Bitch Flicks

Sarah Polley's 'Stories We Tell': A Radical Act

2013-05-21T14:53:00.001-04:00

Movie poster for Stories We Tell

Written by Stephanie Rogers.

We live in an age now when things seem … less “real” to me. Facebook lets us put our private lives on display, and even then, it’s a version of our lives that we edit, exaggerate perhaps, and invent—all for public consumption. People become overnight stars when homemade YouTube clips go viral—often another version of an edited public performance. Our television shows, especially Reality TV—and even shows such as American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance—present stories that appear to be true but are, in fact, edited for a public audience.

So, how do we define “real” anymore or, for that matter, what is “true”?

Polley and her father in Stories We Tell

Sarah Polley explores this concept in her wonderful documentary, Stories We Tell. While the film focuses on her family background and a long-kept family secret of sorts, it ultimately explores memory—how it aids and fails us, and how the act of storytelling often requires us to fill in the gaps. This isn’t a new concept by any means, but Polley’s decision to tell her story through film, and to put that story on screen for a wider audience—in a society (and film industry) that consistently devalues women’s work and women’s stories—is a radical act.

Mary Jo Murphy gives some background on the film in her New York Times review:

A bit more about “the story”: Ms. Polley is the youngest of five siblings. Dad was an English actor in Toronto; Mom, an actress, had two children from a marriage before she met him. She died of cancer when Sarah was 11, and at some point after that, one or more of her much older siblings began to tease her about her paternity. Eventually she did a little investigating.

When she found her answer, and talked to her father and siblings about it, she became fascinated with how each of them was “telling the story and embellishing the story and making the story their own.” The act of telling the story, she said, “was changing the story itself.”

Polley's father in Stories We Tell

I love the idea of the past existing as fluid, ever-changing. And Stories We Tell touches on that, reminding us that people truly do live long after their deaths—in the memories and celebrations of those most important to them. I certainly don’t mean to sentimentalize the story because it’s not a sentimental film (which isn’t to say that the audience in the theater wasn’t a weeping mess), but I want to convey that a woman making an emotionally gripping film about herself, about her mother, about motherhood even—is absolutely a radical act.

Some disagree. Mike LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote the following in his review (titled, “Stories We Tell Review: Not Worth Telling”):

Polley is making a film about her father, her late mother, her siblings. She should protect them. What she shouldn't do is offer up the resulting feel-good whitewash to the scrutiny of a watching world. She shouldn't force on strangers the task of sitting through this. And she shouldn't present a work of vanity and closed-in narcissism as an exercise in soul baring, because it's embarrassing for everybody.

Polley's mother and father in Stories We Tell

In actuality, the most important part of this film—and what makes it feminist—is precisely its “vanity” and “closed-in narcissism.” Of course, I wouldn’t use those words to describe it—I’d say “intimacy” and “closed-in confidence”—because they play into the dominant ideology that women’s stories aren’t important. And Stories We Tell is exactly that—Sarah Polley’s story: embellished, re-enacted, unsure, important. She interviews her father(s), her siblings, her mother’s former lovers, and her mother’s friends, all the while keeping herself outside the frame and directing her subjects, or “storytellers” as she calls them, to tell their individual version of events. How Polley chooses to direct the film, to edit it, to interrogate the assertions of her storytellers, and to learn from them—that is her story.

And telling it is a radical act.

Leigh Kolb wrote a piece for Bitch Flicks last November called, “Female Literacy as a Historical Framework for Hollywood Misogyny” in which she suggested that, “When women finally break through and are able to tell their stories, those stories are immediately dismissed as silly and trivial.” She goes on to say:

Perhaps this bleak, largely anti-feminist landscape in Hollywood is more deliberate. If we acknowledge women's long history of being neglected education and literacy, and that women have been repeatedly told (or observed) that their stories lack action and intrigue for a broad audience, how can this not have larger social effects? And at some point, do we come to the conclusion that these messages are what the dominant group wants?

Polley's mother in Stories We Tell

The good news is that reviews like the one written by Mick LaSalle, who refers to Stories We Tell at one point as “the opposite of a courageous piece of work,” look ridiculous next to all the praise for the film. In fact, if we're lucky, maybe the success of Polley's piece will spark a larger conversation about the marginalization of women and minorities in our culture, about whose stories “deserve” to be told and who gets to tell them.

This film—if “the personal is political” still means anything in the age of my multiple fake Facebook identities—needs to be seen. It deserves to be seen. It’s a film about women knowing and not knowing one another. It’s a film about forgiveness and disappointment and searching for one’s identity and place within the family. It's about existing as both participant and observer in one's own life. It’s about longing and loss and how we define families. It's about the art of filmmaking itself. It’s about mistakes and motherhood and heredity and unconditional love.

And, perhaps most importantly, it’s about a woman in Hollywood—an industry that boasts less than 20% of women film directors and an ever-shrinking number of available roles for women—refusing to accept the devaluation of women's work, getting behind a camera … and daring to tell a story.

Sarah Polley, badass

Movie Makers from the Margins: Lorene Scafaria

2013-05-20T12:55:00.000-04:00

Written by Erin Fenner.

In a 2012 interview with Vulture, Lorene Scafaria said she is not afraid of “quirky.” And why should she be? Indie-wood’s model to movie making seems to be dependent upon quirk. Whimsical women characters bring in the big money in the industry.

Michael Cera and Kat Dennings in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

Scafaria wrote the screenplay for Nick and Norah’sInfinite Playlist, and I can forgive most of the quirk there. The dueling premises – rescuing a drunk friend and finding your favorite band at a mystery venue – worked to propel the narrative forward at a good pace. The growing optimism of the characters matched the lighthearted arc of the film. Most of the characters were palatable. It hardly passed the Bechdel test, unless you consider Norah’s (Kat Dennings) interactions with her drunk friend a conversation, but it did pass the GLAAD test by nonchalantly making an “all-gay” band Nick’s (Michael Cera) connection to underground music and his way to impress fellow music-lover, Norah.

What I am getting at here is: I am willing to forgive the over-abundance of quirk in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. But, I can’t be so lenient when it comes to the film Scafaria directed and wrote, Seeking a Friend for the End of theWorld.

Steve Carell and Keira Knightley in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

The concept is poignant and hilarious, viewing the end of the world through an intimate lens. It forgoes the heroics of a Michael Bay movie and instead inspects the day-to-day challenges of fast-approaching mortality asking: How do we grieve as a community and how do we live with each other when we know that we won’t live any longer?

And, for the first part of the film, that exploration is funny and tender. Dodge (Steve Carell) is a middle-aged insurance man who was left by his wife as the announcement that the end was nigh came over the radio waves. (As in: his wife [played by Carell’s actual wife, Nancy Carell] full-on bolts out the car door after the announcement finishes.)

Dodge’s life doesn’t appear to change too much. He’s bored with the job he continues to go to and interacts with his friends who still remain shallow. You think this might just turn into another existential metaphor for trudging through life – but don’t worry. Dodge meets his manic pixie dream girl, Penny (Keira Knightley), so we don’t need to worry about in-depth examinations because we have our fast-food route to a resolution: love.

Penny is wacky and sentimental. As she’s leaving her boyfriend and apartment she remembers to bring along a stack of records. She’s a hypersomniac; sleeping even while Dodge vacuums around her. She has the sort of bad luck that means, oh shoot, they’re always getting into tricky situations. Penny talks fast and cries expressively. Without her, Dodge would not be able to grasp at the meaning we all want him to find.

She’s the classic MPDG, not because of the quirk, but because she is primarily a male character’s tool for his personal self-discovery.

Their relationship could have been ok. They start out as co-adventurers seeking out their own resolution but, after they have sex one time in the heat of an orgy-escaping moment – we, the Pavloved audience (this is the scene where you ought to cry) – know that the characters are doomed to romance of the cheesiest kind.

Their need to find love in each other to resolve a film about the world ending reduces a crisis of humanity in the way that most American films reduce a crisis of humanity: focusing on the individual struggle of one person trying to connect with one other one person in the carnal way.

They don’t die alone, which is all they wanted after all. Crisis averted.

Scafaria’s lens is interesting at first. It does make sense that a woman director would look at a topic that has been explored from every exploding angle and find something else. But, she explores it in an ultimately sentimental oh-too-predictable way that leaves us with a content male character gazing at his MPDG as the end envelopes them.

Bitch Flicks' Weekly Picks

2013-05-19T12:00:00.000-04:00

Where Have All the Women Gone in Movies? by Rebecca Keegan via Los Angeles Times

Lucy Liu: "People See Sandra Bullock in a Romantic Comedy, Not Me" by Jorge Rivas via Colorlines

Lucy Liu Talks Candidly about Racism and Stereotypes in Hollywood by S.E. Smith via XO Jane

My Medical Choice by Angelina Jolie via The New York Times

Angelina Jolie Removed Her Breasts to Save Her Life. Some Fans Wish She Hadn't. by Amanda Hess via Slate's Double X

'Brave' Creator Blasts Disney for "Blatant Sexism" in Princess Makeover by Paul Liberatore via Marin Independent Journal

Unsurprisingly, Disney Says It's Not Backing Down on that Merida Redesign by Susana Polo via The Mary Sue

'Star Trek's History of Progressive Values -- And Why It Faltered On LGBT Crew Members by Devon Maloney via Wired

The Unending Heartbreak of Great Expectations: Why I Can’t Watch The Mindy Project Anymore by Eesha Pandit via Crunk Feminist Collective

The Other Double Standard: On Humor and Racism in Feminism by T.F. Charlton via BlogHer

How 'Scandal's Shonda Rhimes Became Disney's Primetime Savior by Meghan Casserly via Forbes

Women Front 'Nashville' Band: On Screen and Off, Female Power Drives the ABC series 'Nashville' by Deborah Vankin via Los Angeles Time

Network Axes Fall Hard on Gay Characters by Lesley Goldberg via The Hollywood Reporter

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Pilot Season 2013-2014 by Kendra James via Racialicious

'Brave,' 'Iron Man 3,' and the Faux Feminism of Armed Women by Scott Mendelson via Forbes

Why 'Frances Ha' is the Feminist Must-See Film of the Year So Far by Imran Siddiquee via Miss Representation

The Number of Women in Top-Grossing Movies Hits Five-Year Low. What are Women for in Hollywood? by Alyssa Rosenberg via ThinkProgress

Trailer Roundup: Women-Created Fall TV Shows by Karensa Cadenas via Women and Hollywood

Sitcoms are the Golden Land of Feminist TV Characters by Gabrielle Moss via Bitch Media

Stop Policing and and Questioning Beyoncé's Feminist Credentials by Lauren Rankin via PolicyMic

What have you been reading and/or writing this week?? Tell us in the comments!

Miyazaki Month: Howl’s Moving Castle

2013-05-17T19:00:00.000-04:00

Written by Myrna Waldron.

Howl's Moving Castle travelling through the mountains

The next film featured in my “Miyazaki Month” retrospective is Howl’s Moving Castle. It was the successor to Spirited Away, which was supposed to be Miyazaki’s Swan Song, but then again so was Princess Mononoke. Dude’s never going to retire, and that’s just fine. It didn’t repeat Spirited Away’s success at the Oscars (losing to Curse of the Were-Rabbit) but is still a fan favourite. It’s also one of his few films to be an adaptation (Ponyo’s retelling of The Little Mermaid being the other one) though it doesn’t even try to be faithful. I have read the original book by Diana Wynne Jones, but it’s been a few years (Yes, I promise to re-read it soon). I do know for sure that the war subplot was definitely not in the novel. TV Tropes says that Miyazaki was incredibly upset by the US invasion of Iraq (as any sensible person would be) so he wove that into his adaptation. Environmentalism isn’t a theme this time (beyond lavish depictions of nature, but that’s a Ghibli thing) but pacifism and feminism make a reappearance.

So far, the English dub script is the most accurate of the three films I’ve reviewed. I suspect this is because this film is an adaptation of a Western novel and, as such, includes a Western understanding of Fantasy Tropes rather than Japanese. Far less localization would be required in adapting the script. No Captain Obvious lines this time, thank goodness. There were a few line changes I took notice of, however. In the Japanese version, Sophie says that she hired herself as a cleaning lady. In the dub, however, she says that Calcifer hired her because he couldn’t stand how messy the castle was. Not really sure why the change was necessary here. Another change irked me a little. When Howl is telling Sophie about his past with the Witch of the Waste, in Japanese, he says, “She seemed quite interesting, so I approached her. But she terrified me, and I ran away.” In English, he says, “She was once quite beautiful, so I decided to pursue her. But I realized she wasn’t, so, as usual, I ran away.” The Witch is extremely overweight, but until her powers are stripped by Suliman, she’s clearly still beautiful. This script change reinforces the bullshit that fat women are automatically no longer beautiful.

Spirited Away’s English cast is still better than this film’s. I honestly really do not like the casting of Christian Bale as Howl. I’ve never liked his Batman voice, and that’s honestly all I can hear here. And really, for a character who is a flamboyant, foppish pretty-boy, they chose Christian Bale? Still, at least he had prior experience as a voice actor for Disney. Jean Simmons and Emily Mortimer are fine as Old and Young Sophie. Though it’s a little distracting that Sophie is the only one with a British accent here. And as a fan of old movies, I loved being able to hear Lauren Bacall’s husky voice again. As for Billy Crystal, well, I think they just gave him a basic translation of the Japanese script and told him to go nuts. Calcifer’s dialogue diverges from the original script the most, and definitely has an improvisational air to it. But I don’t mind, since his performance makes the movie. (He also had prior Disney voice acting experience.)

If I had one big complaint to make about this film, it’s that the 3rd act is a MESS. It’s taken me several re-watchings of the film to make heads or tails of it, because there is just way too much going on and very little is explained. This is a problem that is in a lot of Miyazaki films, but it’s particularly bad here. I believe the film’s ending diverges almost completely from the book’s, too. The really mindbending thing is that the film contains a causal loop. Sophie travels to Howl’s past via the black portal on the door, and witnesses him making the bargain with Calcifer. No reason is given for him to make this decision. She’s able to manipulate the events of the past rather than just watching them, and says that she knows now how to save both of them, and asks for him to find her in the future. And the first thing he ever said to her was, “I was looking everywhere for you.” But it is not explained how the black portal can travel to the past. And it is the black portal that Howl exits through when he’s out sabotaging the bombers. So…what exactly does that black portal DO? Was Sophie only allowed to go to the past because she was desperately trying to find a way to help Howl? This stuff still confuses me 10 years later. I know that showing rather than telling is an important filmmaking principle, but there’s a limit here.

