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Careful How You Go.

Ella Kemp explores how film lovers can protect themselves from distressing subject matter while celebrating cinema at its most audacious.

Featuring Empire magazine editor Terri White, Test Pattern filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford, writer and critic Jourdain Searles, publicist Courtney Mayhew, and curator, activist and producer Mia Bays of the Birds’ Eye View collective.

This story contains discussion of rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-harm, trauma and loss of life, as well as spoilers for ‘Promising Young Woman’ and ‘A Star is Born’.

We film lovers are blessed with a medium capable of excavating real-life emotion from something seemingly fictional. Yet, for all that film is—in the oft-quoted words of Roger Ebert—an “empathy machine”, it’s also capable of deeply hurting its audience when not wielded by its makers and promoters with appropriate care. Or, for that matter, when not approached by viewers with informed caution.

Whose job is it to let us know that we might be upset by what we see? With the coronavirus pandemic decimating the communal movie-going experience, the way we accommodate each viewer’s sensibilities is more crucial than ever—especially when so many of us are watching alone, at home, often unsupported.

In order to understand how we can champion a film’s content and take care of its audience, I approached women in several areas of the movie ecosystem. I wanted to know: how does a filmmaker approach the filming of a rape and its aftermath? How does a magazine editor navigate the celebration of a potentially triggering movie in one of the world’s biggest film publications? How does a freelance writer speak to her professional interests while preserving her personal integrity? How does a women’s film collective create a safe environment for an audience to process such a film? And, how does a publicist prepare journalists for careful reporting, when their job is to get eyeballs on screens in order to keep our favorite art form afloat?

The conversations reminded me that the answers are endlessly complex. The concerns over spoilers, the effectiveness of trigger warnings, the myriad ways in which art is crafted from trauma, and the fundamental question of whose stories these are to tell. These questions were valid decades ago, they will be for decades to come, and they feel especially urgent now, since a number of recent tales helmed by female and non-binary filmmakers depict violence and trauma involving women’s bodies in fearless, often challenging ways.

Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, in particular, has revived a vital conversation about content consideration, as victims and survivors of sexual assault record wildly different reactions to its astounding ending. Shatara Michelle Ford’s quietly tense debut, Test Pattern, brings Black survivors into the conversation. And the visceral, anti-wish-fulfillment horror Violation, coming soon from Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, takes the rape-revenge genre up another notch.

These films come off the back of other recent survivor stories, such as Michaela Coel’s groundbreaking series I May Destroy You (which centers women’s friendship in a narrative move that, as Sarah Williams has eloquently outlined, happens too rarely in this field). Also: Kata Wéber and Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman, and the ongoing ugh-ness of The Handmaid’s Tale. And though this article is focused on plots centering women’s trauma, I acknowledge the myriad of stories that can be triggering in many ways for all manner of viewers. So whether you’ve watched one of these titles, or others like them, I hope you felt supported in the conversations to follow, and that you feel seen.

Weruche Opia and Michaela Coel in ‘I May Destroy You’.

* * *

Simply put, Promising Young Woman is a movie about a woman seeking revenge against predatory men. Except nothing about it is simple. Revenge movies have existed for aeons, and we’ve rooted for many promising young (mostly white) women before Carey Mulligan’s Cassie (recently: Jen in Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, Noelle in Natalia Leite’s M.F.A.). But in Promising Young Woman, the victim is not alive to seek revenge, so it becomes Cassie’s single-minded crusade. Mercifully, we never see the gang-rape that sparks Cassie’s mission. But we do see a daring, fatal subversion of the notion of a happy ending—and this is what has audiences of Emerald Fennell’s jaw-dropping debut divided.

“For me, being a survivor, the point is to survive,” Jourdain Searles tells me. The New York-based critic, screenwriter, comedian—and host of Netflix’s new Black Film School series—says the presence of death in Promising Young Woman is the problem. “One of the first times I spoke openly about [my assault], I made the decision that I didn’t want to go to the police, and I got a lot of judgment for that,” she says. “So watching Promising Young Woman and seeing the police as the endgame is something I’ve always disagreed with. I left thinking, ‘How is this going to help?’”

“I feel like I’ve got two hats on,” says Terri White, the London-based editor-in chief of Empire magazine, and the author of a recently published memoir, Coming Undone. “One of which is me creating a magazine for a specific film-loving audience, and the other bit of me, which has written a book about trauma, specifically about violence perpetrated against the body. They’re not entirely siloed, but they are two distinct perspectives.”

White loved both Promising Young Woman and I May Destroy You, because they “explode the myth of resolution and redemption”. She calls the ending of Promising Young Woman “radical” in the way it speaks to the reality of what happens to so many women. “I was thinking about me and women like me, women who have endured violence and injury or trauma. Three women every week are still killed [in the UK] at the hands of an ex-partner, or somebody they know intimately, or a current partner. Statistically, any woman who goes for some kind of physical confrontation in [the way Cassie does] would end up dying.”

