between Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne is ridiculous and hilarious.”

Center Stage — “When Eva (Zoe Saldana) tells Jody and Maureen that she’s no longer dancing for the ballet company’s approval, she’s dancing for herself.”

The Color Purple — “The end when Celie (Whoopi Goldberg) sees her sister for the first in years and meets her children for the first time. Gut-wrenching and heartbreaking.”

Iron Jawed Angels — “Women’s suffrage, female friendships, women banding together fighting for equality…pretty much love the entire movie.”

Kamikaze Girls — “The ending of Kamikaze Girls when Ichiko and Momoko ride off together after defeating the yankis.” 

Mona Lisa Smile — “When all of Julia Roberts’ students ride their bicycles alongside her car. Makes me weep every time.”

Pariah — “Alike’s sister tells her she doesn’t care what her sexual orientation is, she loves her no matter what.”

Princess Mononoke — “Mononoke and Lady Eboshi fighting (up until freaking Ashitaka’s interuptty one-up-manship don’t get me started on Ashitaka).”

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World — “Roxy and Ramona’s fight, Mae Whitman did such a splendid job as her character.”

Sense & Sensibility — “When Elinor confesses to Marianne that she bottles up her emotions.” 

Steel Magnolias — “The end of Steel Magnolias when Clairee & Weezer have a love fight on the bench.”

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me — “Donna and Laura in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. The bar scene, and, later, the ‘are you my best friend?’ scene. Heartbreaking.”

Whip It — “Love when Juliette Lewis tells Ellen Page that she started skating when she was 31 and it took her a long time to find something she was good at and she worked her ass of for it.”

Did your fave movie moments make the list? Tell us in the comments!

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Each week we tweet a new question and then post your answers on our site each Friday! To participate, just follow us on Twitter at @BitchFlicks and use the Twitter hashtag #feministfilm.

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: The Roundup

Even though its finest moments all boil down to well-intentioned, high energy karaoke numbers, and its script (co-written by Justin Theroux) left more cheese in the recipe than what was called for, Rock of Ages is still great fun. Really, it’s like a longer, louder version of Glee or American Idol, but with actors who can’t sing rather than singers who can’t act. Plus, it rocks you like a hurricane.

The Funny Face Always Gets the Big Number: on Funny Girl by Jessica Freeman-Slade

I imagine that at least once a day somewhere in America, some little Jewish girl (or girls with big noses, close-set eyes, skinny legs, and less than model looks) has a benevolent mother, sister, or aunt who pops in a DVD and tells her to sit down. She squirms a bit, but her mom says “Just trust me.” And then up on the screen pops a wildly unself-conscious, funny, brazenly self-confident woman with a voice to stop traffic. Even though she’s seen Glee and watched Lea Michele emote her way through many of these songs, nothing compares to this other creature, the one and only Barbra Streisand, in her debut film, the incomparable Funny Girl.

Mulan: The Twinkie Defense by Karina Wilson

Mulan is peppered with crass jokes about Chinese food orders (because that’s what Americans can relate to about Chinese culture, right?), disrespectful references to ancestor worship, superficial homage to Buddhist practice and some kung-fu styling, of the Carradine kind.  Given that Wu Xia is a rich, diverse, centuries old storytelling tradition, it also seems a shame that the writers didn’t draw more deeply on those perspectives.  Instead, they send Mulan on a tired, Western Hero’s Journey, plugging her variables into the 12-step formula tried and tested by countless Hollywood protagonists. 

The Lion King: Just Good, or Feminist Good? by FeministDisney

When it comes to Nala, her role has always frustrated me a lot. Ignoring that it might not work with the plot already in place, it was quite disappointing that Nala did not take over partially or fully in Simba’s absence. She is always shown, especially early on in the film, to be Simba’s equal, and she is perhaps even more intelligent, or at least a more naturally sound leader throughout the film, while Simba tends to be comparatively a bit more immature and in need of multiple characters propelling him into responsible/rightful action. This isn’t a critique of Simba’s likeability or abilities, but merely to say that in all aspects, Nala would have made at least a decent fill-in.

