The idea of a life potentially being different hinging on a seemingly innocuous decision can, and often is, highly engaging, largely because it is one that is so simple and relatable. … Created and written by Yael Shavitt (who also stars as Sam/Samantha in adulthood), ‘Split’ is a truly feminist work, intentionally created through a female-only team of four women filmmakers, resulting in an all-female on-set crew.
This guest post written by Siobhan Denton is an edited version that originally appeared at The Blue and the Dim. It is cross-posted with permission.
The concept of a life converging and diverging has long occupied the minds of artists and filmmakers. The idea of a life potentially being different hinging on a seemingly innocuous decision can, and often is, highly engaging, largely because it is one that is so simple and relatable. At times, this concept can become trope-like, but when presented thoughtfully, as is in the case of Split, it can aid character development and narrative engagement.
Conceived as a web series consisting of ten 10-minute episodes, Split focuses on the life of Sammy (Yael Shavitt), and the parallel realities that develop after receiving a letter from a drama school detailing the results of her audition. Her reaction to this letter acts as the impetus for the depiction of her parallel lives: one, in which she is a successful actress, confident and often self-centered, and a second, in which she works as an assistant director, lacking in assertiveness. In both realities, Sam/Samantha is consistently engaging, and the narrative invariably moves between the two realities to highlight the difference in Sam/Samantha’s nature and manner created through her actions. The series is well-suited to the chosen format of short webisodes, allowing for character development without losing pacing (the series takes place over ten days).
Created and written by Yael Shavitt (who also stars as Sam/Samantha in adulthood), Split is a truly feminist work, intentionally created through a female-only team of four women filmmakers, resulting in an all-female on-set crew. In an industry that is still dominated by the patriarchy and the male voice, Shavitt and her team not only highlight the need for more female voices, but also the ability of these filmmakers and writers. Focusing on a female protagonist who deliberates over decisions that impacts upon her life, rather than worrying about the clichés normally associated with crucial life choices, is both progressive and refreshing. While we see Sam/Samantha in relationships in both realities, she is never defined by those relationships. Rather, we see her interact with her significant other in a personal manner which clearly indicates that Sam/Samantha is her own person with her own motivations and desires; she is not led by the wants and needs of those around her.
In addition to this female focus, Split also depicts several characters that identify as LGBTQ. These identities never feel unnaturally embedded, simply included to highlight diversity, rather these identities simply are, and in turn, are progressive, allowing the series to tell an intersectional story.
How the trajectory of Split continues remains to be seen, with only the pilot episode currently available on YouTube (the makers have recently finished successfully crowdfunding to raise the funds required for the rest of the project). Regardless, the very existence of a series like Split should be applauded. It is crucial that diverse female voices are heard in a male-dominated industry. Given the hyperreality perpetuated by the media, it is important that other voices, and different representations, are made available to viewers.
Siobhan Dentonis a teacher and writer living in Wales, UK. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Film and Television Studies. She is especially interested in depictions of female desire and transitions from youth to adulthood. She tweets at @siobhan_dentonand writes atThe Blue and the Dim.
Whit Stillman’s adaptation celebrates this power. Taking the text off the page necessarily removes it from the female form in which it is written and therefore extends the realm of female power. … Jane Austen is one of the most, if not the most, famous female authors in the world. Yet, over the course of a series of progressively shittier adaptations… a great comedian and social satirist has been pigeonholed as a romance writer.
This guest post written by Laura Witz is an edited version of an article that originally appeared at Witzster. It is cross-posted with permission.
Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship follows the narrative of Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan rather neatly and although many reviews seem to be, often ignorantly, telling us that this is Austen with teeth or some such, what I don’t think they realize is that Austen already has teeth. The film is great, but it is great because it is so faithful to tone.
Austen probably wrote Lady Susan when she was about eighteen (although it wasn’t published until long after her death in 1871), already aware that her hyper intelligence may not stand her in good stead as a woman, but long before the much sadder points in her life, when she was also to fantasize about being able to intellectually and physically subject herself to the whim of the man intended to be her superior (Mansfield Park).
Where in Mansfield Park the Lady Susan character (Mary Crawford) is sidelined and punished, in Lady Susan, she is celebrated. I once read that Lady Susan is a fantasy of female power in a world where, legally speaking, women had none. This power is in the most part manifested in the original text by the fact that the story is told through letters, a medium really only upper class women engaged in, and since the women control the letter form, they do in fact control the boundaries of this reality. Whenever men get involved, their letters are short and stilted and ineffective. I would argue that, to a degree, this reality is also an idealized version of a very real subculture that did exist.
Stillman’s adaptation celebrates this power. Taking the text off the page necessarily removes it from the female form in which it is written and therefore extends the realm of female power. The men in the film are useless and defunct, from the wonderfully silly Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) (my new crush), to the priggish and apparently clever Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel) and in particular to the “very handsome” Mr. Manwaring (Lochlann O’Mearáin) who, although he appears in several scenes, has no lines, not one.
As in the original text, this is a battle between two women, Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) and her sister-in-law Catherine Vernon (Emma Greenwell). Catherine has her mother (Jemma Redgrave) in her court and Lady Susan has her friend Alicia (Chloë Sevigny) in hers. Throughout the film, these two vie for power, over Catherine’s brother, Reginald, over Lady Susan’s daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), and arguably over a position as matriarch of the family.
The film is great and so are the actors. Tom Bennett as Sir James Martin made me cry with laughter. And the ending, in particular, is very interesting. The original text finishes with Austen getting slightly bored and making fun of her own narrative form. Stillman’s adaptation sticks very closely to the spirit of the text, ignoring the potentially problematic tone of the final passage, which is arguably written in the voice of Catherine Vernon anyway. And most importantly, this film has steered clear of any attempt to romanticize the story.
As most people who know me know, I have an ax to grind where it comes to Jane Austen and I’ve been grinding it for the better part of the last seven years. Jane Austen is one of the most, if not the most, famous female authors in the world. Yet, over the course of a series of progressively shittier adaptations made by people who in some cases don’t even seem to have read the source text (Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice), a great comedian and social satirist has been pigeonholed as a romance writer. Now there’s nothing wrong with romance, I very much enjoy a good rom-com (and quite frequently a very crap one). But the fact is that this genre has been sidelined as one that is trivial and silly ever since Austen herself wrote and idle upper class young women got kicks from reading saucy French novels.
Of course if you actually look at Austen’s works, only Pride and Prejudice can reasonably be described as a romance and that romance is running alongside a lot of social commentary and out and out comedy. In particular, look at Sense and Sensibility, where Elinor marries Edward the bland (a far cry from Hugh Grant / Dan Stevens) and Marianne gets Brandon the old. As a rom-com alone, Sense and Sensibility fails since the major love affair of the text remains unfulfilled.
Dickens wrote romances into every book, but nobody refers to him as a romance writer. The name Allan Woodcourt – or I suppose Woodcourt – hasn’t been adopted as a catch-all for everything women desire and everything that is irritating about the romance genre (Bleak House, in case you’re wondering). Because Dickens doesn’t represent a threat because he is a man and therefore it’s okay for him to be a writer and we don’t need to undermine and diminish him.
So what if we make Austen adaptations that don’t conform to that stereotype? What if we write fan fiction that doesn’t include shit fantasies about pseudo-romances with a misunderstanding of Mr. Darcy? What if someone decides to adapt texts Austen wrote that do not conform to this? What kind of writer do we call her then? And that’s where Love & Friendship comes in. It might not seem groundbreaking that there is yet another period drama out there getting some attention and some critical acclaim, but trust me, this film is rocking my fucking world.
And Whit, if you’re reading this, I have an adaptation of the actual Love & Friendship that we can start work on any day. Although the title might be a problem.
Laura Witz is an editor and writer of plays and stories living and working in the UK. She has written plays that have performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Jane Austen Festival in Bath and her articles and stories have been published in a number of institutions and publications, a few of which can be found on her blog. Witz hopes to one day become an aerial clown. You can follow her on Twitter @Charlotte_Prod.
Writing women as interesting, multi-layered individuals with a rich inner life isn’t impossible, so the fact that men continue to write women with so little substance isn’t because they can’t. It’s that they won’t. And the fact that there aren’t more female-driven comedies isn’t because (sorry to bring this nonsense up again) they aren’t funny, it’s because mostly men run the show and most of them don’t value women as anything other than wives and ‘yacht girl in bikini.’ They don’t see women as funny and interesting and smart and worthy of 90 minutes, so they don’t write for them and they don’t include them. It’s. A. Choice.
In 2015, Glamour magazine published an article by Megan Angelo titled, “Let’s Rewrite Hollywood, Shall We?” In it, she cited frustrating statistics about the state of women in movies. One of them was that “in 2014 33% of speaking roles in major movies went to women.” While the article overall was fascinating and frustratingly informative, it was the sidebars that caught my eye; particularly one written by Nikki Glaser.
