Monday, 28 December 2015

My 5 Favourite Feminist Films of 2015

2015 has been an odd year for films, it feels like for every step forward we take some male director say something sexist and stupid and we take ten steps back. There have been article after article about how there is a serious drought in women helming films, and it's a serious problem – it is no secret that when it comes to films directors are often seen as the geniuses behind them, so when all we see are men being those geniuses it sends a bad message about what women are capable of & it tells young girls who want to direct that there is no room for them. I hope that in 2016 we see a lot more films written and directed for women and that this continues as time goes on. It's a hard battle but women deserve to live in a world where we can see ourselves on screen in all our beautiful glory, with women bringing those stories to live. So in light of that here are my top 5, in no particular order, feminist films of 2015.

Ex Machina

Ex Machina was the first film on this blog for a reason, it was so brilliant in a genre that was drenched in sexism to find one that actually realised what would happen when female robots grew tired of being abused. As a result I started this blog simply to talk about how much I enjoyed it and it has grown and grown since then; you can read the post here. As a film it has some very beautiful shots, brilliantly thought out characters, and the microcosm that it exists in is one crafted perfectly. Vikander plays her role brilliantly, managing to potray the clinical side of a robot whilst simultaneously being softer when needed. It is a film that is aware of the darker, more twisted sexually & violently side of men, but instead of presenting it as uncommented upon fact it shows the consequences of it; it shows what would happen when that violence & entitlement was forced upon a being that had been brought into this world by that which was now causing her harm.

Rating: 5/5 Director: Alex Garland Starring: Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac. Available on: DVD, or to buy on services such as Blink Box or Amazon Video.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Any film that prompts a boycott from 'Men's Rights Activists' is probably one that I'd love. You can read my original post on this here. It was one that again understood the harm that male violence can cause and instead of using it for entertainment instead used women fighting back as its plot. It was a very thrilling joy ride – quite literally – of female, and I hate this word, empowerment. It gave us indivdiual characters that were seperated by more than just their hair colour. The film quite happily focused on the tragic story that Max had come across rather than trying to sideline the amazing Imperator Furiosa simply to keep him as the protagonist. It showed raw female strength & the power of sisterhood and I utterly loved it.

Rating: 5/5 Director: George Miller Starring: Tom Hardy, and Charlize Theron. Available on: DVD, or to buy on services such as Amazon Video.

Inside Out

Whilst little girls often get given tales of Disney Princesses, and much feminist writing has been done about those, they don't often get stories about them simply being little girls. But here was Inside Out a Pixar film exploring, rather than dismissing, a little girl's emotions. It was, again quite literally, a joy to watch. The film explored what happens when big, stressful things happen in our lives – such as moving house – and shows what might happen to a person's emotions during that time. I hope it helped children understand their own feelings, to have them validated, and made human and hilarious. It made me laugh and it definitely made me cry; it was beautiful to have a film with such a great female lead be such a natural, normal, and popular thing. I wrote about it briefly in a post (here) where I talked about Jurassic World & Pitch Perfect 2, two films that seemed to be angry about the fact that women existed & dared to take up space in a world made for men.

Rating: 5/5 Director: Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen Starring: Amy Poehler, Bill Hader. Available on: DVD, or to buy on services such as Amazon Video.

Spy

Spy was a hilarious film, and as a big fan of Melissa McCarthy & Miranda Hart I was extremely excited to see them both in a film. I never quite got around to writing up a post for it on my blog but I enjoyed it thoroughly when I watched it. It feels so ridiculous that I have to praise a film for treating Melissa McCarthy like a whole person rather than as a joke or a backdrop as there are more than enough films about men of all shapes and sizes being treated like people in comparison. But I shall because it feels like it is worth saying, and oh is she ever one hell of a person. Constantly put down upon in the film and underestimated McCarthy's character proves that she is badass. With a hilarious, amazing side kick in the ever great Miranda Hart (you can tell I'm a big fan, can't you) McCarthy kicks arse after Jude Law's character gets killed; yes, a film opened by killing off the beautiful male lead so a female lead could feel sad and take action – when does that ever happen? It's an awesome film, that is so great to watch and I really do recommend it. I won't say more as I wouldn't want to spoil it but what I will say is I never knew the world has such a great comic actor in Jason Statham.

Rating: 5/5 Director: Paul Feig Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Miranda Hart.
Available on: DVD, or to buy on services such as Amazon Video.

Girlhood
As I have not seen this film yet but that I know it is worthy of being this list I have asked Sam Calvert, here and who's own review of Ex Machina you can read here, to write this section for me. Enjoy.

Much like Céline Sciamma’s two previous works, Girlhood is a film which places the focus on issues less portrayed within the medium of cinema. Whereas Water Lilies (2007) explores the sexual awakenings and confusion of three teenage girls and Tomboy (2011) follows the distressing experiences of a transgendered ten-year old child Girlhood shines a light upon the young black girls that call Paris’ rough and tumble banlieues their home. It is on the surface a coming-of-age drama, however themes of race, gender, class and the politics of those subjects are explored and in the tradition of other banlieue films such as Karim Dridi’s Bye Bye (1995) and Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) offers a refreshing counter to standard nostalgia-soaked coming-of-age narratives as well as the ubiquitous cinematic images normally associated with white, middle-class sophisticated Paris. However unlike those films, the cast of Girlhood is almost entirely female.

It is a film that is brutally honest with its female characters, they are as flawed as they are empowered and are never once cast under a judgemental eye by the filmmaker. They do what they want, succeed and fail on their own merits, all in the name of empowering themselves for themselves and not for anyone else – a notion played to perfection in the much talked about ‘Diamonds’ scene. In fact the gender relations at play between the males and females in the banlieue would be worthy of a whole article in themselves. Ultimately writer/director Sciamma sums it up perfectly herself when she states that “French young women today are this girl”. A sure-fire modern classic, a slightly dragging final act is the only thing stopping Girlhood from achieving perfection.

Rating: 4.5/5 Director: Céline Sciamma Starring: Karidja Touré, Assa Sylla, Lindsay Karamoh, Marietou Toure   Available on: DVD, Netflix US, or to buy on services such as Amazon Video.

Very Honourable Mentions: Crimson Peak, Carol, Room, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.


Join me in the New Year where I will be starting a 10-part series exploring female sexuality, and how men find it scary, in films; starting from the teenage years and going all through a woman's life. I'll be looking at great films such as Pariah, Waterlillies, and Under the Skin.

Monday, 23 November 2015

Jessica Jones: AKA Hero

Warning: Spoilers. Also, Trigger Warnings (For the show also): Rape, Abusive Relationships.

