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I did a dumb thing over the weekend: I went to see Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. I have excuses—it was raining, a soft spot for Matthew McConaughey—but they are insufficient. I don't think I've ever seen a movie for women that is so disdainful of women, and I've seen He's Just Not That Into You. Ghosts assumes that we're all so predictable and pliable that every single one of us—from the 16-year-old to the MILF (duh, this movie has a MILF), from the desperate-to-get-laid bridesmaids (are they any other kind?) to the heroine—would want to shag a man with no redeemable qualities except that he looks like Matthew McConaughey. Bongo McC is a handsome guy, but I remain stalwart in my belief that at least some of us could resist a sleazy, cheesy, untrustworthy, commitment-phobic, game-playing cad who says things like "Every night I swim in a lake of sex." Ew.
How does a film such as this, a chick flick that doesn't understand or even like women, come to be? I blame Judd Apatow, the director/writer/producer responsible for the ongoing bonanza in dick flicks, romantic comedies with male protagonists. (Thanks to New York's Vulture for noting that this particular rom-com sub genre needed a name.) These movies aren't a new phenomenon—Annie Hall, Say Anything, There's Something About Mary all qualify— but thanks to the success of Apatow's The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, they're more popular than ever, with at least four similar films coming out this summer.
Now, it's not really Apatow's fault that some of the movies copycatting him suck—his movies don't suck—but Ghosts sucks so hard because it has taken a subtle flaw in Apatow's oeuvre and blown it into a whole movie. Meghan wrote in an incisive critique Knocked Up:
If Apatow tries to suggest that guys need to grow up a bit to meet women's high expectations, he, like his own characters, doesn't seem to get that maybe there's a lot more to women than these expectations.You might say his critique is muddied by its own joyful enactment of male high jinks, and the corresponding absence of anything similar on the part of the women.
Apatow's male characters may have to learn a thing or two, but they still have richer inner lives, more imagination, and more spark than his female characters. His women are less interesting and less fun than his men. And in lesser hands than Apatow's, these lesser-than female characters become totally cardboard, as they do in Ghosts, and we're left with a dick flick masquerading as a chick flick that no woman or man could possibly enjoy.
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- 7
Like every other former sci-fi geek in NYC, I (sorry) trekked out to see the Star Trek movie on Friday night. My assessment? J. J. Abrams has turned out a well-made B movie: The film moves along at a crisp pace, hits all the key retro-nostalgia moments, and is designed to be pleasing to many audiences—old and young, boys and girls. It’s less hard-core sci-fi than pleasing pop kitsch. While the movie contains a lot of references to Captain Kirk’s unredeemed womanizing, it takes them utterly casually. The real focus here, as in the original TV series, is on the dynamic between young Kirk and young Spock.
But that relationship might appeal more to women than to men, even. When you think about it, for all Kirk’s off-ship womanizing with nubile young female types on new planets, the original show always contained some funny gender-bending in it. You could read Spock and Kirk according to traditional male-female roles, with Spock playing the ur-rationalist (Men are from Mars/Vulcan) and Kirk the heart-on-the-sleeve emotionalist (Women are from Venus/Earth). Kirk was always risking what he shouldn’t risk because of a feeling or an intuition. It’s interesting that in a galactic space, as more species crept in, our vision of a leader was allowed to be more stereotypically feminine in some ways, even though Kirk’s physical type, stocky and solid, had not a little John Wayne to it. Interestingly, as Newsweek reminded us, Star Trek has spawned tons of so-called “slash” fiction about Kirk and Spock’s homosexual love affair. More interestingly, someone at the Huffington Post noted a few years back that most of that fiction was written by women. So, gals just like this friendship. Is that because it messes with our traditional role in a way we find pleasing—because we get to roll our eyes at Spock’s emotional density while identifying with the masculine captain too? Or do we actually identify with Spock, who always seems so oddly vulnerable in his difference from others? Or neither. It seems to me, in the end, that it’s the messiness of the dynamic between the two, the way that the roles can’t be neatly divided along chromosomes, that appeals to female (and male) viewers tired of being pigeonholed by gender.
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With stylish women flaunting recessionista chic and Michelle Obama embracing her modest roots—“my parents were working class people,” she repeats in speeches—it may seem like a timely advance that a flurry of independent films (in theaters and on DVD) are depicting those forgotten heroines, working-class women. In Wendy and Lucy, a deglamorized Michelle Williams lives out of her car while driving to Alaska in search of a job. There’s Frozen River, with Melissa Leo in her Oscar-nominated role as a trailer-park single mom, and Julia, with Tilda Swinton playing a downwardly spiraling alcoholic.
These movies are unsentimental and wonderfully realistic on the surface, but take a closer look: why is every one of these heroines involved in some kind of crime? With acts as petty as shoplifting a can of dog food and as horrendous as kidnapping a child, it seems no struggling woman on screen can live inside the law. Under their admirable surfaces, these films subtly reinforce the old assumption that poor equals criminal.