Sophie can no longer put up with Howl's vanity, saying she has never once been beautiful

Sophie is another wonderful Miyazaki female protagonist. Like the others, she has agency, and drives forward her own story. Howl’s name may be in the title, but he’s a secondary protagonist to her. Her character arc is centred around her low self-esteem, and is a commentary on how women are pitted against each other in the interest of attracting men. She’s shy and relatively plain compared to her glamorous mother and sister, so she dresses dowdy and keeps telling herself that she’s not beautiful (even though anyone who sees her would disagree). The Witch of the Waste, who desires to possess Howl’s heart, is jealous of Sophie (and presumably any woman that gets mixed up with Howl), so she casts a curse to make Sophie become a 90 year old woman. We could probably divine some Freudian implications here - The Witch removed her rival by taking her fertility away. The properties of the curse are another thing that aren’t really explained in this film. As the story progresses, Sophie gradually becomes younger (usually appearing 60ish rather than 90ish), but in times when she shows confidence, reverts back to her true age. Her hair even reverts to its original colour when she’s asleep, suggesting that she has to be conscious of the spell for it to work. The explanation given on TV Tropes which makes the most sense to me is that she is unknowingly recasting the spell on herself every time she puts herself down, and that it actually broke long before. Thematically, it seems that this film is arguing that age is in many ways a social construct, and that you only sabotage yourself when you put yourself down. But I can certainly sympathize with Sophie. Lord knows I’ve been there.

Although I find the ending convoluted, I enjoyed watching Sophie save the day. Howl only has his double-edged sword magic to rely on, whereas she has a quick wit that she didn’t recognize in herself until she became old. It wasn’t until there was no reason to doubt herself anymore that she started gaining confidence. Much of her actions are because of her love for Howl, but she does not have a slavish single-minded devotion to him. Instead, her love makes her want to stand up for him, and to want to care for the others in their “family.” She even forgives The Witch and uses affection to persuade her to give Howl’s heart back to him. Only weeks before, she was enjoying The Witch’s struggles to climb the palace steps. It shows how far both of them have come. And I liked that two people who originally considered each other romantic rivals could find an understanding and an affection for each other as family. How often does that happen?

The Witch of the Waste's powers are stripped away by Suliman

Speaking of The Witch of the Waste, I’m still not sure how I feel about her character. I wonder how necessary it was to make her grotesquely fat (admittedly, I don’t remember if she was overweight or not in the novel). She’s clearly the kind of fat person who never moves around at all (she doesn’t even walk if she doesn’t have to), but I am getting very tired of depictions of fat people that make us out to be as lazy as possible. It’s inferred that her outward appearance is a reflection of the ugliness inside of her, but again, is that kind of inference really necessary? It was also kind of sadistic that Madame Suliman forced her to climb up an enormous amount of stairs in order to debase the Witch and make her physically weak. Still, I do like that once again in a Miyazaki film, here’s a supposed villain with some moral ambiguities. She’s clearly not completely to blame for her predicament, or for her greed for Howl’s heart, as she, too, gave up her heart to a demon. And once she’s depowered, she’s a sweet, senile old lady - this is who she really is inside.

Madame Suliman appears to be the real villain of this story. She allows the King to be a blustering, warmongering fool. She entices The Witch of the Waste into coming to the Palace with a promise that her powers will be respected at last, and instead springs a trap that removes The Witch’s powers (brushing it off as a punishment for The Witch’s selfishness). And she sends a royal invite to Howl under both of his pseudonyms, knowing that he cannot refuse and that both of them are him. She even plans to blackmail Howl into fighting for the Empire, or she will depower him just like she did to The Witch. Suliman is a total tyrant, and yet she gets away with it at the end because she’s planning to stop the war. Bit of an anticlimax there, but then again, there was already too much going on in the 3rd act. I wish I knew more about her, especially her time as Howl’s teacher. Surely some of the “War is bad!” stuff could have been dropped for a little more character development for her. (I’m already sympathetic to that message, after all.)

Howl presents to Sophie a beautiful field filled with ponds and wildflowers

I sound like I dislike this film more than I do. I really do love the fairy tale story, Sophie and Calcifer’s characters, and the trademark sumptuous visuals. I love the steampunkiness of the setting (which appears to be Victorian Germany). I love that this is a fairy tale where the heroine is the one who drives the story forward, and makes everything all right in the end. I remember reading some bullcrap from the screenwriter of Oz: The Great and Powerful complaining that there aren’t enough fairy tales with men as the heroes. (Yes, really.) If he’d seen this film, maybe he’d finally understand just how rare heroines like Sophie are. What I love, most of all, is this film’s approach to the issue of self-esteem of women. Miyazaki understands very well just how hard it is for us to be confident in a world that is constantly telling us that we’re inferior. And that we have to find the confidence within ourselves - being told we’re beautiful isn’t enough, we have to believe it.

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.

On 'One Life To Live': Two Young Women Spiral Into Predictable Complications On Hulu's Soap Reboot

2013-05-17T15:26:00.001-04:00

A brand new start for the young set of One Life To Live. (pictured: Andrew Trischitta as Jack, Laura Harrier as new Destiny, Kelley Missal as Dani, and Robert Gorrie as new Matthew)

Written by Janyce Denise Glasper

When One Life to Live got canceled at the same time as All My Children, I felt crushed.

A part of me literally died.

It was easily one of the best written soaps on the air, and the ratings were pretty on par, rising rapidly since ABC’s brutal announcement.

Now, Prospect Park has taken over the reins and produces One Life to Live on Hulu.

Yet the cost of reinvention and brand new start (as vocalized in the autotuned new Snoop Dogg or Snoop Lion produced theme song) made the stories of two young women--Destiny Evans and Danielle “Dani” Manning fall into further character assassination.

I understand that people change, but why have them both shift into individual shocking circumstances?

High school sweethearts--Matthew Buchanan (Eddie Alderson) & Destiny Evans (Shenell Evans).

Before we get into discussing the reboot, Destiny Evans and Matthew Buchanon’s story was the second teen pregnancy storyline in a matter of two years--the first being Starr Manning's. Destiny even sought Starr’s counsel. Matthew had always been reluctant about fatherhood, but Destiny carried the burden of adolescent relationships--of the seeming age old philosophy that sex equated to the ultimate commitment and consequences be damned. Rarely is it ever advised to youth that love is sometimes stronger in other avenues.

Destiny, raised by grandparents feigning to be parents, fell in love with Matthew during their high school years. He didn’t return her affection at first and soon recanted, bearing his heart. Alas, they made love and conceived little Drew.

Shenell Evans' school schedule prevented her return to her NAACP nominated role.

Now in present Llanview, on April 29th, a woman saunters her way into Shelter’s night club opening, cutting passed the long-lined crowd.

“What is your name?” asks the burly security guard.

“Destiny,” she answers, giving a saucy smile. Upon entry, she shifts into the crowd and begins dancing seductively.

It was an immediate double take! This is Destiny? She is certainly different interior and exterior wise. No longer a shy, quiet girl, she is a jezebel, all wild, free, and enticing to the male gaze--no signs of single motherhood in sight.

Laura Harrier is the new Destiny.

Shenell Edmonds couldn’t return and they cast Laura Harrier in her place--an older, skinnier, lighter skinned Destiny who wears midriff baring tops and dances to support Drew.

Recasts are a familiar ways of soap opera life, but it’s the stereotyping that is tough to swallow--one negative pill after another. Teen pregnancy was enough to deal with and now Destiny is going so far down the bad turnpike. One can only expect a surge into a complicated spiral of twisted knots. Her father was a doctor for crying out loud! Can’t something wonderful rub off on her? Why is it always the “Strippers with a Heart of Gold” path? With Matthew’s parents helping her with babysitting duties, shouldn’t Destiny be more liberated in finding passions that didn’t involve stroking the male ego?

Product of Tea Delgado and Todd Manning, things aren’t going dandy for former boarding school Dani Manning either.

Dani Manning (Kelley Missal) and her boarding school friend, Matthew (Eddie Alderson).

Out of control from Todd leaving town and Tea’s lack of attention--her newborn son died earlier this year on another soap, General Hospital--Dani has turned to drugs and alcohol as solace. In the first episode, Dani is barely dressed in an overtly sexy lacy mini and tumbling all over Shelter high on oxycontin and drinks.

I understand that she feels isolated and hurt by Tea and Todd’s parenting skills, but at the same time, it is disheartening that drugs or sex have become the comfort that young women sought. Seeing her rub against men in wanton fashion, looking for escape, is a tired dance routine that the most genius writers continue to utilize. It is as though women have no aspirations, no desires other than to seek intimacy in inebriation and wandering male affection.

Dani is a talented woman who could accomplish greatness and so can Destiny.

I hope that the writers stop going for the deadening shock value factor and bring about a new, refreshing perspective.

Sure, it is part of the soapy goodness phenomenon to break these two girls into complex adult situations, especially seeing as with the new online format cuss words fly like catfight slaps. They are certainly growing up too fast and viewers are brought into the center of this puzzle. I can’t say it is unbelievable because in this medium anything goes.

Sometime as an avid enjoyer, I do long for a little normality and less over-the-top spontaneity.

So where did Destiny and Dani’s maturities go?

A disoriented Dani (Kelley Missal) awakens from her near drug overdose ordeal.

Dani does appear to be on the brink of sobering from the drug habit, slowly. Yet she just moved in with two guy friends--Matthew and Jeffrey. Every dedicated soap fan knows what happens when a woman puts herself in that particular situation.

Still, it would have been nice if Dani and Destiny moved in together, had a young woman’s pad of survival and hope, rubbing off on each other in a way that strengthened a compelling feminine bond and kicked recovery’s ass. They’re around the same age and have similar experiences with hardship. Yes Dani went to boarding school and Destiny went to public; I could see them forming an authentic pact. Dani could gain experience from watching Destiny raise Drew and become a beneficial aide when Bo and Nora are unable to babysit their grandchild.

But of course, close female friendships always seem so frowned upon in soap operas. Catfights truly are the way to go. After all, look at Dorian and Vicki--they’re still at each other’s throats. Plus, Destiny didn’t like Dani in the beginning due to her camaraderie to Matthew. By the way the story is looking right now, Dani and Matthew are getting closer again, and that will likely burn Destiny’s biscuits. Yes. I definitely foresee a catfight (probably decades long if Hulu keeps One Life to Live going) more than bosom buddies in the future of these two women.

Is it any wonder why soaps are fading fast? Dying? Maybe one reason is because of the unoriginal concept of females despising and envying one another. There's no strength in that.

Sigh.

I have no idea which direction these two women will take, but honestly keep praying that the writers give them happiness stemmed from valuing the importance of self worth. That one life to live doesn't always have to be so treacherous and evil.

That gets old quickly.

Here's a Fun and Depressing Graphic About Television, Ratings, and Dudes Who Create Shows

2013-05-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

Canceled: Single Season TV Shows – An infographic by the team at CableTV.com

Do you have any graphics you'd like to share with Bitch Flicks readers? Share them in the comments or email them to btchflcks(at)gmail(dot)com!

Picture This: A Woman Goes to Film School and Becomes a Filmmaker

2013-05-16T09:00:00.000-04:00

Filmmaker Violeta Barca-Fontana

This is a guest post written by Violeta Barca-Fontana.

INT. FILM SCHOOL, CLASSROOM – DAY

First day of class at a film school in Madrid. Twenty impatient students are waiting for the teacher, PACO, a very well known film director. Also in the classroom is VIOLETA (20).

The professor enters the classroom with a serious look and a decided walk. Taking a moment to look over the beardless students, some with incurable acne, who return his gaze with eyes wide open waiting for his wise words.

MASTER

You are twenty five students.

Only three of you will ever direct a film.

The students look at each other hoping they misunderstood him.

The professor continues with his welcome speech.

MASTER

I see there are some women here.

(beat)

In film women usually end up in make-up, wardrobe, or as script supervisors.

The six girls, including Violeta, look at each other for moral support not knowing how to react.

MASTER

I say that, just so you take it under consideration.

That was my very first contact with the film world. The first of many scenes I would live through during my career.

But my professor was wrong. My first boss was a woman; one of the best line producers in Spain and, without a doubt, one of the toughest and most unscrupulous bosses I have ever had. I learned the most about film making from her. I learned how films were really made, and how a well organized production leads to certain success.

Carmen, my boss, treated the women of her team much more harshly than the men. At first I thought she was very unfair to do so, but after all these years, reflecting on how much I learned being around her, I realized that maybe she did it because she felt she could bring out the best in them that way.

I worked with her in two different productions. Without a doubt she treated me worse than any of my co-workers. I think she wanted to take the wind out of my arrogance and break through the wall every film school builds around you: “I know everything and I´m the best.” I think she wanted to show me the subterranean underground of real life, where real movies get made, grown-up movies; where if you want to be called Director, first you have to earn your place with lots of effort and years of experience.

Violeta, in color.

Schools, and above all film schools, just serve to create confusion among the students leading them to believe that their initial easy success inside can be achieved in the professional world. No, ladies and gentleman; making movies is very complicated.

In my second film with Carmen, she promoted me from PA to Second AD. The director was the very well known master CARLOS, already considered an icon in Spain.

Pretty soon Carlos took a liking to me and wanted me to sit in front of the monitors with him all the time, explaining every shot to me. I was fascinated to observe how he would sketch the next shot on a scrap of paper with his Mont-blanc fountain pen to show his Director of Photography. As a film student I look back on those hours with him as a divine gift.

I have great memories of Carlos as one of my greatest teachers, a true genius. Despite this I sensed that inside he believed the idea that women do not direct movies. Carlos constantly asked one of my male colleagues, strangely enough the script supervisor, when he would direct his next short film, and what was he writing lately. I always hoped that longed question would be asked of me, but it never came, as if he assumed that I was not writing, and I had no intention of directing either. I always wanted to expound about my many projects to my Master.

INT. PLATÓ DE RODAJE – DAY

A huge set with over fifty people coming and going, working, loading, unloading, cameras, rails, spotlights. Carlos in the background talking to three men in suits, producers. They talk, they laugh.

Violeta walks in their direction. Within a few feet she feels observed by the group, who have a big laugh. Violeta is about to pass by when Carlos stops her.

CARLOS

Violeta, wait. Come here for a moment.

Violeta draw close. The men in suits stop laughing but kept their smiles behind their ties.

CARLOS

Tell me, what are you working on? So you write?

Have you ever directed anything?

Violeta pauses. Uncomfortably, she looks at the group which is waiting for her to give them a failed reply.

VIOLETA

(timidly)

Well, I just finished producing a feature film with two colleagues from school. It’s called La Fiesta and the Walt Disney Company has picked it up for distribution.