Jessica Jones is Marvel's second Netflix television show following Daredevil. The best way I can put it is that whilst Daredevil is the epitome of male violence then Jessica Jones is the consequences of that same violence. It was an exercise in how to take a typically sexist genre – neo/noir – and use it to tell the story of how women live day to day in a world suffering under male violence. In the pilot we are given the typical noir protagonist: an insomniac who drinks, has no friends and a past that won't leave them alone. It was even complete with narration but it's Ritter's female voice that breathes freshness into a genre that typically sees women as dames who are there to seduce and kill the poor male protagonist.
It is set in Hell’s Kitchen, a place depicted as full of violence and poverty so rife that people have no choice but to live there and suffer. We follow Jessica Jones, a character who shares my name (an experience I'll tell you), who we meet as she is putting a man through her door window, because he oddly blamed her for his wife having an affair. She is established straight away as being similar to many a fictional detective before her, one who has abrasive, illegal methods but who, damn it, gets the job done, and yes she does get called Sherlock at one point. Just like Sherlock using his talents to trick others into telling him things Jess is no different, using a Barbie style voice to get information from a woman over the phone.
Yet Jess brings more to the table than those mere human detectives before her for she is a superhero too. Though the word superhero is perhaps not accurate here, for Jess isn't out fighting crime with her powers – at least not anymore. The show drifts around various words to describe her, though it is not shy in calling her a hero, but it mostly settles on gifted – though even that is argued over by one character, instead calling her a freak. Either way she has superior strength, she can kind of fly, or as Jess describes it 'guided falling', and she can't half take a punch. These skills are often held up as evidence as to how a woman can do a job that comes with the threat of someone deciding to kick your arse. On quite a few occasions did Jess, and her friend Trish, find ways to shrug off and defend Jess' considerable strength, from a cleanse to pilates.
The show explores similar themes to shows like it such as Marvel's Agents of SHIELD which has introduced Inhumans to its current season; it looks at the threat that people with superhuman powers would be, people who can rip people apart with their bare hands if they want to. Jessica Jones adds a dimension that I have always argued: but what if they didn't? What if they were like the many, many people that weren't violent? Like the fact that the violence in this world is pretty much committed by men, the statistics are staggering.
So what is it about women that makes us so much less inclined to commit violence? And what if we got powers? Would we turn around and wreak havoc for the thousands of years of violence and oppression done against us? Or would we be like Jess, who does good and mostly uses her strength to defend herself? As Jess says to someone who accuses her of being 'one of them', “It's people like you that give people like you a bad name”; it's not that she is or isn't the problem but it's like many scared, paranoid, fear mongering people who assume and accuse others of being a threat. That's not even getting into the fact that humans are enough of a threat on their own & that weapons can bridge that gap between human and inhumans, I mean seriously three members of the Avengers are human.
In the pilot she gets a case that starts off the whole season: someone's daughter, Hope, has gone missing. Even in this exchange alone we are treated to one way that gender stereotypes can crop up as the father starts trying to fix Jess' apartment door – the one that she threw a man through. At one point he asks her if she has a spirit level & we get a little moment where noir crosses with sexism as she doesn't have one but instead she hands him some glue, noir protagonists are not the most prepared characters. It's sexism is topped off by him saying he doesn't want to leave a woman alone in the city with a door that won't lock, the irony of this of course being that Jess can more than handle herself.
The theme of strength is a core one of the show however; from dealing with literal, physical strength to a more abstract, mental and emotional strength. This happens because despite Jess' immense strength she was once powerless to use it as her enemy was a man by the name of Kilgrave, played by David Tennant, who instead controlled her mind. It's this helplessness, this losing control over your mind and body that is the key fascination that Jessica Jones explores. Many a time do Trish and Jess point out that being mind controlled by Kilgrave does not make you weak, and that in fact you could be the strongest person in both mind and body and it doesn't matter against Kilgrave's powers.
This is where I say that I'm going to spoil the entire season so I hope you've watched it all before you read on. This lack of strength & weakness becomes especially clear when we find out that his powers are a virus & that the only way to be free of him is by being with him for long enough that your body can create antibodies against it, as happens with Jess. It's also this anti-body resistance that serves as one of many great metaphors in the show for what happens when you leave an abusive relationship. Women who've left abusive partners can still feel trapped, and often live under the very real threat of their ex returning to hurt them – leaving is the most dangerous time for women in these relationships. These women over time would hopefully learn how to be free, as it were, from their partners' spell; whilst Kilgrave has fictional mind control powers he is representative of men who use simple manipulation to exercise that same control of their female partners.
It is through this threat that the show expertly portrays the realities of living in and out of an abusive relationship. Often when we hear about these relationships there are cries of why didn't she leave as though women happily choose to stay with men who hurt them, as though there could be no other side to it. When often in reality women's choices are more complex, as reality often is, and it’s this lack of choice that the show handles brilliantly. Women in abusive relationships are emotionally abused to feel as though they are worthless, that they bring the abuse on themselves and that they deserve it; abusive men also isolate women from their friends, their family, the people who would be able to warn and help them. They make them financially dependent on them so even if they wanted to leave they would have no money to get away. They keep track of everything that they do on the internet, or outside of home – if they even allow them to go out alone that is – so even women finding out that there are options to escape is pretty slim. Considering many people don't understand the signs of abuse, and that much of the abuse isn't physical, it is not really a mystery why people don't get out of abusive relationships. Again, that's not even considering just how dangerous, as I've said, it is when women do finally leave – that is often when they are killed. I am sure there are people out there who have even stopped watching this show, or have had their abusive partners turn it off in front of them after realising Kilgrave is portrayed as the evil villain.
A big part of liberal feminism that I often see is this idea of choice, in particular women's choices. There's a lot of discussion about the idea that women should have the freedom to make whatever choices they want, regardless of the impact those choices have on other women even. For instance, when some feminists talk about how harmful things like objectification can be, how patriarchal ideas of women's worth are tied to how sexually attractive to men they are and when it comes to  women who are objectified – such as those in the modelling and sex industries – liberal feminists are quick to point out that if a woman chooses to be objectified then that's her business. I'm hardly the first feminist then to point out that this is a rather narrow way to look at the world and that it is all but useless for feminism seems as feminism deals with oppressive structures and systems rather than solely individual choices.
Jessica Jones then as a show has much to say on choices and how free women really are to make certain choices. It understands that abusive men and oppressive structures can take away a woman's choice, can remove her chance to say no, and then will turn around and blame her for doing something she had no real choice but to do. As much as Kilgrave uses his powers there's also many times when he simply manipulates Jess with his words, with the threat of making others take their own lives, and with the threat of doing despicable things to those that she cares about. Where is the choice when it’s between your best friend being killed or raped and stopping the man who has ruined yours and many others lives? Many women have argued that in a patriarchy women's free will is twisted and marked by the oppression that she lives under, it's no different for Jess.
On the other hand however, it is very aware of the choices that men make, that men have the power to make for they are the ones in a patriarchy with the most power. Kilgrave is a perfect example of what an abusive, entitled man would do if he was given the power to control minds. He uses women like puppets, there to be raped for his pleasure, to be pretty things on his arms. He even uses a woman, Hope, simply to annoy and lure Jess as he goes through the same steps he did with her - dinner, hotels and such. He gets whatever he wants and it is the simple fact that Jess leaves him and is the one person who disobeys him that makes him so furious he sets out to ruin her life, in the name of loving her.
That again is another corner stone of abuse, and sadly one many believe if newspaper headlines and stories are to be believed. We paint men who kill their partners and their families as loving men whose love was simply so much that they had no choice but to kill them; that by taking their life they were showing some true act of love. Kilgrave made it very clear that he thought that he loved Jess, that he was controlling her because he loved her more than anyone did and that only he could love her in the Right Way. The truth is, of course, that he doesn't love her but instead he is obsessed with her. That he feels like she is his possession and that any time she is a real person, exercising her right to say no to him, that this illusion shatters and he reacts with anger and more and more control.
In the final episode, in the climax of Jess finally standing off and up to Kilgrave in what ends with his death at her hands, is a line that shows how he wants her to see herself; he says to her that she isn't capable of loving, that she could never truly love him because she couldn't love any man. This is again another common abuse tactic as it turns him into the victim and her into the villain; of course he has to hurt her because it’s the only way he can make her see how great he is, of course he has to force her to be with him so he can teach her how to love, and ultimately she ends up feeling like the person in the wrong when it’s his own issues and insecurities that mean she doesn't love him, not hers. It is one of many patriarchal reversals that men often pull to convince themselves that women are the cause of all problems and not men, for example a simple one would be men saying that women are bad drivers when in fact it is men who cause the most road accidents, and especially the most fatal ones.
Even then there are other things throughout the show that hint at the reality of women living in a patriarchal world that abuses women but then hates any attempt they make at dealing with it. For instance, in this final fight Jess tells her best friend Trish, stood nearby after being threatened by Kilgrave with a future of rape and death, that she loves her, and she does so because she knows she's about to murder Kilgrave; she does this simply because she knows that she will be sent to jail – though, luckily perhaps, that does not happen – and this is because killing your abuser is seen as an unacceptable choice women make. There are many, many women in prison for this exact reason and whilst I'm not advocating they should all be free I think that there is a lack of understanding of how little choice these women had in doing what they did.
That so many of these women were faced with their own deaths, or the death of their children, and that the only way to stop them was killing them. Yet women's sentences, like with most other crimes, are harsher for this than men's would be. It is seen as a much greater crime for a woman to kill a man than for a man to kill a woman, just look at the sentences men get for killing a stranger compared to their partners. There is even a plot in the show of Trish getting a gun after she learns to defend herself and almost fails; but even this in the real world has consequences that women suffer worst, as is evidenced by a case where a woman went to jail for decades purely for firing warning shots at her abusive partner. A woman threatening a man was deemed worse than many men's very real violence against women, and children.
Male violence is a constant in the world of Hell's Kitchen, as was made painstakingly clear in Daredevil, and seen in obvious and subtle ways in Jessica Jones. Take the character of Simpson, or G.I. Joe as I took to calling him in my notes, he is very violent, time and time again; he complains that when Kilgrave made him try to kill Trish that that wasn't him, that he isn't like that. Yet as the series goes on his character is marked by the violence he commits, in many situations and against many different people. He even commits the abuse staple of immediately apologising for his violence against Trish as she tries to stop his violence, saying it will never happen again.
But then there is also the aftermaths of male violence scattered throughout; we see this in Jess' PTSD, in the male cliché remnants of Carrie Ann Moss' gender swapped character, in Pam & Wendy paying for male violence, in Hope's abortion, and in a patriarchy so obsessed with women being beautiful that a mother tries to force her own daughter to be sick so she will be skinnier. Male violence is plain and obvious to see once you start noticing it, which can be difficult as it is so hidden, so normalised and mystified by men who would rather you believe that violence just is, it just happens, and that its done by no one in particular. Take for instance Kilgrave's anger at being called evil, calling it reductive because he sees himself as so much greater, so much more complicated than a simple Evil Villain. Yet I'd argue that even the concept of evilness is one used to add a shine to what is otherwise your standard, pathetic entitled man throwing tantrums and trying to manipulate people when he doesn't get his own way.
Kilgrave sees himself not as a villain either, but as a loving partner. He describes recreating her childhood home, one Jess had to leave after a car crash she was in killed her family, and forcing her with the deaths of others to live there as a 'grand romantic gesture'; he gets angry and says that he 'gave and gave' and that 'she took and took', again he is the carer and provider and she the ungrateful leech who doesn't appreciate anything he does for her. People echo abusive sentiments like this when they believe that a woman owes a man sex after a date, that men's kindness should always be repaid as it comes at a cost – whilst women's kindness is one that is severely punished if its lacking. Kilgrave even goes so far as to say that she is crueler than his parents, who accidentally gave him his powers after trying to cure an illness he had in childhood, as to him she committed the worst possible act against him: saying no.
The only criticism perhaps that I would say this show has is that it does try to find reasons for Kilgrave's violence, for his entitlement. It first looks to his childhood, hoping that his shitty parents would be a good reason why a man would use his powers for so much evil; yet when Jess finds that his parents were loving, that they were trying to help and that he turned on them so much that they had to flee she instead argues that if their parenting didn't make him that way then the lack of it did instead. But again that doesn't account for those men who had loving families, that had amazing childhoods and it certainly doesn't explain why women with the worst childhoods don't become mass murderers or terrorists. When you see that on a basic, biological and mental level the differences between men and women are slim to none then it becomes clear that male socialisation is what is most likely to blame for men's violence.
Society, parents, family, friends, adverts, TV, film and all the things that men do and who they talk to and all the bits in between are what cause men to be entitled to the point of violence. It's a patriarchal society that praises men for being aggressive, for being harsh and violent, and that tells them women are sexy rewards for that violence (see most of film) that causes men to seek out violence in the hope of reward, glory, and fame – one that they sadly get, you just have to look at the title of the 2015 Kray’s biopic Legend to see that. But even then Jessica Jones as a show makes it clear that killing is, almost, never the answer, that there are other options than violence, and that being a hero requires making the right, if not difficult, choices. Men's violence is a choice, their entitlement is a choice, and the show makes it very clear how bad the consequences can be when men happily make certain choices.

