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May 10, 2013

Miss Julie and the Timeless Art of Slut-Shaming

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, review, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , |
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org_img_1366920767_LCross posted at Ms.

Apparently, some things never get old.

Neil LaBute, screenwriter of such movies as a remake of the 1973 film The Wicker Man, about crazy, man-killing witches, has adapted the misogynist classic Miss Julie, written in 1888 by August Strindberg. (If you haven’t heard of Strindberg, think Rush Limbaugh as a 19th-century Swedish playwright: avowedly sexist, angry as hell and determined to use his platform to debunk such radical ideas as “women are human beings.”)

Miss Julie is often praised as one of the best examples of Naturalism in the theater, which strove to present humanity without any veneer in all it’s sexy, shitty, greedy glory. It takes place in 90 minutes, set in one location and features only three characters: an aristocrat named Miss Julie, her father’s valet, Jean, and the cook, Christine, who is also Jean’s fiancé.

On a midsummer night at Julie’s father’s estate, the patriarch is away and thus the servants are at play at an offstage party in the barn. Miss Julie takes a break from dancing with her servants, which is scandal enough, to flirt with Jean and have a few drinks in the kitchen. An overt display of sexuality and mutual seduction culminates in sex, after which Jean proposes they run away together and open a hotel. When Julie says she wants to go with him but cannot supply him with the seed money (the money is all her father’s, obviously), Jean turns cold, calling her a whore and proclaiming:

You lackey lover! You bootback tramp! Shut your mouth and get out of here! … I’ve never seen anybody in my class behave as crudely as you did tonight … I’ve never seen the like of it except in animals and prostitutes!

And then he convinces her to kill herself.

LaBute has set his adaptation—currently playing at The Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles—in 1929, dresses Julie as a flapper and makes Jean into John, whose Long Island accent never lets us forget his class. Unfortunately, these choices do nothing to improve on the intentions of the original. In fact, they serve largely to betray the playwright’s inability to accept that, despite Strindberg’s predictions, feminism hasn’t actually destroyed society. In both versions, Miss Julie’s inappropriate sexual behavior is the result of a radical mother who raised her “to believe in equality, the independence of women, and all that;” taught her “everything a boy learns;” and even dressed her in boys’ clothes. LaBute’s setting simply replaces the feminist boogeymen that inspired Strindberg—a growing societal belief in women’s right to education, legal recognition that women could own property and plays like fellow Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, in which a woman dares to assert her humanity—with the success of the suffrage movement, the growing availability of birth control, the New Woman and her daughter, the flapper.

LaBute does nothing to address the historical inconsistencies that this creates. Whereas Strindberg’s Miss Julie’s behavior represented a radical departure from that of her peers, LaBute’s Miss Julie, as signified by the flapper dress, is part of a massive, culture-wide trend of women taking their lives and their sexuality into their own hands. Additionally, as Lisa Hix recently pointed out on The Ms. Blog, despite the prevailing image of the flapper as Gatsby‘s wealthy Daisy Buchanan, the flapper movement actually originated among the working class. Nevertheless, LaBute slut-shames his Julie just like Strindberg does, and she, accordingly, hates herself, just as if she were a Victorian aristocrat.

While Strindberg’s characters do go back and forth between extreme and seemingly contradictory behavior, these contradictions remain internal to the characters and in fact become clear only when considered in relation to the stringent social mores and resulting hypocrisy of the time. LaBute’s context provides no such throughline. On the contrary, it only makes it more baffling that these two people carry around this much guilt. Lily Rabe as Julie furthers the confusion by affecting an accent and timbre of voice obviously modeled off of Katherine Hepburn. Sounding like the epitome of the self-defined woman that Hepburn was, while doing and saying things that neither Hepburn nor any character she ever played would do or say, only makes this Julie even more anachronistic, especially since Hepburn wasn’t popular until the ’30s. On the other hand, the choice does drive home the fact that the playwright thinks women in pants are a bad idea.

Perhaps because the parallel doesn’t actually work, LaBute doesn’t address the period other than through Julie’s costume. During an hour-and-45 minute play in which both characters’ main action is “to drink,” he never once refers to the fact that at the time during which he set the play, alcohol was illegal and not in small part because of strong women asserting their cultural influence through organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. While Strindberg’s play features a company of reveling servants who enter the kitchen and dance while Jean and Julie fuck offstage, LaBute’s version fails to take advantage of the fact that a little Charleston or Snakehips could have done a lot to contextualize the offstage action as well as serving, as Strindberg’s dance does, as a visceral metaphor for sex. As a result, the only thing the adaptation adds to the original is running time.

Jo Bonney, who has worked with LaBute before, directs this world premiere. Though Bonney often gets pigeonholed as the woman director who works on really masculine plays, at least half the playwrights she’s worked with have been women. Here Bonney does the job of a director on a new play: She brings what LaBute wrote faithfully to life. But though a director has no control over what the characters say and do, she does have some influence over why. Bonney could have structured the cause and effect of the performance to tell the story of a woman shamed into an unnecessary death rather than that of a woman doomed by her mother’s feminism.

Strindberg would later suffer no fewer than three psychological breakdowns—one for each marriage—during which, for example, he accused one wife of trying to drive him crazy by sending rays through the walls. (Some scholars credit these breakdowns to drug-induced experiments he performed on himself as part of his dabblings in alchemy and the occult.) Perhaps history will provide us with some insight into LaBute’s obsession with stories that punish strong women and warn society against the dangers they presumably pose. I was hoping his Miss Julie would be more than yet another incarnation of his same old thing, but alas.