Silence. Their smiles go away. Violeta smiles amiably and moves on to continue her work.

I don't know if it's easier or harder to work with men or women. I feel very comfortable working with both. But what I do know is that most of the time working with women means not having to constantly prove your worth. We all know what we're capable of and just do our job.

The Color Thief crew.

This theory held up in my last project, Color Thief. A project, and I promise unintentionally, led almost entirely by females, which from the beginning has been characterized by its fluidity. Is this because it is guided by women? I do not know...

Conspicuous Consumption and 'The Great Gatsby': Missing the Point in Style

2013-05-15T15:04:00.000-04:00

The Great Gatsby (2013)

Written by Leigh Kolb

Critic Kathryn Schulz, in "Why I Despise The Great Gatsby," bemoans the acclaim that the novel receives in literary circles. She says, "It is the only book I have read so often despite failing—in the face of real effort and sincere intentions—to derive almost any pleasure at all from the experience... I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent..."

Well, yes.

Isn't that the point?

Had Schulz replaced The Great Gatsby with "The American Dream" (rags-to-riches wealth and power and the reward of lavish lifestyles and romantic fulfillment), then she would have been spot on, and would have captured the exact message that The Great Gatsby has conveyed to generation after generation, ceaselessly beating us against the current... sorry.

I was looking forward to Baz Luhrmann's much-anticipated adaptation of The Great Gatsby, because I love his Romeo + Juliet so much it hurts. He got it so right, so I figured he could get this right too, especially with Leonardo DiCaprio on board.

Cheers, indeed.

He kind of got it. The first half of the film is lavish and screams "Baz Luhrmann." It was exactly what I wanted. Jay-Z's "100$ Bill" captured the 1920s "Jazz Age" aesthetic of white people co-opting black music. The driving hip hop in the first few scenes exemplified the "hip-hop fascination with money, power, violence and sex," that soundtrack executive producer Jay-Z saw in Jay Gatsby.

But something changes. It seems as if Luhrmann wanted too badly to include most of F. Scott Fitzgerald's text, and his own style was lost in that translation. I wanted the film to be jarring and fast, or painfully slow, with experimental music and filmography throughout. During the second half of the film, the soundtrack became more traditional and subdued. Luhrmann seemed to flirt with style—the typed letters at the end of the film (that I'd like to forget), the slow-motion shot of Tom hitting Myrtle—but there was something lacking in consistency.

That said, Luhrmann does let us focus—even temporarily—on some poignant themes of the novel. Tom's destructive masculinity (his trophy room and his racism expose his character) go unpunished in his patriarchal society. Daisy's vapidity highlights the expectations of a beautiful, wealthy woman, when her hopes for her daughter are that "she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." Daisy herself attempts to live that role, and she escapes punishment because of who she is. Tom and Daisy's privilege shields and protects them. Their "old money," in contrast to Gatsby's "new money," shows the impenetrable American truth that you might be detestable, but you call the shots when you have money and connections. Gatsby's desperate drive for that green light—to be loved—can be bought only momentarily.

The fact that "The Great Gatsby Still Gets Flappers Wrong" didn't bother me, really (although Hix's article is incredibly informative). Having an independent, empowered woman in The Great Gatsby would seem as false as the magical typewriter. No one in The Great Gatsby is supposed to be a character we want to identify with or aspire to be. The men are problematic, and so are the women.

Nick, Gatsby, Daisy and Tom at one of Gatsby's parties.

Luhrmann's characters are often more sympathetic than the novel's, but the core of who they are and what they represent is stable.

Jordan Baker's role was minimized, but she was still a foil to Daisy's carelessness.

I would like to deny the storytelling technique that Luhrmann employs with Nick Carraway, but I cannot. I don't think I would have minded if he'd framed the story as Nick writing a memoir; maybe I even would have forgiven the floating type if it had been consistent (but probably not). However, the fact that Nick begins telling the story to his therapist, who then encourages him to write it down, seems ridiculous. Nick seems just self-aware and self-involved enough to know he has a good story—he wouldn't have needed someone to persuade him to write it down.

Tobey Maguire's Nick has a doughy personality. He's not too likable, but we don't actively dislike him. Maybe we roll our eyes at him sometimes. He's true to the novel, that's for sure.

DiCaprio's Gatsby is mysterious, beautiful, reserved and is able to elicit sympathy from the audience.

Why yes, you can buy this headpiece from Tiffany's.

Carey Mulligan's Daisy is not quite as off-putting as she is in the novel, which seemed to be Luhrmann's goal. He didn't completely deny the existence of the emptiness and disappointment the novel conveys, but he clearly wanted us to be swept up in the fashions and romanced by the gorgeous settings and people (and shirts!).

That (along with the inconsistent style) was my biggest problem with the film—it wasn't depressing enough. Perhaps it was the lack of Gatsby's father showing Nick little Jimmy's meticulous plans, or the lack of a funeral scene, or maybe it was the floaty letters typing out Nick's thoughts—I didn't feel the empty weight of the futility of the American Dream, and the bitter disappointment of a life spent wanting more.

Luhrmann gets caught up in the "romance."

I know Luhrmann can do it—he did it with Romeo + Juliet, with its era-bending dialogue and music, stylized filmography and heart-wrenching ending—but I think he got too caught up with the romance of Gatsby's lifestyle (just like Nick did).

And that's the great reverse dramatic irony of stories like Gatsby—yes, maybe audiences get on some level that Jay Gatsby's story isn't meant to be aspirational. But they relish it in anyway. Donald Trump's hotel is offering the Trump Hotel "Great Gatsby" Package (for $14,999 you can live like an ill-fated socialite?); Brooks Brothers has "The Great Gatsby" collection. Gatsby is like Don Draper; their true legacy—disappointment, emptiness and the tragic nature of a re-imagined life that isn't a dream come true—is packaged in fashion and good looks. That life looks exciting, we think. I want hosiery like Daisy's, and parties like Gatsby's. Conspicuous consumption is idolized.

But that's not the point.

The American Dream is disappointing. Wealth is disappointing. Idealized romance is disappointing.

And then you die. And no one cares.

All of this is meaningless.

Luhrmann's film and the marketing ploys surrounding it don't seem to quite get at that. While I was let down, I suppose I'm not surprised. We live in a society obsessed with wealth, status and pulling oneself up from one's bootstraps. To topple all of that over into an ash heap would be problematic for both the core of American mythology and for Hollywood.

Because if we focus on the tragedy of Jay Gatsby's aspirations and the injustice of Tom and Daisy's escape, then we would have to face the fact that the party is really over. But we can't, and we don't, so we go on, endlessly dazzled and distracted by shiny things (which women are especially interested in, evidently).

And perhaps that's what Nick's final words mean—we keep trying to go back, over and over, to this belief that the green light is obtainable, and it will make us happy. However, that light was not real in 1922, and it's not real now. It's just in 3D.

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

The Remarkable Story of 'Anne Braden: Southern Patriot'

2013-05-15T15:01:00.000-04:00

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (2012)

"I believe that no white woman reared in the South–or perhaps anywhere in this racist country–can find freedom as a woman until she deals in her own consciousness with the question of race. We grow up little girls–absorbing a hundred stereotypes about ourselves and our role in life, our secondary position, our destiny to be a helpmate to a man or men. But we also grow up white–absorbing the stereotypes of race, the picture of ourselves as somehow privileged because of the color of our skin. The two mythologies become intertwined, and there is no way to free ourselves from one without dealing with the other." - from "A letter to white Southern women from Anne Braden," 1972

Written by Leigh Kolb

Anne Braden didn't think that guilt was productive.

She thought that what got people involved in the civil rights movement was a vision of a different world.

Born in 1924, Braden grew up in Anniston, Alabama–where the Freedom Riders' bus was fire-bombed in 1961. She talks about being a young white child in the south, and seeing her mother's house cleaner's daughter wearing her hand-me-down clothes. They were different sizes, so the clothes didn't fit right, and Braden says, "Something happened to me when I looked at her. I knew something was wrong."

Braden dedicated her life to exposing and fighting against racial and economic injustice. She was subversive. She was arrested. She was praised by Martin Luther King Jr.

She wanted a different world.

Anne Braden

Braden is the subject of the documentary Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, which is available on DVD and at select screenings nationwide.

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot trailer

Award-winning filmmakers Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering created this first-person documentary, and its brilliance rests greatly on the fact that Braden herself and her contemporaries, biographer and mentees tell the story. The seemingly hands-off approach by the filmmakers (no audible interview questions or voiceovers) works incredibly well, and lets Braden's remarkable legacy unfold on its own merits. The soundtrack is appropriately present, but not noticeably so, as it should be in a documentary.

This documentary, in short, is amazing. Aside from the technical success of the film is the fact that Braden herself was an extraordinary human being.

Read the full transcript of the film here

Braden says that when she had the realization that something was wrong, it was like photography: "You put the film in the developing fluid and it begins to come clear, but it's been there all along."

The images kept becoming clearer and clearer to Braden as she worked as a journalist in the south and covered the courthouse, seeing black men be imprisoned for looking at white women the wrong way, and seeing how murdered black people were not newsworthy.

She didn't feel guilt. She felt motivated to change her world.

Early on in her career, Braden recognized that issues of class and race were inextricably linked. She says,

"I was in a prison and life builds prisons around people and I had the prison that I was born white in a racist society. I was born privileged in a classist society. The hardest thing was class. I don’t know that I could have ever broken out of what I call the race prison if I hadn’t dealt with class."

She married Carl Braden, who was a "radical" activist active in the labor movement. "We got married to work together," she says. By 1951, Braden was combining marriage, motherhood and activism.

Early on, her activism focused mainly on writing for and talking to black audiences about white people's roles in racism and classism. The head of the Civil Rights Congress, William Patterson, told her that black people already know what she's telling them–she needed to talk to white people, because they are the problem. She remembers that he said to her, "You know you do have a choice. You don’t have to be a part of the world of the lynchers. You can join the other America–the people who struggled against slavery, the people who railed against slavery, the white people who supported them, the people who all through Reconstruction struggled." She says, "I was very young, and that's what I needed to hear." Her work began in earnest.

The Bradens bought a house for a young black family, the Wades, in an all-white neighborhood (it was a way around segregation–Andrew Wade gave them the down payment, the Bradens purchased it, and then transfered the deed). The Wades' home was shot at, crosses were burned in the yard and a bomb was set off underneath their daughter's window (remarkably no one was physically hurt).

The Wades, showing where rocks had been thrown and broken the windows of their home.

The bomber was never caught or tried, but the Bradens were, along with five other whites who helped defend the Wades' house. They were charged with sedition–it was, prosecutors said, all a plot by communists to overthrow Kentucky and the nation.

Braden says that "If you use every attack as a platform, they can't win and you can't lose. It works like a charm." They used their arrest and jail time as a platform. "You can't kill an idea anyway," she says. "To a segregationist, integration means communism."

The film highlights footage from Ku Klux Klan rallies, newspaper stories, meetings, marches, beatings and shootings during the red scare and the civil rights movement. The footage–often presented without narration–is powerful and provides the visual, historical context to Braden's stories.

The film moves forward through each decade, highlighting social justice struggles (especially regarding race and economic injustice) and Braden's continuous role. The complexity of anti-communist sentiment, the freedom of speech and association and violence of the ongoing civil rights struggles are examined in depth.

It was difficult watching the momentous struggles and changes of the 60s make way into the 70s, when she says, "That sense of being part of something larger gets lost." Political activists were repressed and imprisoned, and much of the momentum was lost.

Anne Braden

As the footage from the 70s surfaces, it's in color; all of a sudden history doesn't seem so far away. When white women are screaming and chanting about "Niggers" when busing was implemented in 1975, and throwing rocks at the buses, it's jarring how close it all is. David Duke screams about white power. Communist workers at an anti-Klan rally are shot and killed in the late 70s.

In a statement that seems all-too true today, Braden says of the lasting legacy of this era:

"And this idea of reverse discrimination took hold of the country, and I think it’s the most dangerous idea that’s ever been inflicted on this country. It tells white people that the source of their problem is people of color and it’s such a damn lie because it’s based on the theory that what black people got took something away from white people, and that is the opposite of what happened, every piece of legislation everything that happened that the black movement won, helped most white people and certainly poor and working class white people."

At a 1980 rally in response to the communist workers' deaths, she said,

"The real danger today comes from the people in high places, from the halls of congress to the board rooms of our big corporations, who are telling the white people that if their taxes are eating up their paychecks, it’s not because of our bloated military budget, but because of government programs that benefit black people; those people in high places who are telling white people that if young whites are unemployed it’s because blacks are getting all the jobs. Our problem is the people in power who are creating a scape goat mentality. That, that is what is creating the climate in which the Klan can grow in this country and that is what is creating the danger of a fascist movement in the 1980s in America."

As the film progresses, we see Braden marching for economic justice and to end police brutality. She stands out, with her cropped gray hair, small body and denim jumpers. Her voice shakes into a megaphone when she speaks at rallies, but her age doesn't stop her. She keeps marching. When she can't march, she's pushed in a wheelchair.

Braden passed away in 2006 at age 81. Right before she died, she said, "I just don't have time." She still felt she had too much to do.

Anne Braden and Cornel West

I don't know that I've ever been so inspired by a documentary. By the end, I was crying, near-sobbing–in celebration of Braden's life, in mourning her death and in feeling a burning fire in my white belly that I needed to do something in this world. Anne Braden had effectively told me that I needed to get to work.

At a march, Braden says, "We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it's won." It hasn't been, and we must continue her legacy.

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot puts Braden's lifelong activism into the developing fluid and makes it clear to all of us. We should all look carefully at these images and be moved to not just frame them for display, but to make them shape our world now.

The Flobots' "Anne Braden"

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

'Oblivion:' A Response to Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's Review on RogerEbert.com

2013-05-15T12:00:00.000-04:00

Oblivion (2013)
Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) stands on the landing pad to his home.

This is a guest post written by Gabrielle Gopie-Tree.

I’m not a Tom Cruise fan and I usually don’t watch his films, but I quite like Oblivion. To be fair, I am partial to post-apocalyptic productions but often the action is overdone and the plot underdeveloped; this is certainly not the case with Oblivion, which is a film about monoculture. Monoculture lacks the essential elements for life: diversity, complexity, and struggle.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky sees it differently. While he offers a humorous critique of patriarchy and a welcome, albeit limited, view of misogyny from his perspective as a White male of eastern origins, his superficial review of Oblivion ignores the soulful theme of the film: self-recovery. This idea is central to every aspect of the movie and is quite an unusual perspective in a Hollywood film, particularly in a genre that is typically focused on stereotypical masculinity. While discussion of sex-inequality in film is an encouraging development, there are serious flaws in this element of Vishnevetsky’s criticism. Here is my point of view from my perspective as a Black female of western origins.