The sidebars were mini-stories written by women, re-imagining male-driven movies, such as Die Hard (One of my favorite action movies, by the way. Also, Christmas, but never mind that.). In the re-telling of famous movie scenes, women were given re-defined roles in the lives of the men the movies focus on. My favorite was by Glaser, who took on Entourage, the movie. Confession: I’ve never seen the TV show and definitely missed the movie. But I knew the premise and some of the characters’ names. I didn’t have an issue with the series as it was based on Mark Wahlberg’s friends, but was never interested enough to watch it.
Glaser wrote about “Topless Yacht Girl,” that stock female character that hangs on a man and has no other function and, of course, no lines, at least not often. Here, topless girl on a yacht finds the character of Johnny Drama to be “one of the dumbest people with whom she’d ever spoken.” She’s a pretender, trying to get by, putting up with men that annoy her because they have all the power. She’s also given a name (!) Catherine. Catherine eventually “grabbed her top, ran toward the railing, and dove into the shallow surf.” She swims “confidently to shore” to begin a better life, where she’s valued and happy.
That article has been on my desk throughout the writing process of my screenplay, Honey Pot.
Also hanging around in a stack of inspiration: another Glamour article, an interview with Glamsquad CEO, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson who’s quoted saying, “Be your own best advocate”; and a Women’s Health piece on Reese Witherspoon, who provided a tweet I’ve made an Instagram photo of: “Successful women don’t have a lot of time for people who don’t lift them up.” (I imagine Catherine reading that same article and getting inspired to yacht-dive to freedom). The other thing that Witherspoon inspired me to remember in that interview is that we must do something about all of this. And that’s going to take a lot of work, creativity, solidarity and commitment (Also see the study of women in film, focused on screen time and amount of dialogue for female characters in film by Polygraph Cool, conducted by Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels.)
I’ve been dabbling in screenwriting for a few years, working on it, reading about it, and studying the art form in every way I could think of, outside of taking courses. In the absence of that, I bought the book by Lew Hunter, a professor of screenwriting at UCLA, which is his curriculum in book form, or as close as it gets. I reached out to him and consulted him for advice. After a mishap mailing him a script three years ago, I e-mailed him my first truly serious, heartfelt attempt a baseball screenplay called Minor League Guys in 2015, and he gave me some excellent feedback. Then I realized that I hadn’t told the story I wanted to, so I started over and e-mailed the new version a few months later. He gave high praise for the re-write and I began putting myself out there professionally. I’m still figuring that out. I’d been a baseball writer for a decade, skipping college, and over time figured out what I really wanted to do. I’ve logged many miles and hours developing my craft. Baseball kind of found me, but writing was always my destiny.
Minor League Guys is about four baseball players at different stages in their careers, it was about the world I knew; but what was also important to me, was that the women in the story be given a real voice, a rich inner life, and, you know, lines. The wives of the players aren’t background noise with nothing to do but serve the male characters stories: they’re women who own businesses, go to school, are supportive of one another, and also expect support from their husbands. They all have very equal partnerships with their significant others. Another of the main characters is a woman who works in the front office of the fictional team. In her introductory scene, she’s in command, giving directions and informing others around her. I was mindful with their lines. And none of them are unstable, without personality, or nameless, sitting around in bathing suits.
Perhaps this is what that golden beacon of light Witherspoon was referring to; create the thing you want to see in the world instead of just being upset about what’s missing. And so, that set me on a path I’d been thinking of for a while. A comedy about two women, who get caught up in a crime caper, full of wild twists and turns, lots of fun, and plenty of action. They would have so many lines!
I have a passion for comedies like Superbad and Pineapple Express, and I thought about how women don’t see enough of those kinds of comedies for themselves. The kind where life goes off the rails and your whole day or week is an unraveling adventure full of pitfalls and peril. And most of it is hilarious. My favorite feminist comedies in the past few years have both starred Melissa McCarthy: The Heat and Spy. What freaking fun films. I also admit, despite how much you might frown reading this, that I loved The Other Woman. Yes, it’s about three women in love with a dude that’s lying to them all. But they become instant friends and teammates. We root for them as friends, and as smart women who want to teach that guy a lesson. They outfox him. And they look glamorous doing it and I loved that, too.
But we need more and we deserve a variety of stories, particularly comedy, in which women are the center of the action and they’re not trying to win over a guy or have that be the entire focus. Think about buddy-cop movies like Beverly Hills Cop or action-comedies like The Other Guys or funny westerns or coming-of-age sex comedies. Women want those too. We want to see ourselves.
Honey Pot originated from a writing prompt and developed over a year and a half. I have to sit with characters a while, getting to know them and hear them (so writerly, I know) before I begin. I write down lines, scrawl scene ideas on a college notebook, and take mental note when something interesting or funny happens that I think I could become a scene.
When I sat down to begin, I had a page full of possible titles. I wanted something like Superbad, that had punch to it and sounded like a good time, but also sounded like the name of an awesome music group from the 70’s. I wanted it to imply something about the story in an animated way. But for all the fun I had in mind, other elements were pulling me to expand my vision. I was thinking about street harassment, women in small business, equal pay, single motherhood, how image defines us, and sexual shaming. I also wanted to make fun of movie-making when it comes to roles for women. They’re always the wife/girlfriend/fiancée/mistress on the phone, waiting for the guy to return from the fun, hi jinx, danger and actual story. I felt myself drawn very naturally to weaving these elements into a funny story. Ultimately, every comedy, even the most absurd, has heart. In the creative flow, I was hearing a new voice. The Catherines’ of the world have a lot going on and plenty to say about the way the world treats them.
On the first page of notes, the very first line I scrawled was about slut-shaming. It was funny and served a purpose to the overall story. I realized that this was clicking. I was doing all the things in every scene I needed to. I didn’t want to preach, but show professional, happy women with strong friendships, and healthy personal lives. They have their insecurities, inconsistencies, family issues, and uncertainty about what the future holds. But they’re confident in their abilities. They enjoy life on their own terms. And they’re each other’s allies.
In the midst of dealing with life, and making important business decisions while financially strapped, in walks a client that shakes things up, and sets the characters on a wild path. I ask myself, “Will women have fun watching this?” I remained mindful of the ways in which they spoke to each other, to others in their lives, and how they viewed themselves.
Writing women like that isn’t difficult. It really isn’t. Writing women as interesting, multi-layered individuals with a rich inner life isn’t impossible, so the fact that men continue to write women with so little substance isn’t because they can’t. It’s that they won’t. And the fact that there aren’t more female-driven comedies isn’t because (sorry to bring this nonsense up again) they aren’t funny, it’s because mostly men run the show and most of them don’t value women as anything other than wives and ‘yacht girl in bikini.’ They don’t see women as funny and interesting and smart and worthy of 90 minutes, so they don’t write for them and they don’t include them. It’s. A. Choice.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t know if I could be funny on paper. AND write an action-oriented movie that wasn’t about baseball. AND pay tribute to the mystery stories I’ve always loved. I had no idea if I could do any of those things. But I was inspired and motivated and went from there.
A few years ago, I wrote a screenplay that focused on the life of a woman who had grown up in baseball as the daughter of a player and married a player. She was full of life and sexuality and confidence. In the early part of her life, she was challenged by her father’s strident views and rebelled. I submitted it to the Francis Ford Coppola-created Zoetrope website, where readers were allowed to comment on scripts. One man sent me a message I’ll never forget. Of the heroine, he wrote, “She’s obviously a slut.” I stopped submitting my work there. Subjecting myself to a guy like that didn’t help me as a person or writer. But I remember that now as I pursue telling more women’s stories. I refused to allow the word “slut” or “bitch” (though I understand the use in things like, oh, an amazingly timely website!) or any of the words we use for women and don’t blink an eye about.
In Honey Pot, I wanted to elevate the female experience, the female language. I wanted to write a fun, smartly entertaining story that women could love. I want them to see other women rooting each other on, and working as a team. I want to see myself, having fun, and figuring out how to save the day.
It doesn’t feel groundbreaking. But when I look at women in comedic films, I realize that funny women doing fun, interesting things is still a work in progress. So, let’s keep making progress. We’ve been left out of the fun long enough. I believe Catherine agreed.
Jessica Quiroli is a minor league baseball writer for Baseball Prospectus and the creator of Heels on the Field: A MiLB Blog. She’s also written extensively about domestic violence in baseball. She’s a DV survivor. You can follow her on Twitter @heelsonthefield.
Rock legend Patti Smith and Oscar-nominated actor Ethan Hawke shared stories and ideas about process, acting and writing Thursday afternoon at the SVA Theater in Chelsea to kick off the Tribeca Film Festival talk series. Here are things I learned about the rocker/poet, who is a fascinating raconteur who had a packed audience spellbound.
