When your body is at work 24 hours a day creating another
human, you’re going through a lot physically and mentally. But regardless of
whether you’re spending this moment marveling at your lovely miracle or cursing
the bladder-busting fetus, you’ll probably want to avoid movies that remind you
that all this work and anticipation could be for naught. Go ahead and avoid
these for the next few months (spoilers ahead).
1. Junebug (2005)
This delightful film follows two posh newlyweds on a visit
to see the husband’s rural, North Carolina family. It features the most beautiful gospel singing
you’ve ever heard and an adorable Amy Adams as the pregnant sister-in-law.
She’ll break your heart when she says three words I hope none of us ever have
to say: “He was blue.”
2. The Other Woman
(2009)
Since this Natalie Portman drama is on Netflix Instant, I had
a close call with this one recently. Thank goodness I thought to watch the trailer
beforehand. Apparently the
main conflict is Portman’s character getting over the death of her infant. Avoid!
3. Rosemary’s Baby
(1968)
I don’t know for sure. I refuse to even watch the trailer. But it’s something about being pregnant with Satan's baby. You’re already having
more vivid dreams. Might as well not get any more fucked-up fodder.
4. The Omen (1976)
Again, anything involving Beelzebub and your baby—just give
all of that a wide berth (!!). No need for you to be worried about your baby
getting switched at birth with the anti-Christ spawn of the Devil and a jackal. And then killing you when you figure it out.
5. Trainspotting
(1996)
You probably don’t plan to take up heroin and let your baby
die of neglect, but might as well not be exposed to the vision of the
bloated baby corpse that skinny Ewan McGregor hallucinates is crawling on the ceiling when he’s
detoxing.
6. We Need to Talk
about Kevin (2011)
Do you ever worry that, instead of being a better version of
you or Michael Phelps, your kid will be a rapist or murderer or libertarian?
Well, here’s a movie that will make you worry that you’ll never bond with your
child and he’ll become a soulless human who carriers out a Columbine-like
massacre. I’ve never seen this, and I probably never will. The book plunged my
partner into such a funk that we now look back on the few weeks it took him to
finish it as one of the worst rough patches in our relationship.
7. Game of Thrones
season three (2013)
It’s better than most movies, OK? You know I’m right. But
please, don’t endure Joffrey’s deeper explorations of moral depravity and then
get to the episode with the Red Wedding. You just really aren’t in the frame of
mind to watch a pregnant woman be fatally, repeatedly stabbed in the belly. Or
actually, there’s a bad birth thing in the first season too. Maybe don’t start
watching this show right now. You might end up with a baby named Tyrion or Khaleesi.
I hope, for your sake, that you took my word on it and just
glanced at the titles here. Now mamas, go wash your brain out with Singin’ in the Rain and Pitch Perfect.
Another entry in the
series where I finally
watch the movies whose trailers I’ve seen a million times on VHS tapes that were played on a constant loop throughout adolescence. So far, the coming attractions are universally terrible.
Many of us grew up loving and defining our high school
experiences through John Hughes films. I still have a hard time rectifying my
deeply entrenched nostalgia for the movies that kept me company for untold
hours in adolescence with their often troubling themes: the fact that Sixteen Candles makes light of what is
objectively a date rape or that The
Breakfast Club features some graphic sexual harassment, among other issues. But seeing his 1988 film She's Having a Baby as an adult, there's no internal conflict about identifying exactly what is so absurd and awful about this movie.
Hughes films, many of them rom-coms, tended to end the story right about the
time a couple got together. So She’s
Having a Baby, which came out a few years after his Brat Pack stride, is the logical next step in these characters’ lives. It starts with high
school sweethearts’ wedding day and the mundane horror (only experienced by
men, apparently) of settling down into a career and married life after the
excitement of courtship is over.
This isn’t the She’s
Having a Baby trailer that I remember. I don’t know if it came before St. Elmo’s Fire or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or something else. The trailer I remember featured
a semi-ominous strings score with quick cuts that made it seem like this
coming-of-age dramedy was a lot more serious than it turns out to be. Here’s
the only trailer I can find online—it’s a lot truer to the movie’s tone.
It’s a terrible movie for many reasons. These are just 10.
1. The protagonist is a milquetoast, mealy mouthed douche.
Kevin Bacon is in love with his wife but alternately consumed by either the
nightclub-hopping life he thinks singletons enjoy or a massive sense of
entitlement as a brilliant-yet-undiscovered writer (by day an ad copywriter).
His magnum opus ends up being the story told in this sappy, crappy movie.
2. Despite the fact that all of the main characters supposedly
grew up in Chicagoland, the wife, Elizabeth McGovern, is the only one who has
an accent. Those naaaaaaging A’s.
3. There’s so little development of why Bacon and McGovern even
like each other that we don’t particularly care if their relationship can last
despite temptation. See No. 6.
