Suicide Squad: You Don’t Own Me.

Warning: Spoilers.

I was excited to watch Suicide Squad for a very long time; after reading the comics & loving them and loving that it was going to include characters like Harley Quinn and Katana I went to the cinema and waited to be entertained. Now here is usually where reviews of this film veer off because they weren’t expecting anything, they perhaps didn’t know the characters and instead were wanting to watch a more Marvel like film and got disappointed when it wasn’t; which is weird because I’m pretty sure there are more than 13 Marvel films they could watch instead. I’ve listened to criticisms of the film and I get some of them: it’s start was trying to explain the characters because many don’t know who they are but I enjoyed it and thought it wasn’t half as clunky exposition wise as say Avengers: Age of Ultron; I get some criticisms of Enchantress not being the best villain but as pretty much every Marvel film can attest to when you want to focus on the main characters you don’t get as much time to show off your villain and the resolution can be a bit easy. But I really loved it, I thought it was hilarious, and it did really well at the box office, so it was weird to go online and see people, such as Digital Spy, talking about it like we’d all gathered round and agreed that it was a disaster that Warner Brothers would need help getting over.

In terms of talking about it being sexist there is definitely a fair amount to choose from but I wasn’t exactly expecting feminism from a film about a bunch of serial killers. Now I’m a big advocate for everything eventually being feminist because sexism, especially in films, serves no real purpose except to alienate your female audience and pat the sexist men on the back. But when we get to comics that are almost always written by men, drawn by men, and aimed at men and then we translate those to film it becomes very tricky. For Suicide Squad it was using characters who were drawn by men for men and it’s why we got Harley in hot pants and Enchantress in a bikini. It’s also why we got Black Widow photo shopped for Captain America 2 and why Marvel CU should be glad they haven’t brought Spider Woman to life yet considering the way men draw her character.

There were various moments in the film that were there to show that the members of Task Force X are the lowest of the low, and that those they come into contact with are the same, heck even the guards at Belle Reve were sexist dickbags – it’s not like male prison guards turn off their sexism at work. So I expected plenty of sexism here and there and I got it, and I was uncomfortable in return. The interactions of men with Harley reminded me of animated, and comic, versions of Wonder Woman where she faces sexist comments so she can rebuff them with a look, a word, and sometimes even a punch. Some time ago in the DC offices it was kind of agreed that they should move away from making comics for children and make them for adults instead and they did and unfortunately that meant bringing the sexism and other crap with them; not that Marvel are much better people just seem not to care as much (looking at you 8 years of films with only male leads, particularly white guys called Chris).

But amongst all of this criticism about the sexism and objectification in this film there was a weird bit in an article that criticised Harley’s perfect idea of life: being normal, married to the man she loves, and having kids. Now don’t get me wrong feminism is pretty big on the whole criticism of the institution of marriage, the ideal of heterosexuality, and women’s goal in life being kids but to criticise Harley for this, to me, fundamentally misunderstands her character and her relationship with the Joker. It should be painfully obvious to everyone that Harley is stuck in an abusive relationship with the Joker; he literally manipulates her, abuses her, and despite him coming to rescue her in the film it’s largely to get back the thing he feels he owns. That Margot Robbie had to point this out shows how films, and other mediums, are terrible at getting abuse across to people; though I would have thought that literally leaving Harley to die half out of a car window at the bottom of a river would have made it abundantly obvious.

So for Harley to want normal, unpainted and dyed Joker and a family makes perfect sense. She just wants to be, to not have to fight, to dress up and pretend that she lives for madness and violence. Even in Mad Love, the episode in the animated series that shows Harley’s relationship with the Joker, we see Harley choosing to kill Batman so the Joker will calm down and just be with her; in that we also see him hitting her, hating that she’s smarter than him, her being manipulated by his lies, and even after having been pushed out of a window by him saying that it is all her fault. Then in its final moments when she seems to have realised his true self and motivations she falls straight back into his affections with a measly flower and note; this too is common in abusive relationships as it makes the abused think that maybe he is good after all and that the only reason he abuses is because of her words and actions, and not the reality that it’s his choice.

It was painful for me to watch Harley and the Joker, as it would be watching any depiction of an abusive relationship. It was disappointing too that in the end he is alive and breaks her out of prison again; I understand that any origin story for Harley has to include the Joker as she was created, by Paul Dini, to be his girlfriend but my hope would be that the DCU gets that Harley is better without him, and that we eventually get a solo film where she breaks free for good and sets out on her own. Though maybe stay away from other abusive relationships she gets stuck in, like with Poison Ivy. It’s a shame for me too that Harley’s intelligence often gets misunderstood, such as the climax working because even Enchantress just sees a quirky, flirty, scantily clad woman instead of a seriously smart and brave woman. Even Margot Robbie misunderstood that her intelligence doesn’t mean she can keep herself out of abusive relationships; the Joker is an immensely skilled manipulator – just ask Batman -  and considering the violence Harley has no doubt committed in his name, against others and herself, it wouldn’t surprise me that she has to work to justify her actions by staying with the man who forced her to ruin her life.

Suicide Squad was a joy for me to watch as well just because it was refreshing to watch women be unapologetically horrible; I get the Gone Girl argument that showing women being hideous isn’t the feminist film future we want but it’s at least something to let women be things outside of the few roles they’re shoved into – even half naked Harley was given depth, a key role, and had her character and smarts acknowledged. It was amazing to see Amanda Waller finally done justice in person too, Davis gave a phenomenal performance; the less said about her character in Arrow get shot in the head & never mentioned again the better. Plus, just having basic diversity of having women and men of colour in key roles can’t be talked about enough; to mention Marvel again who so far have had one Asian woman and they shot her and in this we got to see Katana, despite sadly not getting enough screen time (Katana film anyone?), being badass and actually speak Japanese.