The Reception of Corpse Bride by Myrna Waldron

The film is fairly feminist for a horror-comedy, but it’s not perfect. There are at least two fat jokes in the story – a mean-spirited form of discrimination that needs to just end already. I was particularly annoyed that Mrs. Van Dort is portrayed as not being aware just how fat she is. Let’s set the record straight – if someone’s fat, they KNOW, thank you. There are also no people of colour in the cast at all. I suppose this is partly justified in that it takes place in Victorian Eastern Europe, and the aesthetic of the living village is severe whites, blacks, and greys, but there’s no reason there couldn’t have been minorities in the underworld village.

Bros Before Hoes, or How Kidnapping Makes for Great Dance Numbers: on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers by Jessica Freeman-Slade

The enlivening force of Seven Brides is male longing, and it makes for great theater. The Pontipee brothers have lived hard, but falling in love is what softens and civilizes them. But all that civilization is for nothing when Adam, modern man that he is, devises a brilliant scheme, pulled straight out of Millie’s copy of Plutarch’s Lives. Why not do like the Romans did with the Sabine women?

And then comes the merriest song about rape ever.

Chicago by Clint Waters

Not that female murders are anything new, but I enjoy that Chicago features nothing but. While we’re on the subject, there are exceedingly few main male characters in the film (one being Roxie’s dope of a husband and the other being a smarmy lawyer out for money), which is awesome and doesn’t happen all that often in movies dealing with murder. Let alone a musical movie dealing with murder. However, where I believe the film falls short is the fact that none of these characters has redeeming qualities.

Accidental Feminism in Mary Poppins by Megan Kearns

Interestingly, this bastion of film feminism occurred accidentally. Glynis Johns thought she was the one getting the role of Mary Poppins, not Julie Andrews. In order to assuage her potential furor over this fuck-up, Walt Disney told Johns that she had a phenomenal solo. To cover his ass, Disney called up songwriters Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman and said (while Johns was in earshot) that she couldn’t wait to hear the song. The Sherman Brothers quickly researched women’s movements in 1910 England, and wrote “Sister Suffragette” so Johns could hear the song after her lunch with Disney. 

The Princess and the Frog by Janyce Denise Glasper

When compared to the other Disney princesses, Tiana’s story is a bunch of BS. She didn’t have an evil stepfamily, eat a poisoned apple, have graceful legs instead of fins, receive many hours of beauty rest, or become a madmen’s “love” slave.
Does that make her luckier? I think not.
None of those women would wish to be a frog with long, batty eyelashes.
Nope. Not one.

The Nightmare Before Christmas by Jessica Critcher

According to Wikipedia, the two witches aren’t given names in the film, only later in a video game. But even without the name part, they only talk to and about Jack. This sends the message to boys and girls alike that female characters do not have anything substantial to contribute to the dialogue or the plot of the film. Girls and women do not, apparently, have anything interesting or relevant to say to one another, and children internalize that very deeply. While this was probably unintentional, the effect is still the same.

The Little Mermaid by Ana Mardoll

I like The Little Mermaid. I like a lot of things that are problematic, and I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with liking problematic things as long as a certain awareness is maintained that Problems Abound Therein. Art is complicated like that. But I like The Little Mermaid and I think it’s compatible with valuable feminist messages. Certainly, it was my first introduction into a feminist narrative and I have always considered the problematic romance storyline to be camouflage for the real story. But we’ll see whether or not you agree.

Singin’ In the Rain by Deirdre Crimmins

While the genre can whisk you away to foreign lands, and domestic bliss, it is also historically problematic when it comes it its representations of women, and gender in general. Though the men are singing and dancing, they are always men’s men, expressing their gender through ruggedness and emotional unavailability. The women are often window dressing, and pawns in the plot, rather than autonomous people who have actual emotions and ambitions. Singin’ In The Rain suffers from some of the same issues that many musicals have with their treatment of genders, but it does have a surprisingly progressive character as well. 