4. The depiction of marriage is insulting to anyone who’s ever
been in a relationship, but especially hetero women. This film adds to the
cultural narrative that marriage is something that women inherently want and
that makes men inherently miserable. When McGovern is given something to do
except stare blankly at something, she’s only concerned with nagging Bacon or
getting knocked up (and taking the pleasure out of sex). Bonus points for the
revelation that McGovern has never, ever, in their yearslong relationship,
initiated sex. Except when she went baby crazy.
5. Which brings us to the totally fucked-up theme of McGovern
trying to sneakily get pregnant. The trailer above frames this as part of "every married life"—when your lady tells you she’s gone off
the pill. Most women don’t just stop using contraceptives without telling their
partners. We all probably know a few women who would—but they are few. And
probably blood relatives.
6. At one point, the sleazy, bad-influence, bachelor best
friend (Alec Baldwin) comes on to McGovern and tells her she’s the only person
he’s ever loved. This follows longing glances in the one or two scenes he’s in
before this. It’s unbelievable that Baldwin pulls off tortured, unrequited love
in the face of McGovern’s just plain wooden performance. But he does! So it’s
pretty unsatisfying that she doesn’t go for it. That would have made exactly
one unexpected plot point in the whole movie.
7. Speaking of the totally dreamy young Baldwin, anyone who
rejects hetero, married, suburban bliss is either sinister or secretly
depressed, according to this film. Deep down, Baldwin just wants a nice wife.
And his one-time girlfriend, who isn’t interested in the suburbs or tradition,
is a condescending jerk who doesn’t even care that her mother is dead. And
according to Baldwin, she’s also a “slut.” That’s right, she dared to have sex
with him for fun.
8. The tone is all over the place. The scenes of Bacon
imagining assenting to suburban-consumer-hell vows during his wedding, seeing
his lawn-mowing neighbors break into dance to point out their
all-but-choreographed existence, and—a personal favorite—him burning the pages
of his book to keep his wife and would-be child warm, are jarring, unfunny, and
out of place. Especially when life-threatening stuff turns the movie to
tear-jerker territory. Father of the
Bride walked this line much more successfully a few years later.
9. There are weird cameos during the ending credits of Hughes-film
stars and other stars in character, including folks from Cheers and Star Trek: The
Next Generation. It’s the cherry on top of a random, inconsistent movie.
How does it work in the diegesis that Ferris Bueller and the guys from The Great Outdoors are suggesting names
for the baby? Maybe because most Hughes films are set around Chicago?
10. The film is called She’s
Having a Baby, but “she” isn’t even pregnant until well over an hour into
the 106-minute movie.
If you grew up with a VCR, you know practically by heart the
trailers that come before your favorite movies, even if you never got around to
seeing those particular “coming attractions.” But some of them probably
intrigued you—for me, these were mostly films that I wasn’t allowed to see. I snuck some of my most well-worn tapes into my collection under the
veil of independent or classic cinema that my parents either weren't familiar with or thought of as innocuous. But I always meant to get around to
seeing movies like Nightwatch (a
trailer before Trainspotting) and the
film that is the subject of this review, TheCotton Club (before The Untouchables) after I turned 17.
TheUntouchables being an obsession of mine
since I heard about its
homage to the “Odessa
Steps” scene, I’ve seen the trailer for TheCotton Club roughly eleventy billion times.
So it was quite a coup when I finally sat down to watch it on Netflix instant
this fall. And, cheesy and stilted as TheUntouchables often was (after all,
Kevin Costner and Sean Connery were the leading men), that film is the Citizen Kane of mobster movies compared
with the completely absurd, embarrassing TheCotton Club. This
movie is so bad on so many levels, it would take way too long to write a
properly scathing review. And frankly, it would almost be redundant. Res ipsa loquitur. So allow me to simply outline what I found compelling about the trailer and the top 10 reasons why
this (inexplicably Francis Ford Coppola-helmed) film failed in such an epic
fashion.
First, check out the trailer for yourself.
Aside from the damsel-in-distress themes that are so clear
in the trailer but didn’t bother my teenage self, there are still several
things the trailer has going for it. As evidenced by the many (more
successful) movies they've done together, Diane
Lane and Richard Gere have clear chemistry here.
That natural spark is completely doused in the actual film—basically every line
of dialogue that establishes the romantic connection between the two is in the
trailer. I, of course, assumed the love story would get fleshed out. In
addition to that tease, the costumes were awesome, young Lane seemed enigmatic
and magnetic, the set design was unique (I love the look of the
between-the-curtains backstage scene), the Harlem Renaissance is a compelling
and underrepresented (in film) period of cultural history, there was tap
dancing, and there was good music. It had the makings of a pretty good love
story set in the totally enthralling jazz age. To be fair, the musical and
dance numbers are terrific, but they just underscore how much the rest of the
film functions as shoddy filler.