Unfortunately, slut-shaming still sells.

Photo by Michael Lamont of Logan Marshall-Green as John and Lily Rabe as Miss Julie in Neil LaBute’s world-premiere adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie at The Geffen Playhouse.

 

April 16, 2013

The New Evil Dead: A New Lesson in Masculinity. And Oh Yeah, Tree Rape.

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, review | Tags: , , , , , |
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evil-dead-poster1Cross posted at Ms.

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains major spoilers. Also, TRIGGER WARNING: RAPE.

I am not really into gore for gore’s sake: When I go to horror movies, I want to be held in suspense and suddenly surprised, not just grossed out. Luckily for Sam Raimi fans, the new version of the 1981 cult classic Evil Dead manages to combine both surprise and gore. Using Raimi’s signature vertigo-inducing camera work and long, taut pauses, the new movie keeps you on the edge of your seat—until the tension is broken by something terrifying and you practically jump out of it. It’s also got blood. Lots and lots and lots of blood.

The first Evil Dead was a low-budget film that used such old-fashioned techniques as stop-motion to make bodies appear to melt. Though next-gen director Fede Alvarez also used mostly trick props, body modifications and makeup with very few digital effects, the gore in this film is decidedly more realistic than in the original. Likewise, the new film takes itself and the horror genre far more seriously than its melodramatic inspiration.

Though in a clear homage to Evil Dead II, not just one but two people have to sever their own limbs, Evil Dead is not torture porn. Despite its realism, the new movie is still about demons possessing people and doing horrible things to the bodies they are in as well as to the bodies around them. This film is about supernatural evil, not human evil, and the basic human fears it draws on are as much spiritual and psychological as physical. This violence exists not for its own sake, but to teach the characters a lesson, and this time around, the lesson is different.

In fact the film is not strictly a remake but rather a “what if five kids showed up at the same cabin from the first Evil Dead, and had roughly the same things happen to them that happened to the five kids who stayed there 32 years ago?”  Alvarez and Raimi have said they hope to make another Evil Dead II and then bring the two story lines together in Army of Darkness II, implying that the protagonist from this film might meet up with a grown up Ash (Bruce Campbell), from the first. I hope it happens, because the updates this film makes to the original makes the new movie more feminist.

In the first movie, Ash is clearly at a disadvantage due to his sentimental connection to his girlfriend and his sister. You see, in the Evil Dead world, once a demon possesses a body the only way to get rid of the demon is to dismember the body, burn it, or bury it alive. Ash, signified as a girly man by his name–which is really Ashley–cannot accept that the bodies that used to be his loved ones are demons, hesitates to destroy them, and suffers as a result. Though at the end Ash is saved by a symbol of his love for his girlfriend, there is no doubt that the lesson he has learned from his bout with evil is that he has to be ruthless.

In the new movie, David has come back to the cabin, which his family now owns, for the first time in years. He brings his girlfriend and meets two childhood friends there to help his sister detox. But David is disadvantaged not by his sentimental connections to the women in his life, but rather by the fact that he has failed to stay close enough to his family. Named like a king, the manly man David missed his mother’s prolonged illness and death and hasn’t seen his sister in so long he can’t really say he knows her very well at all. His fight with evil teaches him a very different lesson than the one Ash needed to learn: It teaches him to trust his sister and to be willing to sacrifice himself for his family.

Much to the chagrin of feminists, yes, the new movie does include a version of the infamous tree rape scene in the original, but the changes to it are telling. Whereas in the original, Ash’s sister Cheryl is held down to the ground by the branches of possessed trees, in the new movie, David’s sister Mia is held suspended in the air. And whereas in the original the trees are humanized in the ways they hold Cheryl down, the trees in the new film are distinctly trees. The resulting image is more like that of Christ or the figure at the center of DiVinci’s Vitruvian man than that of a woman being held down by a rapist.

The actor’s response to the rape is also different. Whereas in the original, when penetrated, the woman on the ground began to make sexual sounds and to breathe as if having sex, in the new movie, the actor is clearly in terror the entire time. This is violence, not sex. Most importantly, though neither Cheryl nor Mia’s friends believe her when she says she was raped, Cheryl never gets any justice, and her brother Ash escapes alive despite his doubt. Mia’s friends, on the other hand, all die, even her brother David, who finally learns that protecting the women in his life is more important than protecting himself.

Bruce Campbell said on twitter that “Evil Dead is omni-gender in its violence,” but that’s not entirely true. The only sexual assault committed is against a woman, and the only characters who cut themselves are women. But the point of feminism in film is not to avoid representing the horrible things that happen to women; it is to show that women survive despite them.

In the new Evil Dead, Mia is the only one left standing at the end. She slaughters the main demon in an act of physical strength (aided by a chainsaw, natch) that Cheryl could never have accomplished. If only Mia’s friends had believed her instead of dismissing her as hysterical and judging her by her past, they, too might have lived. But neither what the trees did to her nor the losses she has suffered will hold Mia back. This protagonist will not be a victim again.

At least not until the next Evil Dead II.