Vishnevetsky starts with a spirited description of the colour (white) and shape of Jack’s ship, the docking station, and the interior of the central command’s arrival chamber as all being symbolic of female genitalia which he views as encapsulating a violent sexism. I disagree. Instead I see the distilled and contrived soul-lessness of these elements as juxtaposition against the reality of Jack’s former life; a life that keeps calling to Jack in the shape of his attachment to a very green getaway spot on Earth and romantic memories of a woman in pre-apocalyptic New York City. Jack projects an air of perpetual disorientation as his longing for a satisfying existence contrasts with his daily life.

Jack works with Vica (Andrea Riseborough) character to ensure the logistical resource extraction process on a devastated Earth in the year 2077. Vica and Jack are colleagues as well as lovers. They both represent a futuristic version of the patriarchal family: Jack goes out to work each day returning to prepared meals and perfunctory intimacy. Vica is the classic Stepford Wife in both appearance and behaviour: her sheer plasticity and vacuity are her essence. Jack is depicted as having a ‘ruggedly capable masculinity:’ he fixes, fights, and fucks. Despite the mental manipulation of his masters, Jack has a heart. We see this via his expressions of service to others: his successful fight to save a lone dog as well as the woman who turns out to be his wife, Julia (Olga Kurylenko), from death by drone, and his communication of loyalty to the human resistance who awaken him from his alien-induced programming. These are traits typically associated with the feminine, making this a rather feminist/womanist element of Jack’s character and the film itself.

Jack struggles with Drone 166 to get the machine to stand up.

While Vishnevetsky compliments the storytelling method used in Oblivion, he simultaneously lambastes the film as being “derivative” of “several science-fiction movies at once.” I see this critique as plausible in light of the theme of the film itself – self-recovery. However, it seems that while Vishnevetsky is comfortable advancing some semblance of a gender critique, he is much less comfortable discussing the racial element of Oblivion, although he does mention the colour of the pseudo-feminine monoculture that amuses him so greatly as “white.” For example, who could miss the racial dynamics in the fact that there is (as far as I can tell) only one non-white man, Beech (Morgan Freeman), and one non-white woman, Julia--or, that Beech has a similar wake-up talk with Jack as did Morpheus (Laurence Fishbourne) with Neo (Keanu Reeves) in The Matrix. Vishnevetsky’s failure to talk race brings the sincerity of his limited discussion of gender into question.

Morgan Freeman as Beech, the resistance leader who helps Jack recover his identity.

Furthermore, Vishnevetsky’s claim that: Oblivion is about a “lowly technician sending unmanned drones to hunt and kill a demonized, alien Other — until it forgets that it ever was” is overly simplistic. He ignores the element of struggle in the film which is necessary for life and Oblivion is most certainly about the life/death struggle; from the start of the film with Jack and Vica’s life-parody to the story’s culmination in Jack and Julia’s life-reality on a lush green patch of earth, complete with offspring.

Julia (Olga Kurylenko) and Jack recall a pre-apocalypse moment.

While Vishnevetsky sees Oblivion as “a wannabe mindbender that raises questions about its lead character's identity — except that the lead character is too sketchy to make these questions compelling,” I see it as an exploration of a man’s struggle to recover himself from monoculture programming which in itself requires interactions with others for one’s self-development to occur. Curiously, Vishnevetsky condemns Jack using the archetype of the self-sufficient masculinised rugged individual but mislabels it as “creation myth.” Thereafter, he bemoans what he sees as none of the many women in the film being “able to do anything without Harper's help.” This is a very strange critique and smacks of a highly neoliberal notion of sameness as the benchmark for sex-equality. Also, it does not hold up in light of the fact that Vica administers both the home and the office each day while Jack fulfills his duties outside on the ground and she engages in almost all communications with Sally (Melissa Leo) at central control, including the authority to terminate her working relationship with Jack by simply saying they are no longer an “effective team.” Additionally, toward the end of the film Jack and Julia collaborate to challenge the authority of the alien masters including Julia’s decision to undergo cryosleep as the best option for facilitating Jack’s assault on the alien’s central command.

Do not be fooled by Vishnevetsky’s use of terms such as “uterus,” “vulva,” “mother figure,” “creation myth,” and “misogyny” which suggest a feminist critique of Oblivion that just is not there.

Gabrielle Gopie-Tree has a background in law, politics, psychology and spirituality. She is a nomadic social theorist trying to be the change she wants to see in the world; a believer in the lessons of the guide Qadhafi; and valiantly trying to allow the universe to unfold as it should.

Wonder Women and Why We Need Superheroines

2013-05-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

Wonder Women movie poster

Written by Amanda Rodriguez

Wonder Women: The Untold Story of American Superheroines is a documentary by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan available for free streaming on PBS (I heart free stuff). The film shows us Wonder Woman from her inception as a feminist character designed by her creator William Moulton Marston to usher in a matriarchal era to her loss of powers after World War II when women were pushed to leave the work force and go back to their homes, and finally, to the legacy of superheroines who would not have existed without her. In just shy of an hour, we get a comprehensive history and learn what makes Wonder Woman and other superheroines so important for women and girls.

Wonder Woman spent many post-World War II years sans powers as a non-feminist character and her many years after continued to render her as a dubious feminist role model. Kathleen Hanna of the feminist punk band Bikini Kill is interviewed in the film, and she says, "There's, like, so few images of powerful women that women get desperate...we'll just take any kind of garbage or crumb off the table that we can find and claim that as powerful, even when it's kinda not." I agree in many cases with Hanna, especially concerning the pornulated female figures of film and TV whose abilities are confined to that which is sexy and that which pleases men, and though Wonder Woman is often given those qualities to keep her shallow and without a greater political or social relevance, the idea of Wonder Woman has taken root in the collective female psyche as a symbol of strength, independence, and equality. I find it the most fascinating and the most compelling that different iterations of Wonder Woman have ceased to affect her image. Women can be empowered by taking Wonder Woman and personally interpreting her into whatever kind of role model they choose because she is so iconic, regardless of any specific representations throughout her long history.

The feminism of Wonder Woman cosplay is up for debate, but the dedication to superheroines is all radness.

It is perhaps because of Wonder Woman and her endless interpretability that we have more contemporary superheroines/powerful female figures like Xena Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and even Thelma and Louise or the women of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad of Kill Bill. Like Hanna says, sometimes these heroines are not imbued with the most feminist qualities, but their success is a testament to that hunger for strong female representations.

Why are women and girls so hungry for kickass superheroines in the media? Lindsay Wagner, star of the hit 70's series, The Bionic Woman recounts feedback from a fan who'd grown up with the show, "'My dad wanted me to go to beauty school, but...I'm an engineer at NASA...because your character showed me that I could be something far beyond what we were ordinarily on track to be.'" These independent, smart, capable, and confident characters do show the women watching them that they, too, can be all those things. I won't get into it too much here, but the documentary Miss Representation is extremely informative (and a bit depressing) as it details the shocking dearth of female stories portrayed in our popular culture...nevermind stories about strong women. How can women aspire and achieve if there are no examples of other women overcoming similar or even bigger challenges?

Carmela Lane draws inspiration from Wonder Woman to meet daily challenges & to give her daughter more opportunities than she had.

Gloria Steinem views superheroines in our culture as critical:

"Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys when you come right down to it because 90% of violence in the world is against females. Certainly women need protectors even more, and what's revolutionary, of course, is to have a female protector not a male protector."

Think about it: if women can get where they are today, replete with all of our struggles, resistance, strength, and resilience, spurred on by such a paltry offering of role models, imagine what we could achieve if we had a truly diverse base of powerful, intelligent, resourceful superheroines to inspire us to unfathomable heights.

Katie Pineda: Wonder Woman enthusiast with the mantra: "Keep going; keep going; you're going to be more."

"I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy."

2013-05-14T11:39:00.000-04:00

Angelina Jolie

This guest post by Melissa McEwan appears at her blog Shakesville and is cross-posted with permission.

Angelina Jolie has written an extraordinary op-ed for the New York Times, titled "My Medical Choice," about her recent decision to have a preventative double mastectomy after learning she carries the BRCA1 "breast cancer" gene and had an estimated 87% risk of developing breast cancer.

This piece is remarkable for a lot of reasons. Jolie notes that she "finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved" on April 27, and: "During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work." And having managed to keep it a secret, itself a rather impressive feat, she decided to then publicly disclose it, in order that "other women can benefit from my experience."

It's remarkable because she writes very plainly that her ability to get the $3,000 BRCA1 test is a privilege, and advocates wider access:

Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.

And because she does not assert or imply that her decision is the only right decision, but one of many options:

For any woman reading this, I hope it helps you to know you have options. I want to encourage every woman, especially if you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, to seek out the information and medical experts who can help you through this aspect of your life, and to make your own informed choices.

I acknowledge that there are many wonderful holistic doctors working on alternatives to surgery. My own regimen will be posted in due course on the Web site of the Pink Lotus Breast Center. I hope that this will be helpful to other women.

And it's remarkable because Angelina Jolie is generally regarded as one of the most beautiful women in a world that profoundly values beauty and defines women's worth by their sex appeal, and she is telling women to value their health.

There is something deeply moving to me for a woman whose body, by nature of her profession, has been treated like public property even more than most of us, writing such an intimate piece about her body, making it public property in yet another way by her own choice, for the benefit of other women.

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

She lives just outside Chicago with three cats, two dogs, and a Scotsman, with whom she shares a love of all things geekdom, from Lord of the Rings to Alcatraz. When she's not blogging, she can usually be found watching garbage television or trying to coax her lazyass greyhound off the couch for a walk.

Problematic Patriarchy in Jackson Katz's 'Violence and Silence' TED Talk

2013-05-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

Written by Rachel Redfern

Jackson Katz’s incredibly popular TEDxFiDiWomen talk has a lot of people excited and I understand why. He’s engaging and passionate about his incredible support for feminism and minorities and that’s an amazingly positive thing. However, upon review of his solutions to the great problems of patriarchy in the United States, there are actually some very problematic ideals that he’s promoting.

The first ten minutes of Katz’s talk is filled with effusive praise for feminism and what it’s accomplished. Past that though, during the last 10 minutes of his talk he says that he wants to change people from the level of leadership. He suggests that we work within the existing framework to change patriarchy by teaching patriarchs (CEOs, coaches and other leaders) to stick up for women.

Say hello to corporate feminism.

This corporate feminism is basically the patriarchy co-opting feminism and using it, not only as a way to make money for their leadership seminars, but also as a way to continue to promote the status quo of women being taken care of by their male leaders in jobs that are notoriously difficult for women to get. Within Katz’s idea, women are still held apart from the leadership positions that could help to make the changes that directly affect them.

What 'leadership' should look like. I suppose.

Worse than that, those leadership seminars continue to promote ideas of hierarchy and authority. What do these expensive leadership courses say to their students? “Someone has to be in charge.” “Life is like a boat; there has to be a captain, otherwise it would be chaos.” “People need to listen to you because you’re in charge.” "Take control of a situation.” Hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy. Move within the system: Maintain, maintain, maintain.

Katz believes that these leaders of men should be held accountable for the disparaging and inappropriate things that they say. I agree; of course men in powerful positions should be held accountable for their actions and for the things that they say. I hope that media, bloggers, and viewers will continue to go further in demanding such levels of accountability from those around us. And then comes the sales pitch: “We need more leadership training.” Guess what Jackson Katz does for a living? Leadership training. He wants to teach men in power to stand up for women. Are we, as a culture, saying we live in a world where in order to attain a level of common human decency men have to participate in weeklong, over-priced corporate leadership training programs?

Are we so naïve that we believe adult men don’t already know that they should be nice to women? These men (the ones in those amazing and out-of-reach-for-thousands-of-qualified-women leadership positions), are most likely men of education and world experience, and they know that disrespecting women is inappropriate. It’s like telling a group of college kids to not answer their phone during a lecture. Everyone knows you shouldn’t answer your phone during a lecture and we shouldn’t even give the idea credence by positioning it as an option of ignorance. They know better and cries of, “my leadership training program didn’t teach me not to say sexist, disrespectful things about the other half of the population” just isn’t a good excuse and we shouldn’t allow it to become one.

If people say sexist, racist, homophobic, and other offensive remarks, more conveniently placed “corporate feminism” isn’t going to save the day. The day is going to be saved when good people speak out (yes, even those who don’t get to become NBA coaches) using a strong sense of justice and morality without relying on leadership training to do so.

Katz states (timestamp 16:37) that it is “institutional authority” which will save us all. In a larger sense, perhaps it will, as in the case of policemen who arrest perpetrators of domestic abuse, and violence and the justice system which tries and judges them. However, propagating “institutional authority” and its intense vestiges of patriarchy and hierarchy are the problem. We can no longer be happy with the meager scraps of freedom that these ideologies continue to throw at us; we need to be more assertive, more demanding of our rights and the need for respect for others and ourselves. Don’t worry; I’m not calling for torches and pitchforks to storm the castle, but I am saying that we shouldn’t rely on the overblown theories of benevolent authority and patriarchy.

Demotivator® genius. Demotivator® truth?

This leadership training is a minor subversion that ultimately still reinforces the establishment of control that is already in place.

I’ll be honest. I resent the notion that I have to rely on the good will of university presidents, coaches and CEOs to lead the way in my own beliefs of right and wrong. I don’t need their leadership though; rather, I need them stop doing bad things and getting away with it. I’m freely capable of knowing good from evil, offensive and inoffensive, without Joe Paterno’s expertise, thank you very much. This idea puts down everyday, good people and robs them of the ability to make powerful changes, by placing that ability on the shoulders of other, more distant folks.

Now, on a few things I do agree with Katz: these issues affect everyone and they should not be designated solely as women’s issues or men’s; rather they are overwhelmingly society’s issues, humanity’s issues, human rights issues. And I believe that there are wonderful men and women out there desperately trying to fix these problems; even Katz’s sincerity and excited approach is necessary. But continuing to perpetuate the systems that are doing the damage by reinforcing so many structures of control and hierarchy is not the way to fundamentally change all the problems inherent within those systems.

Katz closes with this statement: “We need more men with the guts, with the courage, with the strength, with the moral integrity to break our implicit silence and challenge each other and stand with women, not against them.” I would posit that we should change that “men” into “people” and say that just as much as we need people with the courage to speak out, we also need people with the courage to tear down and rebuild the systems of privilege and hierarchy, not reinforce them.