There is so much more to talk about with this show and I hope that people do as they watch it and that it makes abusive relationships that much clearer so that they can one day avoid them; from Kilgrave underplaying his abuse to make himself the victim, to him taking a beating to make Jess look like the villain, to the idea of trying to fix abusive men and how Jess realises that she isn't the one to do that. Jessica Jones is an amazing show that shows the cost of male violence on women but more importantly it shows the strength, in every way, of women. It shows how female friendship can help mend the damage done by men, how it takes a village to fix the havoc of men's choices, and that in the face of no real choice women still try to make the right one.

Monday, 2 November 2015

Television: Women Live.

I watch a lot of TV, as many people have told me; even people who thought they watch a lot of TV have been surprised at how much TV I watch. Watching this much TV can mean it becomes quite predictable; you begin to spot the tropes, the set ups & it can get quite dull. But worse than that these tropes mean I have to watch the same sexist stuff over & over & over & over. The same boring plots, the same ridiculous lines & the same clichés again & again. I’m sure there is a giant book somewhere that script writers consult that explains perfectly how to do the same thing to your characters as everyone else does, especially when they’re women. Oh if they’re women then you have a handful of roles to shove them into – as well as the same uncomfortable outfits to force them into too, a small number of things can happen to them, and they all ultimately revolve around the men in their life.
As much as each woman is born in part thanks to a man, she may have a brother or a boyfriend, and she may even live with one or two but at the end of the day she still has a whole life independent of men. She still has thoughts, feelings, hobbies; she may have a job, or kids, or a hundred and one other things that writers are happy to understand of men. But women? Being genuinely multi-faceted, complicated, human? Fuck no. That is very often one step too far. Considering the majority of TV (and film) writers are men, to say nothing of directors, it’s surprising that they often fail to use their apparent brilliance, their un-paralleled imagination, and their sheer complexity to think of female characters who do as much as their male characters do.
Now I don’t just watch one genre of TV or only watch shows done by one showrunner these are problems I see across television spanning years, channels, and styles. It’s a weirdly perpetual insistence of ignoring reality because biases won’t let them see the world for what it is. Considering the work that goes into writing & making television shows it has always baffled me that no one along the months that it takes to get a show from script so screen points out how dull it is, how predictable, how clichéd, and how bad it is.
I mean was anyone present during season 2 of The Strain? When *spoilers* Del Toro used a ridiculous myth that pineapple changes how people taste (if you know what I mean, *shudder*) to bring a female character down a peg or two. The character Dutch was incredibly smart & talented, if not a bit criminally inclined, and in the end she was still degraded like every female character is. She was on the verge of being sexually assaulted after being abducted & as she’s rescued she quite literally jumps in the arms of the big hulking man who saves her. I won’t even get into the fact that the relationship with her girlfriend was thrown to the side or how it reflects how television writes lesbians or bisexual women. It was just awful watching & knowing that I am ten times more likely to see this happen to her than to the show’s main character Eph. Half naked, bent forward Corey Stoll anyone?
This then leads me on to two things that happened in The Strain in its finale that became the straw that broke the camel’s back. Once again, spoilers. Firstly, let’s start with Coco, a young, smart, beautiful woman who falls for a very old, rich, horrible man & after the rich, old man does Something Wrong the villain then decides not to punish him, for that would be ridiculous – punish a man for his own crime?! What a world that would be – they decide to murder Coco instead. I was furious, I didn’t care all that much about either character or indeed a lot of that side of the story, no, I was angry because it once again took a whole character away because of something a man did; she was punished for who she fell in love with and for utterly no reason. As much as it seems like it will lead into a storyline where he cuts out her heart & keeps it, alive, in a jar forever so what? Why couldn’t he die? Why can’t she learn how to cut out his heart & keep it alive in a jar? Or is it only women’s hearts that this works for?
Then in the same episode it gets worse. My partner who has read the book the TV show is based off was explaining to me how weird Eph & Nora’s relationship is in the TV show; he described how it’s so much more complicated, serious & how the show reduced it to a simple will they won’t they. Then came the looks, the throwaway lines, all the signs that Something Bad was going to happen, and so it did. In what was completely pointless we get a fight between her & Eph’s vampire ex-wife, I know right, and in it Nora gets infected. She is badass, can fight as good as the rest of them, is extremely smart but no she gets fucked & decides to kill herself. Leaving the fact that I can’t watch a woman fight a woman on TV without hearing the line ‘love a bit of girl on girl, eh?’ from Hot Fuzz (a satire of these scenes, for those who didn’t get it) aside. I was just so angry that in the same episode another female character pointlessly had to die. Moreover, her death was spectacular, there were flashing lights, slow motion & everything because hey a woman dying must be pretty.
I wouldn’t be able to write a list of female characters who I’ve watched die, not even just because I’ve watched so many shows over the years but because it’s just so constant. It’s often without care, without consequence or without compassion. It’s not that they’re fictional & deserve respect it’s that watching television comes with a backdrop of dead women. It means children, men, women have watched many, many women die; in lots of ways, with little care, often at the hands of men, and often done in ways purely for entertainment. I’ve written a lot on violence in this blog, on how it’s often male violence but no one ever mentions the word male in that sentence, and how it is often pointless. But I at least understand that it is a plot that can be used for TV, though it is often over used. But when you’re constantly watching women be killed and men killing women it can make you feel, as a woman, pretty worthless.
As I said to my partner when watching The Strain, and Fear the Walking Dead in which a woman is shot in the arm to punish her father for his actions, I am more than someone who exists in relation to him. I am more than a thing to be hurt or killed for the things he does. I am so much more than someone whose pain & death only happen so he can be sad and cry. I can’t even believe I’d even have to explain this, to anyone at all that women are more than things. There are plenty of male characters who are discarded, I don’t deny it, but they exist on shows where the majority of the main characters are also men, where they all have depth, names and plot lines that happen independent of the women in their lives. It’s disappointing, it’s infuriating, but worst of all it’s just really shit writing.

I always say to my partner that if you can’t write women then you can’t write. We’re half the population not a rare gem that is hard to translate to the page. In a world where men actively discriminate against women in the television & film industry to keep them from directing & writing I would just like to say can you please fuck off so people who can actually write can give us the television we deserve? Thanks.