So unfortunately, the finished piece was no crystal stair, if you
will. Here are just the top 10 reasons this movie is an insulting mess.
1. The main
love story is something you couldn’t possibly care less about. Like I
said, basically every scene that develops the story is in the trailer, and
then by the time they do get together, you’re still wondering why. They
are both kind of terrible.
2. The
fact that this film can’t decide whether it’s an ensemble piece or not.
It’s not hurting for stars: In addition to Lane and Gere, Nicolas Cage and
Laurence Fishburne appear in minor roles alongside several other folks
you’d probably recognize. But the way that The Cotton Club illogically
alternates among focusing on Gere’s cornet player/inadvertent actor, the
bad guy mobster, Cage’s wannabe mobster, Gere’s tap dancing neighbor, and the bromance between the not-as-bad gangster and
his second-in-command is not only dizzying but also shallow enough that we
don’t end up caring about what happens to any of the bunch.
3. Lines
like this (said from not-as-bad mobster to bad mobster and the other
baddie he’s quarreling with—with a zoom in on the speaker for gravitas): “In
the next room, gentlemen, is the best food, drink, and pussy available at
any price in New York. I suggest you take a sample of these things and
remember that this is why we work so hard.”
4. Lines
like this, which are apparently supposed to convey a mysterious bad guy’s
inexpressible evilness (over ominous music):
Gere's character: So, what do they call you?
Baddie: Nobody calls me nothing.
G: Not even your mother?
B: I didn't have a mother. They found me in a garbage pail.
5. Scenes
like the one where slapping becomes a dance move. In one of their more
disturbing exchanges, Gere and Lane’s mutual frustration (and Gere’s
possessiveness) culminates while they’re dancing. She slaps him, and he
slaps her back. The other folks on the dance floor are so amused that they
start emulating the incident as a dance move, thereby initiating a totally
absurd tonal shift in the scene while delegitimizing a clear instance of
possessive intimate partner violence.
6. The
fact that the film taught me yet another word for whore: moll. So happy to
have yet another sexually charged word to insult women.
7. The
completely unintimidating (and poorly dubbed?), mealy mouthed voice of the
main bad guy mobster. I can’t find any evidence of this on the Internet,
but the voice is so odd and mismatched to the actor and his apparent mouth
movements that it seems impossible to me that they didn’t dub in another
man’s voice in post-production—and change some of the lines to
boot.
8. That
they gave a really awesome tap dancer but terrible actor, Gregory Hines, a
dramatic role and yet another underdeveloped love story. Honestly, I’d
much rather see a fully explored version of this love story—between a
biracial singer-dancer who is passing as white and a black tap dancer—but
their story is left as shallow as Gere and Lane’s. Also, Lane may have
been the one who won
a Razzie for her performance in this film, but Hines is about the worst
actor I’ve ever seen in a widely released motion picture.
9. The
thrown-in themes addressing racial inequality. There could have been a lot
to say about white audiences’ consumption of (and simultaneous taming of)
black culture, but the TheCotton Club stops at remarking upon
the fact that black folks can perform at but not sit in the audience of
the club—at least until the end of the film—and that it’s wrongheaded to
take up arms to defend their spaces from white terrorism.
10. Lines
like this, from the little-seen Laurence Fishburne gangster: “When you get
Owney Madden on your ass, you truly have somebody on your ass.”
I could go on, but there are so many good movies out there. Let's spend our time seeking them out instead of kicking this dead horse. Surely the old VHS trailers won't lead me so astray next time.
Don’t let the Darko Entertainment logo fool you if you ever
have the misfortune of seeing God Bless America. If you’re
a wannabe film buff ages 24–35, Donnie Darko is probably
your favorite movie. And though its status as a cult classic forced the film
into the uncanny valley
of popularity, at which point it becomes too popular to be cool, you can’t be
blamed for digging Darko or for
making the mistake of assuming that seeing a Frank the Bunny logo in
the opening credits of a film signals an auspicious start.
If God Bless America
is any indication, the Darko Entertainment logo might as well include a tagline
that warns, “Facepalm all ye who enter here.”
A miserable, 105-minute harangue about the evils of media,
reality TV, celebrity culture, and—wait for it—rudeness, God Bless America follows Frank, a disillusioned insomniac who gets
fed up with American culture and his annoying peers and goes on a killing
spree. You can’t miss the takeaway message in God Bless America, because Frank’s countless soliloquies about the
shallowness and inconsideration of Americans and media are about as subtle as
an icepick in the eye. Obviously, we all hate noisy neighbors, teenagers who
talk through movies, and the abusive voyeurism of reality TV. But this film is
so heavy-handed and obnoxious about teaching these lessons that Frank ends up
coming across more like a cantankerous grump who doesn’t understand the noisy
music and tweets that those youngns are always talking about these days than a
cultural-war hero.