The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the Pitchfork of Puritanism by Leigh Kolb

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.” 

Female Friendship, Madonna/Whore Stereotypes and Rape Culture in West Side Story by Megan Kearns

It’s interesting how other characters treat women in the film. In “America,” the Sharks sing about the xenophobia and racism they experience while the women sing about their aspirations and the promise of a  better life in NYC. One of the Jets exasperatedly wonders why they’re fooling around with “dumb broads.” To which Graziella retorts, “Velma and I ain’t dumb.” Anybodys is the tomboy who desperately longs to be in the Jets. She hangs around the guys, spits on the ground and insults women, and sees the male gender as far more desirable. But rather than depicting gender variance or even a trans character, the Jets view Anybodys as a defective female. Some of the Jets taunt her that no one would want to sleep with her. Because apparently to them (and patriarchal society at large), a woman’s status resides only in her beauty, sexuality and desirability. 

James and the Giant Peach by Libby White

The Aunts are horrific caretakers; starving, beating, and emotionally abusing James relentlessly. Mind you, this is a movie for children. And like in most children’s movies, the Aunts’ outward appearance reflects their inner evil. Both women are made to look terrifyingly cruel and yet simultaneously clown-like, dressed in orange-red wigs and slathered on make-up. During their first 20 minutes on screen, the two women participate in dozens of morally reprehensible practices, everything from shameless vanity to verbally attacking a woman and her children.

Cinderella by Olivia Bernal

Watching Cinderella again for the first time since I was a child, it was amazing to me that time and again Disney portrays women as either bitches or victims. Ursula, Maleficent, Snow White’s Queen, the Queen of Hearts and of course Cinderella’s stepmother Lady Tremaine are all evil women, jealous of the beauty and innocence of their younger counterparts. One by one they seek to quell romance, passion, and everything else good from the lives of the eventual princesses by seeking power, wealth, and beauty of their own. Only a man can save these women from their pitiful disputes, damaging though they are. Perhaps the notion of a man wielding this type of power over a young, beautiful woman was a little too akin to rape for Disney’s taste. Either way, the Disney-fication of evil into an older, vindictive woman promotes an attitude that women are either a victim or seeking to be a victim; a mentality that when unleashed in the real world leads to horrific statements like, “She was asking for it.”

Phantom of the Opera: Great Music, Terrible Feminism by Myrna Waldron

Emmy Rossum’s Christine Daae is a lovely young woman with a pretty (if not exactly operatic) voice, and possibly the most spineless personality I’ve ever seen from a female protagonist. The love triangle between herself, the Phantom and Raoul is the central conflict of the story. Her preference for Raoul, her childhood sweetheart, is one of only two personal choices she makes throughout the entire story.  Neither The Phantom nor Raoul ever seem to take Christine’s wants into account. I know I’m supposed to root for her to end up with at least one of the suitors, (the 26-year shipping wars notwithstanding) but honestly? Run away, Christine. RUN AWAY.

Jesus Christ Superstar: Feminism and Crosscasting by Barrett Vann

Though this is intended to examine the show through a feminist lens, intersectionality is key, and so mention must be given to race. Though the practise of colourblind casting has been open to some debate as to whether or not it’s actually a good thing (allowing, for instance, such un-self-aware gaffes as all-white productions of The Wiz with the argument that they’re being colourblind, they’re being progressive), in the 1973 film of JCS, it’s practised about as truly as I have ever seen. The ensemble of disciples is about as diverse racially as they are among gender lines, and of what one might term the ‘main’ cast, Judas and Simon Zealotes are played by black men, Mary Magdalene a woman of mixed Irish, Chinese, and Japanese descent, and the actor who plays Herod is Jewish. Somewhat ironically, come to that. Actors of colour are not relegated to unimportant side characters; they can be anyone.