Rock legend Patti Smith and Oscar-nominated actor Ethan Hawke shared stories and ideas about process, acting and writing Thursday afternoon at the SVA Theater in Chelsea to kick off the Tribeca Film Festival talk series.
Here are things I learned about the rocker/poet, who is a fascinating raconteur who had a packed audience spellbound:
How she came to co-write “Cowboy Mouth,” a one-act play with music with Sam Shepard:
Sam and I wrote this play cause we had this relationship which we shouldn’t have because he had a small kid, a family. We were young, and we knew we had to end our relationship even though we liked each other so much, (so) we wrote this play sort of as our swan song… (He said) let’s stop crying and write a play.
I said, ‘I don’t’ know how to write a play.’ Sam said, ‘You’re the girl and I’m the guy… Just do what I say…He writes a little set up and then he says something and he hands me the typewriter so I just answered him, and we wrote out a whole play that way and then he thought we should perform it… Sam at the time was sort of like a big deal, so we got to do the play at American Place Theater and there was a part in the play where Sam wanted us to have a battle of language…We battled with language.
How Smith learned to improvise:
Sam improvises his language, and my character is suppose to improvise back, and I said, ‘How do we do that? What will I say?’ … He said, I’ll say stuff and you’ll say stuff back to me, any kind of rhythm and poetry… ‘What if I make a mistake?’ He said, ‘It’s improvising! You can’t make a mistake. If you lose a beat then you invent another beat,’ and that made perfect sense to me. And that little instruction and then doing a play with him I learned how to improvise, which has served me my whole life in everything I do. It was one of the greatest lessons I ever got was from Sam.”
Smith likes getting awards:
It’s really fun to get like accolades. I’ve gotten awards from the French government. I love my medals, and I do I really I get in the swing of it. Somebody wants to give me a medal, I’m really happy. But really the only real success is that success that you know when you’ve done something well, when you finish a poem or you do a certain performance and you know you’ve done a good job.
Gregory Corso and Smith’s first poetry reading:
Of the beat poets, Gregory Corso was the youngest… Gregory had intense energy and he was also very academic as well as being one of our greatest poets… We would go to poetry readings. I was only 20 years old. They don’t have poetry readings in South Jersey… A lot of these poets go on and on… I have to say it was kind of boring… I just sat there quietly… Gregory goes, ‘Shit, shit, shit… No blood, get a transfusion.’…and I was like, ‘If I ever do a poetry reading it can’t be boring, Gregory will cream me.
So I did my first poetry reading in St. Marks in 1972. I was talking to Sam Shepard, and I was telling him I’ve got to deliver. I have to do something that will transcend boredom and Sam said, ‘Play a guitar because a lot of your poems have a lot of rhythm.’ I asked my friend Lenny Kaye, and I asked him if he could play like car crash sounds or feedback and things to the poem and stuff like that, and he did and it caused quite a ruckus and Gregory wasn’t bored.
Smith’s work habit rituals:
I write in the morning usually for a few hours, since I was about 10, almost every day. If I don’t write I feel agitated. I’ll write in a bathroom or a train. I just feel the need always to write something. When I was younger I would stay up all night or smoke a little pot and write… I would sit all day typing on the typewriter but once I had children, once I had children, a baby, I couldn’t do that, I had to redesign and redefine my work time and so I started waking up at 5 in the morning – this was in like 1981 — and from 5 to 8 when my husband and baby were sleeping that was my time to write. That’s when actually really developed a certain work ethic.
How Smith went from being a poet to a performer:
I started out writing poetry, which is a very solitary discipline, drawing, painting also, and I never wanted to be a performer really, but through writing poetry and performing it I evolved into being a performer and then having a rock and roll band but it was not a planned thing. It was nothing I aspired to so it was evolving right in front of me but it was evolving and the people were part of the fabric of that evolution. I would never have done that by myself because I was a solitary worker… I think that’s the one thing that makes me a little different from other musicans, other performers or other rock and roll singers. I’m really of and from the people as a performer. I feel we’re all part of the same fabric I just never would have done it. I wouldn’t have found it on my own. I didn’t even aspire to it.
Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from The Artist. Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.
However, Whale challenges Shelley’s automatic association of the maternal with the absent female: the Bride’s rejection of Frankenstein’s monster shows that the maternal can be absent even when the woman is present, while the blind man’s nurturing care suggests that man can embody the noblest maternal impulse.
As the daughter of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley inherited radical ideas about the intellectual abilities and sexual freedoms of women. She learned these ideas from her mother’s books rather than her presence, however, because Wollstonecraft died soon after her birth. Anne Mellor points to compelling evidence that the undated events of Frankenstein are set over the nine months of Mary Shelley’s own gestation, in 1797, with the date of Victor Frankenstein’s climactic death coinciding almost exactly with Mary Wollstonecraft’s. Created lovelessly as a theoretical experiment, Frankenstein’s monster is the ultimate icon of the unmothered child. Mary’s own beloved father, philosopher William Godwin, would disown his teenaged daughter when she became pregnant by married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a deeply personal betrayal that contradicted his theoretical conviction in anarchy, and motivated Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to rename herself Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Mary Shelley was thus shaped by the trauma of parental rejection as a result of her sexuality, an experience common to girls of the 19th century and queer youth of the 20th.
How appropriate, then, that the greatest screen adaptation of Frankenstein should be the work of a gay man, James Whale, whose own identification with Shelley’s monster is explored in fictionalized biopic Gods and Monsters. Though there have been adaptations more technically faithful to the novel, none has been truer to its central pathos of maternal absence. It was because Whale acknowledged him as the film’s emotional core, that we now associate “Frankenstein” with the abandoned monster rather than his egoistic creator. Where Mary Shelley’s monster rapidly acquires educated speech, while his stigma is a physically undefined “ghastliness,” Whale’s monster evokes intellectual disability by his realistically slow learning, and his distorted physique equally provokes the audience’s ableism, luring them into complicity with the persecuting mob and challenging them with their own temptation to reject the “monster.” In sequelBride of Frankenstein (whose very title suggests the monster as “Frankenstein”), Whale demonstrates his sympathetic understanding of Shelley’s emotional identification with her monster, by casting Elsa Lanchester in the dual role of Mary Shelley and the monstrous Bride. However, Whale challenges Shelley’s automatic association of the maternal with the absent female: the Bride’s rejection of Frankenstein’s monster shows that the maternal can be absent even when the woman is present, while the blind man’s nurturing care suggests that man can embody the noblest maternal impulse.
Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley and as Bride
“The Body,” the acclaimed episode ofBuffy the Vampire Slayer‘s fifth season that portrays the death of Buffy’s mother, features a symbolic art class in which Dawn is instructed to draw the negative space around an object, rather than the object itself. In art teaching, drawing negative space is a recognized technique for breaking preconceptions and allowing the viewer to perceive with fresh accuracy. In a society that chronically undervalues the labor of motherhood, drawing its negative space is one technique for reassessing its worth. Opening with the narrative of a polar explorer who has abandoned his loving sister for territorial conquest, Frankenstein portrays the execution of a girl falsely accused of infanticide, the destruction of the monster’s bride and the murder of Victor Frankenstein’s own bride in vengeance. It may well be claimed that Shelley’s entire novel is a mapping of the negative space surrounding female nurture.
By choosing to bring forth the Bride (in the novel, Victor destroys the Bride before she’s completed), Whale develops Shelley’s theme from woman’s absence into her rejection, touching on painful legacies of maternally rejected queer and disabled youth. Frankenstein’s monster is created with a brain labelled “abnormal,” raising issues of inborn and predestined sinfulness, yet his violence is always directly provoked by cruel treatment and maternal absence. In Bride of Frankenstein, Whale conflates Mary Shelley with her monster through their joint embodiment in Elsa Lanchester, insightfully converting the Bride’s climactic rejection of Frankenstein’s monster into the author’s rejection of herself. To become adult is to assume responsibility for self-parenting. Because adults instinctively base their self-care on the model of their own parents, many suffer for life from absent nurture in youth. Frankenstein’s monster seeks a Bride-mother-lover to supply his lack of parenting, but the new monster is as lacking as himself. Though women are often imagined as unlimited sources of nurture, rather than humans wrestling their own psychologies, James Whale allows his Bride to be broken. Those to whom nothing is given, have nothing to give. Bride of Frankenstein should be celebrated for powerfully reclaiming the maternal as a learned capacity and a voluntary commitment, rather than an automatic quality of womanhood.
Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) rejects Boris Karloff’s “monster”
From its eerie opening of grave-robbing, Frankenstein cuts straight to the rejection of the female, as Henry Frankenstein (Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein is renamed Henry, while friend Henry is inexplicably Victor) writes to his fiancé Elizabeth, instructing her to wait for him: “My work must come first, even before you. At night the winds howl in the mountains. There is no one here.” In its howling winds, the film evokes Shelley’s endless polar wastes, visualizing fields of masculine achievement as deserts of desolation. Though his own father assumes that Henry must have abandoned Elizabeth for another woman, his scientific research is a substitute for all women, perhaps echoing William Godwin’s substitution of philosophical theories of liberation for personal support of his daughter’s freedom. As Henry successfully animates the monster, he cries out, “In the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!” As Christianity teaches that we are sons and daughters of God, so Henry’s assumption of the divine role is surely the ultimate assuming of responsibility for self-parenting, leading to catastrophe precisely because of the deep flaws in his internalized parental model. Boris Karloff’s monster is justly iconic, his sinister appearance contrasted with the mute yearning in his eyes, his palms spread and beseeching for warmth, whether of companionship or simple sunlight. The instant that his monster becomes burdensome, Henry’s first impulse is abandonment: “Leave it alone! Leave it alone!,” displaying an assumed freedom to disengage that is typical of society’s model of fatherhood.
Shelley and Whaley question whether a man who has abandoned family for science can successfully parent his scientific creations, as Shelley’s prologue describes herself parenting the novel Frankenstein. Where Dr. Frankenstein understands public work and domesticity to be in opposition to each other, a patriarchal logic that segregates male and female, Shelley and Whale suggest rather that maternal care is demanded inseparably of both public and domestic spheres. It is Henry Frankenstein’s assistant Fritz, a hunchbacked “dwarf,” who viciously torments the monster with a burning torch, perhaps acting out his own parental model of hostility and rejection. Unlike Shelley’s novel, in which the monster kills as calculated punishment for Victor Frankenstein’s abandonment, Whale presents the monster’s first killings as justifiable self defense. Escaping the tortures of Frankenstein’s laboratory, the monster encounters Little Maria, a young girl who accepts him as a playmate. Through Little Maria’s moving acceptance, in the absence of parental supervision, Whale implies that intolerance must be learned from parental models. Little Maria shows the monster how flowers float, and he accidentally drowns her in compliment to her flower-like beauty. Meanwhile, Henry Frankenstein is driven back to his fiancée by revulsion at what he has created. Leaving Elizabeth at the monster’s mercy, by protectively locking her into her room, illustrates how counterproductive Henry’s efforts to control life have become. The film ends with the iconic image of a mob with burning torches, united to persecute the outsider and avenge the death of Little Maria. As the mob sets fire to Frankenstein’s windmill, Whale dwells on the monster’s agonized screams, panic and isolated death. He then cuts to Henry Frankenstein’s being tenderly nursed by a flock of maids and his loving fiancée, ending his masterpiece with harsh contrast between the abandoned and the cherished.
Meeting the maternal man: “Alone: bad. Friend: good!”
Bride of Frankenstein opens with Mary Shelley narrating the sequel to her tale to Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a setting of elegant luxury–a choice that foregrounds the story’s female authorship. Marvelling at Mary Shelley’s youth and femininity, Byron booms: “Can you believe that bland and lovely brow conceived of Frankenstein?” Yet, though Byron postures in his grinning celebrity as “England’s greatest sinner,” it is the woman, Mary Shelley, who has truly suffered for unsanctioned love. When Byron brands her “angel,” she smiles enigmatically: “You think so?” Whale’s portrait of Mary Shelley revels in her dainty, feminine appearance and twinkling grin, before unveiling her secret kinship with the monster through her reincarnation as his Bride. Fading from Shelley’s luxury to Frankenstein’s burning windmill, from which the monster makes his improbable escape, we witness two women in the persecuting mob: one who weeps at the “terrible” sight, and another who gloats that she is “glad to see the monster roasted to death.” What sharper illustration that woman is “naturally” neither merciful nor cruel, but individual? Henry Frankenstein is lured back to science by the amoral Dr. Pretorius, who has grown life “from seed” to create a menagerie of shrunken authority figures. In this empowerment fantasy, the overbearing, lecherous king can be plucked from his targets with tongs, while the squeakily disapproving bishop may be bottled in a jar. By shrinking authority figures to ludicrous insignificance, Dr. Pretorius is giddily liberated from the constraints of social conditioning: “Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn’t be much more amusing if we were all devils, with no nonsense about angels and being good,” recalling Elsa Lanchester’s skepticism, as Mary Shelley, when described as an angel.
By introducing a second creator figure rebelling against nature (Dr. Pretorius and his menagerie are not in the novel), Whale allows the procreation of two men: “Together, we will create his mate!” Meanwhile, the wandering monster shows self-loathing inability to nurture himself, by attacking his own reflection in a pond, before finding kinship with a compassionate, blind man in the forest. The blind man welcomes the monster, assuming a maternal role: “I shall look after you, and you will comfort me.” Through the excellence of his care, and the rapid progress of the monster under his tutoring, we understand that the maternal is a nurturing quality independent of sex. Men like Dr. Frankenstein do not lack maternal nurture as a fact of their maleness; they willfully reject it in their pursuit of fortune and glory, the social rewards for masculine achievement. In Whale’s ending, it is those who have found mutual nurture – Henry Frankenstein and his fiancée Elizabeth – that Frankenstein’s monster chooses to spare, while those who are unable to care for others – Dr. Pretorius, Frankenstein’s monster and the Bride – “belong dead.” Though they center male characters, Shelley’s novel and Whale’s films reverse male priorities, elevating the maternal to reign supreme.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is credited with inventing science fiction, while her follow-up, The Last Man, founded sci-fi dystopia. After more than a century of male-dominated authorship, science fiction continues to obsessively echo Shelley’s themes of fatherly inadequacy and the vain hubris of the inhumanely over-rationalizing man. Like the persistence of Ann Radcliffe and Lois Weber’s Final Girl in the male-dominated horror genre, or the inability of female creators like Kathryn Bigelow to rewrite the masculine conventions of action film, this persistence of female themes in male-dominated sci-fi demonstrates the power of a genre’s original creators to fix its conventions and shape its expectations. The cultural contributions of female creators like Mary Shelley may be undervalued by society but, like mothers and maternal fathers, they’d leave one hell of an absence.
Brigit McCone covets the Bride of Frankenstein hairdo, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and hanging out with her friends. Friends: good!
In a film, as in real life, with no language to defend herself, the lone woman is a suspect. She gets stared at and scowled at and catcalled and often told that she’s making herself vulnerable, or taking unnecessary risks. In short, our culture says she’s asking for what she gets. A woman alone is unloved, uncared for and written off. In ‘Wild,’ the film based on Strayed’s memoir of her months solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she has several uncomfortable and frankly terrifying encounters.
Most of the film follows Cheryl as she walks alone.
This post by Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.
Right off the bat, I’m going to say that this essay might be more about me and my neuroses than the actual film, Wild. So I’m sorry for that.
I read Cheryl Strayed’s book, Wild: From Lost to Found of the Pacific Crest Trail a few years ago in a time in my life when I was feeling really lost and messed up. It helped me to the degree it could, reminding me of my own writerly quirks, my tendency to sentimentality and (for good or bad) feeding my desire to go off somewhere, somehow and find myself. There were lines I loved, but Strayed’s writing didn’t really get under my skin until I read Tiny Beautiful Things, her collected advice columns written for The Rumpus as Dear Sugar. That, I devoured in one night and cried and cried.
Being a woman and being a writer is a weird and fraught thing. Add to that a certain shyness and a lone wolf tendency and I’m a difficult person to get to know, even harder to like. I see endless versions of myself represented in fiction, in memoirs, as writers tend to write about writing and writing is inherantly isolating, but rarely in films or TV. In a book, we can sink into the central figure’s head and see her as a nuanced figure in multiple relationships and entanglements but in a film, as in real life, with no language to defend herself, the lone woman is a suspect. She gets stared at and scowled at and catcalled and often told that she’s making herself vulnerable, or taking unnecessary risks.
In short, our culture says she’s asking for what she gets. A woman alone is unloved, uncared for and written off. In the graphic memoir, Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life , for example, Ulli Lust writes about her experiences backpacking alone through Italy, where she is told that a woman traveling alone is considered to be a prostitute. In Wild, the film based on Strayed’s memoir of her months solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she has several uncomfortable and frankly terrifying encounters, particularly with two scary looking hunters who assess her body and make her feel unsafe. She is also frightened hitchhiking as she, like most of us, has been raised to believe that anyone who picks you up while hitchhiking is planning to murder and rape you. I particularly identified with the conflicted guilt she feels when she has to lie to the first man who picks her up, telling him she has a strong, loving husband waiting for her just a few miles up the trail. Though he is very kind to her, this lie is necessary for her to feel safe. She shouldn’t feel guilty for taking these precautions, but she does. She shouldn’t have to take these precautions, but part of being a woman in this culture is being afraid. As well as guilty and stupid for being afraid.