God Bless America
is a pathetic attempt at being both Natural
Born Killers and Network. But
unlike the Oliver Stone and Sidney Lumet films that God Bless America wants so desperately to be, the Bobcat Goldthwait-directed
movie’s distain for salacious media isn’t punctured by any thoughtfulness,
theoretical insight, or any gesture toward subtlety.
The film starts with an admittedly funny montage of faux
reality shows that Frank watches late at night when he can’t sleep. These scenes
are the only few minutes of the film that are worth watching. Because even
though the shows-within-a-movie perpetuate the idea that women are catty,
fame-hungry bitches who can’t get along with each other, one scene includes a
catfight in which one woman takes out her tampon and throws it at another woman
for shitting in the first woman’s food. In another redeeming daydream sequence,
Frank skeet shoots a baby.
After being diagnosed with an apparently fatal tumor and
being fired from his job, Frank starts acting out these murderous fantasies. He
starts by hunting down a spoiled reality TV star and ends by targeting the
judges from an American Idol-type
show. So obviously the film is trying to convince us of the evils of media. But
this message gets mixed up when Frank eventually expands his targets to
basically anyone who is rude or who ends up on the wrong side of his pet
peeves. This message is further blurred when we see that Frank clearly desires
media coverage of his antics and when he takes a break from killing to go to a
movie theater to watch a documentary on the Mai Lai Massacre. During
the movie, Frank himself massacres some teenagers who were talking loudly.
We’re supposed to be on Frank’s side because he’s punishing the obnoxious
people that we’re powerless to stop in public. But in the logic of the diegesis,
he’s watching (and apparently appreciating) a film that is deeply critical of
senseless, mass killings.
These muddled moments speak to the larger problem in God Bless America. For a film that tries
so hard (like, Waylon Smithers
hard) to not only make a profound statement about culture but also to
symbolically work against it through Frank’s cathartic killings, the film ends
up reinforcing the same stereotypes and values that it explicitly positions
itself against, especially misogyny.
In Frank’s first big soliloquy—there are probably a baker’s
dozen throughout the film—he chastises his co-worker for being a fan of a
“shock jock” who is clearly modeled after Howard Stern. When explaining his
aversion to the radio personality, Frank says that he doesn’t tune in to the
show because he doesn’t hate people who have vaginas. So he’s aligning himself
with feminists who view Stern and his ilk as some of the most loathsome misogynists.
At this point, the audience could rally behind Frank. He’s
on the right side of a good cause. After all, media objectification and hatred
of women is a well-documented social ill. But Frank’s passion about this
particular cause is puzzling since the film goes on to villainize, violently
punish, or sexualize every woman Frank comes across in his personal life and on
TV.
First, there’s the woman secretary who doesn’t share Frank’s
affection. She actually sets Frank’s rage in motion in a scenario that
completely dismisses and delegitimizes the problem of sexual harassment in the
workplace. We’re supposed to side with Frank when he gets fired for looking up
the secretary’s home address—work files—to send her flowers. While that’s
probably not a fireable offense, the film treats the secretary’s anxiety over
Frank’s gesture as reactionary, politically correct, and ungrateful. But unless
you think that the long-standing, all-too-real problem of men sexually
harassing women at work just boils down to bitches not knowing how to take a
compliment, you could see the situation for what it really was. Frank was a
creepy flirt who mistook the secretary’s graciousness for romantic interest.
Given his propensity to go on a killing spree, the secretary probably sensed
that he was a little off. Imagine if, instead of sticking to friendly greetings
and book swaps, your off-kilter colleague looked up where you live in files that
are supposed to be confidential to do something that leaped over several levels
of appropriate acquaintance behavior. It would freak you out, too.
There’s also his ex-wife, who treats Frank callously when it
comes to custody issues with their daughter, who is just as much a spoiled,
horrible brat as the My Super Sweet 16-ish
reality star who ends up being Frank’s first victim. And, of course, how could
we forget his Lolita-ized sidekick.
Roxy the sidekick is played with about as much panache as
you might expect from a
former Disney star trying to build indie cred. She seems to revel in her pseudo
badassness when she delivers such gratuitous and ineffectual lines as “You look
like fuck pie, Frank.” And her contributions to Frank’s holy war are mostly to
suggest much more shallow targets (people who give high-fives or who misuse “literally”)
than Frank’s more seemingly righteous ones (a Glenn Beck-type pundit and the
Westboro Baptist Church congregation). She also proves that women are liars
when we find out that she’s not all she seems, and she helps bolster Frank’s uprightness
by repeatedly and unsuccessfully trying to seduce him.
Really, everything above is only the tip of the iceberg of
suck. There’s the crappy production, the incongruous music choices, the bizarre
aesthetic tangents, and one insanely, unnecessarily long gun-buying scene that seems
to only exist because the guy playing the gun dealer is someone important’s
BFF. This is an unfunny, politically limp movie that is trying its damndest to
be edgy and important. But ultimately, it’s a very familiar message: An ineffectual
white dude overcomes the bitches in his life and acquires phallic power to
claim the respect he believes he’s entitled to.