Thursday, 17 September 2015

Doomsday: Mad Max in Glasgow

Warning: Spoilers

Doomsday is a film set in the UK, mostly Glasgow and London, about how the Reaper Virus ravages the country. First the virus destroyed Glasgow and Scotland (and Newcastle) and was quarantined by a huge wall, complete with armed guards. But a few decades later the virus is back and now it's infecting London but somewhat luckily a satellite has picked up images of people alive in Scotland. So they decide to send in a team to find out if there is a cure, and it turns out the “best man for the job” is a woman. Eden Sinclair is our protagonist & she had been in Glasgow when the original virus hit, after losing an eye after being shot by a soldier her mother had got her on an army helicopter and saved her. Now Agent Sinclair, complete with robot eye that can record things, is set up with a team to go in and find a cure.
I am a huge fan of outbreak films, along with disaster and zombie films; I love seeing the little intricate details of the downfall of society and how people can rebuild. However, usually as men are the ones writing these downfalls they often just recreate the patriarchal society we live in. It's so disappointing because, to me, it shows a lack of imagination – why tear down a world only to rebuild it exactly the same? Flaws and all? If not worse? So I put Doomsday on hoping to get something different, to get a fresh take on it and see how they handled a world in which a virus had taken out a whole country. What I got was disappointment.
Scotland, after having been left to its own devices, had become a very weird but brutal and dangerous place. We are introduced to a couple of the wild factions that have taken over and those are a Mad Max style faction and a medieval section that is set in a castle that had a gift shop. Both run by men, one in fact run by the son of the man who runs the medieval section – his daughter is imprisoned by her brother and duly branded. It's a very unimaginative take on what a whole country would become when left to its own devices. Moreover its this complete replication, if not to its most savage form, that does not really take much thinking. If you have the chance to make a film, one with an amazing female protagonist, in a genre that isn't really full of great films it's a shame that no one tried to think outside of the box.
Whilst the medieval world replicates the same values from that time it's the Mad Max one I want to talk about. We are introduced to them at first by many people – men and women – trying to murder the team who have come to find a cure; they are all promptly shot down until they overwhelm the group, after having murdered most of them, and Sinclair surrenders. Then we see Eden tied up with furry handcuffs no less and is beaten and has part of her ear bit off. Whilst Eden breaks free after fighting two guards we are witness to a member of her team being burnt alive and eaten as we see those left have resorted to cannibalism. It's a brutal scene and there's a lot to talk about.
Firstly, let's talk about the cannibalism shall we? When the team first go through the borders they accidentally run over a cow and we see that they are infected with the virus. If this is to imply that the virus can cross species and therefore infects their food supply I don't think it quite explains enough; does that mean there are no uninfected species of animals? I find it hard to believe that humans were the only species in Scotland whose immune systems eventually created antibodies. Considering the virus wiped out so many people that the rest of the country felt safe condemning the remaining people to death we can assume that there weren't so many people left, or at least I'd hope so. Therefore there probably aren't many survivors left in Glasgow, or the rest of Scotland/Newcastle. So it doesn't make that much sense to try and live off people when there aren't many left, and it would have taken a long time to get uninfected people or an immunity to eating perhaps raw, infected human flesh.
So then let's talk about where this supply of meat comes from. It's probably children. There aren't children wandering around but what there are is a fair amount of men and women. We also learn that a lot of rape takes place in the quarantine zone and I'll get to that later. So therefore it's not too much of a stretch to assume that women are raped and their children are raised enough to fatten them up and then they are eaten. This wouldn't even be much better because you'd have to wait a long time for them to have enough meat (sorry) to feed what seem like a fair amount of people. Even if you're going to go the (sorry for the spoiler) Snowpiercer route and try and eat parts of adults instead of children then you're still going to be starving, and there didn't seem to be people missing limbs either. So already this world of patriarchal mayhem doesn't make sense as it leaves his people starving and weak and therefore not even strong enough to fight intruding factions.
I know we weren't witness to all aspects of that world but it really did seem as though any form of a farming system – the people were infected not the land I assume – or means of getting water. So even just having a savage patriarchal system isn't even enough to properly provide for its people, even if it was just the men that were getting the lions share. It doesn't take a genius to look at the modern Patriarchy we live in and see that it doesn't make sense and is often destructive. When combined with white supremacy and capitalism it definitely doesn't work. For example you're not getting the most out of your work force if you're not ensuring women are well paid, healthy (sexism is bad for women's health), can actually work (good childcare), and being put in the best jobs for their skill set – same goes for people of colour. This is not to say that capitalism really makes sense or is at all the best way to run a country (spoilers its not) but those rich men who want the most money gain much more from white supremacy and patriarchy to put capitalism first.
Secondly, I want to talk about this world and sexual exploitation. One thing we see during the cannibalism scene is a stage where the patriarch Sol is riling his people up and at the side of the stage are two stripper poles and two scantily clad women who are dancing. The camera makes sure to linger over their body and Sol bends them over in front of him. This whole thing is bad enough but it's even worse when you look at the world that it's set in. Now I'm not saying that it seemed to be gender equal, there were definitely more male soldiers and guards and lackeys but if you look at the crowd and the foot soldiers who attack the team at the start it is clear that women are allowed to fight. The women are dressed just like the men, they are in the same spaces and roles as men are and they carry weapons and fight just as much. So why then are some women still being used as props?
Patriarchy was reluctant to let women fight in armies because women are seen as weak and unable to defend their countries but this world lets them fight and be seen as warriors just as much. So why then is it okay to have some women be brave and fight but others merely be used as objects for pleasure? Perhaps its asking too much of any patriarchal world to make any type of sense but it still feels odd and out of place. Even if you look at desperate times such as World War 1 the UK was more willing to conscript teenage boys than it was women to fight; even in World War 2 countries such as Russia were reluctant to let women fight even when it was clear that they could hold their own – such as the Night Witches. So it seems peculiar then that in a world that accepts that women are strong enough to fight that it would keep some women as there for sex. If you want to pretend that it's because those women love dancing and being objectified then I think this isn't the blog for you.
So then that leads me to why I wanted to talk about this film in the first place. During the narration and later during a description of what Scotland has become since being quarantined we are told that the place has devolved into “rape and murder”. But I want to talk about the rape bit and why if writers would take one step outside of their box and try to understand rape they would see why actually it doesn't fit the savage world that they have in their mind. When those who don't really think about rape talk about it they often fall into the same traps; that only evil monsters commit it, that it's strangers in alleyways who do it, or that women must be doing something to cause good upstanding men to do it. But all of that is wrong, yes evil men rape but so do men that most people would call good or kind or caring, those men probably even see themselves that way. Yes strangers rape strangers but most likely you're going to be raped by someone that you called friend, or a family member and others. Lastly there is not an action, a way to dress, a word, or a movement or anything else that could possibly cause a man – any type of man – to rape a woman. Otherwise women wouldn't say it or do it or wear it; if you're sat there thinking that drunk women bring rape on themselves and that that's a perfectly reasonable way to think and that you're only saying it to help women then you probably think the women deserves it or that you think a woman being outside and drunk is a crime that should be punished with rape. Sound barbaric right? Yet many people happily say this online, in real life, on TV, make polls about it, and think pieces about it. All of which miss the very clear point that rape is about control and power.
Committing rape is always a calculated choice, one that the rapist could stop at any point but chooses not to because he wants to pretend he has power over someone else by hurting them. It's not about sexual attraction because straight men rape men and gay men rape women and so on. Therefore when people write stories and films and TV shows about savage and dangerous men they often make sure to explain that those Bad Men Rape. Its used as short hand to explain that these men are bad guys because they choose to rape men. This again often ignores the fact that those who rape are often ordinary men, normal men, your friendly neighbour. It's extremely likely that you know a rapist and that you wouldn't know it because he hides it well. It's the same for those who abuse their partners, they are often charming because it would be pretty hard to hide that abuse if you're a suspicious loner who always laughs about hitting women.
It's how people have forgotten that Sean Penn extremely brutally hurt Madonna, it's how people forgive athletes who are abusers under the guise of giving them a second chance, and it's why people rush to defend rapists – they would rather live in a world where women are lying whores than where nice men are rapists. So trying to pretend that it's only due to the downfall of society that rape would become – as though it isn't already – common. It also belittles and infantilises these same women who are warriors, as though none of them have taken action to punish and stop men raping. Which leads me straight to my next point.
Fuck Patriarchy. I've said it before when I reviewed Mad Max & other films I wish that writers (often male) would stop only ever imagining a patriarchal society. I'm not even talking about a matriarchy, which by the way would have a focus on nurturing and not just be a recreation of patriarchy but with women being the murderers and such. It's so dull to watch what is meant to be a fresh take on our world and what our world could be and then seeing the same BS of well most men are stronger than most women therefore they would rule everything. It pretends that women's strength in other areas means nothing, or that their smarts mean nothing, their charisma and kindness means shit all. That they couldn't offer a world that people would want to live in more than one of poverty, murder, and cannibalism. Or maybe that's just me. Maybe I just happen to think that men are capable of more, of wanting more, of controlling their need for power – over society and women's bodies. Or maybe we just live in a Patriarchy because men really are just too shit to think of something better or to create it, after all they've only had forever.