What do you think? Is the Katz talk a brilliant harbinger of change and feminism? Or relying too much on patriarchal authority?

Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection, however she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.

The Occasional Purposeful Nudity on 'Game of Thrones'

2013-05-13T13:00:00.000-04:00

Written by Lady T.

Much has been said about the gratuitous nudity on Game of Thrones. Several feminist critics (such as yours truly) have written about the objectification of the female characters, and how the writers use naked women as objects for male fantasy or to develop male characters.

Challenging the use of nudity in a TV show or film will predictably result in accusations of prudishness and pearl-clutching, as though feminist critics are nothing but live-action versions of Helen Lovejoy.

"Won't somebody please think of the children?!"

It's easy to assume that critics are ranting because they're too squeamish and repressed to look at pictures of naked women without feeling embarrassed. Leaping to that conclusion is much more comfortable than acknowledging the problematic aspects of using naked female bodies as decoration and masturbatory fodder.

The accusation of prudishness is also a strawman argument, assuming that viewers who object to objectification can't tell the difference between gratuitous nudity (where naked bodies are used for spank bank material) and nudity that serves an artistic purpose.

In fact, the difference between gratuitous nudity and artistic nudity is not that difficult to discern. Even Game of Thrones, the show that puts the word "tit" in "titillation," occasionally uses nudity in a way that isn't exploitative and adds to a scene rather than detracting from it.

One such example can be found in the story of Daenerys Targaryen, a character who is more frequently naked than most other characters on the show. The very first time we see Daenerys, she is a pawn in her brother's game to earn the throne he feels is rightfully his. Stripped naked, Daenerys steps into a bathtub, her eyes haunted and her expression blank. She is the sacrificial lamb and she knows it, and her nakedness is symbolic of her status as an object.

The last time we see Daenerys in the first season, she's naked again--except this time, she has just emerged from flames and hatched three dragon eggs. The fire that consumed her enemy and her clothes has left her skin smudged but unburnt. Her nakedness is no longer a symbol of her vulnerability--it's a symbol of strength.

The Mother of Dragons, Daenerys the Unburnt

Daenerys doesn't have to be naked for the viewer to understand the change in her character, but the nudity in both scenes highlights and reinforces the dramatic growth she's had over ten episodes.

Another scene that includes purposeful nudity takes place in the third season, where Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth, captive of Stark family allies, bathe in the tub (though sitting on opposite sides). Jaime, having lost his swordfighting hand, is even more sarcastic than usual, insulting Brienne's prowess as a fighter and implying that her former king died because she wasn't a good enough knight. At this, the maid of Tarth leaps to her feet, completely naked in front of the Kingslayer, staring him down until he apologizes for impugning her honor.

This is a great moment for Brienne's character--only moments before, she was embarrassed to share a bath with the Kingslayer, but when he insults her, she wastes no time in asserting herself. When she rises to her feet, naked as the day she was born, she isn't subject to the same male gaze as the chorus of nameless prostitutes on Game of Thrones. She's still a warrior, and being stripped of her armor doesn't change that fact one bit.

And the scene only gets better from there. Jaime Lannister, used to being the strongest and most skilled person in the room (in both swordplay and wordplay), is stripped in every sense of the word. He's vulnerable in a way he's never been before, confessing the truth about his reasons for killing the Mad King, and he eventually faints into Brienne's arms, whispering, "Jaime. My name is Jaime."

Brienne hears Jaime's tale of killing the Mad King

Much like Daenerys's scenes at the beginning and end of season one, the nudity in this scene represents both strength and vulnerability. In this scene, Jaime Lannister reveals more of himself than he's revealed to any other person, and this only works if they're both literally stripped bare.

Now imagine how much MORE powerful these scenes would be if the frequent use of gratuitous boob shots hadn't turned this aspect of the show into a running joke.

Despite strawman arguments that claim the contrary, it's really not all that hard to discern the difference between gratuitous nudity and nudity that serves an artistic purpose. People who claim otherwise are not confused; they're deliberately disingenuous.

Lady T is an aspiring writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.

Choose Your Own Sexist Adventure: Victim Blaming, Domestic Violence, and the Glorification of the Nice Guy™ in 'Mud'

2013-05-13T11:35:00.000-04:00

Matthew McConaughey all over the movie poster for Mud

Written by Stephanie Rogers, who spoils the entire movie.

I wanted to see Mud because it looked like an interesting film about the cult of masculinity. It is, in fact, a film about masculinity and father-son relationships, but it goes out of its way to avoid offering an actual critique of masculinity. If anything, Mud celebrates the masculine by demonizing the feminine. The women in this film carry the sole responsibility of ruining every dude character’s life, and Mud screams through a megaphone its Women Are Awful message from the first scene all the way to “Help Me, Rhonda” playing over the closing credits. And I thought Side Effects was bad.

I hated that I had to hate Mud; the young boy who plays Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his best friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) blew my mind, and Matthew McConaughey as Mud gave his best performance since Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (ha). Reese Witherspoon somehow even managed to garner sympathy for a second with her ten minutes on screen, a serious feat given the fact that the character she plays (Juniper) gets blamed by everyone for Mud’s predicament as a fugitive in hiding. Ellis’s parents, too, particularly Sarah Paulson (as Mary Lee) of recent American Horror Story: Asylum fame, gave moving performances, and I especially liked Michael Shannon’s three brief scenes as Galen—not because anything other than sexism and man-childness occur—but because he always commands the screen (see Take Shelter and Revolutionary Road). The actors, specifically the two young boys, save this film from entirely shitting all over itself.

Jacob Lofland (Neckbone) and Tye Sheridan (Ellis) in Mud

Matthew McConaughey plays Mud, the title character, and I keep reading everywhere that Mud is a retelling of Huck Finn, so okay. Two 14-year-old boys, Ellis and Neckbone (best. name. ever.), live in a poor yet quaint and lovely town on the Mississippi River. In conventional boys-as-adventurous-explorers fashion, they sneak their small boat off to an island down the river where they find an abandoned boat stuck in a tree. After climbing up there and sifting through a treasure trove of Penthouse magazines (because that’s necessary) and finding a bag of canned beans, they realize someone lives on the boat. Mud! The rest of the film shows men bonding with one another by objectifying women, beating up men to defend the honor of women, and blaming women both for the abuse inflicted upon them by men and for the problems they “cause” for the men around them. It’s a real win-win for the ladies of Mud.

Ellis goes to find Mud on the island

Brian Moylan of Hollywood.com describes the film as follows:

There is not a woman in this movie who doesn't betray her man, cheat on him, use him, steal his home, rob him of his authenticity, make him move to a boring condo complex in the suburbs, or otherwise force him [out] of his natural and driving male essence … This thing might as well be a river fort with a giant "No Girlz Allowed" sign out front.

Hard to argue with that. Here’s why.

I guess I knew in pretty much the first scene (and in the first lines of dialogue), when Ellis told Neckbone he had a crush on a girl and Neckbone responded with, “She’s got nice titties,” that Mud might walk a fine line between either existing as a coming-of-age tale or offering up a sexist piece of shit under the guise of a coming-of-age tale. It’s a little bit of both.

The freakshow Ellis and Neckbone see when they first meet Mud

The neatly tied up plot goes like this: “Two teenage boys encounter a fugitive and form a pact to help him evade the bounty hunters on his trail and reunite him with his true love.”

Sounds romantic, right? See, I definitely teared up during its most manipulative moments, and I definitely came to care about the characters, and I definitely wanted to leave the theater feeling okay about that rather than feeling guilty for liking a movie that portrayed my gender (and even men), with such simplicity and disrespect. I psychically begged Mud to reverse all its misogyny in the end, to somehow invalidate the sexist ideology it spent nearly two hours enforcing, so that I could write about its complexity and nuance and be all, “Wow, what a smart deconstruction of Southern masculinity!” No dice.

Instead, I get to write about typical Hollywood gender-trope drivel, except it exists in a fucking semi-indie film, and, according to me—a genius—indie films ain’t supposed to rely on Hollywood gender-trope drivel anymore. Let’s begin.

Best Fucking Friends Ever

Every man in this movie tells a story about a woman who wronged him. Every. Single. One. The opening scene (juxtaposed with the “nice titties” comment and the Penthouse porn) shows Galen, Neckbone’s uncle and sole caretaker, getting reamed by his girlfriend. She bolts from his home, whips around to find the two boys sitting on the porch, and says something like, “You make sure you always treat girls like princesses!” We quickly learn that Galen tried something in bed that his girlfriend didn’t like, so when she throws a handful of gravel at him and yells, “I’m a princess!” Galen and the boys (and the audience) laugh at her “irrational” reaction and prudishness. Boys will be boys, honey.

Michael Shannon as Galen, aka Misogynist of the Year

Ellis and Neckbone then leave the house carrying Galen’s book on how to understand the opposite sex (because that’s necessary), and the film officially begins its Women Are Awful message with not even a hint of fucking subtlety or irony: welcome to prudes, princesses, titties, Mars/Venus, hysteria, virgin/whore nonsense, and porn, all within the first five minutes of screen time.

Not surprisingly, we learn that Mud finds himself stuck on an island and running from the law because of Juniper, a woman he fell in love with as a young teenager. The film pulls no punches in its insistence on blaming Juniper for Mud’s situation; she involved herself with an abusive man—a pattern for her—and since Mud lurves her so much, he obviously needed to murder the man responsible for beating her and causing her to miscarry. Juniper’s beating also destroyed her reproductive system (why not?), and that factors strongly into Mud’s decision to kill. The message here, and Mud all but says it, is that robbing a woman of her God-given responsibility to bare children is unforgivable and punishable by death.

I wish that were the only instance of blaming a woman’s reproductive capacity for another man’s misery, but, alas, Tom (a possible former CIA assassin, played creepily by Sam Shepard) can barely stand to interact with anyone ever since his wife and son died during childbirth. He raised Mud as his own son (only Ellis knows his biological father, played by Ray McKinnon), and sits on the river shooting his gun every now and then like a hater. Basically, women are misery-inducing killjoys who suck at performing their duties of procreation.

Sam Shepard waiting to ... kill ... something?

When women deign to momentarily stop holding hostage the broken hearts of men everywhere, they fall into the coveted category of Desired Object, going from active life ruiners to passive beauty queens.

Reese Witherspoon as Juniper with Smeared Mascara

We first meet Ellis’s girl crush (presumably the one with the nice titties) when Ellis sees an older boy put his hands all over her in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. May Pearl (the next best character name after Neckbone and Mud) pushes away the sexual harasser, but do you think that stops Ellis from charging through the parking lot with reptilian stealth and jacking a high school senior in the jaw? No way. That would mean not employing the Damsel in Distress trope, and, in turn, allowing women to wield their own authority and agency. But Mud gives no fucks about women other than how they push the male-focused plot forward. As Megan Kearns notes in her review of Iron Man 3:

The problem with the Damsel in Distress trope is that it strips women of their power and insinuates that women need men to rescue or save them. And yet again it places the focus on men, reinforcing the notion that society revolves around men, not women.

That’s Mud in a nutshell, although many reviewers—and most people in the history of everywhere—still manage to confuse misogyny with Nice Guy™ acts of “chivalry.”

The Piggly Wiggly: after-school hangout

~~Interestingly~~ ~~Upsettingly~~ Predictably, the moment that moves Ellis away from rescuing May Pearl—after she rewards him with a kiss and tells him to call her, in typical Damsel in Distress trope fashion—relies on even more misogyny. The congregation of boys in the lot stops their commotion cold when Juniper suddenly appears—in all her blonde-haired glory and cut-off daisy dukes—and saunters into the Piggly Wiggly. The boys gape at her. The teenage girls squirm all jealous. And my brain jerks from all this Sexist Whiplash.

To rewind and parse: a boy street harasses a girl; another boy saves her from said harassment (Damsel in Distress); she publically rewards him for saving her; Juniper shows up as Desired Object; women become jealous of one another over male attention; and Ellis and Neckbone begin their inevitable lightweight stalking of Desired Object. In the span of three minutes.

Okay.

Juniper as Desired Object with Black Eye

It gets worse, though, way way worse. Later, Ellis and Neckbone find one of Mud’s bounty hunters, who was hired by the father of the man Mud murdered (hi, alliteration!), beating the crap out of Juniper in a motel room off the highway like, “Bitch, tell me where Mud’s hiding OR ELSE.” (Stalking women comes in handy sometimes, for both bounty hunters and young boys.) Naturally, the boys save our resident Damsel in Distress by bursting through the motel room door at just the right moment and pretending to sell a cooler full of fish (ha). The mob thug smacks Ellis down too, though, and that’s when the film finally turns into the Southern gothic crime thriller I’d been hoping for—but not before Juniper rewards Ellis with a kiss for saving her.

LIKE, ARE WE IN FUCKING SUPER MARIO BROTHERS?!?!?!

May Pearl smiles at her knight in shining armor

The abuse of women in Mud, which serves no purpose other than to normalize domestic violence for the viewer, is horrifying in its own right, but I ultimately found the Blame the Victim ideology the most disturbing aspect of Mud. Not only does the film voyeuristically depict the harassment and physical abuse of women at the hands of men with no critique or analysis, but it also shows the male characters verbally blaming women for the abuse inflicted upon them. Tom, who acts as a father figure to Mud, delivers a lengthy monologue to young Ellis all but calling Juniper a no-good whore for getting involved with so many abusive jerks and ruining Mud’s entire Nice Guy™ life. (You know, because Women Are Awful and consequently at fault for all the choices men make, including their choices to beat the shit out of women.)

Sarah Paulson as Mary Lee in Mud

The film’s message devolves even further to insinuate that—because Mud hasn’t been physically abusive toward Juniper and has even heroically punished the men who have been—he has both earned and deserves her love. And so, the audience can’t help but dislike Juniper when the boys catch her slutting it up at a bar with a billiards-playing bro instead of sailing off to Mexico with Nice Guy™ Mud in his fixed up former tree boat. A small part of me waited for the film to pause on Juniper’s face for a moment and toss up an UNGRATEFUL BITCH title card, just to make sure the audience got the point.

Juniper, aka UNGRATEFUL BITCH

Moylan of Hollywood.com also talks about the harmful messages Mud sends:

The takeaway to the story seems to be that the only people you can count on in this world are your male friends and your father figure. At the end of the movie, after all hell breaks loose as Ellis and Neckbone's entanglement with Mud gets crazy and deadly, we see each male character have a touching moment with his father figure. None of them are any good—Ellis' father can't make money, Mud's adopted father is a deadly "assassin," and Neck's uncle treats women possibly the worst of any of them—but, heck, in a man's world it's the man who teaches you how to man like a man that man man man. And some of the man manning that men masculine you with is hatred of women. Ellis' father … tells him at one point, "Women are tough. They set you up for some." Eventually, when Ellis confronts Mud about how much girls suck, Mud replies, "If you find a girl half as good as you, you'll be all set." See, a woman can never be as good as a man.