Bechdel
Test: Probably fail. I hate this movie way too much to go back and check.
Feminists have women in The Avengers well-covered.
The conventional wisdom goes something like this: The only heroines exist alone
in teams of men (the
Smurfette Principle). The ladies kick ass but do so in skin-tight clothing, and one
uses sexual wiles in the line of duty. But what’s more interesting in The Avengers, and what hasn’t been
talked about much, are the different shades
of masculinity on display in the more crowded field of male heroes and
villains. It’s a
consistent thread that, not surprisingly, reinforces suspicion and antipathy
for men who drift toward the feminine and the queer.
The Avengers
follows a group of heroes—some skilled warriors, some superhuman, and some
aided by technology—who were assembled to fight an extraterrestrial threat to
the Earth. That threat comes in the form of Loki, who was raised as a demigod
with his brother, Thor. Loki is, even by sight, different than the heroes whom
he is pitted up against throughout the film. He’s thin. He has an English
accent (you can’t call what Australian Chris Hemsworth’s Thor—bless him—spits
out a proper English accent). Loki has shoulder-length, slicked-back dark hair
that those of us who curled our hair in the ‘90s (and the ‘60s!) would say is
"flipped out." He wears a really dorky two-horned hat. He’s into fancy canes and
scepters. And when he makes an appearance as a civilian, he chooses a posh art
show in Stuttgart, Germany, and shows up in a suit with a long coat and a
fashionable scarf.
Loki contrasts with the male Avengers, all of whom represent
different facets of American machismo. Captain America/Steve Rogers spends his
free time boxing and is the very embodiment of World War II (the good old days
before the civil rights and women’s rights movements) white masculine
benevolence. Iron Man/Tony Stark represents an unpracticed intelligence, a
playboy sensibility that absolves him of his tight clothing and otherwise
too-groomed facial hair, and the idea that enormously wealthy defense
contractors will eventually have our best interests in mind. Hawkeye/Clint
Barton is a covert ops military man whose archery sharpshooting, choice of a
hunter’s weapon, and implied romance with Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff
establish his toughness. Oh, and those
arms.
The dichotomy of acceptable and undesirable masculinity
seems to be represented in both iterations of one of the Avengers: the Hulk. At
first blush, the “rage-monster” Hulk looks like the picture of dangerously
unbridled masculinity. The Hulk is a physical danger to everyone around him
because he’s supposedly an uncontrollable destructive force. The other side of
his personality is the unassuming, mumbling, shy scientist Bruce Banner—who,
aside from his meekness is still a desirable American archetype because of his innovation and expertise in what
we still know is a
largely male, white job field. But if you think of the Hulk and Banner on polar
ends of the scale of masculinity—a bullet-spitting monster versus a sometimes
suicidal and ineffectual brainiac—that spectrum seems to be um, smashed, at the
end of the film when we find out that Banner can control his transformations
more than we thought. Banner says he’s secretly “always angry,” so his weaker self
is bolstered by his hybridity—he always has smash-happy Hulk standing by.
The most direct comparison of Loki’s masculinity with his
Avengers foes has to be made with his brother, Thor—the Viking-inspired demigod
who wields a big hammer—and hilarious. Thor has long
hair like Loki, but it’s the Fabio-like blonde locks that grace many a
(similarly muscled) romance novel at your local CVS. But the similarities stop
there. Thor couldn’t be more different as a man.
Thor and Loki were raised on another planet, and Loki was always jealous of Thor’s strength. Because he could never rival Thor
as a warrior, Loki developed the skill of manipulation. On Earth, his scepter has the power to essentially reprogram people's brains into mental slavery. Through Loki, we see
the dominance that masculinity supposedly craves diverted from physical power
to dominance over men’s free will and very consciousness. And that’s a dangerous
refraction of masculine angst. In the form of this villain, we learn to fear
physically weak men much more than we fear strong ones—at least with the
latter, what you see is what you get.
The difference between and hierarchy of mental and physical power is clearest when the uncontrollable masculine force of the Hulk illustrates Loki's puniness. One of the most-loved parts of the film—at least the one that got the biggest
laughs in the two screenings I’ve been to—is after one of Loki’s many harangues
about how he’s the cleverest guy ever and how base and beastly the Avengers and
humans are. The Hulk responds by grabbing Loki and beating him into the floor
several times like a rag doll, after which Hulk utters his only line of dialog: puny god. This declaration comes after Loki’s emasculation is made phallic in jokes about
Loki’s “performance
issues” with his scepter.