Thursday, 6 August 2015

TV: Humans: Revisited.

Warning: Spoilers.

Since the last blog post, here, on the Channel 4 show Humans it has been renewed for a second season after doing quite well. I have been begrudgingly watching along, to see if it gets better as I loved the Swedish original and also to see if it has gotten any worse with its misogyny. I am starting this post before I have watched the last 3 or four episodes of the show, that conclude tonight, as I wanted to discuss one of the things that had happened in a previous episode that I feel was utterly indefensible. I have yet to see what consequences, if any, this act has resulted in but I will find out later and include it in this post.
Amongst all of the shows more science fiction side, not necessarily relevant to this post, and amongst the chances it’s made to the original which I find each are bad decisions is this overwhelming need the writers, mostly male, seems to have had to increase the sexism depicted in the series. As I mentioned before I understand its attempt at realism and its need to create a new show that isn’t just a shot for shot remake to the original. I just find it baffling, each episode that the strongest differences that are included are moments of sheer misogyny. What an odd thing to want to contribute to a show that has so much potential, especially for a show that is exploring what it means to be human, how we treat other people, and what influence technology and AI might one day have in our lives.
The biggest, most staggering, moment for me was one that took what was an implied naughty suggestion in the original and made it what amounted to a rape scene. In the original it is a sexist joke that the father has a chip that can make their robot, Anita, into a robot that can have sex - and simulate the touches and noises that are associated with it; the father doesn’t use it but keeps it instead of throwing it away, and it is later used consensually, or as consensually as you can get with AI, between the son and Anita. However, in the remake they decided to have the father cheat on his wife, that annoying nagging robot hating wife, and the whole act was disgusting. First we have the scene where Anita teaches him how to install the sex chip, making her a complicit factor in her sexualisation and literal objectification. There is flirting on his end, him asking her about her experience of sex & sexuality but ultimately it is his decision and he is the one who takes the lead and has the power. After getting her into the right settings he then immediately has sex with her but it definitely did not seem like consensual sex, between two people in love or who want to just have fun.
No, it was a blank faced, submissive Anita who simply lies still as an object while the father has sex with her. She isn’t active, she isn’t playing a role other than thing and the whole scene is awful to watch. Afterwards, realising what he has done, the father tells her to clean herself up and Anita, emotionless, leaves to do so. But before she goes he orders her, for she is his owner and she has to do what he says, to delete what he just did from her memory. The whole scene is very abusive and that alone feels like the equivalent of drugging a woman so you can rape her, and then if she remembers telling her to just forget about it. For the rest of the episode it goes unmentioned and only comes up again when they are checking her memory for unrelated reasons and the father has a worried moment that they might find out what he did.
In the next episode the daughter discovers that someone had used her sexual settings and is disgusted; she tells her mother and her son, realising that it was his Dad, covers for him and says it was him. Rightly the mother is disgusted by the fact that he had sex with their robotic nanny, someone who is a member of their family, and that has issues with understanding and consenting to sex in the form she is in; though it goes unquestioned when the son points out that he couldn’t possibly because he needs to be 18 to do it which he isn’t. Instead of sitting him down and trying to deal with it straight away the Mum sends him away, tells him to go to his room rather than being quick to let her son know that what he supposedly did was wrong. I can’t imagine being a mother & being confronted with something like that but sitting them down to talk to them about a revelation like that would surely one better done sooner rather than later?
Then when the father comes home his character continues to be one I find utterly revolting. Initially he allows his son to remain as his cover, yes he lets his wife think that his teenage son is a pervert rather than admitting his mistake – his son understandably isn’t too happy about that. Later the father finally reveals what he does to his wife and the whole scene was a car crash that made me gasp again and again at the ridiculous justifications he came up with. In the end the scene devolved into him thinking that because Anita is a Synth that it’s not cheating and then turns around and blames his wife for working too much. The fact that she works a lot -though it is only shown once in the entire first season, in the first episode and you never see her at work again - is constantly used against her, along with other little things to point to her being a Bad Mother.
The most baffling and ridiculous thing about this whole scenario however is the father’s assertion, one he makes repeatedly, that Anita is not human so therefore it doesn’t matter what he did. He agrees that it was perhaps disgusting but that really because she’s only a human he should be able to have consequence free sex with her, as though it doesn’t matter to his wife. Why then if she is such a nothing-ness robot did he want so much to have sex with her then? We could see his sexual frustration before he did it and he had plenty of time to stop and leave her alone but he didn’t. He decided he wanted to sleep with her & he turned around and did it. So why now this insistence that she is a pointless inanimate object? As though that makes it better somehow?
Moreover, the show spends an episode or two shunning him, showing him for the disgusting man he is but then very quickly forgets it as he is needed to help the family in the more science fiction aspect of the show. Even Anita rushes to his aide to justify his behaviour by, when she is back to her old self, saying that she could tell that he hated himself before he had ‘finished’; clearly he didn’t hate himself enough to leave her alone in the first place, or own up to his act. Plus he certainly doesn’t seem to think of her as just a robot, not a sexual being, as when he finds out that she has had previous owners he makes comments complaining about how many owners has she had and how many have gone tinkering around in her, perhaps being jealous at the fact that she might have had sex before him; which apart from being just so creepy is so possessive of what he tries to defend as a literal object.
My main problem with Humans is that, along with it just being a worse show in terms of writing, dialogue and direction in comparison to its original, it doesn’t live up to it’s potential. As a concept, though one I find a bit done to death, I think AI and the question of what makes us human is one that could be utterly and thoroughly explored. Though the problem is that because TV and films are just so heavily written and directed by men we never truly get the full spectrum of what we could get with these films. We get a very limited one that focuses on the male perspective and frames the women’s stories as almost primarily ‘gets hurt by men’. My life as a woman and as a person is so utterly not defined by the things men may have said or done to me and I really think all writers need to see and understand this. Especially those writing worlds that could be so different from ours because even for a near future Humans ignores so many social issues that it could have explored that it’s just so disappointing.
Take for example something that a We Are People protestor says at a rally, he complains about the fact that humans wouldn’t need to look after their kids or make meals for them because they can just get Synths to do it. But that ignores the fact that we already have a lot of women who get left with the majority of domestic care, or that nannies exist already or that people hire maids and butlers and all the rest. I would like to hope that the show is using the Synths to make a point about how we dehumanise certain aspects of our population to do labour that the majority of men don’t want to do but it doesn’t mention it. It doesn’t highlight how it’s women who now don’t have to do so many domestic chores – though I highly doubt that poor women’s lives have gotten any different. It doesn’t look at racism and how those in poorer countries might get replaced by robots.
The show acts as though it exists in a microcosm, though one that clings to its misogyny, and that everyone leads similar lives. It doesn’t really deal with the fact that the dehumanised Synths are replacing dehumanised people in dehumanising jobs, bar making a jab at human women as I mentioned in the previous post on Humans. It just seems like such a shame episode to episode that it aims to be a show about how family life might be affected by robots, as mentioned in an article in Digital Spy, but actually goes about doing everything but. The issues the family has mostly seem to revolve around an unruly daughter, a working Mum, an unfaithful Dad, and an angry and sexually inappropriate son; all of those issues can exist without Anita being a Synth. However the focus on science fiction is one of the few things that saves the show as, perhaps despite its best efforts, it heavily focuses on a conspiracy style plot to give consciousness to Synths and the effect that might have on the world as a whole.
Which again treats humanity as though they are all violent men who are not capable of empathy; they act as though if robots all got the ability to be sentient that they would take over the world but that even if they didn’t humanity would destroy them anyway because ‘we’ can’t handle anything being bigger than us. This conveniently forgets that people who aren’t straight white men already live in a world where we are treated like we are lesser, that we don’t hold as much power as others, and that we already know what this feels like and haven’t turned around and murdered everyone (remember all those violent genocides committed by female feminists? Yeah me neither). It is this constant insistence that men are all that humanity is made of and that no one would be kind to these robots and that we would all, women and children alike, turn and murder sentient beings.
The entire series, despite it being only two episodes shorter than the original, has a surprisingly lack of storyline; by this I mean if you watch the original first season there are so many more characters, plot lines, and issues explored that it baffles me that the remake ignored so many opportunities to really explore certain aspects of the world that has been created. For instance as we see many characters blended together we get weird mismatches that those who have only seen the remake perhaps don’t realise are so short and underdeveloped. So for those who haven’t read my Real Humans post, that is here, I will explain one of those storylines that I was waiting for and that was but a fleeting moment. One of the subplots that carried over was a male character who has a wife whose wife leaves him for her Synth, or hubot as they are in the original; though the circumstances are very different in the remake – in the original the character is abusive and that’s why she leaves him – the general gist of the storyline is still there. We still see her dating the Synth, we see her acknowledging the fact he is attentive which is something that her ex was lacking, and we see her change his programming to make him better in bed. It is the latter that perhaps seems like it was finally acknowledging the idea that male Synths might be used for sex.
However what we don’t see, and that is explored a lot more in season one though perhaps more in season two, is a lot more of that side of the story. For instance when the woman in the original takes her robot boyfriend to be modified we see her do it, in a brothel, and we are exposed to how her request for him being better in the bedroom is compared to a man asking for his robot to be given the ability to feel pain for his BDSM abuse. Then we get a full, developed storyline of her feelings about what she’s done, how it affects their relationship, and how it changes his personality. Yet in the remake all of that is discarded with as she is a much more minor character; instead we are given one scene and one scene only in all of season one about the danger of this whole affair.
We see her ex-husband get a call and go to her aid because her Synth is banging on the door that she has put a chair under and she is scared. Her ex arrives and immediately begins a threatening affair with the Synth, prepared with a crowbar in case he doesn’t listen to him. Then the Synth says that he needs access to his wife so he can ‘penetrate’ her, robots that aren’t sentient don’t really have a sense of humour or an ego so the show instead did it for him – allowing him to grandstand about having sex with this man’s wife. After beating the robot the wife immediately runs to his aid, gently touching his face and tells her ex to leave. Then that’s it. That whole storyline gets shortened to one, barely examined scene that in fact makes the fact that a robot is trying to rape his wife all about the ex-husband who is offended by this fact.