 

February 27, 2013

Dammit Mamet

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, review | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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Slide1

Warning: This post contains language which may be considered profane, sexist, ironic, feminist and/or totally quotidian.

Oh Mamet. Mamet Mamet Mamet Mamet Mamet. Fuuuuucking Mamet.”Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting. In his tail? In his tongue.”

Ask almost any theater practitioner what they like about David Mamet and they’ll tell you: It’s the words. The text. The language. The fact that the words are the actions. Mamet, they will tell you, is always playable. There’s no bullshit exposition or sob-story character development, it’s just people acting on people in a kill-or-be-killed world. It’s like Shakespeare, they’ll say, down to the punctuation. The words suit the action and the actions suit the words.

Ask almost any feminist what they think of Mamet and they’ll tell you: sexist. Racist. Abusive. Antagonistic to telling women’s stories. I was a college theater student when Oleanna, a play inspired by the Anita Hill hearings about a professor accused of sexual harassment by a student, came out, and I was horrified. By some interpretations, the story’s logic makes it seem as if a woman calling out harassment is a woman asking to have the shit kicked out of her. After the student successfully gets the professor fired, he savagely beats her. Blorch. Not cool. And yet, for 19 years, everywhere I’ve done theater, from New York City to Cambridge, Mass., to Los Angeles, I’ve had people tell me, “Mamet depicts real life, real people.” “You should read True or False, it’s the best book on acting ever.” “His writing captures the rhythms of real life.”

What better occasion for a theater feminist to take a second look at Mamet the Man and his damn Mamet Speak than last week’s cross-sex cast reading of his iconic film script Glengarry Glen Ross, directed by Jason Reitman (Juno) and produced by Film Independent at LACMA as part of their Live Read Series. (Sidebar: Doesn’t the fact that Mamet Speak has a name indicate that it’s probably not how people actually talk? My opinion: Mamet’s language, if comparable at all, is almost as heightened as Shakespeare’s.)

Glengarry-Glen-Ross-Poster_510x651

To be clear, the script read was not the play Glengarry Glen Ross but the screenplay for the movie Glengarry Glen Ross (see plot summary here), including the scene featuring Alec Baldwin (“ABC: Always – Be – Closing”), which was not in the original play. During the reading, Reitman, accompanied by projections of stills from the movie with the actors edited out, read enough of the action for the audience to understand the context. Large-type signs on each of the actor’s music stands named their primary character.

John Williamson, played in the film by Kevin Spacey, was performed by Mae Whitman. Carla Gugino set the house on fire as Blake (Alec Baldwin in the film). Catherine O’Hara outdid herself as Shelley “The Machine” Levene (Jack Lemmon). Robin Wright fucking punked Al Pacino’s skinny Italian ass as Rick Roma. Melanie Lynskey redefined the term pussy with her rendering of George Aranow (Alan Arkin). And Maria Bello stole the show with her direct-to-the-audience vaudeville delivery of the scheming Dave Moss (Ed Harris).

As Reitman clarified before the reading began, no rehearsals for this performance took place. The music stands, scripts, signs with the character’s names on them, projections of locations from a movie made in 1992 of a play written in 1983—all served to remind the audience that they were not being asked to actually believe that these were really women characters in the here and now saying things to each other such as, “Are you man enough to take it?” and “A man’s his job and you’re fucked at yours,” and calling each other “faggot” and “stupid fucking cunt.” We were, rather, witnessing a live experiment in what if.“

What if the “relentlessly macho” words of Mamet’s characters were spoken by and embodied within women? What if his classic Glengarry Glen Ross could be done in a way that reveals once and for all that the uber-masculine behaviors of Glengarry‘s sales/conmen are driven not by their biological male identities but by a capitalist system that relies on pitting people against one another like so many roosters at a cock fight? What if?

The experiment was a rousing success. In fact, these women pretty much tore the fucking roof off. Though they were using the film script, the presentation—with its signs and music stands—was distinctly theatrical. The presence of the actors in the same space-time as the audience, reacting to our laughter and our discomfort, returned the text to its roots, and the humor of the script resonated far more than it does in the consistently bleak film. None of it was staged, but Carla Gugino, with her model-like frame and wearing the kind of heels that very few people can actually walk in, re-read Baldwin’s “brass balls” speech and made it absolutely believable. Catherine O’Hara elicited more sympathy in her struggle to care for her dying daughter than does Lemmon’s more pitiful rendition in the film. (She was funnier, too, and being funnier than Jack Lemmon is no easy task.) Best of all, the ideological notion of a group of workers toiling under a capitalist “enslavement” and “befuddled by a middle class morality” rang far more true when the workers depicted were actually members of an oppressed group.

Then again, I wonder whether today’s openly small-government, anti-regulation, pro-gun conservative Mamet would write a play so obviously critical of the way the unchecked capitalist impulse towards financial success perverts our personal moralities. Regretfully, the team stopped short of fully committing to the exercise by cutting the language which would have been most difficult to hear spoken by a woman (such as a monologue by Roma [Wright/Pacino] about memories of sexual encounters with women). After all, such experiments, which make no attempt to convince the audience that this is actually happening, must be willing to make people as undeniably uncomfortable with our unquestioned assumptions about sex and gender as possible in order for us to gather enough data to prove or disprove our hypotheses. Plus, I would have loved to hear Wright say her “balls feel like concrete.”