I work in a restaurant where I infrequently work night shifts that end at 4:30 a.m.; I don’t mind the work, but I hate having to pay for a taxi home multiple nights. Recently I was talking to a male coworker, kind of idly complaining about this fact. He said, “Well you could always just walk home.” I was stunned at the display of his privilege, that he was so completely unaware that a young woman might feel unsafe walking home, weary, through deserted city streets in the wee hours of the morning. Encounters like this tempt me to avoid precautions, to say, nothing could actually happen to me, that I’m being kind of vain to think I’m a target, but it’s against my programming.
Sometimes she is joined by other hikers along the way, but is always alone again sooner or later.
I have met and interviewed Jean Béliveau , a man who left his home and spent 11 years walking around the world and read about Mike Spencer Brown, the Calgarian who become the world’s most travelled man after visiting nearly every country in the world. These stories fill me with anger and jealousy. When I decided to attend journalism school, my grandmother made me promise that I would not go to one of “dangerous countries” where we were always hearing about terrible things that happened to journalists. In school, I attended a lecture given by Amanda Lindhout, a woman who was kidnapped and tortured in Somalia after going there as a war correspondent. Some of my female relatives even sat me down to watch Taken, framing it as an educational film about what might happen to a woman if she is not careful traveling.
I wasn’t planning on war correspondence, but the idea that it was something denied to me as a woman, made it seem interesting to me. Just like hearing that women were not allowed to be priests the Catholic church made the priesthood seem tantalizing.
So on one hand, I want to see what Cheryl did as a super feminist act, rejecting this idea of special circumstances and extra vulnerability for women but on the other it seems like a deliberate denial of reality. Just because nothing horrible really happened to her, it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have. It doesn’t mean that any other woman, inexperienced in hiking and all alone on the trail, who is inspired by her, could not meet a horrible fate.
Men walk around the world and women are told it is not safe for us to do. We are cowed by these warnings and unsure if by listening we are being smart or letting ourselves be subdued, just as we are uncertain what to do when we are told to dress in modest ways to avoid rape. This should not be our responsibility, and yet isn’t it smart to do all we can to keep ourselves safe, to be realistic?
With these ideas, Wild is very much a woman’s story, taking us deep into Cheryl’s head and her attempts to become a complete person. Though I enjoyed the direction by Jean-Marc Vallée (and as a Canadian, there’s always a tendency to cheer when one of us does a thing) and I’m fond of Nick Hornby, it’s a bit sad that this story of all stories was not given to a female screenwriter or director. That being said, I think the filmmakers did an adequate job addressing this conflict.
On top of this they achieved the near impossible, taking a book about a writer and a writer’s process, a young woman’s tortured internal life being perhaps the least cinematic thing in existence, and making it enjoyable to watch.
Cheryl considers her mother, Bobbi, the love of her life.
The majority of the film follows Cheryl’s hike through the PCT but it is frequently interrupted by flashbacks related to her relationship with her mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern), who she considered the great love of her life. We see her as a towheaded child (played by Strayed’s real life daughter) as her mother becomes her sole protector, whisking her and her brother away from their violent father, as a young woman whose embarrassment over attending college with Bobbi turns into horror over her mother’s sudden sickness and death, and finally as a self destructive grieving daughter, seeking solace in anonymous sex and heroin, both of which contribute to the destruction of her marriage. The idea to hike the PCT comes to her at what framed as her rock bottom, she sees the guidebook with the stunning vista she later visits on its cover, while waiting in line to buy a pregnancy test, sure that if it turns out to be positive, she will have to get an abortion.
In a low point in her life, Cheryl finds the PCT guide book.
In Wild, the use of flashbacks its accomplished with rare skill. They are not popped in arbitrarily, teasing the audience with tidbits of information parceled out through her story, as in many films with parallel timelines. Instead, we see these things as Cheryl is recalling them and become part of her attempts to process what has happened. There is no one single thing that set her on the path careening towards disaster, walking a thousand miles with no real plan for her life post-trail and no money to live on, but a mosaic of things that are revealed to us in and out of sequential order.
Moreover, the line between past and present is blurred by double exposure, images that will later have significance flashing briefly across the screen and the use of music. Diegetic music, music that is actually playing within the world of the film is rare, limited to flashbacks, trail stops and the Grateful Dead tribute she attends, but Wild is saturated with music, most of it, playing through Cheryl’s memory. The music that makes up the soundtrack becomes a hybrid of diegetic and non-diegetic as it is accompanied by Cheryl’s own singing, humming, and voiceover. She also engages with the music she imagines hearing, mentioning in voiceover a song she’d like to hear, that quickly becomes the soundtrack to the scene.
Witherspoon makes college age Cheryl seem real and familiar.
This effect, Cheryl’s coming of age and self discovery is dimmed by Witherspoon’s age. Though she appropriately inhabits the character and her struggles, seeing a 40-something woman go through these things is not as harrowing as seeing a 20-something woman go through them. If Witherspoon’s Cheryl is struggling with the loss of her mother and her loss of self, we’re tempted to see her as a privileged whiner, not a girl suddenly on the brink of life without any life lines. In flashbacks, Witherspoon, aided by unfortunate bangs, also plays college-aged Cheryl. Though we never believe she is actually 22, she skillfully apes the mannerisms and posture of a haughty college kid. She never fully disappears into the character, but we get what she’s trying to do, just like we get that the cast member on Saturday Night Live aren’t able to pass a children but are able to remind us of children. For me, this is aided by her wardrobe, which is full of the sorts of pea coats, boots and denim shirts I wore as a millennial college student and see as signifiers of the breed.
The exploration of privileged is also an important aspect of the film. Though the extremes of Cheryl’s working class background mentioned in the book, that the house she grew up in did not have running water for example, make it into the film, it is still clear that she is not comfortably middle class. In one scene, she and Bobbi discuss their work as waitresses and how hard Bobbi had to work to support Cheryl and her brother on her salary. During her hike, Cheryl is approached by a man writing for The Hobo Times, who declares her the rare example of a female hobo. She argues, sure she has no money, no home, no family, but she is not a hobo, she is not homeless. Hobos are other people, she is just between homes.
As Cheryl becomes an educated woman, we see her begin to look down on her mother and her lack of sophistication, her poverty and her flakiness. As a college student, the first in generations of her family, Cheryl is posed to cross class lines. Her desire to be a writer, in some ways, a frivolous career choice, often seen as only accessible for the leisure classes, recalls this. Her education, which she takes for granted, is contrasted with Bobbi’s late in life decision to attend college alongside her, taking advantage of a program that offers free classes for parents of students. For Bobbi, it is a rush of pure freedom to finally get to read and write and engage with texts in literary theory and Women’s Studies courses.
Cheryl’s break-up tattoo: another writerly trait.
To the extent that Wild can be looked at as a coming of age film, it is about Cheryl’s writing and the slow agonizing birth of her literary voice. The books she reads on the trail become important landmarks for her, such as the James Michener, an author her mother liked who is looked down on by literary types, and the Flannery O’Connor and Adrienne Rich that she sees as glimpses of how she would like to write. When she is told to burn the books she is finished reading, Cheryl recoils in horror; only truly evil people burn books. Though she ultimately begins burning what she had finished reading, Rich’s Dream of a Common Language stays with her the whole way as a talisman. In the book Wild, She keeps a tally of books read and books burnt along the way.
Her decision to get a matching tattoo with her ex-husband, Paul to keep themselves tied together when they get divorced also strikes me as such a writerly thing to do. Getting a break-up tattoo seems bizarre to most people but as writer, I didn’t question it until someone told me it sounded weird. These tattoos make a good story, a symbol of Strayed which she references in various of her writings. They put a cap on her marriage and give it a narrative arc that makes her life seem more like a story, something comfortable and easy to enjoy, easier to gain distance from, than real life.
Cheryl also practicing becoming a writer in the literary quotes she loves in the trail guestbooks, which are set at intervals along the trail, which she attributes to herself as well as the author of the quotes. In this practice she enters into a long tradition of young writers copying out influential texts like The Great Gatsby to the rhythm of the words. In this way, Wild is about Cheryl’s growth and maturation as a writer as well as a woman.
This might be why so many uninformed critiques of the film compare it to Eat, Pray, Love; if you ignore the grit of Cheryl’s desperation, youth and poverty, her trip would seem like a laughably naive attempt to “find herself.” This might be the only way our mainstream culture knows how to categories women’s stories, ghettoizing them as as non-fiction chick-lit.
But Wild is without the scenes of romance or consumerism, or even an assurance that Cheryl will be alright at its end. We see her leave the trail (and symbolically her trials) behind as she reaches The Bridge of the Gods in Portland, and hear her in voiceover reference her future husband and children, but we never see them. The story is not carefully wrapped up in a bow and Cheryl is not perfected. Though she “grows up” to give advice as Dear Sugar and become a celebrated writer, we’re able to like her, to identify with her because she isn’t living this perfect new life of food and love and prayer with nary a nagging worry. As Wild ends with a reprise of Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa,” the film’s haunting “Que Sera Sera” theme, and a montage of photos of the young wild Strayed, her grit is the lasting image of the film.