The real problem is the lack of exploration into these characters’ motives. We can assume they are driven to despair and crime, that society just won’t give them a break, but that’s not the same as seeing it portrayed on screen. In Frozen River, Leo’s character, Ray, stumbles into a scheme to earn cash by driving illegal immigrants across the Canadian border. The film makes it clear that the smuggling is wrong and dangerous; we sympathize with and fear for Ray even while we disapprove. We have to take a step back to realize that director Courteney Hunt’s taut filmmaking and Leo’s nuanced performance allow the film to glide past Ray’s moral dilemma. And why didn’t Wendy ask for a job before stealing from the grocer? What possessed Julia to accept a working mother’s bribe to kidnap her child from his grandfather’s custody?
The Hollywood working-class heroine is usually a Norma Rae or Erin Brockovich, a reformer making a grand social gesture. The new indie films more authentically depict their characters’ workaday lives. That’s why it’s so disappointing to find them undermining their own heroines, reinforcing an assumption that should have been blasted away long ago—that the poor are morally suspect and quick to steal.
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More and more frequently, movie trailers are better than the movies they're promoting. As they've become increasingly adept at short-handing a feature-length plot, and increasingly unconcerned about revealing all the elements of said plot, they play like accelerated shorts, complete with a story arc and emotional climax, ruining plot twists and funny-the-first-time-you hear-them jokes. They're trailers for people who hate surprises.
David Edelstein, in his New York review of the new Terminator film (aka, the film where Christian Bale lost his shit), demurs from revealing a mysterious fact about one of the protagonists. ("I won't deprive you of the pleasure of figuring out his secret for yourself, about an hour and a half before the Big Reveal," he writes). The trailer is not nearly as circumspect, having revealed months ago that the protagonist in question is, in fact, a hunk of metal.
Another trailer that outdoes its source is the glorious promo for Glee, Fox's new show about a high school glee club, premiering tomorrow night. The show itself is, apparently, "sweaty and desperate to impress," but the trailer...Wow. The trailer is the Platonic ideal of trailers for anyone who enjoys fictions involving high school, angst, music, geeks, jocks, teachers, highly choreographed dance routines, and "Don't Stop Believing." (How long before the cultural capital accrued from its appearance in the final minutes of The Sopranos starts to dissipate? Years?) It's a larger population that you might imagine.
One new trailer that doesn't ruin everything is the sneak of Nine, a musical inspired by Federico Fellini's 8 ½ co-starring Daniel Day Lewis, Judy Dench, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Sophia Loren, and, confoundingly, Kate Hudson and Fergie. The trailer, like the film, is overly ambitious, stuffed with dance routines, period costumes, black-and-white footage, baby blue convertibles and a charmingly brusque Judy Dench. It's a treat. After watching it, I had no clue if the final product will be hugely inspired or a huge mess, and that uncertainty was a nice surprise.
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- 8
The joyful, saccharine, karaoke-inspring Glee, which premiered last night on Fox, got me wondering: What did we do before Tracy Flick? She first appeared, embodied by Reese Witherspoon, in 1999's Election, a previously unidentified personality type, the driven, ruthless, terrifyingly ambitious striver who micromanages her inevitable rise to power in relentlessly cheerful tones. In the decade since Election, Flick has been transformed from a fresh, new character into an archetype, found frequently in both nature and fiction. Hillary Clinton, as Slate pointed out during the election, is a Tracy Flick. Kristen Gillibrand is the "Tracy Flick of New York politics." Amanda Lorber, of MTV's reality series about high school newspaper The Paper is "The Tracy Flick of Journalism." Amy Poehler's character in Parks and Recreation is a "dorkier version of Tracy Flick." And that's just the beginning. Tracy Flick is like the prostate—not so long ago, we didn't know she existed. Now you can scan to find her.
I bring this up because one of Glee's main characters, Rachel Berry, is a total Flick. She's a frighteningly focused performer who won her first dance contest when she was 3 months old. She gives compliments like, "You're really talented. I know because I'm really talented too." (Flick isn't the only character from Election to appear in Glee: the dumb hunk played by Chris Klein has been reimagined as a dumb hunk who sings. "My dad got killed in Iraq the first time we went over there to fight Osama Bin Laden," he narrates.) Given all these Flicks—and there are surely more to come— it seems logical that there must have been Flicks around before we got into the habit of identifying them as such. (Was Margaret Thatcher a Flick?) What did we call these women before there was a shorthand that simultaneously captured their drive and core unlikableness? Were they better off before they could be so easily labeled?