As a whole I think moving towards more films like this with amazing women in lead roles, being all sorts of things (though let’s move away from this whole saving the girlfriend thing yeah, whether she’s taken over by an ancient witch or not) is a step in the right direction. I’ll grit my teeth through another Batman, and Superman film if it means we get a chance to see some of DC’s incredible female characters on the big screen. I’ll keep on enjoying superhero films that have bite, that get the catch 22s of trying to save the world (I actually liked Iron Man 3 guys), and if one more person tells DC films to lighten up I might just have to sit them down and explain to them that it would be super boring if we just kept making superhero films that were identical to one another, shout out to Marvel CU there. Now I think I’m going to go crack out my Gotham Sirens graphic novels.

Blindness: Apocalyptic Patriarchy

Warning: Spoilers (for film and book).

Blindness is a film based on a book of the same name, it came out in 2008 & it boasts starts such as Julianne Moore, Danny Glover & Mark Ruffalo. Problem is, it’s sexist as hell. It starts with the First Blind Man, played by Yûsuke Iseya, suddenly going blind, a man helps him back home and he explains to him how everything is white, utterly white. He sees a specialist, Mark Ruffalo and as time passes he wakes up and he too can only see white. Then it starts to spread, infecting more people and eventually all the few people who were in Ruffalo’s office when Iseya visited him also have the ‘White Sickness’ disease. They are put in a quarantined sanatorium and left to their own devices – yep, they are given food and there are guards to shoot them for stepping out of line but no one even remotely tries to go in and help them lest they get sick themselves. Eventually outside help starts to run out because the entirety of the world has gotten sick and gone blind too.

However, throughout all of this the one person who is not blind is Ruffalo’s wife, played by Moore. For some reason, unknown in the film, she is immune to this disease. Great you’d think, that’s amazing she can help the officials and help get the world get back on track (with the help of already blind people who live ordinary lives) and hell maybe even she has antibodies that can be used to create a vaccine and a cure. Oh, wait – she’s a character’s wife… never mind! As I was watching it felt like there were a lot of pretty basic messages the film was trying to get across but none of those were that women are more than wives, not really. Yes, she achieves different degrees of success, yes she helps them all in the end but ultimately she spends the entire film selflessly helping her husband and everyone else. Somehow I doubt the film’s message was ‘women’s unpaid labour drives everything in the world and we should stop taking it for granted’.

Now I love pandemic films and zombie films and all that sort but unfortunately these films, and others, have a tendency to get pretty stupid when they try to make points about the nature of humans. I think the films that try to point out human nature usually say more about the writer than they do about the human race – human race by the way is a terrible film example of this, so too is Circle. They devolve into ‘everyone is an arsehole, expect children and except maybe women, but only some women, and even then fuck those women they can put up or shut up’ and it gets really old. Every new film, and in this case book, comes at the angle as though it’s fresh and original and maybe people will be less of an arsehole after watching this film. But no, they won’t because you can’t even make a film about being less of an arsehole without showing rape.

So after a couple of weeks when each ward in the sanatorium is full of blind people the one ward that is full of men, that is run by a man who literally declared himself king of his ward, has started stockpiling the food. He has a gun and first he takes everyone’s valuables and then when they are all gone he demands – yep, originality at its finest – ‘the women’. Or girls as he repeatedly calls them, because that’s what you want to do to the women you rape: infantilise them. So we have this film that’s really looking at people, their prejudices, how they come together, how violent men rip them apart, and then because apparently in an apocalypse the one thing you can bet never dies is patriarchy we get rape. It throws in the usual mess of well the women volunteer themselves and oh one of the characters is a prostitute, the men trying to point out that yes actually it would have been different if he had demanded all of the men to rape instead of the women, and it’s just all a total mess.

Then Moore’s character has to lead eight women to their rape, each woman is terrified and the men are acting like animals. Instead of cutting away, instead of feeling ashamed that the audience couldn’t just know that this is bad they carry on because hey narrative. They film Julianne Moore getting forced to her knees, they show other women being abused and raped whilst the one man who was born blind asks if he can suck on a faceless woman’s nipples. Then one of the men gets violent and he beats one of the women to death. Again, I’d say it was the film showing that rape, violence and murder are all on one great male violence spectrum but nothing in the film leads me to think it was anything other than hey of course this would happen because that’s what women do right – they die.

Later when it’s Ward Two’s time for the women there to be raped the man who was born blind stops by Moore’s ward and she tells him how one of the women died. He actually looks fucking sad, he looks shocked and mildly horrified. As though raping women was fine but hey he didn’t actually want them to die. If your audience is men, then do you really need to show women being raped for them to understand not to do it? Like they have no capacity for empathy to know that hey maybe raping, beating and killing women is a bit fucking much? Then Moore decides enough is enough, had to have the rape and murder first though because the threat of rape isn’t enough to stand up to (none of the men ever gave a shit by the way, one of the husbands was revolted his wife was going to be violated because it reflects badly on him, and one man got pissed off that the women didn’t want more nights of being raped). She takes a pair of scissors and she goes and stabs the ‘King’ in his throat, not before the camera showed us plenty of women being raped though just for good measure.

Then a woman burns the whole place down because fuck that shit. The world by then has already gone to absolute hell so there are no guards and Moore lets everyone out, she guides them home, there’s a scuffle about food and yada yada they all go back to her house to live out of their days. Until, spoiler the first guy who lost his sight, Iseya, can suddenly see again. Danny Glover gives us a voice over of how he’ll miss blindness because it might have given him a chance with a younger woman, that everyone is happy because it means they too might get their sight back, and hey what of this poor exhausted woman who’s been looking after everyone else. Personally, I hope she runs away and lives out her days not being sucked dry.

Throughout the whole film her husband treats her like rubbish, is unappreciative of the fact Moore is going through hell to stay and help him, and then he literally cheats on her. But she doesn’t give a shit, because of course she doesn’t. She’s a fucking saint. So he carries on pawing at her, saying how he can’t see her as a wife anymore because she’s more like his carer (not that that’s dealt with in anyway in this film), and it’s just all so annoying. It’s annoying because Ruffalo has played this character a million times; this sappy type of man who expects and demands unpaid emotional labour from fictional women who turn around and act like he’s a gift to women. It’s not enough to tell men that rape is bad, you have to also tell them that they aren’t entitled to shit. That women do not exist to make them feel better all the time, to pick up after them, and to do all of this at the expense of their own feelings, time, and desires.