For me it felt like a long trend of ignoring nuance, weird dialogue, messy plot and characterisation that made watching the first season not enjoyable at all. I did watch it because I loved the original, I’d hoped it would get better but when you’ve seen it done before and done much better it can make it a chore to sit through. I hope that if the show, which has already done well enough to get a second season, finds its feet that it explores more of what it was lacking. I hope that the writers realise that women exist outside of the men in their lives, that they have ordinary bad things happen to them that aren’t inflicted on them by men, and that even as robots we are interesting people to be explored too. I don’t know if I’ll tune in next season but if I do I hope I won’t be disappointed.

Final Girl (2015): They Don't Seem to Like Women Much.

Warning: Spoilers.

Final Girl is an independent film made by a male photographer; it stars Abigail Breslin and Seneca Crane I mean Wes Bentley. The story explains little and takes place in a time that looks simultaneously modern and as though it’s set in the 50s – this isn’t a strength. The whole film attempts to be somewhat of an artistic statement, with the directors use of lights – spotlights on each actor, often highlighting their shadow – is more a distraction than an artistic flair. Mainly this film feels very much like it was made by a student in film school, and that isn’t really a compliment. However the worst place this lack of experience or skill is clear is the writing, and directing.
The plot of the film is that when Breslin’s character Veronica was recruited aged 5 by William, Bentley’s character, to be an assassin who avenges wrongs, we assume. We are given little information about this decision and it is the first of many that give the film a creepy and infuriating theme rather than an air of mystery that I assume was the intention. We learn her parents died, but they must have just died before the film starts as he asks her if she knows what happened. How did they die? What was her life like before this? What did her parents do that lead her to being immediately recruited after their deaths? It is a film where I would be much more interested in the backstory of its female lead but it instead decides that it’s not that interesting. So instead it establishes Bentley as a father figure of this young girl who assumedly raises her day in day out as a young child whilst also teaching her survival and fighting skills. This becomes disturbing later in the film.
So once we have been told to ignore all of this and simply pretend that taking away a young girl’s childhood, children can’t give consent, and to brush away the ethics of this we see her training with Bentley. Despite her 13 years of training previously she doesn’t actually seem to display much of any skill. She is 18 when the film begins to follow her and yet the brunt of her fighting skills do not appear to have been taught yet. He teaches her how to strangle him, whilst he strangles her too; this mutual abuse is ignored on any real emotional level until she is given a drug to confront her worst fear, a drug that she will later use on her enemies in this film.
But her main fear doesn’t seem to be simply that she is frightened of him, or that she isn’t strong enough to defend herself; but more that him turning on her will mean that he is rejecting her. Yes, him romantically rejecting her is her worst fear. It is unclear really as to why she has feelings for him as again it is not explained, though it is deemed important enough to be a consistent subplot in the film. There isn’t really that much chemistry between Breslin and Bentley, mainly so both of their characters are seen to be cold. The only scene between them of her confronting her feelings to him out loud is a scene where she gets out of the shower and, in a towel, cuddles him on the bed and he rejects her.
All we really know about his character is that he is so much older than her that he once had a wife and child who are now deceased. If we are to assume that this was all before he met her, as she doesn’t seem to know much about them, then he must be considerably older than her. Never mind that if she died whilst he was training her what that meant about how much his wife either didn’t know, or was fine with. Once again the deliberate plot holes in this film lead to a very disturbing and ‘not okay’ world. So the main love story in the film is a very inappropriate one due to the age gap, his father figure status, her dependency on him in every way, and what could potentially be Stockholm syndrome slipping in.
But as I said that is merely a subplot that happens over a few scenes as the real focus of the film is Veronica’s first solo mission, it’s a real misogynist lovefest. There are four, presumably well off considering they are never seen out of tuxes, white young men who regularly find young women, tell them that they are going to a dance so they get all dressed up and then they take them into out into the woods and chase and murder them. Again watching the film I had no idea how there was so little interest in what seemed to be pretty, young white women going missing; it is unclear how long it has been going on but between them they murdered at least twenty women. What’s more is I have no idea why Veronica needs to go on her own to stop these boys.
The film tries to frame it as revenge, as though these murdered girls’ only justice would be their murderer’s deaths, an attempt at an eye for an eye. But the film doesn’t care about the murdered women any more than it cares about any of its characters. They are treated as beautiful, destroyed objects who exist as mostly nameless and only to be shown at their worst possible time; we only see women in their last moments before death or as hallucinations in the film’s climax. Neither attempt to show the pain and horror they felt does it them any justice, they are merely a plot point though yes one of the main ones. So instead the film’s focus is on the four boys and who they are.
Each boy, they are not men, is each given a unique character. The film explores each of them in turn before they go to attempt to murder Breslin’s character. We see Shane, who is defined by the fact he has a girlfriend, Danny who is defined by his quirky, loud personality, Chris, the leader, and Nelson who is defined by the fact that he wants to sleep with his own mother. The film decides each murderer needs a backstory, that each one deserves to be a fully realised personality, and that a lot of screen time should be given to them as individuals and as a group. They reminded me of a group of boys on Gilmore Girls who Rory meets at the private college she goes to who are reckless, privileged to all heck, and there is even an overly posh and quirky one of them too.
When we first meet the boys as a group Veronica asks how one of them can have a girlfriend seems as he murders women she also says that they don’t seem to like women much; now rather than examine the blatant misogyny behind a group of boys deciding to chase, hunt and kill women for sport the film decides the fact that their women are unimportant – even though it is the only real reason that Veronica appears to be doing this on her own seems as she fits their profile. No instead Bentley just replies that they don’t seem to like anyone much. This appears to imply that they are simply psychopathic killers who merely chose women by chance.
Before the film’s climatic hunt we are given two scenes in a diner where she interacts individually with Shane’s girlfriend and the leader of the group Chris. The scene with the girlfriend is one that feels dreadfully like it was written by a man, which it was. It tries to be a bit witty – “I’m a vanilla girl” “You should give yourself more credit” - to have Veronica explore why this girl can be with a murderer and not know it but just ends up feeling awkward and simply blames this girl for not realising who she’s with and leaving him. Then we get the scene that starts the main plot, Veronica is dressed up and sat in the diner and when Chris – who’s penchant for blonde women has already been establish because we all know women’s personalities, bodies, wants, needs desires and all the rest are neatly defined by what hair colour we have – sees her.
The irritating use of light is used to quite literally highlight Veronica, as though a psychopathic murderer has just fallen in love when really he’s just found the perfect object to kill. But oh did he pick the wrong object, for this women is an actual woman with skills and hands to punch with. She won’t simply run and scream and get shot like her predecessor, the also blonde, Jennifer. He flirts, as it were, with her and she establishes herself as Not Like Other Girls™. So he asks her out to what he thinks she thinks is a dance but what we all know is his and his friends attempt to end her life. I assume we’re meant to watch, with juicy dramatic irony, as we sit there knowing that him and his friends will instead die at her hands. But with such bad everything it feels utterly hollow.
Veronica’s character is not necessarily unique either, in an age where most films are written by men we have this singular version of a strong woman where her skills in murder and violence are what makes her As Good As Men. But Veronica isn’t a feminist figurehead, she’s barely a character at all; Breslin is a great actress and she gives it her all but there’s just no saving her from bad writing and directing. Moreover however it follows a recent trend in films to subvert a horror trope, the film’s namesake, the Final Girl. Seems as horror films are a chance for men to depict graphic violence against women with a somewhat free pass it has also meant that there will be plenty of women who need to survive at least near the end of the film so the narrative has someone to follow. Often these characters are murdered but ultimately they became a cliché, and one that isn’t even specific to women as many horror films have Final Boys too, as it were.
It is this subversion that I feel is actually no real subversion at all. For example if we look at the film You’re Next, which I enjoyed but also has its problems, we see what is meant to be an extreme flipping of this trope on its head. The main female character not only survives but she fights back, and she does so hard. What was meant to be a simple murder your whole family for their life insurance scheme becomes those who schemed, including her own boyfriend, end up getting murdered by her. It’s bad enough that women in films are forced to be violent just to be heard and treated like a real character and not an object. As a feminist I don’t say anymore that feminism is about equality because for me it’s not; it’s about liberating women out from under men’s dirty shoe. Equality with men would mean having the equal power to rape, to destroy lives, to take lives and none of that is what I want for women. It is not strong or brave to take a life, misogynistic men do it every day and they are cowards.
But it gets worse as we find out that in You’re Next the only reason she knows how to fight back is because her father was a survivalist and raised her in a camp designed to teach people how to stay alive. So now we have two films who are both trying to show a woman who knows how to fight back and both only can because they have skills, that took years to master, taught to them by men. Not even women who learnt skills themselves because they grew up in a world that has men who want to kill them, not women who learnt skills because their mothers taught them to survive in a world that wants to kill them, and not even women who bloody well taught themselves how to survive because those are skills that can come in handy one day. It’s a joke, one often shrugs off women’s fighting skills by saying that she grew up with brothers. It’s utter nonsense.
The film’s climax is one that tries hard to be somewhat deep, to examine humans and their deepest darkest fears as we finally see the boys drink the mixture of truth serum and what amounts to a fear toxin during a sigh worthy scene of truth or dare. Each boys’ reaction to their fears is what allows Veronica to fight back and kill them, this in and of itself is also insulting. She struggles with each fight, it doesn’t really appear that she was taught how to use her smaller size to her advantage – get in close – or how to use the fact that she is not as strong as each boy to help rather than hinder her. Even in Divergent we are given a scene where the female lead Tris is taught to use her elbows to accommodate her small and weaker size. As we see in the final fight against Chris who hadn’t drank the mixture when it’s not in play she has a very, very difficult time holding her own.
The quirky boy’s fear is as weird as he is and is a fear of Pandas and it’s not that hard for Veronica to kill him. The boy with the girlfriend’s fear felt somewhat gratuitous as his fear is his girlfriend both cheating on him with Chris, we see them making out against a tree, and also her finding out about his murderous past time. It ended with Veronica strangling him but as a scene it ended up being severely dull. Then we are shown the boy who has an Oedipus complex, who is getting circled by masked thugs and we see him kissing his mother who earlier somewhat flirtingly gave him an ice cream before he left – as with everything else being disturbing in this film it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that his romantic relationship with his mother wasn’t simply a fear or hope. Each murder did not feel like justice it just felt like a boring end to boring characters in a boring film.
Finally, with the others dead and Veronica bloody, dirty and exhausted we see her try and fight Chris. She struggles and it isn’t until she luckily gets him in a stranglehold, with flashbacks to her strangling William, that she wins and can prepare what’s coming next. She feeds him the drink and whilst he is unconscious she hangs him from a tree, his feet on a tree stump and stands in front of him while he wakes up. We watch as she scolds him for being a big bad murderer and we find out that his greatest fear is the ‘Ghost Girls’, as they are credited, coming back to haunt him and avenge their deaths. This is the main moment, one of many however, that I realised that the man writing this had no real understanding of misogyny, or even psychopaths.
Yes this man murdered women with reckless abandon, yes he was probably a psychopath and they do have empathy but they can happily switch it off, but no his greatest fear would in no way have been the women he’d murdered coming back to get him. He does not care about women, he has no remorse for what he did else he would stop, he doesn’t care about killing them else he wouldn’t have started in the first place. No he hates women with every inch of himself, that’s why he treats them like objects whose death is amusing. So there is no way in hell that his fear, even in the moments before his death, would be the women he has killed. He certainly wouldn’t have felt so bad that he’d beg for it to stop, as though seeing them were any form of agony. Any shred of guilt he felt would be one warped by narcissism, one that is less about what he did to those women and more about how it landed him in a situation in which he will very probably die.