Sagay discovered the subject of her Jane Austen-like drama a decade ago when she viewed the 18th century portrait by an unknown artist of a beautiful, biracial woman standing next to a blond, a woman in a pink brocade gown, in the galleries of Scone Palace in Scotland. The blond woman reaches out to the other woman who is slightly above here in the picture, and who wears a silk gown and an exotic headdress. She has a twinkle in her eye and exudes life and even has a sense of mischief. You cannot take your eyes off her.
Misan Sagay, the brilliant and passionate screenwriter of Belle, was in Manhattan recently to promote the film. Director Amma Asante and actors Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Belle), Miranda Richardson and Sam Reid also fielded questions from the press in separate rooms.
Sagay discovered the subject of her Jane Austen-like drama a decade ago when she viewed the 18th century portrait by an unknown artist of a beautiful, biracial woman standing next to a blond, a woman in a pink brocade gown, in the galleries of Scone Palace in Scotland. The blond woman reaches out to the other woman who is slightly above here in the picture, and who wears a silk gown and an exotic headdress. She has a twinkle in her eye and exudes life and even has a sense of mischief. You cannot take your eyes off her.
Here are highlights of the interview with the screenwriter, who is also a medical doctor. Sagay speaks with a precise and clipped English accent, but she exudes warmth and passion, especially when she talks about the genesis and the message of Belle.
What was it like to see it fully realized from your script? Was it everything you envisioned?
I think it surpasses what I think that everything at every level more and more was brought to the thing and I think it’s a marvelous movie, so I’m very proud of it.
How did you first discover the story?
I was at university in Scotland. I was a medical student… It’s where William and Kate met. It’s a very traditional university, so quite often I would be the only black person around and so I went to visit Scone Palace and I was walking through and I came to a room and bang, there was a black woman in a painting, and I was stunned and intrigued and thrilled. She didn’t look like a servant or a slave. And I though, ‘Wow!’ and I looked at the caption and it just says, ‘The Lady Elizabeth Murray,’ so Dido is not known. The black woman is unknown. She’s completely silent and I remember carrying this image with me for years and when I went back to Scotland years later and I saw it again, the caption had been changed to ‘The Lady Elizabeth Murray and Dido, the Housekeeper’s Daughter.” I looked at that and I thought, ‘The Housekeeper’s daughter”? She doesn’t look like that, it doesn’t look right, and that was what was the jumping off point for me for the script. Who was she? Who was this woman who was gazing out of this portrait, not just with directness but with a mischief in her face, and who was pointing to her cheek as though, you know, “I’m what I am,” and I really wanted to tell her story.
Did you ever find out why they updated the portrait?
I think it’s almost a Teutonic shift that the older Mansfields were probably less accommodating to the view that this was blood and this was a relative and that the younger generation then are receptive to it. It may be it was updated because people began to ask, up until then no one had asked, and then people had begun to ask. Yes, I think it’s odd that was the story that was put there but that’s what they felt comfortable with I suppose.
It seems like that same story could happen today couldn’t it?
Absolutely. I lot of the research that I did was actually going to speak to people who had been adopted into very, very white environments and yes that story can play out today.
Dido was educated. She could write. There was no reason she hasn’t left a journal. She’s not left a word. This is a girl who lived very carefully about what she said and did. She may have been a Mansfield but she certainly wasn’t free. It was the same feeling I got when I spoke to people who lived in those environments, beloved and taken care of, but always slightly on eggshells.
What did you find out about her father?
That he was an Admiral… But what I found out, the two things that are really interesting, he must in some way he must have lived with Dido’s mother in the West Indies beforehand. And also when he came back to England that his relationship with Dido’s mother fell apart and he then married appropriately but appears never to have lived with that new woman. Whenever you’re doing research you always end up reading stories in the gaps between the stories and my romantic story is that they broke up that relationship and he never loved again. But he certainly never lived properly with his new proper wife, never had children with this new woman.
So you have archival material that no one else saw?
I don’t know that other people didn’t see it. I know that other people, who had seen it, did not – you look at the papers that were out that time – lots of them sort of fudged the issue of who she was. I think it was an issue who she was. I don’t want to say I was the only person, but I was prepared to name – and I wanted to name – what was there. I thought it was a lovely story.
How long did it take for you to develop this story?
I wrote the pitch in 2004 and I began to write the story then, and then the screenplay developed over (time). By 2010 it was over, so it was a long process. It’s a difficult script, many, many difficult decisions had to be taken in order to stay true to this central thing that it would be Belle’s story, so how do we do that? And also what is our aim? Belle herself did not marry until she was 32. It would be perfectly possible to write a long story of her as a life frustrated and a life from which she did not really fulfill herself until after everyone had died. I just didn’t want that for her! I wanted her loved! I wanted her to be beautiful! I wanted somebody to rip off her bodice and want to do so.
I wanted her to be beautiful and so that was why I took that decision that what might be the obvious story was not the way we would go; I would go with a love story.
I also wanted to make sure we looked at this cusp when she would really be discovering, really what being black meant. In the Arcadia of Kenwood and cocooned by childhood and wealth she would not have encountered that until she could encounter the point where she wanted to get married and that there is no place for her… The moment when you understand what your race actually means I think is a big one and I wanted that for her.
What other research did you do to make it factually true to the cultures and to the period?
This kind of thing needs massive research, especially when you’re writing about women. For example, the decision to put women and to have their relationships, which I’m always interested in, to write this sort of Jane Austen romance, made this research absolutely key, that finding the voices of women like this at this time. I was amazingly lucky to stumble on the diary, on the actually diary written by the Countess of Hardwick… much of what was the day to day life we see arise from looking at those women.
I was always looking for emotional truth. There weren’t video camera. We don’t know what actually went on. But it is true in that the Zong case happened. She was in his house. He had to deal with it, so there was a huge amount of that sort of research. (Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of England, handed down a decision in this case, which involved the massacre of slaves, and which became instrumental in the abolition of slavery. He also raised Dido as though she were his daughter.)
There are so many parallels with Belle’s story and even with stories of women of color today. What is the message you would like to get out?
It’s terribly important that this is a voice of black women, that’s what this film is. The main thing for me is this issue about your worth.
There are so many messages, and a lot of it is subliminal but from a very young age what are you worth, compared to other people? And I think it was something Belle had to encounter. What was she worth? She was worth loving but she wasn’t worth eating with.
At the moment where Belle herself had to say, you know what? I’m worth me. I’m worth loving and I can have it. And I can be myself and I think that is the message and I think at the end of the day when every screening I’ve attended the women will stand up and clap because the moment when she says that is a great moment for all of us. I think that it’s a terribly empowering moment and I think that that was the aim.
This movie is so unique, just by the mere fact that both the writer and director are black and female. What type of relationship do you guys have?
I was unwell and I left the project. In 2010 Amma came on as director and she – I believe and feel that at the moment where I maybe had flagged, because it had been seven years, but the script was there, the subject was there, everything was there, that Amma was able to take the baton and run with it, and run for her life with it and she has done an extraordinary, extraordinary job. She’s been true to absolutely everything that was the aim from the beginning.
I assume you’re talking a bit about the controversy. [There was a Writers Guild of America decision that credited Misan Sagay as the Belle screenwriter.] Whenever you see tough opinionated women, you will see tough opinions. And I think that’s what we have here, but I have nothing but admiration and respect for what she’s done as a director, and I think it’s a marvelous movie, marvelous.
What’s next for you?
I’m doing a historical story set in Burma during the Second World War. We always think that it’s white people who have fought that battle, which is called the Forgotten War, but in fact it was won by 300,000 black Africans that were taken over there as part of the British Empire and it was a war that Britain was losing and they brought the Africans and they fought their way through the jungle and helped. Without them the War in the East would not have been won but no one’s told their story.
You’re also a medical doctor. How does that inform your writing?
I think it informs my writing because one of the things you that you look for – maybe you all know this without being a doctor – you’re looking for truth. You look at what’s in front of you and you say what is the emotional truth here?
It’s not that different a process for me. I love doing both things. There’s an immediacy to medicine which there isn’t in this. It can take years looking for a story but to me they’re not that different.
Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.
This guest post by Deborah Pless previously appeared at her blog Kiss My Wonder Woman and is cross-posted with permission.
I first saw Bring It On when I was still deep into my rebellious phase. You know the one. Lots of punk rock, plaid bellbottoms (they came back in style just in time for my middle school years), and an intense loathing for anything that smelled of “school spirit.” I prided myself on never attending a single football game in high school, and I absolutely never ever cared about cheerleading.
I was a rebel. A grrrrl. And no cheerleader was going to get in my way or the way of feminism.