The Surprising Feminism of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Myrna Waldron

Yes, the film is flawed, especially if taken at its apparently anti-feminist face value. But contextually, I feel that this film’s depiction of women is quite fair for its day. Yes, it would be nice if the girls weren’t stereotypes and Lorelei wasn’t a blatant golddigger, but then, where would the plot be? Not only are its stars, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, important landmarks in feminist history, but their characters are too. Their friendship is absolutely ironclad – they put each other first, even though both are looking for love in different ways. Their confidence in their intelligence, lifestyle, and sexuality is incredibly liberated for what was supposedly a time of suffocatingly patriarchal morality.

“I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar … ish” by Lady T

Mostly, though, I’m curious about the reasons behind writing these “Hear Me Roar…ish” songs, especially the two numbers from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals. If the women are just going to end up with the men they’re declaring independence from, what’s the point of these songs at all? Did Rodgers and Hammerstein realize in both cases that they didn’t have a big musical number for all of the women in the show, and write these songs to give their female chorus members something to do? Did they decide that three solo songs and two duets for Mary Martin were not enough, and want to give her yet another number? (If that’s the case, I really can’t blame them for that, because Mary Martin is made of magic.) 

Tangled by Whitney Mollenhauer

In the end, I think it makes a good case for women’s “proper place” NOT being just in the home, but out in the world/public sphere!  I’m not sure how you could get any other moral out of it.  Even in Mulan, after she saves China, she ends up returning home, and (we suspect) marrying the army captain guy, instead of taking a job with the emperor.  In Tangled, the movie’s premise is centered around the idea that it’s wrong and horrible to expect a woman to spend her whole life at home.

Aladdin by Lia Gallitano

Essentially, all of the women are defined by their attractiveness to men. “Ugly” women, then, are used as comic relief. In one of the first scenes, when a woman opens the door and says of Aladdin, “Still I think he’s rather tasty!”, everybody in the audience is supposed to laugh. Aladdin looks at the woman (who is quite large) and jumps in surprise and disgust. Oh, silly fat woman, you can’t have feelings because you’re ugly! We’re supposed to laugh at how ridiculous her thinking Aladdin is “tasty” is—because fat women and ugly women are not supposed to have sexual desires. Only when the sexy women do this is it okay—nobody is laughing at Jasmine’s proclamations of love for Aladdin, because it doesn’t seem ridiculous now. Aladdin is attractive, she is attractive, so they can be in love. 

Glee! by Cali Loria

Having a character on TV who does not fit into the mold of being a perfect Westernized ideal of beauty would, in someone else’s hands, be refreshing. Glee, however, focuses on the extremes of women, enjoying the overt and campy hyperbolization of its characters which, in essence, detracts from actual storylines and only serves to render the women flat and one-dimensional: Jewish starlet, slut, dumb blonde, conniving cheerleader, sassy black woman, an Asian, and, now, a full-fleshed female. Glee has a recipe with every ingredient, but stirred together it’s one big lump of heterogeneous stereotypes.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Rebecca Cohen

At every turn, Snow White embodies old-fashioned, small town American ideals. She helps a baby bird not just back to its nest, but back to its “momma and poppa” (because every creature should properly be part of a traditional nuclear family, of course). When she arrives at the dwarfs’ cottage in the woods, her first instinct is to clean up. She assumes, in keeping with traditional gender roles, that the children who live there must not have a mother. That’s the only possible way to explain how their house could be so dirty. Not only does she clean up the place, she enlists the help of the woodland fauna. Indeed, Snow White domesticates everyone and everything around her, spreading the conservative ideals of cleanliness, hard work, and unquestioning acceptance of the status quo even to the animals. She civilizes the dwarfs as well, refusing to feed them until they’ve washed up. 