Reitman was unavailable for comment, so I can only speculate as to his intentions in directing the reading, but last year he directed a Live Read of Reservoir Dogs with an all-black cast, indicating a genuine creative and/or social interest in expanding possibilities for women and people of color in Hollywood films. Film Independent is a non-profit that runs such programs as Project Involve, which partners young filmmakers of color with mentors in the business. I hope the series and Film Independent continue to investigate such possibilities and dares to go even more boldly where no women have gone before.

In terms of Mamet, both his supporters and detractors tend to make the mistake of conflating sexist characters with sexist plays, and sexist plays with a sexist person. Though I can’t provide a thumbs up or down on Mamet the Man or everything he has written, I can address some of the difficulties of making those determinations:

  • A play/film containing sexist characters is not automatically a sexist play/film: True.
  • That some of his plays/films are sexist does not automatically make Mamet the person sexist: True.
  • That he has been seen to be loving with his family means Mamet and his plays/films cannot be sexist: False.
  • In that they reveal the shit women have to deal with on a day-to-fucking-day basis, Mamet’s sexist characters actually make his writing feminist: False.
  • That he is open to changing a character that was originally written for a gay man to a heterosexual woman proves that he’s invested in creating diversity in his characters: False.
  • That most of the women characters he has written are femme fatales with toothed vaginas, forever leading men, Siren-like, to their doom: True. In fact, though people regularly call upon Mamet to write more roles for women, the entirely male worlds of Glengarry and American Buffalo actually represent his least problematic work.

The actability of Mamet’s plays make them fascinating to watch and useful for teaching the craft, and the indelible imprint he’s made on American theater and film cannot be ignored. More cross-sex readings (and dare I say, full productions) of his plays could give audience members and theater folks alike the distance from the “gritty reality” of the words in order to think critically and determine the ideology behind those words.

This reading was enough to make me want to look again, but it’s hard for a theater feminist to get past Oleanna. It’s hard for an intellectual to get past Mamet’s propagandistic conservative manifesto The Secret Knowledge. It should be hard for anyone—particularly the Jews he increasingly claims to represent in his pro-Israel advocacy—to get past him comparing feminists at Harvard calling out sexists to Nazis at Dachau. (Seriously. Dachau.) And though I’m finally open to reading it, ironically, my ex-husband took our copy of True or False in the divorce. Seems appropriate, but still. Goddammit.

Cross posted at Ms.

 

February 18, 2013

Feminist Face-Off: Beautiful Creatures vs. Twilight

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, review | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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smaller 2It’s hard not to make the comparison: two supernatural teen romances, both adapted from Young Adult novels, both involving a Romeo and Juliet-like attraction between a human and a superhuman. For feminist spectators, the popularity of such genre films warrants an investigation of their depiction of gender roles. So how do the two films stack up?

For the purposes of this analysis, let “feminist” be a film in which 1) The women characters are subjects and not objects–they are not just acted upon, they also act. 2) The ideology of the film, as reflected in its structure and content, at least questions, if not replaces, the constructs of sex and gender that are oppressive to women in our world.

What you need to know: Beautiful Creatures, which opened on Valentine’s Day, is a coming-of-age story of a caster, or witch, named Lena (Alice Englert), who on her 16th birthday will be claimed either for good or evil. In the months before her claiming, she falls in love with a mortal boy, Ethan (Alden Ehrenreich). Her family tries to keep her away from him but to no avail, and he soon becomes enmeshed in the spiritual struggle for her soul, along with Lena’s Uncle Macon (Jeremy Irons), her aunt, grandmother, cousins and the spirit of her evil mother, Sarafine (embodied for the second half of the film in the town’s religious zealot, played by Emma Thompson).

In Twilight, the sexist Victorian notion that for women sex equals death is perfectly embodied in the dangerous love that Bella Swan has for Edward Cullen, a love that does eventually lead to her death. Beautiful Creatures, though it is also about a girl’s coming of age and a forbidden love, is only peripherally about sex. Unlike Twilight, in Beautiful Creatures a woman’s sexual desire will not determine her fate. The main problem with her boyfriend is not that choosing to be with him will kill her, it’s simply that he makes things a little more complicated. Point for Beautiful Creatures.

What about the other women characters in both films? In Twilight, the mother is fairytale-ishly absent (not so feminist). In Beautiful Creatures, the mother is first absent then present, but evil (even less feminist). In Twilight, women vampires are capable of choosing to be either good or evil (feminist), whereas in Beautiful Creatures men casters can choose to be good or evil but women cannot (not so feminist). In fact, the battle for Lena’s soul is largely fought not by Lena herself but between her Uncle and her mother, indicating that her biology and heritage play the largest role in determining her fate (not so feminist). And, though Lena’s sexuality will not determine her destiny, her evil cousin caster is clearly driven largely by a deadly sexual desire (not so feminist).

Finally, in Twilight, the story is told from Bella’s perspective, but the narrative voice is that of a perennial victim–a woman whose own desire repeatedly puts her in the way of danger and violence. In Beautiful Creatures, the narrative voice and initiating action is given to the young man, while Lena is held largely captive in her Uncle’s decaying Southern Gothic mansion. But as the movie progresses, Lena learns to master her powers, which are greater than her Uncle’s, and starts to make her own choices. Nevertheless, according to the supernatural mythology of the story, nothing she does will determine her fate. (You can work out the feminist points here, plus and minus.)