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While consumers are cutting back on a lot of things because of the recession, they’re still plunking down big bucks for designer jeans. (LA Times)
Romantic “devices” and his-and-hers lubricants are flying off the shelves in supermarkets and drug-stores during the recession. (Advertising Age)
Malls, those ubiquitous shopping meccas that sprang up in the 1950s, are turning into ghost towns in the recession, with many struggling properties reduced to largely vacant shells. (Wall Street Journal)
The idea of the recession causing families to move en masse out of New York City “is about as likely as a giant ape climbing on top of the Empire State Building,” writes Hugo Lindgren. (New York Mag)
Although bartering has a long history, both users and facilitators link the recent spike in goods-trading to an obvious common denominator — recession. (Denver Post)
Attendance at movie theaters this year has jumped 14 percent, as recession-weary Americans are increasingly opting for films’ escapism. (LA Times via San Jose Mercury News)
The number of companies offering traditional defined benefit pension plans was shrinking even before the recession, but the downturn has accelerated the decline. (USA Today)
“With chronic instability comes a shift in loyalty from the company to one’s own calling, skills and personal life. Many people are embracing the risks of entrepreneurship, and others … are transforming what they do within a large corporation.” (Forbes)
In times of economic crisis, women are more likely to go on a shopping spree than in normal times. “This type of spending, or compensatory consumption, serves as a way of regulating intense emotions,” said Karen Pine, a University of Hertfordshire professor. (LiveScience via FoxNews)
The recession could be deadly for many pets, whose owners can’t afford to keep them or pay for vet bills. 780,000 pets — including 200,000 dogs — could be put down as the recession takes its toll. (MomLogic)
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- 12
The Terminator movie franchise is notable for its creation of one of the earliest tough female action-hero characters: Sarah Connor, mother of John Connor. In the later movies, her son becomes the leader of the resistance to Skynet, the computer system that launched the war against humans, but in the first two she plays a crucial role. In a sense, she’s a Mary figure, the mother of the savior, but rather than cast a vulnerable softie, James Cameron cast Linda Hamilton, tough girl. Who can forget her biceps, or her famous chin-up scene? So I went to see Terminator: Salvation hoping to find more of the same gender complexity. Instead, this movie, directed by McG is as conventional as can be. McG is hardly known for his auteur subtlety. But he did direct Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and theoretically should have a feel for the female action in this film.
Not so here. Instead, John Connor (played by a very buff Christian Bale) flexes his way grimly through the film, pausing every now and then to kiss his very pregnant wife, Kate. She gets to ask questions and make a few comments about the evilness of the new hybrid terminator Skynet created. And to be sure there are a few good action scenes with Moon Bloodgood: We watch a daring pilot crash after a battle with the machines; she ejects and pulls off her helmet to reveal a sexy mane of hair. But this is quickly followed by her getting her ass kicked by some would-be rapists; she’s saved by a brawny male whom she then cuddles up to by the fire, saying “I’m cold.” Yuck. I want Sarah Connor back.
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Meghan wasn't the only person who missed Sarah Connor. Terminator Salvation lost the weekend's box office war to another sequel, Night at The Museum. There's surely some "in this economy" fauxrgument to be made explaining this outcome (ITE people want family friendly fare, not dark tales about the world's end), but I think Terminator's problem is more basic, a structural flaw, a storytelling 101 screw-up.
Apocalypse narratives—movies, books, TV about the end of the world—can be divided into two groups: stopping the apocalypse narratives and surviving the apocalypse narratives. In the former, the end of the world is nigh, thanks to nukes, aliens, meteors, robots, a deadly virus, an odious supernatural being, or even angry trees. The worst is on the verge of happening and the whole story centers on the heroes pulling us all back from that brink (Think Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter, Independence Day, Armageddon, Outbreak etc.) In the latter, the apocalypse is a foregone conclusion. The word's been decimated and some small group of survivors rattles around in the wasteland, forgotten or hunted, scrounging for food or banding together to fight an evil overlord. (Think Mad Max, The Road, Oryx and Crake, The Matrix, Battlefield Earth).
Generally speaking, fictions aren't both of these narratives at once—and for obvious reasons. If our heroes stop the apocalypse, there isn't one to survive. If there's an apocalypse to survive, our heroes failed to stop it, which makes them a little less than heroic. But that's exactly what has happened in Terminator Salvation. After watching John and Sarah hustle, plot, and risk death, their mental health and society's approval to stop the machines, the fourth movie unceremoniously supposes that, despite all this effort, they have failed: the apocalypse is here. It's as if Frodo lost the ring to Sauron in The Twin Towers or Voldermort killed Harry in The Goblet of Fire and we were all expected to be interested in the next installments, even though they now have a completely different set of stakes. Of course, all the time travel in the Terminator universe means the future, and the rise of the machines, is always subject to change. Next time, they should consider putting off the apocalypse for a few more years.