Despite an Intelligent Heroine, Beauty Obsession, Sexism & Stockholm Syndrome Taint Disney’s Beauty and the Beast by Megan Kearns

The only other female characters in the movie are Mrs. Potts (I heart Angela Lansbury!), the wardrobe (who has no personality) and the French maid feather duster. A grandmotherly type and a sexpot. Of course Disney does their notorious matricide in the form of the protagonist’s mother either dead or non-existent. They demonize stepmothers and solely focus on both daughters’ and sons’ relationships with their fathers. Seriously, Disney, what the hell have you got against mothers?? And yep, I’m aware Mrs. Potts is Chips’s mother. Doesn’t count. Not only is she not Belle’s mother, she’s a fucking teapot for most of the film. Belle has no female friends, no mother, no sister, no female role model. The importance of female camaraderie and sisterly bonding remain absent from the film. 

My Top 6 Favorite Female Empowerment Songs in Musicals by Megan Kearns

As much as I adore musicals, most songs are about men, either men singing them or women singing about men — men they desire or men who have done them wrong. Where are the songs belted out by the ladies for the ladies?? After perusing my DVD collection, Broadway ticket stubs and good ole’ google, I’ve compiled a list. In no particular order, here are my favorite powerful women anthems in musical film.

That Glee Photo Shoot by Fannie

I could also talk about how annoyingly predictable it is that, of all of Glee’s diverse cast members, it is the two women who most conform to conventional Hollywood beauty standards who have been granted the empowerful privilege of being sexified for a men’s mag. For, despite Glee’s idealistic and uplifting message that It’s What’s On the Inside That Counts, the show’s resident Fat Black Girl With A Soulful Voice is noticeably absent from the shoot.

Carousel: A Fairytale Screen Adaptation of the 2012 Republican Anti-Woman Agenda by Stephanie Rogers

Re-watching it this week—for the purpose of writing about how much I admired the way it handled domestic violence issues (in 1956, no less)—I realized my 13-year-old self understood jack shit about misogyny in film, and she certainly didn’t understand what constitutes successfully raising awareness about violence against women.

The only thing I can think to say about Carousel now, as a 34-year-old woman who’s been both a witness to and a victim of physical abuse at the hands of men, isn’t just that I’m appalled by its sexism or the blasé nature in which it deals with physical abuse (I am), but that I’m seriously freaked out by how a movie musical from sixty years ago manages to feel like a fairytale screen adaptation of the 2012 Republican anti-woman agenda.

 

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: The Funny Face Always Gets the Big Number: on ‘Funny Girl’

This is a guest review by Jessica Freeman-Slade.

I imagine that at least once a day somewhere in America, some little Jewish girl (or girls with big noses, close-set eyes, skinny legs, and less than model looks) has a benevolent mother, sister, or aunt who pops in a DVD and tells her to sit down. She squirms a bit, but her mom says “Just trust me.” And then up on the screen pops a wildly unself-conscious, funny, brazenly self-confident woman with a voice to stop traffic. Even though she’s seen Glee and watched Lea Michele emote her way through many of these songs, nothing compares to this other creature, the one and only Barbra Streisand, in her debut film, the incomparable Funny Girl.

The 1968 movie is legendary, almost impossible to remake due to Streisand’s unforgettable turn (recreating her role from the 1964 stage musical), and with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill. It’s based on the true story of 1920s entertainer Fanny Brice, one of the major attractions in the golden age of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies. Fanny knows she’s a star, but is constantly told that her unconventional looks will keep her off the stage (or as her neighbor puts it, “If a girl’s incidentals/are no bigger than two lentils/then to me it doesn’t spell success.”) But Fanny stands out, because she’s hilariously funny and has a golden voice, and so fame, like anyone who watches the movie, finds her irresistible. What the movie has at its core, is a message about female self-confidence, about self-reliance, about how the world reacts to strong women, and how, ultimately it’s all about chutzpah. Which Fanny (and Streisand) has in spades.