If the Hulk is masculinity’s sheer force harnessed for good,
that masculinity violently puts the puny Loki in his place. Of course, it’s not
just that Loki is feminized. He’s also queered. He’s the only Avenger who
hasn’t been explicitly or implicitly depicted as having a heterosexual
relationship—in this film or in one of the other Marvel movies that led to this
mash-up. But he also has an accent that is often associated with effete
European men, and his dressed-down wardrobe is much more stylish and
metrosexual than anything the other Avengers wear, Tony Stark’s tight shirts
notwithstanding. But this subtext is made more explicit when Stark wakes up
from a death-defying fall worried about whether one of his fellow male Avengers
gave him CPR. Or in his words, “Please tell me no one kissed me.” So even
fast-talking, beardscaped Stark draws a clear line to distinguish himself from
queerness. Loki doesn’t specify any such aversion and is obsessed with his
scepter and submission. And that’s on top of his racial otherness—in Thor, Loki is revealed to be an orphaned
Frost Giant. So even though he seems like a regular old Aryan demigod,
underneath he’s ugly, blue, and up to no good.
Joss Whedon put together another smart, enjoyable film in The Avengers. He’s no feministnovice,
which is why it's surprising that the men in this film reinscribe some troubling messages about masculinity
and sexuality. The mostly male team and their villain reinforce the notions that the feminine, the queer, and the other are to be feared and
quashed and that these traits need to be set up in diametric opposition to the idealized
male hero.
Bechdel
Test: Fail, I think? I can’t remember.
Overall Grade: B+
Feminist Grade: D
My mom playing at the oldest golf course in the world, Scotland's St. Andrews
In case you missed my AAUW Dialog post about how my mom was a Title IX trailblazer for women's golf, check it out. You'll be treated to several amazing 1970s photos.
Over at AAUW Dialog, I revisited one of the most important films in black feminist cinema, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, on its 20th anniversary to talk about the movie's revolutionary structure and how far we've come since.
If you’ve read anything about Cabin in the Woods, you probably know very little about the film except
that it’s supposed to be a genre-bending horror flick, its release has been
delayed for two years, it was written by Joss Whedon, it got crazy buzz at
SXSW, and it stars a now-famous
actor who looks much, much too old to be sporting a letterman jacket. Any
further details have been mostly deemed spoilers, though Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum managed to write a smart review
without divulging too much.
So if you’re looking for a great review that won’t spoil all
the surprises, stick with Schwarzbaum, because to convey how impressive this
movie is from a feminist perspective, this review will wrestle with all the
gory, gory details of the movie that no one wants to ruin for you.
Cabin in the Woods
is a film that not only plays with the conventions of the horror genre, it
exposes the falseness of gender stereotypes and lays bare what society is
really afraid of—losing socially constructed femininity and masculinity. The
film starts by introducing us to a group of professionals in an underground
bunker who are preparing for a mysterious event—the atmosphere and security is
reminiscent of a government defense contractor. We find out that their mission
involves five college students who are on their way to hang out in, yes, the
famous cabin.
The group of friends ends up being identified by the
contractors as fitting into the typified horror genre gang—the athlete, Curt;
the whore, Jules; the scholar, Holden; the joker, Marty; and the virgin, Dana. We
soon find out that the contractors are orchestrating a complex ritual to
sacrifice the group of unwitting students by letting loose supernatural
monsters to kill the group—in a specific order—as an offering to bloodthirsty, ancient gods who, if unappeased, will kill everyone on Earth.
The contractors lure the group to the cabin, heavily monitor
their movements, fabricate lethally advantageous environments, and even chemically alter
the young adults’ moods with adrenaline and libido-increasing hair dyes and
gases. Each of the victims’ statuses as archetypes of the
horror genre—and by extension, of society—depends solely on these
interventions. We see from the beginning of the film and through the characters’
own disbelieving dialogue that the athlete isn’t an alpha-male; he’s a brave
but sensitive sociology major. The whore isn’t a sexed-up Paris Hilton clone;
she’s funny, smart, and only blonde because the contractors manipulated her
into coloring her hair with chemically laced dye. The
scholar is smart, but he’s also handsome and strong. The joker is a pretty
hilarious pothead, but he’s also the one that sees through the manipulations
and ends up surviving improbably longer than any of the other victims, other
than the virgin—who is not, in fact, a virgin.
It might not seem so revolutionary that the five characters
don’t live up to the stereotypes that they’re being forced to play. Characters
seldom do fit into these types perfectly. But what’s interesting—and downright revolutionary—is that Cabin in
the Woods places these stereotypes at the center of the very existence of
the world and then lets the world to burn.