I would say it was a disappointing end but by then I had no expectations that could be dashed. It was the first of what I’m sure is many films from the writers and I don’t think that’s really a good thing. It would be better to actually try and direct the lights less and the people more, to research narrative and characters, and to do a lot more looking up misogyny. It was another film that wasn’t for women or even men as it didn’t seem to think much of either of them. I hope that any future attempt to subvert this genre will at least see women for the strong and interesting people they are and perhaps, I know it’s crazy but bear with me, give them their own voice in the film industry with which to prove it.

Tuesday, 7 July 2015

Teeth: No Man Was Harmed In the Making of This Film

Warning: Spoilers.

Teeth is a film that didn’t seem like something I would rush to see; it didn’t seem like it would be particularly flattering for women considering the film’s premise was that a woman had a scary vagina filled with teeth. But as I put it on to review this week I soon found myself laughing, loving the character, and I quickly realised that the film’s writer, Mitchell Lichtenstein, was very much on the side of our female lead Dawn. It is surprisingly a film you could call feminist in that it understands sexual assault, the mind-set of those who commit it but also those of whom suffer from it all whilst being unapologetic in its condemnation of those who commit sexual violence, admittedly in a unique way.
I also didn’t realise it was going to be so funny, not realising until I was on imdb that it is listed as a black comedy. The film was hilarious in many ways, Dawn could be a bit melodramatic in her innocence and it definitely didn’t treat the male genitals like some god given gift like pretty much everything else does. It was nice to watch a film that played on the horror trope of the ‘monstrous feminine’ body, the apparently petrifying vagina, and actually give the power back to women to show how ridiculous that all is – even when in this case it was well founded. I defy you, even as a man who perhaps squirmed their way through this film, to not laugh at the man who shouted “Vagina dentata!” over and over.