Streisand had only appeared in one Broadway show before then, a small but memorable part in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, and she was far from the only candidate to play Fanny. When Jule Styne consulted Steven Sondheim about the development of the show, Sondheim had major qualms about potentially casting a marquee star like Mary Martin. “I don’t want to do the life of Fanny Brice with Mary Martin. She’s not Jewish,” he said. “You need someone ethnic for the part.” And Streisand was ethnic, especially when put up against a bevy of chorus girls that looked like they’d stepped straight out of Beach Blanket Bingo. The other contenders before her included Anne Bancroft, Martin, and Carol Burnett, but Streisand took the ugly duckling premise and turned it on its head every time she sang. (Fanny’s first line to a skeptical producer says it all: “Suppose all you ever had for breakfast was onion rolls. Then one day, in walks… a bagel! You’d say, ‘Ugh, what’s that?’ Until you tried it! That’s my problem—I’m a bagel on a plate full of onion rolls.”) And she stood out among the other Broadway stars at the time, in the same way Fanny did in her day.

Of course, therein you meet the first problem with Funny Girl—that to buy it, you have to believe that Barbara Streisand is ugly.

Yes, I know. You have to believe that this girl…


…is considered unattractive, uncastable, and undesirable.

The real Brice had big gummy features–a clown’s face. And though Streisand looks gorgeous in every shot, even in Fanny’s pre-fame days (check out those amazing nails), she doesn’t lose her undeniably ethnic look. She stands out, especially when surrounded by all the Aryan thin-nosed beauties of the Ziegfeld follies. And so the premise of Funny Girl, of almost every joke, rests on whether you believe that Fanny, despite her face, earns every drop of success because of her extraordinary talent. Each joke has the same structure: someone throws a derogatory comment Fanny’s way. Fanny volleys, with wit and acid and intelligence. The movie provides a model to every girl out there (no matter how attractive she is) about how to deal with a world that doubts you because of your appearance, because of your difference. When everyone’s a critic, especially in the entertainment industry, and you know you’re something special, they will have to accept you as you are, and fall in love with you for what you bring to the performance. Just watch Fanny’s first performance for a theater, and how she bends the audience to her will:

By the time she’s backstage, she’s won over the crowd…and within it, her future love interest, the dazzlingly handsome Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif.)

Then the joke changes—how could a guy as perfect and beautiful as Arnstein fall for a gummy-faced girl like Fanny? Because he knows what the rest of the world doesn’t—that she has a spark, she stands out, and that’s a sign she’s going to be a star. But the movie, as it traces Fanny’s rise to stardom, constantly returns to the presumably unassailable fact that she can’t hold Nick, or anything, in place simply by being female and beautiful. And so the movie becomes a commentary on what an unconventional woman does to keep herself successful in a world that doesn’t immediately recognize her talent.

Fanny, blessedly, has little time for people who insist she behave conventionally. Even when she lands the dream job, as a featured player among the glittering chorines of Ziegfeld’s follies, she balks at behaving like any other starlet. When Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon) puts her in the star spot in the closing number, she says, “I can’t Fanny: I can’t sing words like: “I am the beautiful reflection of my love’s affection.” I mean… Well, it’s embarrassing… If I come out opening night…telling the audience how beautiful I am, I’ll be back at [my first job] before the curtain comes down.” When he refuses to do so, Fanny concedes, but finds her own special twist for the number:

And of course it pays off—Fanny becomes a huge star, but it doesn’t change the kinds of jokes thrown our way. When Nick finally attempts to seduce her, every line of his advance is played for laughs. Pitting Nick’s debonair style against Fanny’s neurotic dodging is meant to underline just how unlikely this pairing is…and to make the viewer as skeptical as Fanny.

 Even when Fanny hooks Nick, and even after she gets to sing a ditty about how great it is to be “Sadie, Sadie,” married lady, the story continues to treat Fanny as a liability. When Nick finally starts showing his shortcomings as a card shark, he is too insecure and prideful to ask Fanny to bail him out. He is thrown into prison, and Fanny gets the news just as she’s heading out of the theater for the night. “You still love him, Miss Brice?” the reporters shout. “The name’s Arnstein,” she replies defiantly. This is a woman who refuses to let her critics define her—even if it means putting the joke on her.