Overall it was a disappointing and infuriating film and I should know now that nine out of ten films will be. More women need to be allowed to write films, to direct and produce films. We need the female gaze, the female voice to educate and entertain. Cause frankly I’m bored to death of the male gaze showing me the same thing while it’s male voice bores me with the same old stories. I’ve read great apocalyptic fiction that doesn’t have rape in, that doesn’t throw women to the outskirts, and you know what? It’s absolutely awesome. So I’ll say as I always say, step up men. Stop preventing women from getting a word in, pay attention to your own crappy behaviour and let’s stop acting like a patriarchal world will outlive us all.

I’ll leave you with the line from Wikipedia on the director talking about the rape scenes in the film:

“Meirelles explained his goal, "When I shot and edited these scenes, I did it in a very technical way, I worried about how to light it and so on, and I lost the sense of their brutality. Some women were really angry with the film, and I thought, 'Wow, maybe I crossed the line.'”

Knock Knock: Ugh.

Warning: Spoilers.

Knock Knock is a film directed by Eli Roth, it was also written by him & two other men and it’s a remake of a 70s film called Death Game. It certainly feels like it got its politics and campiness from the 70s film. I can’t imagine watching Death Game and feeling like it needed remaking for a modern audience. I’d certainly add it to the list of films that are more about backlashing against feminism, such as Jurassic World, than I would saying it’s a film feminist’s would like – you know, like Eli Roth said. When I first heard about Knock Knock, seeing that it was a film about sexy women hurting some poor man I instantly thought it sounded dreadfully sexist (of course it is) but then for the director to go oh well nah they’ll love it is just so typical and embarrassing.

Basically the plot goes like this: one night a family man (the most loving, amazing, perfect husband and father) is at home working while his family have gone away for the weekend (join us Daddy! No I can’t, I have to catch up on being an architect as you can tell how successful I am at it by my amazing house) and then there is, you guessed it, a knock at his door. It’s raining heavily and there are two young women at the door drenched and they explain that they were trying to find a party but their taxi driver misheard them and took them to completely the wrong place and can they come in and use his phone. So instead of being a jerk, and come on what could these innocent women possibly do to him, he lets them in; eventually they’re in dressing gowns as their clothes dry and Keanu Reeves’ character Evan acts like they’re so weird for not wanting to sit in soaking clothes but oh they’re cute and young and isn’t it just all great.

Then they ‘seduce’ him because you know that thing where men just literally lose all their faculties and use of their brain when a woman makes a move on him – frankly I’d say that makes them dangerous people to run the world if that’s all it takes for them to become idiots. So he sleeps with them, a lot – in the bed he shares with his wife, in his shower and then the next morning is when things change. He awakes to find his house trashed, and as the film goes on they tie him and make him sit there as they write things like ‘whore’ on a picture of his young daughter and all the rest – feminism, remember. Then they start to play a game, they explain how they have done this many times – go to a house where a man is alone, ‘seduce’ him, and then fuck with him after the fact – and they make him answer questions about how many man say no (none).

Then they tell him how he’s now a paedophile because they’re both under the age of consent, now spoilers here, they’re actually both over 18. But again the three male writers oh so feminist that they are wanted to use an ‘erotic horror thriller’ to make the point that maybe if you’re going to sleep with a woman you make sure she’s old enough first. But men I hear you, women are liars, they have fake IDs, it’s just so time consuming in between meeting a woman and getting undressed before asking how old they are when you didn’t even bother to ask their name! But hey, when the other option is jail…

Now amongst all this I had a very hard time understanding really what Eli and his co-writers wanted from me, the audience. Did they want me to be on the side of the women? Agree with them that Evan was in the wrong (he was, but also they were in different ways)? Or be on Evan’s side that he was perfect and instead just the victim of two psychopathic hotties (last two words were ones used by rotten tomato reviewers of this & the original film). I didn’t feel sorry for Evan because yeah how hard is it to say no to sex when you’re married with kids but also there are moments where the two women are criminals such as when they destroy his house, his wife’s art, where they stab Evan, and you know when they accidentally cause a man’s death, paper maché him, paint him and then call their usual guy that disposes of bodies for them.

I mean they clearly are criminals, who yes make good points that seduction is a stupid word designed to excuse grown men’s actions – especially when those actions are criminal – but at the end of the day they’re meant to be the villains and we’re meant to root for Evan. But that’s difficult when he’s just so dreadful, so self-righteous about how his life is ruined by nasty little women who gave him no choice but to have sex with them – and god that speech he gives, if you’ve seen it you’ll know the one. So really it just made me feel bored, that I was watching the usual sexist rubbish, and that this film really shouldn’t have the word feminist anywhere near it – other than in ‘yet another film for feminists to avoid’.

Who I do feel sorry for is his wife, which again is a character whose story doesn’t care much about – she sees her trashed house at the end but mostly just looks shocked before the film ends. But now she has to divorce her cheating husband, move house or live in one that is defiled, mourn the loss of a close friend, reorganise her career because her art gallery is missing its main piece that was trashed by them and has her friend’s blood on it; she has to presumably clean up the house – women’s work am I right! – and remove all the family portraits that have penises drawn all over them, explain why Daddy isn’t around anymore to her kids and generally just find a way to move forward.

Or alternatively, if she stays with her husband despite his cheating she has to do all of that whilst listening to her husband justify it by him going on and on about how those psychopathic whore bitches tricked him and left him in the ground, literally, up to his neck while he watched a video of him being raped – yep, one of the women literally rapes him while he’s tied to a bed and the film skips over that fact, instead it’s creepiness is her being dressed in his daughter’s school clothes (how they fit her I’ll never know) and uses it in the end of the film as the video of that rape is posted on Facebook for his friends to see. She’ll have to stand by him while he rebuilds his life, she gets to explain to all her family and friends what happened, what they saw on Facebook and hear how dreadful that must be for Evan, and her. She’ll have to sacrifice her time to help him emotionally while her own art exhibit goes up in flames. Not saying that other horror films don’t have similar endings, with untold consequences (or told ones if you watch the many dreadful sequels of so many franchises) but this one in particular is one where Evan won’t be the only one suffering.