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When it opens this weekend, I hope a lot of XXers will go see Drag Me to Hell, the new Sam Raimi horror movie, so we can discuss it here. In addition to being (I thought) a satisfying two hours' worth of alternating laughs and screams, it's a very rich text about female power. So rich, in fact, that I'm not sure yet exactly how to read it. The heroine, Christine, a young bank loan officer played by Alison Lohman, denies an old Hungarian woman, Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) an extension on her mortgage payment, and as a result, the old woman stands to lose her home. Mrs. Ganush, a practitioner of the dark arts, puts an ancient curse on Christine: she will be haunted by horrific visions for three days, at the end of which time she'll be snatched down to hell by the devil himself.
A battle ensues between the two women that takes place on both the physical and metaphysical planes: They slug it out in a parked car, an open grave, and assorted spooky venues suspended between this world and the next. What sets this movie apart from your average slasher thriller is the main character's fierce rejection of victimhood; she's a pretty girl in danger, yes, but also an ambitious career woman who morphs over the course of the movie into a fierce (and at times unscrupulous) warrior fighting for her own soul. The cronelike Mrs. Ganush is unmistakably the villain, but she's deeply sympathetic in her way. She's not a hockey-masked chainsaw-wielder but an immigrant grandmother who begs on her knees to be allowed to keep her house and who, when wronged, resorts to the only power she can command: Satan. I also loved that the film's men, Christine's puppylike boyfriend (Justin Long) and her palm-reading spiritual adviser (Dileep Rao), were relegated to the loyal-helpmate positions traditionally reserved for girls in B-movies (just think of Bryce Dallas Howard in Terminator: Salvation, standing by her man.)
But an equal and opposite reading of the movie might see it as antifeminist and even misogynist, a punishingly negative allegory about female ambition. Christine denies the old woman a loan because she has her eye on a promotion at the bank. In exchange for choosing to prioritize her job over human relationships (ie., for not being "nice" to the old woman), she is literally damned to hell, while her even more unscrupulous male colleagues get off scot free. In this second reading, the crone character, with her wizened face and icky false teeth, would be an expression of the filmmaker's (or the audience's) fear of the aging female body. The message to viewers would then be: Old women are unacceptable at all times. Beautiful young blondes get a pass, as long as they act nice and don't get too many ideas about getting ahead.
I won't reveal whether or not Christine suffers the fate threatened by the movie's (awesomely pulpy) title. But if you do see it, please drag yourselves back here to talk about it next week.
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- 16
As Nina pointed out last week, and the Times pointed out over the weekend, Disney's The Princess and The Frog, its first animated feature to star a black heroine, Tiana, is already controversial, and it doesn't come out until December. Watching the trailer for it on the big screen over the weekend (it's playing before Pixar's totally awesome Up!) got me thinking about another potential source of contention: Tiana's voice.
There are currently eight Disney Princesses (Tiana will be the ninth), and whatever the other princesses' ethnicity—five are white, and Jasmine, Mulan, and Pocahontas are Persian, Chinese and Native American respectively—they all speak in clearly enunciated, accentless, standard American English. Tiana does not. She has a Southern-Cajun drawl, which, in Disney's defense, is probably what a girl born and raised in New Orleans, as Tiana supposedly has been, would sound like. That said, what constitutes a "black voice" versus a "white voice"—not to mention the stereotypes attached to Southern accents in particular—is hugely fraught: It's not just a meaningless character quirk that the black princess is the only princess who sounds different from all the rest. It can't be.
It's vaguely plausible to me that Disney didn't think about this, that giving their first black princess a Southern accent signifies something more than just geographical accuracy. After all, this is the company that had to scrap the initial version of the film because they didn't realize that having their first African American princess be a maid named Maddy was boneheaded to the point of ignorance. Perhaps they only intended Tiana's voice to be "sweet" and "different"—and maybe to some viewers that's all it will be. Maybe if Tiana had sounded like the other princesses, some viewers would have been incensed that Disney had chosen to white-wash her. Am I making too much of this?
It seems to me that when it comes to the princesses, there's good in difference—every little girl, of every race, deserves to feel represented—and also good in sameness. Whatever the various princesses' races or cultural backgrounds (and certainly, Disney could have more variety in this regard), they're all similar: resourceful, plucky, kind-hearted, and Kewpie eyed, with some adorable animal friends, a habit of bursting into song, and luck with the princes. The more different kinds of princesses that there are available, the more similar little girls' experiences of the princesses become. Every little kid who has a princess that she feels connected to, represented by, akin to will know what it feels like to want to be a princess, dress like a princess, and beg her parents to buy all the tons and tons of schlocky merchandise branded with a princess' face. Belle and Pocahontas are different, and may appeal to different children, but adoring Belle or adoring Pocahontas probably feels pretty much the same. So, to bring it back to Tiana, does her voice add to the good difference, subtract from the good sameness, or change nothing at all?