Ellis and Mud talk about Being a Man probably

I can already hear the arguments. Mud exposes the hyper-masculinity present in Southern culture! The boys don’t know any better! That’s just how it is down there! Maybe. But, an intelligent film might consider taking that harmful social construct to task rather than rewarding the male characters for their sexist behavior. Mud presents misogyny as endearing for fuck’s sake, and art—in my opinion—possesses a responsibility to challenge those constructs because it also possesses the power to change them. The dudes in Mud experience no consequences for their bullshit; the film, in fact, revels in their Women Are Awful blues and invites the audience to participate. I’m less interested in whether the depiction of Southern masculinity is authentic. Why not make a statement about how that authentic Southern masculinity hurts women and men?

It never comes close to saying that. But it does manage to deliver a much more cynical message.

Ellis and Neckbone, rightly looking a little terrified of Mud

Halfway through the film, Galen says to Ellis, “This river brings a lot of trash down. You gotta know what’s worth keeping and what’s worth letting go.” Sure, he’s referring to literal trash (as he points to a newly repaired chandelier he found in the river), and he’s referring to Mud, a known fugitive (because he’s seen Ellis and Neckbone hanging out in the river with Mud), but—make no mistake—he’s also referring to women. The film never stops telling us that Women Are Awful, worthless, disposable.

In the end, Ellis’s dad comes to terms with his wife leaving him; Mud finally moves past Juniper; Ellis ogles a new girl (in slow motion!) after May Pearl breaks his heart in public; even Tom learns to leave the death of his wife behind. The men’s collective triumph becomes the fact that they finally learn to let go of The Trash in their lives and hold onto what’s most important—their relationships with other men. So while Mud is a coming-of-age tale in the traditional sense, and coming-of-age tales deliver all kinds of important messages for their young protagonists to absorb, the film mostly wants Ellis to learn that sometimes you just need to fucking drop a bitch.

How sweet.


How sweet, indeed

Bitch Flicks' Weekly Picks

2013-05-12T23:00:00.000-04:00

Shonda Rhimes on TV's Lack of Diversity: "I Think It's Sad and Weird" by Jamilah King via Colorlines

Network TV is Broken. So How Does Shonda Rhimes Keep Making Hits? by Willa Paskin via The New York Times

Girls on Film: The Danger of the 'Female Filmmaker' Label by Monica Bartyzel via The Week

The Onion Can Go to Hell [Trigger warning: on their "joke" over Chris Brown beating Rihanna to death] by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville

Hollywood Abhors an Aging Woman. Too Bad for Hollywood. by Sagit Maier-Schwartz via Slate's Double X

Pissed Off: When Did Playing Evil Women Become a Rite of Passage for Oscar-Winning Actresses? by Melissa Silverstein via Women and Hollywood

YA Author Takes on Gendered Book Covers with the Coverflip Challenge by Rebecca Pahle via The Mary Sue

The Gender Coverup by Maureen Johnson via The Huffington Post

This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter from TV Spoilers (Spoiler: She's a Girl) by Dana Liebelson via Mother Jones

The Women of Mad Men Kick Ass in Season 6 by Nicole Aragi via Buzzfeed

18 Female Friendship Truths, As Told by 'Bridesmaids' by Erin LaRosa via Buzzfeed

What have you been reading or writing this week?? Tell us in the comments!

Please pardon our mess!

2013-05-12T21:02:00.000-04:00

We have lots of people tell us they like our site.

We also have people who tell us the site looks stuck in 1999.

We hope you'll be patient with us as we try to bring Bitch Flicks' design into the 21st century.

Miyazaki Month: Spirited Away

2013-05-10T19:00:00.000-04:00

Written by Myrna Waldron.

Haku and Chihiro walk through a floral maze

Spirited Away has a deserved reputation as Hayao Miyazaki’s Magnum Opus, and even managed to outgross Princess Mononoke at the Japanese box office. It’s also, to this date, the only traditionally animated non-Western animated feature to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Which really should be called the Pixar Award For Distinguished Achievement At Being Pixar. I have trouble believing that the film is 12 years old, because it feels like it was released only yesterday. I slightly prefer Princess Mononoke, but Spirited Away is just as much a masterpiece as Miyazaki’s other works.

And, of course, it’s feminist too.

The English dub is not as accurate as Princess Mononoke’s was. It’s still very well done, but there was a lot more ad-libbing, extra dialogue, and some slight fiddling around with plot points. The Captain Obvious problem happens again with some of Chihiro’s dialogue, (“Haku! You’re bleeding!”) and they have her talk about Haku a lot more often than she does in the original script. The other characters often make allusions to The Power of Love that weren’t there in the original. Zeniba even says that her curse on Haku was broken by Chihiro’s love for him, though I think this change was added not so much to push the romance angle but to make the whole situation with Zeniba a little clearer. …Not that it helped much. I prefer the casting of voice actors in this film, as there aren’t any gratuitous celebrity voice actors this time. Of the main cast, the most well-known name is the late Suzanne Pleschette, and she would only be familiar to Baby Boomers for the most part. Even then, she and almost all of the others had previous experience as voice actors for Disney. And yes, Disney, you get a cookie for casting Daveigh Chase (who was fantastic as Lilo) instead of one of the Fannings. One other thing I have to commend the English dub for is that hilarious song about No-Face that John Ratzenberger ad-libbed for his character. Definite improvement over the original, which was already a very funny scene. I don’t know why the English dub team decided to go back to doing celebrity voice actors for future Ghibli releases, especially ones that are destined to immediately date the film like a Cyrus sister and a Jonas brother would.

Chihiro is the type of little girl heroine I wish I had when I was younger. Hayao Miyazaki has said that he specifically designed her to be average, relatable, likeable, and non-sexualized. He has also said how much he resents that a hero can be unattractive, but a heroine must always be cute. Chihiro really does look, act and feel like a real Japanese child, not a fantasy of what one “should” be. Her story has been compared to Alice in Wonderland, which I can sorta see (little girl is trapped in a dreamlike world where people are needlessly hostile to her and not much makes sense). One thing I really love about how Chihiro is depicted in this movie is all the little touches that make her feel real. When she puts on her shoes, she taps her toes on the floor to make sure the shoe is on properly as she walks off. Something that we normally don’t even think about, our tiniest little unconscious habits, Hayao Miyazaki has thought of, and added to the depiction of his heroine.

As mentioned before, one of Miyazaki’s favourite themes is environmentalism, and it plays a role in the plot in two instances. First, Chihiro proves herself to Yubaba and the other workers by successfully “curing” the Stink God that was actually the spirit of a severely polluted river. The “Stink God”’s appearance is a pretty heavy condemnation of how disgusting pollution is. The characters make it clear with their expressions that the bathhouse guest is the worst thing they have ever smelled in their lives. Its very presence rots the furniture. It’s actually pretty hard not to feel grossed out during that scene, and again at the end when Chihiro and the others pull the enormous pile of garbage out of the river spirit. This scene gives a strong visual consequence of pollution, and by adding a spiritual element to it, gives another reason for sympathy. Environmentalism is referenced again when Haku turns out to be the spirit of the Kohaku River. Chihiro had fallen in the river when she was very small, and he had saved her. She tells him that the river was drained and built over, which is why Haku forgot his name and identity and entered his life of servitude to Yubaba. A major character’s life was ruined by a lack of reverence for nature.

Chihiro and Haku remember how they know each other

I am appreciative that once again, romance is not the most important “goal” of the story, but what is most important is to just to show Chihiro’s maturing (though I do think the English dub pushed the “power of love” angle a bit too much). And really, I honestly feel uncomfortable thinking of Chihiro and Haku’s relationship as romantic. The characters mention that Chihiro loves him, but it’s a very shortsighted person who immediately concludes that the only definition of love between non-related people has to be romantic. She’s a little girl, he’s an immortal dragon spirit. There’s no way their relationship (if there even is one) can work - they’re better off as friends, just like Ashitaka and San. And really, who’s to say that Chihiro isn’t the type of person who just loves everyone? She’s shown to be a kind and generous person, and she even shows some degree of affection towards Yubaba.

It is fitting that the beginning of the film is about Chihiro and her family moving to a new home, as the major theme of the film is transition and change. Chihiro is just at the cusp of puberty - that awkward, rather unpleasant time where you are rapidly leaving childhood and you’re not sure what’s going to happen next. She starts out petulant and sullen as she hates having to leave her friends behind. And right from the beginning, we see how negligent and foolish her parents are, as they let Chihiro roll around in the backseat without a seatbelt (and her father drives around like a maniac!). It’s too late for her parents to learn anything, so Chihiro has to step up and be the responsible one. She has her moments of weakness, especially near the beginning when she repeatedly breaks down and cries, but this is a reasonable reaction for her. I’m (supposedly) an adult, and I’m not so sure I wouldn’t panic if I were in her situation. It’s very striking when Chihiro shows maturity - she remembers her manners again, she works hard without complaint, and she shows that she has a great intuitive ability. This is very deliberate, I suspect. Just like Chihiro’s parents, we often make the mistake of dismissing a child entirely because they’re a child. And little girls in particular seem to be dismissed and underestimated the most. Look at the crappy toys they get. “Here, honey, this is a plastic iron and ironing board so you can play at doing work! And here’s a doll that talks about nothing but shopping!” Miyazaki has given us a heroine that shows us just how strong and capable children can be - intellectually, emotionally, and physically.

The other characters go through a character arc of maturity and change as well, and likely as a result of meeting Chihiro. Haku starts off ambiguously - he confusingly shows great kindness and yet great coldness to Chihiro at the same time. But when he regains his name, and regains his freedom, his cold eyes become warm and affectionate. He starts off as a kind of saviour or guardian to Chihiro, which she repays by being a kind of saviour to him. Rin, the spirit that Chihiro assists in the bathhouse, very quickly goes from contempt to kindness as she gets to know Chihiro. Her third helper, Kamaji, starts off gruffly, but quickly goes well out of his way to help her, such as pretending that she’s his granddaughter, and even giving her train tickets that he had been saving for 40 years. These three characters who serve as her helpers all have one thing in common - they make a complete arc from rejecting Chihiro to totally embracing her.

Chihiro passes by a mysterious stone statue

The twin sorceresses, Yubaba and Zeniba, also go through a character transition. Yubaba is apparently the villain of the story, as she steals Chihiro’s name and forces her to work for her parents’ freedom. And yet she is not entirely evil, (there’s that trademark Miyazaki moral ambiguity again) as she clearly loves her baby Boh, and even keeps her word to release Chihiro’s contract if she passes her test. She’s not a nice lady by any means, but when the story ends she doesn’t seem nearly as horrible as she did at the beginning. Boh himself goes through a fairly quick maturation, as he starts off as a coddled shut-in paranoid about germs, and ends up happily assisting Chihiro, and both figuratively and literally stands up to his mother. Zeniba… I have a little more trouble understanding. When we first see her, she’s clearly trying to kill Haku for stealing her golden seal. She also physically transforms all the creatures in Yubaba’s room, which seems to be a punishment against her sister. At that point, she is not only physically identical to Yubaba, but identical in personality as well. So it is pretty jarring for her to be suddenly sweet and grandmotherly to Chihiro when they meet. She’s still kind of brusque, but definitely a complete transformation from her introduction. I’ve never entirely been able to figure it out. There’s a theory that Yubaba and Zeniba are two halves of the same person (which is hinted at when Chihiro calls both of them “Granny”), which sort of gives an explanation…but it’s hard to wrap my mind around.

The whole movie is kind of a mind screw, really, and I don’t think that’s entirely because I’m mostly unfamiliar with Japanese mythology. When I finished rewatching it yesterday, I had more questions than answers. I cannot take credit for this observation, but my mind was blown when it was pointed out how different the entrance to the tunnel was at the beginning and the end of the film. At the end, the red paint has worn off. The tunnel has been covered in ivy. The cobblestones are covered with grass. The foliage is thicker. And the little stone statue has been eroded by weather. Chihiro’s father points out that there are leaves all over the car, and dust inside it. But just how long were they trapped inside the spirit world? It seemed like less than a week to Chihiro’s perspective, but it has obviously been much longer than that. All of those changes from beginning to end suggest that they were in there for decades. Time and space clearly have no meaning there (for one thing, the day/night schedule is flipped), because why would it matter to something immortal and immaterial? But then the horror hit me. What happened when they arrived at their new home? At the very least, this family has been missing for a week. Pretty heavy implications there.

I have other questions too, not just about the period of time and ambiguity of Zeniba’s character. Is Boh actually Yubaba’s baby? How long has he been a baby? What do the bathhouse workers actually look like (their humanoid appearance is obviously not natural)? What will happen to Haku, since the river that he represents is gone? Did cleaning the polluted river spirit actually clean the river itself? Were Chihiro’s parents genuinely being gluttonous, or were they enchanted to act that way? How did it become nighttime so quickly after Chihiro’s family crossed into the spirit world in broad daylight? Were Chihiro’s family the only humans who stumbled into the spirit world, or have there been others? (The tunnel’s not all that well hidden, after all!) But the fact that I want all these answers tells me that this is the mark of a film with rich world-building, and a film that shows rather than tells. When I woke up this morning, I thought I didn’t have as much to say about Spirited Away. And yet, here I am babbling for 2100 words. That’s the sign of a film that is special.

Rest In Peace: Jeanne Cooper, The Fiery Kay Chancellor Of Genoa City

2013-05-10T15:34:00.003-04:00

For nearly 40 years, Jeanne Cooper has played Katherine "Kay" Chancellor on The Young and the Restless.

Written by Janyce Denise Glasper

In every daytime soap opera, there’s always that one woman who’s the matriarch, the steadfast character reflecting many generations inside the fictional town.

All My Children’s Pine Valley has Erica Cane.

One Life to Live’s Llanview has Vicki Lord.

Days of Our Lives had Alice Horton.

But The Young and the Restless’s Genoa City had the unbelievably sultry Katherine “Kay” Chancellor.

Playing her since debuting in 1973, Jeanne Cooper’s near forty-year run as the rich, illustrious businesswoman with short silver hair and deep rich voice was originally meant to be temporary, but Cooper put so much passion and charisma into Kay that she was kept on for decades longer.

I was about four years old when starting my CBS soap opera watching ritual with my mother and quite obsessed before preschool even started. At 12:35 PM, Young and the Restless kicked off afternoons of shared chocolate ice cream pints laced with drama, cheesy orchestra music, and click clacks of heeled shoes. This was a comfortable tradition--two dedicated hours being lost in other people’s problems in life and love.