After some requisite killings by a zombie family that the
contractors let loose on the cabin group, we learn that the victims must not
only play the roles of the five types of people—they also have to die in a certain
order. And as anyone who has ever seen a horror movie can probably tell you,
that rule actually just means that it matters what order the women are killed
in—sluts first, prudes last. The men can die somewhere in the middle, and they
do. But the climax of the film comes when, against all odds, the joker and the
virgin not only escape from the sequestered woods, where they were trapped. The
pair also manages to break into the contractors’ compound and unleashes a
warehouse full of supernatural monsters that kill the very people who were
manipulating the cabin-goers’ fates. After finding their way to a temple where
the blood sacrifice is ultimately offered, the contractors’ stern director
(Sigourney Weaver) reveals that the only way for the world to be saved is for
the joker to die—the virgin can live or die according to the ritual, as long as
she’s the last survivor. In the end, the
pair decide that, if the world as we know it relies on this kind of sacrifice, maybe the
world should just end.
This message makes for a nonconventional horror movie (or
any movie) ending, that’s for sure. The last shot of adventure or horror films generally don't signal armageddon. But the sentiment behind the ending is what’s revolutionarily
feminist about this film. If, symbolically, society is based on sacrificing the
freedom to perform femininity and masculinity in whatever way you choose—if civilization
as we know it relies on these stereotypes for its very survival—then it
deserves to burn to the ground. There’s nothing morally redeemable in the
virgin killing the joker to keep this system intact. They both throw that option out and
embrace the end of the world, guessing that maybe it’s time for another
species to have a shot at life on Earth.
Cabin in the Woods
will likely get feminist criticism for maintaining some of the Mulveyan
conventions of classic narrative cinema, especially the let’s-stare-at-the-whore’s-ass
shot or the horror-flick staple of tainting sex scenes with violence. The film
could have made the same point about film and societal conventions without including these
stereotypical ways of simultaneously fetishizing and chopping up women’s bodies
onscreen.
But what saves this film from being dismissed as a typically misogynistic, if unique and very funny, horror movie is its statements about the
ominous, systematic way that people’s lives are disciplined. In this film, that is represented in the very real way that the contractors trap this group of
college students in an environment where they never had a chance to survive. And
although the plot begs an obvious question—why not just summarily execute these
five in the desired order—the answer seems simple to anyone who has ever read pessimistic
early film or Marxist theory. The fact that the victims are offered a choice of
which monster to invoke allows the powers that be to blame us for our own
demise, forgetting the fact that we were always only ever choosing
which way we would die. These particular victims refuse to make the ultimate sacrifice to the society of the
spectacle. And they take the system down with them.
Last year’s animated Disney release Tangled, which reimagines the life and adventures of fairy-tale maiden Rapunzel, is a prime example of why the morals of contemporary cinema are sometimes so difficult to pin down.
Tangled follows the same basic premise as the original Grimm’s tale: A long-haired blonde grows up sequestered in a tower, raised by a witchy woman who isn’t her mother. A princely type dude who is ultimately a love interest comes upon the tower, the witchy woman injures the dude and ultimately Sister Golden Hair heals him and they live happily ever after, probably as royalty. But this film departs from the original in a few ways that are important to a feminist analysis. First, Rapunzel’s hair and powers are crucial to why she’s imprisoned in the tower in the first place. Rapunzel’s golden hair magically keeps her adoptive mother, the vain Gothel, young. And if Rapunzel’s hair is ever cut, it turns brown (yikes, there’s something very Aryan-paranoid about that) and loses its magic.
Recirculating the cinema trope of the older, single woman as hateful and menacing is nothing new, but I hate to see it revisited, especially since it recirculates two gross ideas: that when women try to look young—as we’re constantly told we need to—they become monstrous and that women who aren’t married are violently threatening to the nuclear family. Watch Sunset Boulevard, among many other films, or read the “Scary Women: Cinema, Surgery and Special Effects” chapter of Carnal Thoughts for analysis on how we reproach women who go too far to look younger. And see Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Single White Female and many, many other films for examples of single women viciously disturbing heterosexual life with their spinster-ness.
The other big departure Tangled makes from the original fairy tale is the characterization of Rapunzel herself as a heroine instead of a damsel in distress. Certainly, if you read the Grimm’s version, Rapunzel does almost nothing but grow strong hair, sing sweetly and cry magical tears. It’s true that Disney’s version of Rapunzel is more active in the shallow, postfeminist sense of “strong women characters” that are so often touted in postfeminist movies.
When this film was recommended to me, it’s this active nature and dynamism of the heroine that was cited—especially the fact that, at the end, Rapunzel makes the move to kiss her prince instead of the other way around. I’ll admit that the portrayal is nuanced, from a feminist perspective, and that it’s a pretty delightful movie (who can resist a smart-ass chameleon?), but part of the reason this review has taken me a month to start writing is that the final feminist verdict is murky at best because this text is the quintessence of a postmodern, postfeminist take on history, class and gender.