So imagine my surprise when partway into the movie I’d rented as a hatewatch I realized that I cared. A lot. I really, really wanted the Rancho Carne Toros to win that darn cheerleading competition. It made me deeply uncomfortable.
Kirsten Dunst and Eliza Dushku in Bring It On
But looking back on it, I know exactly why I love that movie. It’s not “just” a cheerleading movie; it’s a cheerleading movie. A movie about female athletes in a feminine sport doing incredibly difficult things for the sheer love of the game. And doing those difficult, athletic things as a team.
More than that, this isn’t a movie about a ragtag group of misfits who somehow rise to success. It’s not about women trying to succeed in a man’s world. It’s got more interesting, diverse female characters than you can shake a spirit stick at, and the male characters are the ones who feel ancillary. The male characters are the ones getting flack for joining the sport, and the whole story revolves around a team of women in a female-dominated sport competing against other women at the top of their game.
Cheerleading.
I just dumped a lot on you right there, so let’s back up. Bring It On, released in 2001, stars Kirsten Dunst as Torrance Shipman, a peppy high school cheerleader in her senior year. Torrance has just made team captain of the Rancho Carne Toros, a team that’s just won their fifth National Championship in a row. She’s excited. She’s ambitious, and in the first five minutes of the movie she sends a girl to the hospital.
Gabrielle Union as Isis in Bring It On
And injured player means they need a replacement, so bring on the recruits! Torrance and the team hold tryouts, eventually selecting Missy Pantone (Eliza Dushku), a transfer student from LA and a gymnast looking for an athletic outlet. While Missy is leery of joining the cheerleaders at first, she eventually gives in, because they are athletes, and it sounds like fun.
Unfortunately, Missy gets pretty pissed when she realizes, and tells Torrance, that the Toros have stolen all their cheers, plagiarizing them from an inner-city squad in LA, the East Compton Clovers. She proves it too, and Torrance is horrified to learn that all their National Championships were the result of cheating. Worse, the Clovers know about it, as their captain, Isis (Gabrielle Union), makes very clear. The Toros won’t be getting away with it this year.
Torrance is devastated and has to figure out what to do. They try to carry on as usual, but the Clovers show up at a football game and humiliate them by showing that the cheers are stolen. They try hiring a choreographer, but that ends badly when another team hires the same choreographer, and they both bring the routine to Regionals.
Kirsten Dunst as Torrance Shipman in Bring It On
Finally, they reach the end of their rope, and Torrance decides to do something drastic: make up their own entirely original routine, like they should have been doing all along.
From there to the end of the movie it’s a lot of training montages and inspirational speeches, but the ending is what really sticks the landing here. The Toros and Clovers both compete at Nationals. They’re both really good. And the Toros lose.
But they don’t care, because for once, they lost on their own merits. Besides, second place in a National Championship with a routine they made up in three weeks isn’t all that bad, and the Clovers were genuinely and indisputably better.
Torrance (Dunst) and Isis (Union) face off in Bring It On
Now, there is a romance in the movie, with two guys vying for Torrance (Missy’s brother Cliff, the punk rocker, and her college boyfriend Aaron, the cheating jerk), but the romance is never the feature. It’s a nice side dish to the entrée that is competitive cheerleading. And the entrée is fantastic.
For all that it’s ridiculously sexualized by the media, cheerleading really is a sport. Not only that, but it’s also the single most dangerous high school and college sport, resulting in the most injuries and hospital visits. Cheerleading is terrifying, and it’s hard, and it’s really hard to do well.
The story in Bring It On is about women in a sport that’s totally hardcore trying to be the best. It doesn’t gloss over the sport’s sexualized history, with the football players, who have never won a game, taunting the male cheerleaders by calling them fags, and openly objectifying the women on the squad. No one respects the cheerleaders. But they don’t care.
Missy (Dushku) and Torrance (Dunst) in Bring It On
Or rather, they do, but they don’t let it bring them down. Missy, the character who first disses cheerleading as “not a real sport,” comes around in a big way when she sees that it is physically challenging, and just, you know, fun. She sticks by the team, and even contributes to their ultimate routine. Her gymnastics expertise is sadly underused in the film, but it’s clear that she’s a consummate athlete, and her devotion to the team helps us as an audience get invested.
More than that, though, Missy starts to appreciate the “girliness” of the team. At first she sneers, but she slowly comes around. Because being girly doesn’t mean being weak, the movie shows us. Girly girls are just as capable of kicking butt. Doesn’t mean you have to be a pretty princess, but you can. It’s okay. You can like shoes and still be a top-notch athlete. When Missy starts to get it, we start to get it. She doesn’t lose herself in the squad; she just gets more comfortable. Like she doesn’t have to front, and whatever she’s into is fine. Because they’re a team, and teams support each other.
It’s funny too, because you don’t often think about it, but not only does the movie pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, it also passes the Race Bechdel Test, and contains a surprising lack of White Savior behavior. While Torrance does feel terrible about what her team has done to the Clovers and tries to make amends by raising the money for them to attend Nationals, the Clovers turn her down. They don’t need her help, and they manage to raise the money themselves.
The Toros perform their routine in Bring It On
The title of the movie itself is a sign of how seriously this movie takes the competition, not only wanting to win, but wanting to win because you are actually the best. When Torrance tries to use her white guilt to “make it right,” Isis tells her that all she should do is bring it.
“You want to make it right?” she says. “Then, when you go to Nationals, bring it. Don’t slack off because you feel sorry for us. That way, when we beat you, we’ll know it’s because we’re better.”
Ultimately, I’m pretty sure that’s the message of the movie. That the real pride in sports comes from doing your absolute best no matter what, and win or lose, being completely proud of what you did. The Toros don’t have a lot to be proud of for most of the movie, and you can see the damage it does to them. So their final performance, and their second place win, is a moment of triumph. They fight long and hard and they get the score they deserve.
Kirsten Dunst as Torrance Shipman in Bring It On
I’m not saying the movie is perfect, mind you. There is an alarming amount of sexual objectification even with the caveat that it’s bad, and some of the characters are total stereotypes. Jan, the male cheerleader who just does it because he can finger girls, disgusts me, and the entire bikini car wash thing is sad. But no movie is perfect.
So back to little high school me sitting on the couch, jaw dropped that a movie about cheerleaders in sexy uniforms, that doesn’t skimp on the sex-talk or avoid the sexual issues surrounding the sport, actually made me care. And it made me kind of excited. I wasn’t about to go and try out for the squad, but I was still inspired.
I saw women at the peak of their skill competing in a sport that is for women, by women. A sport where being girly doesn’t mean being weak, and where you try your absolute best because you refuse to go quietly. I fell in love.
Deborah Pless is the blogger-in-chief over at Kiss My Wonder Woman. She lives in Western Washington.
This guest post by Candice Frederick previously appeared at her blog Reel Talk and is cross-posted with permission.
Brit Marling is one of the most authentic actresses of her generation. Remarkably so. She’s not a method actor, not someone who is particularly possessed by a character. Rather, her performances are organic, like they’re peeled from her own person, and not a distant portrayal. No matter how flawed her characters are, she plays them with the same amount of caress and kinship as if they were all varied parts of one whole.
And that’s just the type of actress needed to serve as the ambiguous moral compass in the riveting new drama, The East. In a film that right from its start questions its own intent, Marling (who co-wrote the script with the film’s director, Zal Batmanglij, who also teamed with her for 2011’s Sound of My Voice) quietly yet fiercely redefines the political drama genre in which it exists. Marling plays Sarah, a smart, recent college grad who’s just landed a job at an elite private intelligence firm. Her first task? To infiltrate a dissident group of individuals, a freegan collective, whose sole mission it is to punish and take down various pharmaceutical companies that they feel have indirectly poisoned consumers with their products (in a sense, giving them a taste of their own medicine). The East refers to their latest, largest, target company in which they have a more personal interest.
Despite their cause and their ultimate actions, this cartel, so to speak, isn’t an aggressive batch. They live not too far away from the political heartland, Washington D.C., in a wall-less house torched several years ago by their leader, Benji (Alexander Skarsgård in a solemn yet passionate role), who once lived there as a young boy. They munch on earthly cuisine mostly found on the ground or in dumpsters and avoid any processed or store-brought items to eat, wear, or consume in any way. Needless to say, they appear as vagrants, even though they consist of once-valued members of society who played their parts in the America machine. When one of them, Doc (Toby Kebbell), a physician, experiences first hand the effects of the industry’s conspiracy, he completely changes his life focus to join the cause. Each of the players, including Izzy (Ellen Page), who’s a little feisty firecracker, have had similar paths where the cause has affected them personally.
Izzy (Ellen Page) and Benji (Alexander Skarsgard)
It is Sarah’s job to learn their tactics and plans and report back to Sharon (Patricia Clarkson), her manager at Hiller Brood in D.C. But things change once she learns the truth behind their efforts.