Especially if you watch the alternate ending, where Evan finds the two women playing the same game with another man – another poor, helpless man who couldn’t help but sleep with women – and one where he puts on black gloves and knocks on their door for a change. I don’t doubt that that scenario would most likely end with both of their deaths, and that if that film existed men would cheer him on – you make those bitches pay! Ugh. In many descriptions of this film Knock Knock is described as a man’s fantasy gone wrong, i.e. two young and sexy women showing up at your door then having sex with you. Those women give you what your wife can’t, they let you have fun then leave the next day without a trace, free sex with no strings attached – unless they end up like all women are, psychos! Again, ugh.

This film is basically what three men think women are like, but don’t want to admit they think women are like that. Where they take the idea of empty women who just want to have a bit of fun and then decide their personalities would be murdering criminals. It’s not enjoyable to watch, it’s not scary at all and it more sounds like if someone made a film of what their mate Steve told them about this story he heard of these two hot women – phwoar – who went crazy and attacked his mate John, and the story ends with him and his friends sitting in the pub going – well, that’s women: crazy.

Sex and Sexuality 2: Concussion (2013).

Warning: Spoilers

Concussion is a film about a bored lesbian housewife who becomes a sex worker. For me the last part almost made it something I didn’t want to watch, I’m not really here for films that go all Pretty Woman and pretend that being a ‘sex worker’ is totally awesome and has no problems that getting rid of stigma can’t fix. But luckily Concussion isn’t that. Now it doesn’t explicitly talk about the violence inherent in prostitution but it is hinted at here and there throughout. Concussion shows a very specific type of sex worker and oddly enough it’s the one that people are so quick to defend: a white, well off woman who purely does sex work because she chooses to. Whilst the film doesn’t exactly preach that this is the epitome of sex work it doesn’t really mention all the women whose experience of prostitution is nothing like hers. For information on the myths surrounding prostitution, decriminalisation and the Nordic Model go here, here and here.

It was refreshing to watch a film about lesbian women, found in the LGBT section of Netflix, that, whilst yes was about sex, was about them as people. No one died, no one seduced their student or went jealous and killed someone. It could have easily been about a straight woman doing the same thing except it wasn’t. It showed that no one really likes housework, no one is really fulfilled cleaning up the house and taking care of the kids – despite how much they love & care about those kids. At its core it’s about women needing a hobby, needing an outlet for the boredom that is the necessary and boring day to day stuff. Nothing would get done if we were all walking around in un-ironed un-washed clothes, hungry and in a house covered in filth after all but that doesn’t mean its inspiring and fascinating – for anyone who wants to read more about this you should buy this book.

So Abby decides to go back to work as an interior decorator, who renovates homes and apartments to sell them. As she works with her contractor they talk and one thing apparently leads to another and she’s paying for sex in the apartment they are renovating. Afterwards she’s complimented on her skills and so she decides to become one herself. As she never really explains it to her wife it’s not really clear what she does with the money she gets but it’s clear the money isn’t needed; her wife works as a lawyer and despite their house and two kids they seemed to be fine financially when she was unemployed, her going to work was to get out of the house more than anything. She works out of this white, clean apartment, she completely chooses her own clients and the closest she gets to having a pimp is her contractor getting her clients who is later replaced by his girlfriend – named The Girl – who is a fresh faced young woman getting her degree who needs the money for student loans.

The only real showing of a woman in this industry who perhaps is struggling and does need the money is when Abby visits a prostitute who appears to be addicted to drugs. The second she walks in a less fancy motel room she sees the woman taking drugs, she offers them to Abby who declines. Then the woman bends her over the bed and the scene changes. It’s not really talked about but it is the catalyst for her choosing a more expensive sex worker next, and for her to give herself more options in future. It’s made clear that Abby doesn’t want to be like this woman, nor does she want to sleep with this woman or women like her and because of her money and status she happily does neither.

The choice and freedom that Abby has is a luxury and it is plentiful. She doesn’t choose her clients but she does choose that they only be women – not an option for most lesbian sex workers, especially considering the money is with men who are the vast (so vast) majority of people who buy sex. She chooses where to conduct her business, again not something seen in sex work – especially considering the dangers of inviting a stranger back to a place where you know you’re alone; contrast this to brothels in decriminalised places like Germany where women have options like mega brothels, or colour coded places that look like stables. Then there’s one client who is particularly violent, she throws her around and strangles her but she just never invites them back; she says no and that’s that, she says she ‘has to protect herself’ but again due to not needing the money it is a luxury she can literally afford.

Abby also does something unusual that is specific to her own brand of sex work, something that prostitutes who need money quickly and efficiently can’t do, she meets her clients for coffee first. She sits in a nice looking coffee shop and she asks them questions about herself, she wants to know them as people before she sleeps with them; some clients don’t seem happy about that, they just want to have sex and be done with it. But others, such as one woman who is in her twenties who has never had sex or kissed anyone, come to enjoy it and it helps them break the ice. This is a key thing Concussion does as well, it really wants to reinforce that this film is about women as people not women as sex objects, something that it so easily could have fallen into; I would attribute that to the female writer and director, Stacie Passon, as it shows how easily the female gaze can change film.

Ultimately Concussion is about desire, about the exploration of female sexuality, how family can change you as a person and how a desire to be a person, to be a woman doesn’t have to conflict and rip it apart. It shows it has feminist roots in a character who recommends The Second Sex – ‘it was crazy’ – to a woman who feels uncomfortable in her own body, and with Louise Bourgeois’ art hanging on the walls in the room where she sees clients. It shows women being shy, women being erotic, and women being human; it made me want to keep watching and existing in that world where women get to be all the things other films deny them. It’s not, I don’t think, asking for much to acknowledge that in a patriarchy the female gaze can mean a lot – it can mean a break in the drudgery of films that don’t like or respect women. When it comes to sex and sexuality, to films about lesbians having a lot of sex, I’d say the female gaze is pretty damn vital.

P.S.