However, at the very end of Beautiful Creatures (STRUCTURAL SPOILER ALERT!), the narrative voice–handles in most of the film by Ethan’s voiceovers, is given to Lena, implying not only that she has become the central character but also that in possible sequels (the book from which the film is drawn is the first in a series of four) her character could become even more of a subject. For diehard feminist spectators, this shift may not be quite enough, but the resolution of the film manages to call into question the inviolability of gender roles in the world created by Beautiful Creatures. Whereas Bella’s death in childbirth is a foregone conclusion in the Victorian world of Twilight, Lena’s future looks bright.

Because the central character’s morality is not determined by her sexuality and because she doesn’t have to become a mother/die to become powerful, feminist fans of supernatural films will definitely enjoy Beautiful Creatures more than they did Twilight. So I say go see it: If it makes enough money, we might get a few sequels, and the more mythologies available to supplant the repressive one represented in Twilight, the better. If that doesn’t convince you, consider this: The acting is better than in the Twlight series, the writing is better (Viola Davis agreed to be in it only after insisting that her part be changed from a servant to a librarian) and the design is better in Beautiful Creatures.

Photo, clockwise from top left: Alice Englert as Lena (Beautiful Creatures), Emily Rossum as Lena’s evil cousin Ridley (Beautiful Creatures), Ashley Green as Alice (Twilight) and Kristen Stewart as Bella (Twilight).

 

January 22, 2013

Guillermo del Toro’s Mythical Mamas

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, review | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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1-Mama-PosterCross posted at Ms.

For horror fans, January is both a blessing and a curse. Christened “Hollywood’s dumping ground,” January is where movies go to die. With everyone’s attention focused on awards season, or so the thinking goes, studios can afford to release films from which they do not expect much profit, many of which are horror movies. Though The Silence of the Lambs opened in January and did quite well, releases more typical of the month include From Dusk till Dawn and BloodRayne. (Remember them? Exactly.)

So while fans of Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) were eagerly anticipating the premiere of his newest film, Mama, last Friday, most of the world won’t notice it. Despite Mama debuting at number one with more than $28 million in the weekend’s box office, Del Toro’s upcoming summer blockbuster Pacific Rim, opening in July, will attract a much wider audience, as did Hellboy, which he wrote and directed, and Rise of the Guardians, the recent animated holiday release on which he was executive producer. Given del Toro’s prominence and power as a contemporary mythmaker, Mama and its representation of motherhood bear some exploration.

In four films (so far)–The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, and now Mama–del Toro embodies the very real childhood fear of losing one’s parents in a variety of mythical creatures that terrorize children until they either die or are saved by new and/or redeemed parental figures. Del Toro is known for drawing on fairy tales, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that in all four movies, the children’s birth mothers are dead, dying or absent, and their replacements are not much better.

The two most recent films in this series (Dark and Mama) feature a Hollywood archetype I like to call the Reluctant Mother. Think Diane Keaton in Baby Boom. Just as the Reluctant Hero is forced to go upon a journey when he would rather not but nevertheless manages to prove his heroic nature and learn valuable lessons, the Reluctant Mother does not not choose motherhood but rather has it thrust upon her. After bonding with actual children–and in del Toro’s films, trying to save them from monsters–the Reluctant Mother usually realizes she really did have it in her the whole time. Ah, motherhood: so instinctual all it takes is a demon from an alternate universe to make you want to do it.

In Mama, two young girls are taken by their crazed father–who has just shot their birth mother–to an abandoned cabin in the woods. Just before he can kill his children and himself, he is killed by a poltergeist-like monster who then raises the girls in the wild until, one day, they are rescued by an uncle and his girlfriend, who take the girls to a new home. Mama, as the girls call their monster, tags along. The girlfriend–played by Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) and identified as Reluctant by the excitement she shows at the beginning of the film upon reading a negative pee-stick pregnancy test–can’t quite hack laundry and meals, but she does prove handy in fighting Mama, who it turns out does not always have the girls’ best interests at heart.

This motherhood triptych–one dead, one Reluctant and one supernaturally evil–tells us a lot about the contemporary anxieties regarding parenting that inform del Toro’s and other contemporary films of the supernatural. Family structures are changing along with women’s social roles: Not all children are raised by their birth mothers, not all women want to be mothers and, as exemplified by Mama (who it turns out was a Victorian mental patient who killed herself and her baby and then hung around as a ghost looking for children to raise in its place), not all women should be.

Mama‘s typical January-film problems–plot threads that are introduced only to be abandoned and supposedly-smart characters who insist on investigating something they know to be dangerous at night and alone–keep the film from saying anything very specific about these fears. If the movie does represent a progression in del Toro’s exploration of motherhood, it is an unfortunate step in the wrong direction. At least when Katie Holmes’ Reluctant Mother in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is killed, one can argue that it shows she shouldn’t have been forced into that position to begin with. Chastain’s decent performance aside, I prefer the independent, Pat Benatar-esque rocker she embodies at the beginning of Mama to the one who ends the film having learned her lesson: Her place is in the home.

Guillermo del Toro (like George Lucas, Peter Jackson, the men of Marvel, et al) runs an empire that combines film, television, comic books and video games to make myths that reflect important anxieties of women, but if not consciously checked they only reinforce patriarchal norms. Women in such male-dominated media fields as gaming are beginning to report their struggles with discrimination and harassment, and media studios would be well-served by adding more women to their teams, both to balance the workplace environment and to provide perspective on products. (Believe it or not, women do watch creature features, read comic books and spend their money on action-packed summer blockbusters.)