For years, I would come home from school and ask greedy questions, wondering what the “fancy lady” (my nickname for Kay) had gotten into. My mother would recite all the day’s stories, and I fed on excitement-tinged words like ambrosia, always ready for the next delicious morsel.

Stylish, sophisticated, independent Kay was an amazing inspiration and constant favorite. Her razor quick wit, fiery spirit, brimming intelligence, and refusal of fuss from anyone including men were commendable charms to watch. Magic energy beams in Cooper’s bright eyes at each delivered word and ruthless spirit engaged her footsteps. She could throw anything at any character--physically or verbally with the power of a ferocious lioness. They would either feel threatened or step away insecurely at this rage, intuitively knowing that she was a feisty woman who could not be barred or caged.

Kay (Jeanne Cooper, right) and Jill (Jess Walton, left) have the longest-running feud in daytime history.

Kay’s contention with Jill started out as they usually do in soaps--over a man! Their relationship progressed over the years toward meddling in their offspring's lives and business dealings over the Chancellor Empire, but the embittered twosome has since softened, especially after almost finding out that they were mother and daughter for that hilarious short period of time. They still trade barbs every now and then, with Jill getting angry last week about Kay not telling anyone about her brain tumor.

Even as she aged, the writers still gave Kay great stories--from alcoholism, to many marriages, and the first soap opera extreme makeover (Cooper pitched the idea). The talented Cooper, a former Hollywood film and television star, could do anything. As an avid soap watcher, it is quite amazing to see that opportunity to shine when in other arenas of television and film that is a gift rarely received. Being on a soap opera involves tremendous strife, especially seeing as these actors read 300-page scripts and memorize them daily. With a woman like Cooper still doing and enjoying it, she showcases her passion. It's not just work for her; it's a joy that shows in every scene that she steals--shining so bright and beautiful. Age means nothing but numbers!

Jeanne Cooper finally won an Outstanding Lead Actress in Drama Series Daytime Emmy in 2008.

Jeanne Cooper, who contributed so much of her remarkable life to daytime, died May 8, 2013 at the age of 84, just a few days after filming her last scene on The Young and the Restless’s 40th anniversary. A woman to honor and appreciate, she will be celebrated on CBS with a special that airs on May 28, 2013 detailing her phenomenal run.

How many soap actors, let alone actresses get this kind of treatment?

Only a legend.

Though I cannot wait to see what stories they tell about Kay and the actress, my 12:35 PMs are a little sadder now.

And yes, my mother and I mourned her loss over the phone.

The Terminatrix Problem

2013-05-09T12:00:00.000-04:00

Written by Robin Hitchcock

Kristanna Loken as the T-X or "Terminatrix" in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

On round one thousand seventy eight of the eternal “do the time travel rules in the Terminator movies make any sense?” debate, my partner and I decided the only reasonable course of action was a Terminator movie marathon [we excused ourselves from having to suffer through Terminator Salvation, because life is too short to watch that dull abomination more than once].

The time travel debate, of course, rages on, but watching the first three Terminator films in short order made their relative strengths and weaknesses all the more clear. [Or, in the case of T2: Judgment Day, relative strengths. That movie HAS NO WEAKNESSES.] I held out hope that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines might have some new charms or interest placed directly next to its legendary big sister. It’s a movie I want to like more than I do, despite the crippling absence of Sarah Connor, awkward recasting of John Connor, and the distractingly aged Schwarzenegger. Oh, and James Cameron out of the director’s chair, half-heartedly replaced by some “I made one of those submarine movies from the early aughts, and no my name isn’t Kathryn Bigelow” hack (Jonathan Mostow).

I know now why you Botox

And then there’s that whole thing where Terminator 3 completely defies the defining spirit of the series “no fate but what we make for ourselves” and goes all predestination on our asses. You have a fate! You have a fate! EVERYONE HAS A FATE! Man, this movie has a lot of problems.

But allow me to expand on just one of them: The T-X, or Terminatrix, played by Kristanna Loken. Judgment Day had one of the most memorable movie villains of all time in Robert Patrick’s T-1000. Living up to that standard is a tall order. T3’s only answer for how to up the ante is boobies.

Inflatable boobies! [To be fair, they also give the T-X various and sundry additional powers like technopathy and plasma weapons, but they feel thrown against the lingerie billboard and they don’t quite stick.]

From a gender studies point of view, there’s a lot of potential in introducing the first female terminator. What are the tactical advantages of boobies? Why do robots (shape-shifting robots, at that!) even have gender identities? Why does the T-X have a “sexy” curvy endoskeleton?

That's not how skeletons work!

Spoiler alert: none of these questions will be answered or even adequately addressed by T3. Instead, Kristanna Loken will do her best Robert Patrick impression whilst having boobies, and it will fall completely flat (pun perhaps subconsciously intended).

Nothing will ever be this scary.

There’s several problems with Loken (as well as the writers and the director) deciding to go the T-1000 imitative route. First, obviously, is that it’s essentially impossible to live up to the memory of Robert Patrick’s chilling performance. Secondly, it throws away the fascinating idea introduced in T2 that different Terminators have distinct personalities (thankfully, the Battlestar Galactica reboot would pick up their fumble).

And finally, a beautiful woman acting robotic just isn’t that notable in our culture of objectification.

Women are so often used as beautiful emotionless props it can be hard even for feminists to notice when it’s happening. In the era of widespread photoshop abuse, images of women are increasingly not quite human: everyone has the same glowy, flawless, fresh-off-the-factory line look.

3-D printed Natalie Portman

Emma Stone with upgraded robolashes

Olivia Wilde is a female pleasure unit.
She requires a new coat of paint.

These images should freak us out, but they’re all too easy to accept as honest representations of a inhuman beauty to which we should all aspire. This objectification is such a pernicious part of the cultural DNA that the usual rules of the uncanny valley don’t apply to beautiful women. When Robert Patrick played the T-1000 with inhuman rigidity and emotionless focus, it was terrifying. But when Kristanna Loken played the Terminatrix using exactly the same mannerisms, she was just another sexy fembot.

Ask your beautician about mimetic polyalloy, the new revolution in skincare

Even when something is as thoroughly pre-ruined as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the patriarchy finds ways to make it even worse.

----------------

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town. She always leaves the room when Sarah Connor starts carving "no fate" into a picnic table during T2 because she's afraid to watch the nuclear attack dream sequence that comes next.

Mixing Business and Pleasure: Making 'Movement + Location' and Staying Together

2013-05-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

Bodine and Alexis Boling

This is a guest post by Bodine Boling, originally published at Bright Ideas, the Seed&Spark blog.

Here is the synopsis for Movement + Location, a crowdfunded independent science fiction film currently in post-production that I am making with my husband, Alexis Boling:

Kim Getty is an immigrant from 400 years in the future, sent back in time to live out an easier life. It’s a one-way trip of difficult isolation, but in the three years since she landed, Kim has built a life that feels almost satisfying. She has a full time job, shares an apartment with a roommate, and is falling in love.

But when she stumbles on a teenage girl who is also from the future, Kim’s remade sense of self is tested. After the girl leads Kim to her long-lost husband, now 20 years older than her and maladjusted to this time, Kim’s carefully designed identity begins to unravel. Kim finds herself having to choose between two entirely different lives. But once her secrets are exposed, she realizes that the real decision is what she’s willing to do to survive.

I want to say first that it was a gift to make a movie with my husband. I came back to that thought a lot when we were in the thick of production, both of us feeling misunderstood and unappreciated. Gratitude is a good way to find center when all else is cratering. It bailed me out of stress-induced derangement more than once.

If you find yourself about to get into something similar, I’d warn you that production with a loved one feels a bit like the worst parts of getting a tattoo. It can be painful, enormously so, and you’ll question whether you've made the right decision, and well-meaning friends will be like, No, but really? You’re sure you want to do this?

But if you get the chance, take it. Sharing what matters most to you with the person you most love is something almost no one experiences outside of parenthood. And the end result could be something you’re proud of for the rest of your life.

I have three pieces of advice:

1. Bring in an outside producer who can break ties. You need to trust this producer and they need to feel comfortable saying no to both of you. This is the person you’ll call when your spouse hasn't responded to an important email even though he promised he would and you don’t want to be accused of nagging. This is the person you’ll pull aside on set so you can vent while the next shot is being set up. It will feel like this person is saving your life, but they will actually be saving your marriage.

2. If something is said to you that can be interpreted two ways, assume it was meant in the way that doesn't offend you. This is hard advice to take but will make your life ten million times better.

3. Making a movie requires a level of confidence that is brutal to maintain. Remember that the person in the room it’s easiest to get mad at is also the person best able to help you cope. You both understand how hard what you’re doing is and how much it matters. Give the support you want to receive and watch it come back.

And look forward to production ending, which it will, because that’s when people will start telling you how cool it is that you were able to make something with a loved one. This sentiment will be absent on set, but trust that it’ll come. What you’re doing is wonderful, all difficulty aside. Enjoy that if you can.

I promise it’s worth it.

Bodine Boling is a writer, actress and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. You can find her on Twitter and follow her process of making the film at http://movementandlocation.com.

'Girl Rising:' What Can We Do To Help Girls? Ask Liam Neeson.

2013-05-08T14:11:00.001-04:00

Girl Rising (2013)

This is a guest post written by Colleen Lutz Clemens.

Girl Rising unites prominent female authors, such as Edwidge Danticat from Haiti or Aminatta Forna from Sierra Leone, with girls such as Wadley or Mariama from their respective countries. Together, Danticat and Wadley, Forna and Mariama, and seven other pairs have their stories of oppression, resistance, community, and family narrated by the likes of Beyoncé or Meryl Streep. Each story works as a discrete unit in the film, using animation, music, and images to give the viewer a glimpse into each girl’s reserve of resilience.

Wadley from Haiti

Mariama from Sierra Leone

Connecting the nine stories are interludes which show other girls in school uniforms as they hold us up signs sharing dreary statistics about girls in the developing world, such as boys outnumber girls in primary schools by 33 million. The stories teach the audience that these girls live in families that love them—even if that love looks different than it does in “the West”—and that education, poetry, art, and organizing are the keys to giving each girl the tools to recognize her own importance and to find her voice.

One of the interludes.

Girl Rising knows and plays to its audience: women in “the West” with access to basic services and education who have some extra money in the bank and a desire to help other women. The documentary works to connect audience members to a movement with the lofty goal of raising money to ensure more girls are educated worldwide.

I love the idea of educating girls. LOVE IT. I love any movie that takes the time and attention to tell the stories of girls to an audience that otherwise would not hear such narratives. I want every girl who wants (and maybe even doesn’t want) to be sitting on the floor or on a chair wearing a hijab, burqa, or baseball cap in a classroom to be there. If that movie is working toward that goal, then I am just about all in, which as a scholar and critic is pretty much as “in” as I can get. However, what proves potentially problematic is the way in which narrator Liam Neeson offers the convenient promise that once girls are educated throughout the world, then global issues will diminish and all will be right.

Thus, two things are still bothering me after seeing the movie a few weeks ago. First, fixing the world via education seems like a pretty big burden to put on the shoulders of girls. The implication of the film is that if girls would just have access to education, so many of the world’s problems such as poverty and malnutrition would disappear. To me this rings the same bell as when people say, “If only women ran the world, there would be no more wars.” There would be wars. There isn’t some kind of natural peace sense linked to the X chromosome. I want girls and women to have the agency that women around the world have been working for—I believe in that idea and in the movie’s thesis that if girls have education, the world can be better. But I don’t think it is just or fair to expect girls to fix all of the problems the movie seems to think they should fix.

Second, the film exploits the burqa to make its point about women’s suffering. It should be no surprise that the last segment is the one that Western audiences will be most eager to witness: the story of Amina in Afghanistan. This young girl is forced to marry at an age when an American girl would still be hanging One Direction posters on her pink walls. Watching her story takes the viewer’s breath away. The girl seemingly has no agency, no voice, until Western filmmakers come and listen to her. She lives in fear of violence, of becoming shamed by expressing her desire to live a life different from the one prescribed to her by virtue of her gender. She is the image of the Aghani woman Westerners are so familiar with but know little about.

Amina

Here’s my concern: I don’t think any of these problems will go away if she rejects and sheds her burqa. So when (spoiler alert) veiled girls start to run up the hill tearing off their burqas as the music crescendos and the voiceover offers us the idea that liberation is just around the corner once the girls reveal their identities, I cringe. This gesture is a bravery manufactured for the audience. Taking off a burqa is a solution that makes the audience feel good. It echoes the rhetoric of post-9/11 warmongering when suddenly we needed to invade countries in the name of women who needed liberation, a convenient excuse when those same women’s plights were completely ignored up until September 10, 2001. Of course, the movie does this on purpose, allowing us to feel justified all over again in our simultaneous invasion and ignorance.

I admire the girls. I want Amina to have everything she wants, even after only meeting her for ten minutes in the film. Yet I fear the other girls’ stories get lost in the noise of the past decade’s war with countries where “brown, veiled” people live. I was thrilled to be invited to co-lead a discussion after the film, yet the moment the lights went up the audience only wanted to talk about Afghanistan, about the Taliban, about Islam. Ten minutes into the discussion I gently steered the conversation back to the girls, as they had already been forgotten in the audience’s desire, and I might say selfish desire, to forget the bigger issue and make the suffering and anxiety all about ourselves again.

But Amina’s section also contains my favorite part of the film: when she looks at the camera and accuses the audience of being silent. She pointedly asks: what are “you” going to do? Of course, right after this segment, the film gently supplies an answer: text GIVE to 5515 and donate money to the 10x10 organization. I didn’t see a flood of phones light up in the theater. But this move of Amina looking at an audience filled with Americans and calling them out for staying silent in regards to her actual issue—“I have no school to go to, my family married me off at 13”—gives me the greatest of hope. Not her running up a hill taking off a burqa that she probably put right back on when she got to the other side of the hill: I can only imagine that she was forced to put her veil back on, although the film’s website says it cannot offer information about her current status as it may endanger her. But that she would look the West in the eye and say “You cannot forget about me. I will not forget about you. We are in this together”: that kind of girl rising is the kind of movement I want to be a part of, one what works toward greater access to education and doesn’t need to make me temporarily feel good or justified in the process.

Azmera

Colleen Lutz Clemens is assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn't reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her one-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.

Panmela Castro Graffiti Art: A Feminist Statement?