Before I get to the awful male characters depicted in this film, awful in their actions, I would like to just write about how brilliant Dawn is. She is very much a cliché, a playing on many tropes of how women are portrayed in films overall but horror films in particular; she is very chaste as we see her begin the film wearing a red promise ring and talking at a club telling the joys of celibacy and saving yourself until marriage. She often wears t-shirts she seems to have bought in this club, warning about the dangers of sex; her room is full of pictures of fairies and flowers, her bathroom is pink, and fitting with the films very much on the nose metaphors there is a cherry sticker on the wall to match the cherry patterned cup by the sink. We slowly see her innocence and naivety taken away as the film progresses yet she remains a good person, not falling into another cliché of going completely to the other side.
Dawn seems like a simple person, talking about a girl’s natural modesty in response to a flustered sex ed teacher who is trying to explain why in their textbook the picture of the vulva is covered by a sticker but that the diagram of the penis is not. She loves her parents, and is there for her Mum as she is very sick – which leads to a confused Dawn not having anyone to ask about her very confusing anatomy; in the same way that boys may be confused asking their mothers about their body there is only so much her father might be able to help her with her body – though even he would be able to explain that having teeth down there is not natural. Dawn’s body is used by the men in this film as an object yet the film never joins in, it very much keeps her a fully realised character with great acting keeping her interesting and sympathetic.
The film explores the way we view the female body, in the past and in the present; its whole premise is based off an old myth that many cultures wrote about, that there was a woman who has teeth in her vagina, vagina dentata, and that this woman must be conquered by a hero to defeat her – more on that later. As with the sex ed lesson trying hard to avoid displaying the vulva, something a student actually accurately describes as such which shows that even if you try not to teach it in schools students will learn about it. It also shows the cognitive dissonance that exists in a culture that is obsessed with women’s bodies as sexual objects whilst trying their best to be ignorant about the realities of female anatomy; as is shown by the brother’s arguable fear of the vagina, again more on that later, despite the many posters of naked and half naked women all over his walls. This insistence on making the female body a mystery, of giving it a sexual power that many women don’t want or ask for – Dawn’s vow of celibacy means she is even averse to watch kissing etc. in films.
By denying teenager’s sexuality we create a curiosity that could easily be sated with knowledge, with teaching boys and girls about their own bodies and urges. If we pretend that by teaching all teenagers about sex will mean they all go straight out and do it we can’t properly protect those who already are. Teenagers, and older, need to be properly educated about the very real risks of sex such as STDs and pregnancy. Many studies have shown time and again that education along with access to affordable protection and birth control can prevent the spread of STIs and teen pregnancy but still it is something many ignorant people insist is something that shouldn’t be available. Children will find it a lot easier to remain children if they’re not having to raise their own.
Following this avenue of thought we meet Tobey, a man who meets Dawn at the celibacy club The Promise, and straight away I knew he would be the one to first assault her. He told her he agreed that they should wait until marriage to have sex, he would accompany her to the cinema and on a trip to the lake with friends and repeated The Promise’s beliefs back to her. Yet later when they are alone he explains to her that he is only ‘pure’ in ‘his eyes’ and explains that he has already had sex once, a year ago. Back at the lake they go swimming, with a little bit of shock from Dawn at seeing Tobey only in his swimming trunks and they both laugh at how they had both already imagined each other’s naked bodies. Whilst in the water they kiss, Dawn laughing, and Tobey feels her breasts but she immediately stops him. She swims away, not wanting Tobey to follow, and goes into a cave that was earlier mentioned as being a place people come to “you know”.
Dawn’s face was one of wonder, happy to be intrigued by the mini-waterfall and the cave as a whole. She seems confused by the blanket and pillows in the cave but uses one to keep her warm; Tobey begins to swim towards her and ignores her protests after he explains that he’s freezing. He sits with her and they begin kissing, they lay down together and he turns her over and goes on top of her. As he’s kissing her neck she makes it very clear she wants him to stop, she shouts no and yet he ignores her; he fights her, covering her mouth to shut her up and in doing so smacks her head off the cave floor and knocks her slightly unconscious. He immediately takes advantage of her dazed state by removing his trunks and he starts to rape her. It is clear it’s unwanted, she fights and screams and he carries on, shouting that he hadn’t even jerked off since Easter – as though his celibacy is something to be rewarded by Dawn, regardless of whether she wants it or not.
It is during the rape that Tobey begins screaming, the audience hearing a crunch sound that is heard throughout the film and no doubt in men’s nightmares, and then we see the place where his penis used to be. The film is very open about showing the blood and devastation that is a consequence of each men’s sexual assault and abuse and with its 18 rating it is also happy to show the removed penis, often applying humour in many, often disturbing ways. After Tobey flees Dawn does too and we see her being extremely confused, horrified and worried that she hasn’t heard anything from him since; we later find out that Tobey died, either from the shock, blood loss or simply falling and drowning in trying to get away. It is a very unique consequence to rape but the fact that a rape in a film has an immediate, negative consequence for the rapist is something that is important to show (many rapes in real life often have no consequences and a majority often go un-convicted). As you’d expect with the premise of the film we unfortunately follow Dawn get taken advantage of throughout.
The next time her vagina uses its teeth is on a male gynaecologist who was causing her pain by forcing four fingers into her, it is a gruesome scene as his hand gets trapped inside her as she tries to push him away; it is another example of a male character ignoring her requests to stop, her obvious pain and discomfort in the pursuit of forcing something into her vagina and its end result is similar. This is the scene that leads to him shouting “Vagina dentata! It’s true”; it is unclear whether he knows of this myth due to his job or whether his research on the female vagina in pursuit of his career lead him to come across it. Either way we later see him in surgery getting his fingers reattached. I won’t even go into his comment about how tight she was but let’s just say it’s more of a comment on the man and his sexual skills than it ever really is about the female body.
The next time her downstairs teeth are used it is with a new Dawn, pun not intended. She is more aware of her body, learning to explore it sexually after thinking she is no longer pure after her rape. This idea of women being uniquely modest is one simply designed to ensure that women are not as sexually attractive as men are; moreover men used to use rape as a way to steal women away from being the property of their father or another man and to make them their property instead and so putting the blame for this act purely on the immodest, promiscuous woman. People, women especially, are neither pure nor impure and the idea of virginity is simply yet another way to treat men and women as being something that is irrevocably changed by sex; this ignores many things such as the fact that a man’s penis is not a magic sword that can change anything it touches but also that things that are used to signify female virginity such as the hymen can be broken in many other ways and even not broken through sex.
Dawn finally has sex of her own choice, after going to him when she has no one else to turn to. She even tells him about her downstairs teeth, though he brushes her off and jokes that he is the hero who will conquer her. However there are many problems with this sexual encounter such as the fact that he may very well have drugged her, he hands her a pill whilst she is in the bath that his mother apparently uses to relax, and when we see her later open her eyes her towel is undone and he is using a sex toy on her. This already starts the sexual encounter with an extreme lack of consent, very much being sexual assault, and Dawn, inexperienced but happy to have someone touch her intimately despite knowing about her teeth, consents to further sex. The next day they have sex again and whilst she is on top of him he gets a call and answers it, he laughs and promises that he did it and tells her to say something into the phone. As the audience may have already figured out he only slept with her for a bet.
He saw Dawn as a challenge, something to conquer not due to her teeth but due to her vow of celibacy; he tells her that he had a feeling it wasn’t something she was too serious about. Not only does this once again reduce Dawn to an object, ignoring any choice she may have, it treats her as forbidden fruit – there are a lot of serpent metaphors in this film, and a mention of Eve. Women, despite popular belief, are in fact people, with full lives and interests and autonomy and we exist in and of ourselves. We don’t need a man to see us to exist, we don’t need him to touch us to be solid, and we don’t need to be fucked to be whole. This is something that the film tries to teach as this disrespect of Dawn results in yet another severed penis, leaving him literally crying for his mother and clambering around trying to collect his penis.
By now Dawn has very much learnt how to control her teeth, a weaponised vagina if you will. She has learnt, the hard way, that there are men in her life who are happy to treat her as an object for sex rather than a human being and she now has a tool to deal with it. The film also argues, briefly, that humans and animals evolve over time to change their anatomy to protect themselves. The implication is that Dawn – “it’s about you Dawn” – has adapted to protect herself from the men who would inevitably sexually abuse and assault her. Whilst this argument implies that men are destined to sexually assault the film itself tries to show men that that route is not without its very real consequences; this is something you think would be obvious yet the threat of prison does nothing to deter men from rape and instead we’ve happily created a world where the social, emotional, and physical consequences are much, much worse for the victims of rape than for the rapists themselves.
As the final act of the film begins Dawn’s mother has sadly passed away, her step brother Brad ignored her screams to have sex with his girlfriend, and Dawn is setting out to get revenge on him for letting her die, as well as for setting his dog on his Dad after he tells him to move out. Throughout the film her step brother is heard arguing with his girlfriend, he refuses to do anything other than anal intercourse with her and there is even a weird and uncomfortable scene where he uses a dog biscuit to simulate raping her mouth. She is there when he makes his dog attack his father and as she learns what the audience might have guessed – that Brad is ‘in love’ with Dawn. The film opened on Brad and Dawn sitting in an inflatable pool in their front garden, him complaining about her and saying he doesn’t like her; after Dawn’s Mum stops Brad’s Dad from having a go at him for saying he hates her we are, almost casually, introduced to the premise of the film in the context of him sexually assaulting her. Young Brad holds up his bloodied bitten finger and we know that it’s because he had assaulted her and she bit back.
It’s this bitten finger that is used to show his feelings for her as we see him pretend perhaps to not remember what happened to it, and we even later see him sucking it. He explains to his father that he wishes he hadn’t made Dawn his sister and that he always wanted her. Dawn, after realising his feelings and what she can do with them, dresses in a thin white dress and comes onto him. He protests ever so slightly, only to ask why now, and immediately flips her over as he knows exactly what is down there. Yet she turns back around and lifts her dress up, and after he spends time trying to get a look he decides it is worth the risk to finally sleep with her and he does. However he quickly realises what a mistake that was as again we hear the crunch, see his face of realisation and pain and he gets what has always been coming to him as his penis is very much bitten right off. What follows is a rather disturbing and gross, but surprisingly funny, scene of his dog then eating his penis and Dawn leaving him to bleed and realise exactly what he did.
Teeth draws to a close and we see Dawn having to hitch-hike a ride out of town after her bike tire gets punctured. As soon as she stuck her thumb into the air it was obvious what was coming; the old man driving the car later pulls up, locks the doors, and simply smiles at her and sticks out his tongue. Dawn starts off pissed off, annoyed that yet another man is deciding to sexually assault her, and the film ends with her looking provocatively at him and at the camera as we are left knowing that now every single man who hurts her will get utterly and exactly what he deserves.