Despite the common backlash against women who dare to to criticize representations of women in these fields (shout out to Anita Sarkeesian), we should keep an eye on del Toro–even his January releases. He is a master monster movie maker. As he no doubt continues to use a variety of media to represent the ways we are scared by changes to traditional family structures, I hope he’ll turn from punishing the women who benefit from those changes to questioning why the idea that some women don’t want to be mothers scares people so very, very much.

 

October 2, 2012

“The Mindy Project” – Comedy and Contradiction

Posted by Holly L. Derr under review | Tags: , , , |
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Cross posted at Ms.

Watch it while you can: Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project, which premiered last week to mixed reviews, may or may not have a long life. Most of Kaling’s hardcore fans watched it online before it was on TV, so it probably has more devoted viewers than the disappointing ratings it received suggest. But FOX clearly scheduled the show directly in between two new episodes of its hit series The New Girl hoping for more viewers than it managed to snag.

Call me a skeptic, but what are the chances of a sit-com that represents the many and often contradictory layers of contemporary American womanhood becoming a big success? For many, a character who is at once invested in doing good, succeeding in her career, finding a partner and having sex creates too much cognitive dissonance to resolve.

Mindy Lahiri, the central character, is an ob-gyn in private practice who wants to make money and yet can’t say no to a patient in need. She also likes sleeping with men to whom she is attracted regardless of whether they are capable of having a relationship, while she loves romantic comedies and is determined to find her “one.”

The Huffington Post‘s Maureen Ryan misunderstands the premise, calling it “muddled” and “not cogent,” and she deems the central character “off-putting.” It is indeed hard to reconcile the notion that a woman might be willing to help patients without insurance, focus on earning money, look for a romantic partner and be able to enjoy sex with attractive men, but in the course of 22 minutes Mindy manages to do all of those things. In fact, it is her being pulled in so many directions at once that makes for the show’s best comedy.

That may be because these are exactly the kinds of contradictions most women live with every day. Look around you: How many women do you know who engage in nonprofit or volunteer work while devoting themselves to careers in which they hold positions of power and are well paid, and meanwhile love sex and hope to find someone with whom to share a committed relationship? My guess is, quite a few.

So get them to watch The Mindy Project. They will probably enjoy it, and they could give this historic sit-com–the first to be written by and starring an Indian American–legs.

Oh, and while you’re watching, check out Kaling’s legs: She’s not ashamed of her body, so it’s no surprise that she’s created a character who isn’t either–and it’s no surprise that in the first episode that character is insulted by a male coworker about her weight. Who among us hasn’t been?

The Mindy Project is on FOX Tuesdays at 8:30 pm.

 

June 1, 2012

Coming to Sandra, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sandra Bernhard

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, review | Tags: , , , , , , |
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Cross posted at Ms.

I have never really understood Sandra Bernhard.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. After admiring her fantastic turn as ballsy sexual harassment lawyer Caroline Poop on Ally McBeal, my absolutely favorite show at the time (1997) about my absolutely favorite “dead feminist,” I told a friend, “I’ve never really gotten the Sandra Bernhard thing.” “Have you ever seen The King of Comedy?” the aspiring-screenwriter and Scorsese fan asked, as if that would settle things. (Scorsese fans always think it will.) A trip to Blockbuster for a VHS and a few hours later I said, “Wow. That’s an amazing movie. But … I still don’t really understand Sandra Bernhard.”

It’s hard to write about a cult figure when you’re not in the cult. So in preparation for reviewing her new show Sandrology at Los Angeles’ REDCAT, I made another attempt at unraveling the enigma that is Sandra Bernhard. Her irony has always appealed to me, but I wanted to know, what’s it all about? What is she really getting at?

In her movie Without You I’m Nothing, available on Netflix, she does a rote, almost solemn, performance of her stand up for an all black audience at the iconic jazz club The Parisian Room. For much of the movie, a straight-faced Bernhard recites her standard jokes about growing up Jewish as if she’s sharing common tribulations with the audience because, as she puts it, “You know our people have always gotten along so well.” No one laughs.

Minus the chocolate-smeared woman, I thought, This is not stand up. This is performance art. The juxtaposition of references from utterly distinct worlds combined with her sober delivery creates a surreality that makes you question whether she’s being funny, serious, ironic, or just silly. The performance of race and ethnicity is always, like the performance of gender, a political act. But if she means to be political, what political statement is she making?

Though my appreciation of Bernhard continued to grow with my research, my understanding of her did not, and I soon found myself in a room full of hard-core fans, all eager to see her new show, feeling like the only one who wasn’t sure what to expect.

Sandrology opens with the titular comedian, singer, dancer, actor and author performing Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain.” In typical Bernhard fashion, everything about her performance – her smile, her dancing, her voice – makes you wonder, Is she serious? Does she like this song? Is she making fun of it? Is she just enjoying being on stage? Can she really be doing all these things at once?

Moving with ease between personal narrative and musical tributes/sendups of Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga and Carol Channing, Bernhard manages to simultaneously perform herself and authenticate that performance as real. Like a woman doing what she was born to do, she perfectly suits the size of her personality and her voice to the space and to the people in front of her so that you always feel she’s being honest as well as deliberately opaque. References to her girlfriend and her family – she is clearly the “patriarch” of it and she’s clearly proud of that – flow easily off her tongue and land just as easily in the audience’s open minds.