2013-05-08T09:00:00.000-04:00

Panmela Castro

Written by Amanda Rodriguez

"I was able to survive through the art of graffiti." - Panmela Castro

Heloisa Passo's short documentary Panmela Castro about the eponymous Brazilian graffiti artist and women's rights activist is included as part of the Focus Forward: Food for Thought installment of the Tribeca Online Film Festival. In around three minutes, Castro manages to be inspiring and recontextualize graffiti art. Castro views grafitti as an act of expression that seizes women's rights. She sees her art as a way to bring women together through the hosting of graffiti workshops for women where they make art while talking about women's issues like domestic violence, the cycle of violence, and gender equality. In Castro's vision, the movement of female-centric graffiti spreads from country to country as women share it among their communities.

I was also struck by what a male dominant artform graffiti traditionally is and how moving it is to see a group of women gathered around a building creating graffiti in a style that I've rarely seen, as it is a unique expression of the experience of being female in an oppressive patriarchal world.

Part of Castro's Bob Bar solo exhibition "The Myth"

Though graffiti is typically a masculine artform, it is also typically the expression of the oppressed. Graffiti has its roots in underprivileged, urban youth of color. Not only was graffiti a method with which these young men could articulate their individuality and their sense of repression, but it is also an anti-authoritarian type of protest. When considering Castro's grafitti, this art-as-protest theme becomes particularly prominent because public spaces are so often unwelcoming for women, if not downright unsafe for them. This idea of reappropriating public space, of claiming space by marking it, customizing it, turning it into a reflection of the female self...is awesomely powerful.

Panmela Castro signs her work Anarkia Boladona

The short film lists some of the international accolades that have been bestowed upon Castro for her important work. In the end, Castro calls herself a "dreamer" and draws inspiration from one of her recurring character creations, Liberthé, who is "free in such an ample way that we can't even imagine." Castro's artistic vision coupled with her vision for the global unity of women through grafitti art is subversive, beautiful, and just what we need. The idea that one woman acting out her dream can have a butterfly effect, causing revolution in the lives of other women around the world gives me hope. Castro brushes away the cobwebs of apathy and shows us that maybe we can make a meaningful change in our own lives and in the lives of other women, too, by just doing what we love.

Is Pepper Potts No Longer the "Damsel in Distress" in 'Iron Man 3'?

2013-05-07T11:39:00.001-04:00

Movie poster for Iron Man 3

Written by Megan Kearns | Warning: Lots of spoilers ahead!

Superhero films often exhibit assertive, outspoken female characters. Yet they often simultaneously objectify women’s bodies, reduce them to ancillary love interests or perpetuate gender stereotypes. So when I heard that Pepper Potts would have a more active role in Iron Man 3, I was excited yet remained cautiously skeptical.

Gwyneth Paltrow eagerly talked about putting on the Iron Man suit and getting tired of the "damsel in distress":

“I was really hoping that Pepper would be more engaged in this movie…So I was really happy, not only that she was wearing the suit, but that you see her really on equal ground with Tony in their interpersonal dynamic, and as a CEO, and then she’s got all this action… I think in order to move things forward and keep it fresh, you can only be the damsel in distress for so long, and then it’s old.”

Producer and Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige also said they wanted to “play with the convention of the damsel in distress…there is fun to be had with "Is Pepper in danger or is Pepper the savior?" over the course of this movie.” Okay, okay, this all sounds awesome to me.

Now I’m all for subverting gender norms. But is Pepper really empowered? Or does she really remain a rearticulation of the Damsel in Distress trope?

When Pepper puts on the Iron Man suit, it’s not of her own volition. It’s not because she cleverly thought of it. Tony, who can now recall his arsenal of Iron Man suits on command, remotely puts it on Pepper to save her during an attack. Once she’s in the suit of armor, Pepper does make the most of it as she gets scientist Maya (who of course has to have had a sexual past with Tony) to safety and protects Tony from a falling ceiling as well.

Tony Stark

However, when Gwyneth Paltrow discussed putting on the suit, I envisioned an assertive move by Pepper -- that she boldly decides to put on the armor so she can go out and save Tony. Not something she passively has placed on her body by a man. What could have been an interesting exploration of Pepper and gender becomes a wasted opportunity.

Just because Pepper donned the Iron Man suit for like two minutes, doesn't mean she isn't a "damsel in distress." She still is for a majority of the film. Archvillian Aldrich Killian kidnaps Pepper and ties her up, using her as bait to lure Tony and blackmail him. Yep, that sounds like a passive damsel to me.

In Iron Man, Pepper is Tony’s personal assistant and according to him, his only true friend. In Iron Man 2, she becomes the CEO of Stark Industries. By The Avengers, they co-exist as a team, partners both in romance and work as Pepper helps Tony develop Stark Tower and the Arc Reactor. In each film, Pepper grows and progresses to have a more important role. So how did Pepper -- Tony’s friend, partner and brilliant CEO of Stark Industries -- get reduced to an objectified and victimized "damsel in distress" yet again?

Gwyneth Paltrow in Iron Man 3

Discussing the Damsel in Distress Trope in video games, although it’s also completely applicable for film too, Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency talks about how the trope provides incentive and motivation for the male protagonist. The trope is also a form of objectification and is not synonymous with "weak" but rather a form of disempowering women, even strong ones, while empowering men:

“So the damsel trope typically makes men the “subject” of the narratives while relegating women to the “object.” This is a form of objectification because as objects, damsel’ed women are being acted upon, most often becoming or reduced to a prize to be won, a treasure to be found or a goal to be achieved…The damsel in distress is not just a synonym for “weak,” instead it works by ripping away the power from female characters, even helpful or seemingly capable ones. No matter what we are told about their magical abilities, skills or strengths they are still ultimately captured or otherwise incapacitated and then must wait for rescue. Distilled down to its essence, the plot device works by trading the disempowerment of female characters FOR the empowerment of male characters.”

Surprisingly, as it revolves around Tony, Iron Man 3 passes the Bechdel Test. Huzzah! A brief conversation transpires between Pepper and Maya, the botanist who invented the Extremis virus. Maya laments being naïve about science, just wanting to help people and how her ideals became distorted. Pepper reassures her, telling her that Stark Industries once carried out military contracts so she shouldn’t be so hard on herself. What a nice moment. But don’t get too cozy. This moment of sisterly bonding shatters when Maya betrays Pepper. Sidebar, it’s interesting that Maya has a change of heart not after talking to Pepper but after talking to Tony later in the film.

There’s a telling exchange near the end of the film when Killian tells Tony he injected Pepper with the Extremis virus because he wanted to make Pepper perfect. Tony, ever the good boyfriend, retorts, “That’s where you’re wrong. She already was perfect.” This could have been a nice albeit clichéd message about accepting and appreciating people how they are, rather than trying to change them. But 5 minutes later, when Pepper asks if she’s going to be alright because she's got the unstable virus in her, Tony says he’s going to “fix” her because that’s what he does, he “fixes things.” Ahhh the mechanic imagery strewn throughout the film comes full circle.

Gwyneth Paltrow in the Iron Man suit

It’s a strange juxtaposition between "she’s perfect the way she is" and "I’ll fix you," especially in proximity to one another. This dialogue could have easily been altered to show Pepper’s agency -- that either she wanted to keep the virus and harness the superpower or have it removed. We could have seen things from her perspective. But instead, it’s all to convey how Tony is decisive and protective of his woman and how he’s grown emotionally.

Taking place after The Avengers, we see a changed Tony Stark. Due to the stress of combating aliens and traveling through worm holes, Tony suffers anxiety, insomnia and PTSD. I was pleasantly surprised at the film’s respectful depiction of mental illness. Although its treatment of people with disabilities is abhorrent. We see the weight of Tony’s obsession creating Iron Man suits straining their relationship. Pepper is frustrated that his suits come before her. But they never resolve their issues. It’s as if Pepper said, “Oh I almost died, got injected with some fiery shit and now you fixed me? Okay, we’re good now!” Um, no.

So what’s the lesson here? Don’t worry, ladies. The right man will fix you and all your problems.

Pepper isn’t an empowered, self-actualized character in Iron Man 3. Instead she’s used as an object for the two dudes to fight over. She’s used to show that Killian is a villain who never really loved her while she’s used as an incentive for Tony to fight and to realize what truly matters in life. Tony and Killian battle it out with Pepper as a trophy to the victor, aka the better dude.

As film critic Scott Mendelson said: “For Potts, the movie was about other men giving her temporary agency/power and then quickly taking it away again.” Despite her intelligence and success, she possesses no agency of her own. Men bestowed power upon Pepper. Any power she appears to exert stems from men. Now some superheroes (Spiderman, Wolverine) have their powers given to them by others, either by accident or against their will. But once they have their powers, they decide what to do with them. They decide through their intelligence or cunning how best to utilize their powers. But Tony and Killian make all the decisions for Pepper. She doesn’t make any for herself. Pepper doesn’t choose to don the suit. Tony does. Killian decides to inject her with the Extremis virus that grants superhero powers. She doesn’t choose to keep the Extremis virus or have it removed. Tony decides to remove the virus. Even though she has a brief romp with superpowers and briefly kicks ass, Pepper somehow remains less empowered in Iron Man 3 than in the other films. Men decide her fate.

Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts in Iron Man 3

If the film really played with the conventions of a "damsel in distress," rather than playing out every other superhero trope, Pepper wouldn’t have been kidnapped or if she had, she would have saved herself, rather than needing Tony’s rescue. At the film’s climax, we do see Pepper, injected with the Extremis virus, kick ass and save Tony. Oh and of course she does it in a skimpier, sexy outfit. So even in the shadow of empowerment, Pepper must be anchored as a sex object, intertwining power and sexuality. Again, it isn't about Pepper's growth and development. It's about how Tony sees her.

While she acknowledges it “isn’t perfect on gender issues,” Alyssa Rosenberg posits that Iron Man 3’s “progressive gender play is noteworthy when you consider the kinds of roles actresses in superhero movies usually get stuck with.” But no, no it’s not progressive. Did we watch the same movie? Having women scientists and women CEOs in your film, while a good start, isn’t smashing gender stereotypes if you ultimately reinforce the same old tired gender tropes and clichés. It isn’t actually showcasing powerful women if you continually undercut women’s agency.

While action sequences are enjoyable, fighting is probably not what audiences find empowering. It's characters' decisiveness, assertiveness, ingenuity, struggle to survive -- all of which can be conveyed through a visual manifestation of action sequences.

Sure, it was nice to see Pepper kicking ass. But let’s be clear here. Just because a female character wields a sword or shoots a gun or uses her fists to punch a villain, doesn’t automatically make her emotionally strong or empowered. Possessing agency to speak her mind, make her own decisions, chart her own course -- these are what make a character truly empowered.

The problem with the Damsel in Distress trope is that it strips women of their power and insinuates that women need men to rescue or save them. And yet again it places the focus on men, reinforcing the notion that society revolves around men, not women.

Maybe I’m a greedy feminist but four minutes of ass-kicking does not automatically make an empowered female character shattering gender tropes, nor does it satiate my desire for a depiction of a nuanced, complex, strong female character. Sigh.

Oblivious Hollywood and Its New Movie 'Oblivion'

2013-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

Written by Rachel Redfern

Tom Cruise’s latest movie, Oblivion, is exactly that, a movie about Tom Cruise; upon watching, it felt as though any other character had been thrown in as an after-thought, which obviously denied them of any personality or importance to the plot. This of course leaves one with the odd idea that had they just nixed everyone else from the film and had Cruise be the only actor, it might actually have been a better movie.

Oblivion is the latest Sci-fi action movie blockbuster from Hollywood, directed by Joseph Kosinski and starring (the somehow never aging) Tom Cruise, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko, Morgan Freeman, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (hello, Jamie Lannister!). The plot: Jack (Cruise) and his partner Victoria (Riseborough) are clean-up and maintenance crews for the energy-creating and defense units that are left on Earth after everyone moves to Mars (basically like Wall-E except not as good). Of course, Jack is a curious sort of fellow, and mystery abounds when a spaceship crashes on Earth with a curiously familiar woman inside and the sudden reveal of Morgan Freeman (who, sadly, has basically 10 lines for the whole movie).

Tom Cruise saving the day in Oblivion

While some of the ideas could have been unique regarding the mystery and eventual climax of the film, for the most part it all feels very stock and trade. The whole movie is just watching Cruise go from one location to the next, kick someone’s ass, save someone, and have an inordinately pretty woman make love eyes at him. (Seriously, Cruise has to fly the jet, destroy the evil machines following them with his amazing skills, and shoot one-handed to pop off the ones that get too close, all while the female lead sits in the passenger seat looking scared and confused?) It feels flat and familiar and lacking in any kind of interaction with the other actors or scenery; it’s really a very static film with only one dynamic actor and everything else a fancy prop.

It’s a shame that the rest of the characters weren’t interesting, unique, or even had many lines. There were some great male actors in the film, specifically Coster-Waldau and Freeman who were sorely underused. Beyond that, their plot lines were unexplained and vague, lacking in development, explanation or screen time.

That’s not even the worst though; let’s consider the women of the film. The female characters were a type that I haven’t seen in a while, being so wholly lacking in personality that it was like watching a 70’s action movie. They were fairly helpless, dashingly clueless, often naked for no reason, and sent longing looks in Jack’s direction a lot—with ever-so-slightly-parted, lingerie model lips. Really, is it impossible to close your mouth when you’re in love?

Olga Kurylenko looks longingly at Tom Cruise in Oblivion

I was actually surprised at how lackluster and generic the women were; lately it seems that Hollywood is at least trying to have one interesting woman in a film, but the lack of effort here was laughable. Again, EVE, the female robot in Wall-E was a thousand times more interesting and developed with a far more fascinating and distinct personality.

The effects and the landscape were, as in most big Hollywood blockbusters, impeccable. As is the lead actresses clothes, hair, make-up. But that’s the problem; it’s all so soulless. The technology has a lot of rounded corners and blue, floating touch screens and it’s all very pretty and it’s all very unoriginal. The lead actress is tall and thin, has the ends of her long hair curled and wears a nice 4-inch high heel shoe—the poster child for how to dress for a job interview.

Andrea Riseborough looking impeccably dull in Oblivion

I just want to see something new: a less-sterile spaceship, some messed-up hair, maybe a square corner on a computer screen, hell I’d settle for a power cord. It’s just monotonous. Where is the vibrancy, the life, the touch of grit? Could there at least be one pair of ill-fitting jeans? How about some sense of relatable emotion like embarrassment, rejection, disappointment? What if the technology malfunctioned? Or the Macgyver-ing of the wires just didn’t work?

I don’t know, Hollywood; what if something new happened? Do what you haven’t done in a while and surprise me.

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Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection; however, she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.