After the film I briefly watched an interview with the actress who plays Abby, and the woman who plays a friend Abby knows, cough, called Sam. It starts with the male interviewer saying to the women 'it's not about the sex, it's about the story'; he repeats this because he maybe thinks that it's important to them that this man thinks that he didn't think about them having sex whilst watching a film where at least half of it is women having sex. I just wanted to mention it as it was a weird thing to clarify but also that maybe it was because he didn't feel like it was about sex because the sex wasn't for him, it wasn't aimed at him and it didn't include him. It was all about women. But I have to say as a bisexual woman watching the film it would be pretty hard to pretend that it wasn't at least a little (okay a lot) about the sex.

Sex & Sexuality 1: Felt.

In this history of cinema there are films about men in all their glory, all their flaws and everything in between. But when it comes to films about women that’s not quite true. Women are expected to look stunning, to be inhuman and to be what men want them to be. So I’m doing a project where I try and find films about women’s sex and sexuality that treat women as human beings who can be complex and erotic and all the rest. First in the list is Felt which looks at sex.

Warning: Spoilers (for all of the film).

Felt is a slightly autobiographical film about a woman called Amy who was sexually assaulted, it starts after the fact and shows her dealing with day to day life. We see her as she goes on dates, hangs out with her friends and it’s painful to watch people not understand her or how to deal with her. It would be reductive to call Amy weird, to say she’s just odd or messed up; she’s stuck in a process of trying to find her own way to heal, to figure out who should be in life, and how to interact with people again after something has shattered everything she thought she knew about people and herself.

Amy is an artist and she explores the female and male body using her art. She creates costumes that mimic the male body and it’s fascinating. Watching Amy walk around the woods wearing a skin tight suit with a fake penis on it is something to behold. It’s worth putting it in perspective too, remembering the many films that show men dressing in ‘women’s’ clothes, the documentaries on men wearing masks that are sick caricatures of female faces and remembering how little we see this reverse. But also worth remembering the societal context that makes what Amy is doing so different.

Amy isn’t, and this is my opinion here as she only explains it once, wearing a fake male body because she wants to be a man but because she wants to see what it’s like to have the thing that hurt her, a penis. She wants to see what power it supposedly has, how something so simple could shake her world so much, and what it’s like to explore nature in something she sees as destructive, and for her to be the opposite as she saves a dragonfly that is stuck in a spider’s web. She has many costumes in the film but it’s her exploration of the male body that’s so striking in the context of the rest of the film. Felt didn’t start with a rape, or a sexual assault – it didn’t feel the need to be like Irreversible, thinking that the only way you could understand rape is to brutally show it. Amy wants to show you what happens after, what a woman feels like when her own body is used against her.

When her own female anatomy is invaded she can hardly escape it, she can’t just not go back to the scene of the crime and so she gives herself a new body instead. Her friend doesn’t get what she’s doing, she gets annoyed and angry as Amy sits across from her wearing a lyrca mask to mimic a man’s face. She gets frustrated and sees Amy’s ‘acting out’ as something that is selfish, she wants her to be ‘normal’ so she doesn’t have to try & understand Amy or think about what she’s going through. People often hate the word victim because it reminds us that we live in a world full of perpetrators. It’s easier to want people to call themselves survivors, to pretend that they were spontaneously hurt and that they’re braver for it. No one wants to admit that men are hurting women.

So Amy explores instead, she reaches out with felt and lyrca and padding and tries to understand how these differences in sex can be so vicious. At one point Amy goes to a photo shoot, a naked photo shoot and we see a woman standing half naked on the bed; she is topless and wearing underwear and black lace tights – the man taking photos of her is fully clothed, with a big beard and hat. Then out comes Amy wearing another suit, a bra with fake nipples and underwear that has a plastic vulva on. It’s a sight to behold and the whole scene is really actually touching. The guy taking the photos tells her to stop, to leave, to end the joke as he doesn’t find it funny. However the woman who was already there loves it, she lets her walls down and she starts having fun.

Female friendship is something that has got feminism further than men want it to; this solidarity in the face of assault and oppression is something that men want to break and stop because it’s so powerful. This scene is a great expression of that, two women who have never met before in a situation that is not about them as people but purely about them as pretty objects with boobs. But there’s Amy showing the female anatomy in all its glory and the man taking the photos doesn’t want it. He wasn’t there to take photos of women, of the female body in its realness but in its fake-ness; he wanted the objectified version that lets men pretend that women aren’t human. Amy and her new friend, Roxanne, start messing around and farting and just generally being so great and real.

Afterwards they go out to a bar, they play pool and have fun. Then a guy comes along, so they be themselves and he gets uncomfortable. One of my favourite things about this film is that it features a fair few scenes of men looking uncomfortable and in a world where TV and film actively makes women feel uncomfortable it’s really great to watch. Then as the film progresses Amy meets the man from the bar again and they start dating. He tries to be the Nice Guy, the one man in the world who won’t hurt Amy, who sees her as she is and loves her for it. He takes her to see art of women – which is so great – and he throws her a vulva/vagina birthday which is amazing. She shows him her art, which is full of dildos and felt penises, she sits stabbing one with a felt needle and he asks her to stop as it’s painful for him to watch – she doesn’t.

Then Amy explains why so much of her work is about penises, as he asks, and she explains it’s because she lives in a rape culture. She tells him that the world wants her to be an object, it wants her body for its pieces and she hates it. It would be hard to find a woman who wouldn’t agree, even those who want to pretend it doesn’t exist must still have that feeling – that men see their greatest worth in their body. That there is always a suffocating wall around them of women’s breasts, of their arses and skin. That no matter where you turn you see men being human, being flawed, and then women being sexy and pretty no matter what situation they are in. So Amy turns to felt, she turns to plastic and she creates the things that patriarchy holds dear, and then she stabs it with needles.