What ultimately carries Fanny, and Funny Girl, as one of the greatest musical comedies ever (and makes Fanny one of the best characters, male or female, ever written for Broadway) is that her weapon is always her strength, her self-reliance, that aforementioned chutzpah. Fanny truly believes that she can do or accomplish anything, including saving her own doomed marriage, if someone just gives her the chance. When she and Nick decide to separate after his release from prison, she is utterly heartbroken. But even in that moment, she pulls herself up and delivers a superb performance, looking more beautiful and elegant than ever. And that’s where the message of Funny Girl really sings out: NOTHING is as radiant as self-confidence.

———-

Jessica Freeman-Slade is a writer who has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She works at Random House as a cookbook editor, and lives in Morningside Heights.

  

Weekly Feminist Film Question: Who Is Your Favorite Female Movie Villain?

Exploring dark complexity, spouting snappy one liners, or cruel and calculating — actors often say that villains are the most fun to play. So in this week’s Feminist Film Question, we asked you to tell us who’s your favorite female movie villain. With characters ranging from action and period drama to comedy and animation, here’s what you said!

Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) in Batman Returns
Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) in Kill Bill 
Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter) in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Parts 1 & 2
Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) in Ran
Mrs. Iselin (Angela Lansbury) in The Manchurian Candidate
Ursula (Pat Carroll) in The Little Mermaid 
 
Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil (Glenn Close) in Dangerous Liaisons
 
Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) in  X-Men, X2, X-Men: The Last Stand
 
Joan Crawford (Faye Dunaway) in Mommie Dearest
 
Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) in Misery
 
Maleficent (Eleanor Audley) in Sleeping Beauty
 
Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones) in Chicago
 
Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) in The Devil Wears Prada
 
Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
 
Lady Tremaine (Eleanor Audley), Cinderella’s Stepmother in Cinderella
Mitsuko Souma (Kou Shibasaki, Suzuka Tonegawa) in Battle Royale

Pris (Daryl Hannah) in Blade Runner
 
Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin) in Romeo is Bleeding
 
Ester (Isabelle Fuhrman) in Orphan

Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty) and Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk)in Heathers

Lian Nichang (Brigitte Lin) in The Bride with White Hair

Who are YOUR favorite female villains??

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Each week we tweet a new question and then post your answers on our site each Friday! To participate, just follow us on Twitter at @BitchFlicks and use the Twitter hashtag #feministfilm. 

Quote of the Day: Samhita Mukhopadhyay, from ‘Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life’

Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life

I hate dating. I’m really bad at dating. I meet up with a dude, and I’m usually like “eh” after five minutes, ready to move on. I don’t suffer from a throwing-in-the-towel mentality of sorts, where I’m willing to settle for any dude, just for the sake of filling one of my many supposed obligations as a woman–Finally Finding Love. I’m more of an impossibly-high-standards dater, one who stares at the dude in front of her, like, “You’re obviously not a progressive feminist with a clear understanding of the ramifications the media has on the self-esteem of women and young girls, and you haven’t listed one single female musician or a woman-driven film in your endless list of ‘favorite things’ … so why don’t you get out of my face.” Right?! Bad. At. Dating. 
So I bought Mukhopadhyay’s book to see if it could help me stop being horrible at dating; it definitely helped me think about dating in a different way.
She focuses on the sexist dating advice industry throughout the book, and she writes in the introduction that the book is about “conundrums and confusion; it’s about the contradicting messages we get from popular culture, feminism, our social circles, politics, and the romance industry. It’s about charting trends in how women and men are talked about in the media; it’s about pointing out hypocrisy, and it’s about dealing with a world that is still reliant on antiquated ideas of gender.” 
I found the book most helpful for me, however, in its discussion of finding The One. We live in a culture that obsesses over the idea of The One. The film industry especially pushes it (usually upon women) in the Romantic Comedy aka “chick flick” genre. I personally didn’t realize how much I (feminist! media critic! blogger! constant reader of the feminist blogosphere!) had actually internalized these messages until I read Mukhopadhyay’s book. Turns out, when you go into every date subconsciously ready to decide within five minutes if this person is The One, then you’re probably going to end up with a fuckload of first dates … without too many second or third or fourth dates with the same person. 
She also points out that the portrayals of single women in film and television often make single ladies look like total losers, which is also difficult to not internalize (even for someone who spends most of her free time critiquing media representations of women). Conundrums and confusion, indeed! Overall, the book shines a light on the dilemma of Dating While Feminist, and I encourage all daters to read it, even if you don’t necessarily consider yourself a Feminist, and even if you’re not as awful at dating as I am. 
One of the most important aspects of the book deals with exactly what we deal with at Bitch Flicks–how pop culture, especially film and television, works to perpetuate stereotypes and help maintain the status quo … while also making me a shitty dater (if I haven’t yet made that clear).
I’ll leave you with the following excerpt. Because it’s important to always keep an eye out for this bullshit. After all, knowing it exists is the only way to fight against it! #realtalk

Television is a reflection of our cultural norms at a given time, so it makes sense that during the ’60s and ’70s–a time of cultural revolution where the very definitions of family, sexuality, relationships, and femininity were being pushed–women were written as living comfortable, fun lives as single women who engaged in sex when they wanted it and often opted out of long-term relationships. Laverne & Shirley, at the height of its viewership, was the most watched sitcom in the United States, surpassing Happy Days, which is shocking considering its often serious and feminist themes. Laverne & Shirley took on unplanned pregnancy, sex before marriage, and workplace equality.
[…]
If we look to the sitcoms of today, we see weaker depictions of women dominating the tubes. We see women who are smaller in stature, more neurotic, confused, wishy-washy, and often dysfunctional. There are few sitcoms about single women even on the airwaves today, actually. But think of the leading ladies in sitcoms, from Everybody Loves Raymond to The King of Queens; both Debra and Carrie represent good, faithful (and hot) wives. And while the plotline shows they are often the ones in charge, their story lines are secondary to their goofy, irresponsible, “bro-ish” husbands. While these characters’ behavior could be chalked up to the shows being satirical or humorous, there is a noticeable difference between how women and their romantic relationships have been represented over the decades. 
Similarly, if we are to look at the representation of single black women even from the ’90s to the new millennium, a quick comparison of 227 and Living Single to Girlfriends shows you how differently actresses are cast today. Earlier shows cast black women of varying sizes, skin tones, and hairstyles, whereas more recent shows seem to only cast thinner black women with straighter hair and more Caucasian features. Let’s just acknowledge that you don’t turn on the TV and see a great actress like Esther Rolle these days (unless you’re watching The Biggest Loser). 
[…]
Popular television has changed, but what has entered the public domain are new caricatures of femininity that play to our most regressive stereotypes of how single women should think, talk, and act. And while reality TV is supposed to be “real,” the images of single women have only gotten less real. According to reality TV, all single women want to get married and their lives are meaningless without this milestone, despite any personal or professional successes they might have seen. This has closed up any real possibilities for characterizations of single women as anything but failing at the dream of romance. 

You can purchase the book here.

Additional Links

Why I Love Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life by Andrea (AJ) Plaid via Racialicious

Dating While Feminist: An Interview with Samhita Mukhopadhyay by Allison McCarthy via Ms. Magazine

The Rumpus Interview With Samhita Mukhopadhyay by Neelanjana Banerjee via The Rumpus

She’s Just Not That Into Dating by Tracy Clark-Flory via Salon

It’s Not Feminism That’s Ruining Romance: A Fresh Spin on Dating by Noelle de la Paz via Colorlines

Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s Web site