What The East does that makes it more interesting than many other films that have saturated the political genre is its distinct intangibility. It doesn’t set out with a particular purpose. Rather, it embodies a general sentiment of frustration and complacency. The film paints a portrait of a young woman, already impressionable due to her age and unwavering drive to succeed. Sarah’s not a martyr because she’s not really sure she wants to be, despite an unspecified determination. She’s not sure which position to play; she knows she wants to be in the one that lets her win. Which makes her a prime target for both Hiller Brood and the anarchist group because she’s not on either side, really. She’s extremely accessible, in part due to Marling’s natural vulnerability, which makes her point of view that much more relatable even if it doesn’t specifically resonate with you.
Thankfully, Batmanglij and Marling’s screenplay approaches the subject on a much broader level so that it never comes off as a public service announcement, despite the course of events. Sarah’s strength, even when she becomes submerged with the group, is so magnetic to watch. The film also does a good job of clenching the viewer with a heart-thumping score that increases the intensity and pace of the events. If you’re a fan of Tony or Ridley Scott’s work, you can see their influence there. They are just two of the producers of the film.
When we first meet Sarah (Marling), we know her as a young woman who jogs to the sound of Christian music playing in her ears. With Marling’s introductory narration in the beginning of the movie, you can tell right away that Sarah is a soft, empathetic young woman who could easily fall prey to a more pragmatic personality (like her boss, Sharon, for instance). She’s just trying to do what’s right, what she knows to be pragmatic. She has a steady live-in boyfriend with whom she is in love, though she does not confide in him about her professional escapades. She does everything her boss tells her to do, but her actions become less dependable when she becomes affected by the group’s efforts, providing the film with its murky transition.
The beauty of The East is that it doesn’t take any side; it humanizes both sides and shows the weaknesses and strengths of both arguments. In that sense, it is an honest movie. It doesn’t tell you to think any one way or change your opinion on the pharmaceutical industry. Though the movie takes you inside the lives of those involved in the protest movement, and one pro-industry magnet who’s gone rogue, it doesn’t beat you over the head with either story. It’s the rather sensitive portrayals from each character that you will remember the most.
“27 is old.” Frances Ha is a love letter to that idea–that 27 is old, but is, at the same time, the beginning of everything. For this generation, 27 is at that cusp between youth and adulthood and it is painful, terrifying and full of misery and joy. The film captures that moment perfectly, and its bare French New Wave style allows the story, which focuses on, in the words of director Noah Baumbach, “That period in your 20s where you’re necessarily having to separate yourself from a kind of romantic idea of yourself,” to be on full display.
In addition to capturing that moment, Frances Ha also has at its center a friendship between two women. It easily passes the Bechdel Test, and was co-written by the actor Greta Gerwig, who plays Frances.
“I’m not messy, I’m busy.”
In an interview, Gerwig says that the film and its focus on evolving relationships and changing is about that “moment when you’re exiting your youth and you really only know it when it’s gone. It doesn’t announce that it’s the last day of youth, it just leaves…” While these kinds of stories are not rare, seeing the focus placed on a woman’s life and female friendship is.
Frances Ha is one of those rare films that makes a feminist’s heart grow three sizes in an hour and a half.
The female protagonist and her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), are engaged in the most important relationship on screen. Frances and her boyfriend at the beginning of the film break up (he wants to get cats and for her to move in with him; she wants to keep living with Sophie), and Sophie has a relationship with the kind of guy who wears a ball cap and says, “I have to take a leak,” but the central relationships are Frances and Sophie and Frances and herself.
Frances and Sophie’s friendship is incredibly realistic.
Frances is an aspiring modern dancer (she’s an understudy and teaches dance lessons to children at a dance company), and anyone with minimal knowledge of the dancing profession knows that 27 is likely far too old to have any hope of joining the company, yet Frances hopes. She’s sure that this is the year she will be chosen for the company and at least get to tour.
Sophie moves out to live with an acquaintance in Tribeca, where she’s always wanted to live. Frances haphazardly becomes a roommate to two “rich kid” young men (an artist, Lev, and a writer, Benji, with wealthy parents), and she doesn’t get asked to dance in the Christmas productions, much less be a part of the company. Frances’s life–which hasn’t yet felt like it’s begun–is unraveling.
Frances, Benji and Lev.
When she goes home for Christmas, she lies in a bathtub full of water as her mother pounds on the door: “Frances, how much longer?” she pleads.
The length of her life seems short and long, and the next step is elusive.
Through it all, Frances perseveres. She doesn’t break down, she doesn’t quit moving, even if her moves sometimes feel clunky–and real.
In what’s arguably her lowest moment, when she’s attending a dinner party with her temporary roommate who doesn’t seem to like her, Frances does break–in her own way. She drinks a bit too much and when she learns (from strangers) that Sophie is moving to Japan with her fiance, Frances decides to go to Paris.
Frances dances through the streets to David Bowie.
“Sometimes it’s good to do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it,” she says. At this moment, she means going to Paris–even on a charge card–and having a worldly experience. It’s disappointing, as most of those experiences that we are “supposed” to have often are. Frances is left feeling empty, and more lost than when she began.
She makes sure to be home on Monday, because the head of the dance company had requested a meeting with her. Frances–charmingly delusional–thinks she’s going to ask her to be a member of the company. Instead, she’s offered an office administration job. Frances says no. She’s not ready to move into that part of her life, where she no longer has that unfettered hope of being who she thought she was going to be.
She returns to her alma mater to be an RA during a summer dance camp (where she discovers she’s not even allowed to take dance classes) and a server for special events. It’s during this experience–the juxtaposition of her life and the college students’ lives, and her being an adult in a place of youthful potential–that something changes. She runs in to a drunk Sophie at a fundraiser. Sophie is belligerent and stays over in Frances’s dorm room. Their roles are reversed that night. Frances seems to have it all together and Sophie is falling apart.
“Your blog looked so happy,” Frances says after Sophie says she’s been miserable and won’t be marrying her fiance. They both had been struggling to do what they are supposed to do when they are supposed to do it, but it’s not working. They must separate themselves from that “romantic idea” they’d had of themselves, their “story of us” that included taking over the world, to move forward.
Frances does so by taking the administrative job at the dance company, and is able to continue choreographing. Her eyes glisten with happiness in the control booth as dancers on stage perform her choreography. As the gorgeous, disjointed dance goes on, the camera pans through the audience, focusing on all of the people in Frances’s life who care about and support her. The company owner compliments her work, gushing over the performance. Frances briefly talks to one of her old roommates, Benji, and it is clear that something might develop between the two of them. But the person she’s “making eyes” at is Sophie, her best friend.
The framing of Frances’s life around a dance career is perfect, because dance is a profession that one ages out of, and it’s so much, on the surface, about performance. Frances, as she perceives herself getting older, feels like she needs to perform to choreography not her own. When she realizes she can make her life work in another way, she’s rewarded.
In an article at Forbes, Dina Gachman notes the importance of Frances’s career trajectory, and the lesson that there’s something in between getting exactly what you think you want or settling for less:
“That doesn’t mean you should meander all over the place without a plan waiting for success to rain down on you, but one of the great things about Frances Ha is that it’s saying: It’s OK that your life and career aren’t picture perfect. Maybe the picture is just different than you imagined.”
In the end, Frances is moving into her own apartment, a sign of success, since her living arrangements have always been cause for stress and uncertainty. She’s able to work and make a living in the dance world. She’s everything she wanted to be, just in a different way.
Frances dancing in a grown-up pencil skirt.
As she goes to put her handwritten name plate onto her mailbox, her name is too long to fit. She folds it neatly, and “Frances Ha” peeks out from the window. She did what she needed to do to make it fit, much like she did with her life. When she does figure out how to make all of the pieces fit, she gets everything she needs and realizes what she wants.
“While capturing the hilarity, awkwardness and anxiety all of us might face in our late 20s – gaining and losing best friends while pursuing what feels like an increasingly impossible dream – Frances Ha says something very specific about gender. It shows us that women can be messy, graceful, sad, funny, artistic, ambitious and caring all at once. You know, human.”
The sheer humanity on display throughout Frances Ha feels much more groundbreaking than it should. The women and men in the film are not people you aspire to be, but they are people, on some level, who you are and who you know.
After watching the film, I immediately told my best friend she had to watch it. The depiction of female friendship and the muddy misery of the mid-20s was breathtaking. There are so many art-house and Hollywood films that center on men’s coming-of-age stories, and so few about women’s. Frances Ha shows that it can be done, and it can be done well.
That moment when you are in the control booth of your life, which may not look how you thought it would, but it’s just how it’s supposed to be? That’s a great moment.
When a flawed and wonderful woman is having that moment on the big screen? That’s a great moment for all of us.
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