As the film goes on we see her friend, Roxanne, driving and as she’s driving she sees Amy’s loving boyfriend Kenny. But he’s holding hands with another woman, so she takes a picture and she finds Amy and she shows her it. Amy asks her why she wants to hurt her, why she wants to break them up and Roxanne explains that she just wants her to be happy and that he won’t be that for her. But Kenny was meant to be different, and it’s hard at first for Amy to let go of that. Like any woman, on the internet or in real life, she’ll have been told, by some well-meaning man who lives in a world where women need correcting no matter how smart they are, that not all men are like that, not all men are abusive, and not all men objectify people. But they do, all men live in a patriarchy and all men in one way or another punch down. Whether it’s through seeing women as sexy objects, through watching porn, saying sexist jokes, calling women bitches, and the hundred and one options for screwing over women that they have at their disposal they will have done at least one.

So Amy takes him into the woods, she shows him her special place where she goes alone in her costumes to heal. She puts on her male costume and she gives him her female costume, he looks pained and uncomfortable as she makes him strip and get changed in a hollowed out tree in the woods. Just before this he tried to sit her down and explain how he hasn’t been quite truthful with her, she didn’t let him finish as she already knows what he’s going to say. So, walking through the woods in their costumes, she asks him to lie down on a tree and he looks so scared. She climbs on top of him, kissing him and then out of her bag she pulls out a pair of scissors – “they could cut through anything!” – and she stabs him repeatedly. Again, something that has been done to women in film since men realised they could film it and call it art. Then, as we all knew would happen watching the film, she takes those scissors and she cuts off his penis; she holds it against her body, an actual one to replace the plastic one, and she walks through the woods. The End.

It’s a film designed to make men feel uncomfortable, to make them feel embarrassed for the things they say, the way they act, and the abuses they commit. I hope men turn away when they watch it, that they wince as she brandishes the scissors and that they feel like I do regularly when I watch TV & film – that it’s not for them, it’s not there to be their friend, that it’s there to show them that their body is for consumption. Felt is a film that doesn’t shy away from saying the truth about the patriarchy we live in, and I love it. It’s a film that people call feminist that for once actually is feminist. It’s not about choice, it’s not about reclaiming sexy, it’s not even about showing how women are broken by men but that women are people who are human in a world that doesn’t want them to be.

The Z Word: 10 Badass Women in Zombie Films

After watching a zombie film that had an amazing female character in it that demoted her to being the sister of the protagonist who spent most of the film bound & gagged with her hands over her head it made me think, once again, about women's role in zombie films. It made me wonder how many times we'd seen the zombie film cliché of a killing your family after they've been turned but with women killing their husbands - Dawn of the Dead came to mind but that was about it. Then a lot of time was spent trying to think of zombie films I'd seen where a woman was definitely the protagonist and from what I could think there are only 7 – four of those are one franchise, 2 of those are the remake of said franchise, and one separate one. Zombie films, like most other horror films (and most films full stop), have a problem with women and often can’t find the balance between objectifying women and making them male badass characters with boobs. So I thought I’d write a list of some great female characters – and protagonists – in zombie films for those women like me who love zombie films and awesome female characters.

Zombieland: Wichita and Little Rock

Zombieland is a comedy horror that follows the weedy Jesse Eisenberg as he survives a zombie apocalypse by creating rules and following them. In his journey he meets the great Wichita and Little Rock played by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin respectively. Both characters get the chance to be a bit complicated, a bit devious, and very human. It’s a staple of the genre and it’s pretty unlikely that if you’re reading this list you haven’t already seen this film.

Dawn of the Dead: Ana

Dawn of the Dead is a 2004 remake of Romero’s film, the third in his franchise. It’s a great film that looks at how different people fit together in times of crisis, and what would happen if you gave birth during a zombie apocalypse. Ana handles the whole thing in her pyjamas which in my opinion is how I want to experience an apocalypse, it might not be practical but I’d sure be comfortable. It’s not often remakes become brilliant films in their own right but this one certainly does.

Cockneys Vs Zombies: Katy, and others

Cockneys Vs Zombies is another great example of what happens when British people make a zombie film – see: Shaun of the Dead but disregard Doghouse. The protagonists, two brothers, start by trying to rob a bank to keep their Grandad’s care home open and they end up leaving the bank into, yep, a zombie apocalypse. It has its hilariously British moments and it’s a great film overall. Katy is that female character who has to keep stepping up to save her cousin’s lives because they’re useless and she’s awesome. I also just have to mention the amazing Peggy played by Honor Blackman who shows that age means nothing when there are zombies to fight.

Night of the Living Deb: Deb

I’ve mentioned this film before, here, as an alternative Valentine’s Day film but that doesn’t mean this film is first and foremost a romance film. It follows the totally unique Deb as she gets awkwardly forced out of the door by a one night stand and walks into a weirdly quiet town full of zombies. It has some sigh inducing sexist moments but Deb turns this film into something special. It’s definitely one for those who love their comedy mixed with horror and weird, wonderful women.

Fido: Helen Robinson

Fido is what would happen if after a zombie apocalypse in a world resembling the 1950s where they domesticated zombies and used them as servants. I’ve written about it in detail here because of the great Helen Robinson as played by Carrie Ann Moss. It is a weirdly lovely film, parts horror and comedy (you can tell I have a favourite genre), and it is quite a gem of the genre. Helen is a great example of what happens when you don’t disregard female characters and limit them by the limiting ideals of the time.

Pontypool: Sydney and Laurel-Ann

Pontypool is a seriously underrated film. It’s set in a radio station and follows a radio host as people around him get infected. It’s hard to talk about it without giving the plot away but if you love inventive zombie films I’d definitely give it a watch. Its slow burn nature is part of its beauty and all of the main characters involved play their parts brilliantly. It’s very loosely based off a book, mainly using its premise, which is also unique and has its moments that are pretty terrifying when they’re read in a creepy voice when you’re listening to the audiobook late at night like I was. Helen, Helen, Helen anyone?

Warm Bodies: Julie

Warm Bodies is basically Romeo and Juliet with zombies but also if zombies started to become more human, that old chestnut. It’s a really enjoyable film, with some pretty hilarious moments and though I haven’t read the book yet I all but guarantee it’s a great book too. Julie reacts kind of weirdly to what happens in the film when you remember that R is a zombie, who has murdered people, people she knows. But then you remember it is using Romeo and Juliet as its basis and it reinforces yet again how weird and inappropriate that play is. But either way Julie is a female character that manges to be a proper person the whole time and everything. The way films are these days I’m classing that as a win.