Though advertised as a whole new show, as Sandrology unfolds you may notice that Bernhard’s references are oddly dated: Bristol Palin’s role as spokeperson for Candies‘ abstinence campaign (which she criticizes not by taking down Palin or abstinence but by attacking the quality of Candie’s shoes), the Royal Wedding, and Michele Bachmann. Eventually she admits that she’s not doing an entirely new show, but even then, the guessing game as to what is new and what is not, what is improvised and what rehearsed, continues to throw the whole nature of the performance into epistemological question, with Bernhard loving every minute of it. As if in answer to my questions, while describing a past romantic attraction she adds as a sidebar, “Don’t try to pigeonhole me. Unexpected things get me going. Like my plumber.”

In a perfectly fitting conclusion to an evening of non-sequitors and name dropping, Bernhard performs a medley of “Sex Shooter” and “Janie’s Got a Gun,” wagging her butt at the audience as if to say, “You may not have gotten what you expected, but you can’t deny you got me.”

I have never understood Sandra Bernhard, but I sure do like her. After all, just because she is a Jewish lesbian mother head-of-the-household who makes her identity part of her work doesn’t mean that her work has to fulfill this intellectual critic’s desire for a clear political message. Politics aren’t that simple, and neither is Sandra Bernhard. Perhaps just being in a room full of people who can see and love a person for all of those things at once without even batting an eye is political enough.

Get tickets for Sandrology if you can (only 9 performances left). If not and if you, like me, want to know this woman better, check out Ally McBeal, Season One, Episodes 8 and 9 and Without You I’m Nothing. Oh, and Scorsese fan or not, everybody should see The King of Comedy.

 

February 8, 2012

Helen Hunt Runs the Show in Our Town

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, review | Tags: , , , |
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Cross posted at Ms.

The moment she enters, walking quickly, in her masculine work boots and jeans, you know that she is a woman in charge. That’s what a real stage manager is, after all, but in most productions of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-Prize winning classic, Our Town, the Stage Manager is an old white man, replete with gray hair, a pipe and an archetypal New England accent that implies age, wisdom and tradition.

Actor Helen Hunt, as the Stage Manager in David Cromer’s production currently running at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, Calif., has none of these things. And yet, surprisingly, she, unlike the Norman Rockwell-esque narrators of most productions, has real power.

Set in the early 20th-century fictional New England town of Grover’s Corners, Our Town chronicles the cycle of life–from daily existence to love and marriage to birth and death–in distinctly American terms. That is, if American means small town, Christian, white and middle class. For Grover’s Corners is a place where “Polish Town’s across the tracks” and “women vote indirect.”

Whereas in most productions the narrating Stage Manager, speaking from a position of privilege, takes for granted that the values of Grover’s Corners are the ultimate American values, Hunt, without judgment, gives it to us the way it was. She does not pontificate or eulogize, she presents the town and its inhabitants and allows the audience to form their own opinions about this particular version of Amerca’s past. Her straightforward delivery, combined with the fact she is a woman telling the story, transforms the narrative from a given to a question.

Though unusual, the direct speech and modern dress of this production actually suit the writing. Wilder, with his romantic and yet surprisingly plainspoken text, both valorizes and interrogates traditional American values. The interrogation part is lost in most productions, which make the simple, bygone America of the play into an object of nostalgia. This production, on the other hand, creates genuine distance between the values of Grover’s Corners and those of today, and thereby allows us to wonder whether we really would, if we could, return to those times. The realization that we might rather not mirrors the lesson Emily learns in the final act: “That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance … .”

The great achievement of the production is that even though it successfully avoids nostalgia for a patriarchal past, it doesn’t lose any of its sentiment. In fact, Emily’s tearful realization that “all that was going on and we never noticed” hits even closer to home when she says it in a sweater that I’m pretty sure came from J Crew.

Cromer’s production could have gone further in destabilizing our vision of a perfect American past: Other roles written for men could have been played by women (the professor and the choir director come to mind), and the production could have included actors of color. Storytelling is a way of exercising power–of giving voice to the voiceless, of changing the narrative of history. Casting Helen Hunt as the narrator, importantly, democratizes the role of storyteller. Next time, Cromer should democratize the role of protagonist as well.

Photo of Helen Hunt in David Cromer’s Our Town by Iris Schneider. Our Town runs through February 12 at the Broad Stage.

 

September 15, 2011

The Personal is Political, and it Always Has Been

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, review | Tags: , , , , |
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Cross Posted at Ms.

What happens when you take the Trojan women out of The Trojan Women?

That’s what playwright Jocelyn Clarke has done in his new play Trojan Women (after Euripides), adapted from the Greek playwright Euripides’ 2,400-year-old original. East Coast-based experimental theater group SITI Company is currently performing the Clarke play, directed by Anne Bogart, at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles.

The play tells the story of the end of the Trojan War, when the Trojan men have all been killed and Hecuba, former Queen of Troy, and her daughters are about to be taken back to Greece as sex slaves.