For those who live outside their own assholes (i.e. outside academia), let me briefly explain what I mean when I talk about postmodernism and postfeminism. Postmodernism as I understand it—and trust me, it’s a very shallow understanding—basically describes any cultural product that was made after World War II and thinks of itself as innovative and groundbreaking compared to the social, political and artistic norms of the past. Theorists like Frederic Jameson basically called bullshit on this notion and said that postmodern texts, while they think of themselves as radical and politically advanced, are really just the same ideas repackagedin shinier wrapping. Jameson described postmodern art as schizophrenic, shallow and always loyal to the capitalist status quo.
It doesn’t take a whole lot of reflection or insight to realize that sexism is alive and well, so pseudo-empowerment is something that we should be concerned about as movie fans and media consumers. We should resist the idea that a text is empowering when it’s actually actively propping up sexism or whatever “ism” you’re concerned with critiquing.
So, what is it about Tangled that so exemplifies postmodernism and postfeminism? Well, the first thing is that Rapunzel as an active, feminist character is all over the place. She’s magically powerful, but only in very narrow, acceptably feminine ways—namely, healing and singing. She beats up her love interest Flynn Rider when he intrudes into her tower, but her weapons of choice are her hair, a symbol of her beauty turned powerful, and the wifely frying pan, a piece of kitchen equipment that is usually seen in comedies that turn domestic violence around into something large women inflict on slight men. She saves herself and her initially unwilling travel partner, Flynn, from life-threatening situations multiple times, but it's usually with her magical powers and feminine charm. Rapunzel’s goal of seeing an annual show of floating lanterns is what sets the journey in motion, so she’s actively making the story happen (as opposed to what Laura Mulvey describes as women characters being bystanders while the male protagonist does things to and around her), but it’s not really a radical expedition—she intends on going right back to her tower to paint and read (that sounds downright Victorian) once she has seen the lights.
Where Tangled does pave a clearer path for critique is where it addresses class relations. The film paints a portrait of a society ruled over by a benevolent king and queen whose daughter, who turns out to be Rapunzel, was kidnapped when she was a child. The plebeians love their rulers so much that they collectively mourn the heir to the throne’s disappearance every year on her birthday with a brilliant floating lantern display (similar to the commoners' Aurora song in Sleeping Beauty). Now isn’t that quaint. They joyfully celebrate their class status and dance around the kingdom outside their tidy, shabby-chic homes to vaguely Celtic music. They are clearly ecstatic to work in whatever trade they’re in, propping up their friendly monarchs’ palatial lifestyle. This heavenly class dynamic flies in the face of the brief brush with reality that the hero Flynn brings us when he talks about his childhood in an orphanage, which led to his thievery in adulthood.
Confused about what Tangled ultimately means? Me too! That’s the tricky part about postmodern texts. As Jameson says, they’re nearly impossible to pin down theoretically. So while I try hard to make definitive assessments as to what films are doing well and where they’re failing, this children’s film has been one of the most difficult ones for me to wrap my feminist head around. Of course, for many feminist media critics, the most important thing is to simply ask these questions and to know what you’re watching. That’s the fun—but also the curse—of being an active media consumer.
Imagine you’re an educated person with a professional job, but that job—and any other you’re likely to find in your entire country—pays below the poverty line, and everyone you’ve ever known your whole life is desperately poor. What if you had a chance to make life better for your entire extended family? But there’s a catch: You have to work in another country for nine months of the year in a job that makes many run scared.
Ramona Diaz’ s documentary The Learning explores just this scenario for four math and science teachers from the Philippines who are recruited to teach in Baltimore’s underserved schools. The film follows their first year away from home. Growing up surrounded by crushing poverty despite their education, Dorotea Godinez, Angel Alim, Grace Amper and Rhea Espedido make the heart wrenching move to the United States—away from their beloved students, husbands, children, parents and friends—to become the breadwinners for their entire extended families.
This is possible because the United States has a hard time recruiting and keeping math and science teachers, especially in famously rough schools like the ones in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. And the women make about 25 times more than they were making as teachers in the Philippines: Godinez says that where she used to make about 180,000 pesos a year, she now makes over 3 million.
What Diaz lovingly shows throughout this documentary is the emotional and physical toll that transcontinental work takes on women whose usefulness to America’s children inevitably comes at the cost of breaking up their own families. And although the film illustrates this injustice clearly—especially in the epilogue, which makes explicit that the Philippines’ recent economic boom grows on the backs of its women’s transcontinental labor in the form of money sent back home—it’s disappointing to hear the four women display and recite the tenets of the American dream since it flies so violently in the face of their reality. When Alim encourages her students to never give up on their dreams by showing them footage of her trip to a Disney park and emphasizes to her family that she wants to dedicate her salary to their education so they can have a better life, it contradicts the terrible bargain she had to strike to escape poverty as an educated person.
These four women are clearly compassionate, talented educators who are taking every chance they have to make life better for themselves. It’s just unfortunate that they have to make that choice to begin with.
5. Trainspotting
(1996)