28 Days Later: Selena

Another great British zombie film, though this time pure horror. Selena is awesome and helps make this into the great film that it is. Though I, controversially, prefer 28 Weeks Later I still recommend this film for the lovers of fast zombies – even if they’re not technically zombies, hush. What I will also recommend you do after you’ve watched this film is play the game Left 4 Dead and play In the House, In a Heartbeat (“That was more than a heartbeat”) and it makes the finales of the maps something truly intense.

Rec 3: Genesis: Clara

This film sometimes gets a bad rap because it’s so different from the other Rec films but I think it’s a perfect example of how to expand an established universe. It’s a really enjoyable film, part horror and part romance. It follows Clara and Koldo at their wedding as their reception gets interrupted by zombies; the found footage style stops as we watch both Clara and Koldo get separated and try to find each other again. The moment where Clara has a chainsaw and she rips her wedding dress because it’s getting in the way is more than badass enough to earn her a spot on this list.

Rec: 1/2/4: Apocalipsis: Ángela

Rec is the Spanish found footage zombie film to rule all Spanish found footage zombie films. Some may know it as the film that inspired Quarantine, and the terrible Quarantine 2. Ángela is a news reporter who was filming a segment about firefighters when the building she is in gets quarantined due to, you guessed it, zombies. It’s an iconic film of the genre for a reason and as the films go on Ángela continues to be a tour de force. She is a perfect example of how amazing it can be when you let women be the protagonists of not just zombie films but any film. More of the same please.

Honourable Mentions

Kelly in Dead Set – a series by Charlie Brooker on Channel 4 that asks and answers what would happen to the Big Brother contestants if there was a sudden zombie apocalypse.

Many, many female characters (particularly Michonne and Carol) in The Walking Dead – both in the comic and in the show, they are badass and human at the same time.

Liv Moore in iZombie – loosely based on a comic this show looks at what would happen if eating someone’s brain (when you’re a zombie of course) helped you solve their murder.

Mia in Evil Dead (the 2013 remake) – the franchise has a very erm mixed relationship with female characters but the finale of this film shows why Mia is getting an honourable mention.

Amy in In the Flesh – a BBC three show about what might happen if, after the initial apocalypse we found a way to stop zombies being rabid and helped them assimilate back into the normal world. It’s an underrated show that sadly got cancelled on a cliff-hanger.

All the women, Julie in particular, in Les Revenants – A French TV show that looks at what would happen if people who had previously died came back from the dead. There’s also a French film that the show is based on, and a Canadian film of similar theme with a great female character too.

The Most Honourable Mention: Z Nation

Warren, Addy and Cassandra in Z Nation – my favourite zombie thing by far. Z Nation is a TV show that follows a group of people crossing American to get a man who might hold the cure to the zombie apocalypse to doctors who can do something about it. It’s just a shame that guy is a jerk. It is brilliant, hilarious, and it truly came into its own in the second season as its bigger budget allowed each episode to be explorations of how zombies would fit with aliens, Native Americans, and so much more. Not to mention that Warren and Addy are totally incredible.

Dishonourable Mentions

This is for those films that are pretty sexist but still managed to give us great female characters – even if time watching is spent wishing they were in a better film.

Brooke in Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead – a character that could have held an entire film herself, but sadly wasn’t given that chance. It's an Australian Mad Max style zombie film that has it's moments but ultimately didn't live up to it's potential.

Kim in Kill Zombie! – A Dutch comedy horror about a guy trying to save a female colleague, it has a fair amount of sexism but I really enjoyed Kim’s character as she kicked ass – one scene aside, ugh.

Aurore in La Horde – a French film about a group of police officers who are trying to get revenge for the murder of one of their own that very quickly turns into a fight to survive. It has one scene in particular that is disgustingly misogynistic, but Aurore stands strong with a great fight in a kitchen.

Cherry Darling in Planet Terror – a Tarantino zombie film that is terribly sexist, I really didn’t enjoy watching it at all but I will concede that Cherry is pretty badass, even if it is ultimately in a male wish fulfilment way; see: the line about her only having one leg making it easier to ‘get access’, gross.

'Little' Note about my love for zombie films and feminism:

A really annoying thing about films about the apocalypse is that they are often written by men – this is weirdly true for zombie films – and as such they tend not to know how to deal with women. They can quickly fall into boring exaggerations of patriarchy as though that’s the best they could come up with, see Doomsday (here). Zombie films can be have this problem too as they give us female characters that are either there to be saved, to be objectified/killed, and to fall into the Badass Female Character trope; the latter often being your standard action hero male character, but one they see as being great because they’re kicking ass whilst being a woman, as though that makes it fundamentally harder.

In all other non-apocalyptic films I talk about how male violence is a problem and that often it’s gratuitous and is a lot of the time there so men can watch women get hurt. With zombie films, and TV, this can also be the case such as in The Walking Dead where their biggest problem is not surviving in a decimated world, or protecting themselves from zombies but is in fact fighting violent men time and time again; this was evident in Fear the Walking Dead when even in the throes (ish) of the start of the apocalypse we’re still treated to men torturing others and it bored me half to death. So this is where zombie films get to be different, they need to be violent in order to live because zombies are strongest in numbers; if you don’t kill one zombie then chances are it will come back to literally bite you or it will get its friends and turn into a horde that will kill everyone.

But my main reason for loving zombie films, books and TV shows is nothing to do with the violence and the gore but for all the other things. It’s for the little moments of terror, that voice on the other end of the phone going “hang on? Steve? Are you alright?” and knowing exactly what is happening. It’s because I love the sheer creativity that can come out of the genre as people take all sorts of situations and add zombies. It can be a great genre for women too as it gives them a chance, despite what crappy male writers think, to shake off the daily sexism they experience and just focus on getting through the day in a world where it’s all humans versus zombies. Sexism, if you write zombies right, becomes a distraction. But mostly, I just really love zombies.

If you think there’s any women in zombie films - or TV - I’ve missed (mostly because I haven’t seen every zombie film ever, yet) then let me know in the comments or on Twitter at @FeministFilms! Or even if you just want any more recommendations of zombie related things, such as zombie books with great women in.