From Agamemnon to Oedipus Rex to Lysistrata, all Greek drama is told through two lenses: that of the oikos (family) and the polis (city), with the interpersonal family dramas of the characters mirroring the political dramas of war, power, and money. In Euripides’ play, the relationship between the personal and the political is personified by a chorus of Trojan women, representing not individual women but the women of the city, for whom the city’s fate is their fate. It is here that Clarke makes his biggest adaptation: he changes Euripides’ titular character from a chorus of  women to a single man, who is revealed after a few scenes to be a hermaphrodite. By changing the chorus from a group of women to a single voice emanating from the body of a male actor, the playwright attempts to separate the oikos from the polis, and in so doing reveals the truth: that you really can’t.

Without the visual and aural impact of a group of nameless and faceless women, the play becomes more about real women, and specifically the women of the royal family: Hecuba and her daughters Cassandra and Andromache. And then of course there’s Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships, the Greek beauty who Aphrodite gave to Paris as a reward for choosing her as winner of a godly beauty contest. Helen, who presumably started the whole war.

But as with all things woman, the personal is never entirely apolitical. In the adaptation, as in the original, Helen is forced to defend herself to her husband, Menelaus, who plans to kill her for her betrayal. When no one is moved by the idea that she left her husband for Paris because she was possessed by Aphrodite, she claims that she actually saved Greece from ruin. Had Paris chosen Hera or Athena as the most beautiful, she asserts, the goddesses would have granted him the military and political power to conquer Greece; so, she argues, her adultery worked to Greek advantage. Hecuba’s rebuttal is also not personal: It is a defense of the goddesses. And Hecuba’s desire to see Helen killed is not rooted in sexual jealousy, as Helen presumes, but rather a desire for vengeance on behalf of her country and her family’s losses.

Though the characters make the same arguments in the original, they gain resonance in their new form. The absence of a group of generic Women allows the play to be more about women with individual thoughts, feelings and desires, and still, those thoughts, feelings and desires remain political. The viewer realizes that even in the original Greek tragedies, the oikos and polis are not actually opposites but rather one and the same thing. Troy does not survive without the family, and the family dies with Troy.

As feminist theater scholar Sue-Ellen Case has argued, the women in the original Greek tragedies do not actually reflect the reality of women’s lives at the time. Rather, they are men in drag–male versions of womanhood. The real women of Attica were largely confined to the home; they were not allowed at direct-democracy assembly meetings, and might not even have been allowed to attend the theater. But they were allowed to play a public role in the religious life of the polis, leaving their homes to worship and to perform public rites and rituals around birth, marriage and death that only women were allowed to perform.

Clarke’s adaptation makes the hermaphroditic chorus a priest of the Earth Mother goddess Kybele. By placing the women of the play in a religious context, Clarke highlights the real importance of religion in the lives of classical women. At the same time, says Norman Frisch, a project specialist at the Villa,

Through this newly invented character, we get a far more precise impression of why the goddess-worshipping Trojans and their ‘feminized’ worldview are held in such contempt by the conquering Greeks, whose values are entirely patriarchal and religion solely Olympian. We understand more clearly why the Greek generals feel compelled to reduce Troy to cinders—not only in order to plunder its vast wealth, but also because they fear and despise its ‘degenerate’ and ‘effeminate’ culture.

Unfortunately, this does not entirely solve the problems of the sexism in the original. The matriarchal culture of the Trojans does not lead to women having political power or fulfilling lives outside of their families–though it does lead to a high valuing of motherhood. One does not imagine that these Trojan women ever lacked for childcare or help around the house. But, ultimately, their identities are so tied to their marriages and motherhood that, when those things are gone, nothing remains.

Helen also remains problematic. Perhaps as part of the effort to reflect the “sensibilities and souls of 21st-century individuals,” she is clad in a modern-day semi-transparent evening gown complete with sparkling jewels and high heels. This Helen speaks like an evil version of Elle Woods and uses her sexual power to control the men around her. Helen has always been problematic, and this production capitalizes on her history as a fetishized object with a more glamorous costume and more heightened acting style than the rest of the women. The male gaze of Menelaus is put on literal display, as the actor playing him sits center stage and looks lustfully at Helen while she talks. However, I wish that the show did more to interrupt the audience‘s gaze in order to remind us that even this contemporary version of Helen is not a real woman but rather a man’s idea of woman–and a metaphor for the power lust that drives men to war.

As an investigation of women in antiquity, women in Greek mythology and the idea of the personal being political, Trojan Women (after Euripides) is well worth a watch. Ellen Lauren’s powerful performance as matriarch-in-chief Hecuba is particularly refreshing in Los Angeles, where the arts scene is so dominated by Hollywood that few women speak as resonantly or move with as much strength as Lauren can. Director Anne Bogart’s touch is elegant as she orchestrates staging that ranges from stunningly still to boldly expansive, alternating the focus between the intimate personal experiences of the characters and the larger context of the dying city.

That modern writers and postmodern theater companies can adapt, add to, subtract from and stretch a classic like this and still have it mean so much is a testament to the writing of Homer (whose Iliad first recorded the Trojan myth) and Euripides. That it can also explore the issues of modern feminism is a testament to the artists behind the production.

Trojan Women (after Euripides) runs from September 8 to October 1 at the Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater at the Getty Villa.

Photo by Craig Schwartz. Left to Right – Akiko Aizawa (Kassandra), Ellen Lauren (Hecuba), Makela Spielman (Andromache) © 2011 J. Paul Getty Trust.