Suffragette: Votes for Women

Suffragette is a film that is so ridiculously overdue; in two years it will have been one hundred years since certain (over the age of 30, married – 8.4 million) women were given the vote. It wasn't even until 1928 women (who were over the age of 21) were given the same voting rights as men. As is shown at the end of the film there were a few countries before the UK that gave women voting rights and many more that didn't until afterwards. The thing that's important to remember that the vote for women wasn't simply about votes but about gaining legal standing in a lot of areas – such as the legal recognition that mothers have rights over their children, as is mentioned in the film. It's hard to imagine now being so powerless, having no right to be in government, to have a say in the world that affects them, not even having the law recognise that you should be able to look after your child or own your house and everything else that women were denied then.

The film follows Maud Watts a woman who gets involved in the suffragette movement; we see as she tries not to get involved as she has seen the consequences it has for other women. As the film goes on we see the consequences that fighting for women's rights has on women's personal lives; Maud loses her job, she gets kicked out of her home, and when her husband has no idea how to raise a child – that's Maud's job after all – he simply gets his son adopted instead. Many men around the world like to pretend that women are inconsequential, that they run the world and control everything but they forget that without women everything would fall apart. Capitalism relies on women's unpaid labour after all – feeding men, raising children, keeping the house clean and fresh; men would struggle if they had to do all of that and 'run the world' all on their own. Icelandic women proved this by almost all of them protesting and after the country all but collapsed under the weight of women striking change began to happen and they are now the most 'gender equal' country in the world.

One thing that's striking about the film is actually how little has changed despite the hundred years having passed. For instance, there is talk about women becoming MPs and as much as we have moved on and more and more women are elected 72% of the UK government is still male. The majority of board members, CEOs and all the rest of the powerful positions in the UK are male. This is called Patriarchy, men controlling the government and men also pretending that it's no big deal. But that's exactly what Suffragette shows, it is a really big deal. So much so that women were prepared to go to hell and back to get it. There were many moments in the film where I almost cried because of just how important it is. When Emmeline Pankhurst stands and gives a speech to women on a balcony it's hard not to understand. When she says never surrender it's hard not to feel the importance of being a woman and fighting for the women alive today and those who will come after us. Even now women are still fighting to keep creating a better future.

The film, rightly, emphasises the physical struggle suffragists went through. They were beaten by police despite their lack of violence against others, and they were brutally force fed in the jails by a government who didn't want blood on their hands but was happy to deny them basic human rights. I'd like to say I learnt about all of this in school, that as a teenager I was taught about the horribleness of the Cat and Mouse Act of 1913 but I wasn't because I wasn't taught about it in school; I remember having one English lesson where we read a play about the suffragette's but my Academy school didn't feel it pertinent to teach us about women – not in history but also not much in other subjects. Women grow up around the world not learning their history, as we as unlearning sexism women have to learn that they do in fact have a history and that it's an amazing one full of strong, courageous women.

Women's words are often seen as violence and as such men often react with actual violence – this isn't absent from Suffragette; from Violet's abusive husband to the police brutality it is clear that women's actions and dissent are taken to be way too far. As is pointed out in the film, the Suffragette's weren't killing people, they weren't setting out to start a war as many men have for many causes throughout history, and one thing that can be said of the fight for women's liberation is that it is not one built on the bodies of murdered people – though it does remember the women who have died at the hands of men. After all women are not taught to be violent, to be aggressive, and instead they are taught to be quiet, submissive, and timid. Even now when we praise strong women there are still many women who are punished for it with violence and ridicule. Regardless of the rift between the suffragists and suffragette's we can thank both of them for gaining the women's right to vote; after all, a large part of the government giving in was, after World War I ended, a desire not to return to a time of civil disobedience by suffragettes. For example, countries that too had suffragists like France had to wait longer for the right to vote.

A character in the film calls the suffragette's actions unjustifiable; he is referring to blowing up letterboxes and smashing window's with rocks but stands idly by while the police batter women right in front of him. Pankhurst's words are important as she points out that women want to be lawmakers but not lawbreakers, implying that the second one is the only way to get to be the first. In the film, as in real life, the suffragettes blew up MP David Lloyd George's house and it is said by many as going too far. Women who weren't even allowed to own property were taught to respect it more than their own rights; to see brick and mortar as more sacred than their place in creating the law. Anything is more important than women or their right to be seen as human beings; something that is still constantly evident in today's society. Maud points out war is the only language men seem to speak; though I think that violence is never the answer I do think that women can't politely ask their oppressors for change because they hold onto their power with such force that they would never happily and voluntarily give it up.

Suffragette's finale is the death of Emily Wilding Davidson, a tragic but pivotal moment in the fight for women's rights. It rightly focused on what that death would have meant to those who knew her, to women fighting the same fight, and as it changes to real footage from her funeral it is hard to fight back the tears. It struck me however that there are still those who would have been watching not knowing what was coming, that there are those who don't know her name, and that is a travesty. That these amazing women and their fight is still not recognised – statues that don't exist, women we are not taught about, and even those women of colour who were part of the movement that we still have to fight to recognise and remember. It must have been a great honour to play those women but we still have to so far to go. Even now feminists of all different types still have to fight for basic rights still to be recognised – in all countries, Western and otherwise. Men fight to denigrate women, to objectify them and insult them so we don't rise up; they want to keep us reliant on them, keep us uneducated and apart so we don't take what is ours.

For what Suffragette teaches us, as all of women's history does, is that things can change. Women can get more rights, they can get men to respect them more, and that we don't just have to accept things as they are. Men's oppression of women isn't the way things are supposed to be, it isn't natural and normal it's completely man made (emphasis on the men) and as such women can tear it all down. I look forward to watching it happen and I encourage women to keep the memories of the suffragettes alive. Most importantly we must keep their passion alive, their desire for change, and their power for taking what they are owed. I look forward in future to sitting my future children down – especially if I have a daughter – and showing her this film; of having them be proud that these women existed, that they can be and do just as much as they did, and that things are getting better and that them watching that film – even just it existing – is proof.