She adds: “I felt like the film was in service to both victims and survivors, and I use the word ‘victims’ deliberately. I call myself a victim because I think if you’ve endured either sexual violence or physical violence or both, a lot of empowering language, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t reflect the reality of being a victim or a survivor, whichever way you choose to call yourself.” This point has been one many have disagreed on. In a way, that makes sense—no victim or survivor can be expected to speak to anyone else’s experience but their own.

Carey Mulligan and Emerald Fennell on the set of ‘Promising Young Woman’.

Likewise, there is no right or wrong way to feel about this film, or any film. But a question that arises is, well, should everyone have to see a film to figure that out? And should victims and survivors of sexual violence watch this film? “I have definitely been picky about who I’ve recommended it to,” Courtney Mayhew says. “I don’t want to put a friend in harm’s way, even if that means they miss out on something awesome. It’s not worth it.”

Mayhew is a New Zealand-based international film publicist, and because of her country’s success in controlling Covid 19, she is one of the rare people able to experience Promising Young Woman in a sold-out cinema. “It was palpable. Everyone was so engaged and almost leaning forwards. There were a lot of laughs from women, but it was also a really challenging setting. A lot of people looking down, looking away, and there was a girl who was crying uncontrollably at the end.”

“Material can be very triggering,” White agrees. “It depends where people are personally in their journey. When I still had a lot of trauma I hadn’t worked through in my 20s, I found certain things very difficult to watch. Those things are a reality—but people can make their own decisions about the material they feel able to watch.”

It’s about warning, and preparation, more than total deprivation, then? “I believe in giving people information so they can make the best choice for themselves,” White says. “But I find it quite reductive, and infantilizing in some respects, to be told broadly, ‘Women who have experienced x shouldn’t watch this.’ That underestimates the resilience of some people, the thirst for more information and knowledge.” (This point is clearly made in this meticulous, awe-inspiring list by Jenn, who is on a journey to make sense of her trauma through analysis of rape-revenge films.) But clarity is crucial, particularly for those grappling with unresolved issues.

Searles agrees Promising Young Woman can be a difficult, even unpleasant watch, but still one with value. “As a survivor it did not make me feel good, but it gave me a window into the way other people might respond to your assault. A lot of the time [my friends] have reacted in ways I don’t understand, and the movie feels like it’s trying to make sense of an assault from the outside, and the complicated feelings a friend might have.”

Molly Parker and Vanessa Kirby in ‘Pieces of a Woman’.

* * *

A newborn dies. A character is brutally violated. A population is tortured. To be human is to bear witness to history, but it’s still painful when that history is yours, or something very close to it. “Some things are hard to watch because you relate to them,” Searles explains. “I find mother! hard to watch, and there’s no actual sexual assault. But I just think of sexual assault and trauma and domestic abuse, even though the film isn’t about that. The thing is, you could read an academic paper on patriarchy—you don’t need to watch it on a show [or in a film] if you don’t want to.”

White agrees: “I’ve never been able to watch Nil by Mouth, because I grew up in a house of domestic violence and I find physical violence against women on screen very hard to watch. But that doesn’t mean I think the film shouldn’t be shown—it should still exist, I’ve just made the choice not to watch it.” (Reader, since our conversation, she watched it. At 2:00am.)

“I know people who do not watch Promising Young Woman or The Handmaid’s Tale because they work for an NGO in which they see those things literally in front of their eyes,” Mayhew says. “It could be helpful for someone who isn’t aware [of those issues], but then what is the purpose of art? To educate? To entertain? For escapism? It’s probably all of those.”

Importantly, how much weight should an artist’s shoulders carry, when it comes to considering the audiences that will see their work? There’s a general agreement among my interviewees that, as White says, “filmmakers have to make the art that they believe in”. I don’t think any film lover would disagree, but, suggests Searles, “these films should be made with survivors in mind. That doesn’t mean they always have to be sensitive and sad and declawed. But there is a way to be provocative, while leaning into an emotional truth.”

Madeleine Sims-Fewer in ‘Violation’.

Violation, about which I’ll say little here since it is yet to screen at SXSW (ahead of its March 25 release on Shudder) is not at all declawed, and is certainly made with survivors in mind—in the sense that in life, unlike in movies, catharsis is very seldom possible no matter how far you go to find it. On Letterboxd, many of those who saw Violation at TIFF and Sundance speak of feeling represented by the rape-revenge plot, writing: “One of the most intentionally thought out and respectful of the genre… made by survivors for survivors” and “I feel seen and held”. (Also: “This movie is extremely hard to watch, completely on purpose.”)

“Art can do great service to people,” agrees White, “If, by consequence, there is great service for people who have been in that position, that’s a brilliant consequence. But I don’t believe filmmakers and artists should be told that they are responsible for certain things. There’s a line of responsibility in terms of being irresponsible, especially if your community is young, or traumatised.”

Her words call to mind Bradley Cooper’s reboot of A Star is Born, which many cinephiles knew to be a remake and therefore expected its plot twist, but young filmgoers, drawn by the presence of Lady Gaga, were shocked (and in some cases triggered) by a suicide scene. When it was released, Letterboxd saw many anguished reviews from younger members. In New Zealand, an explicit warning was added to the film’s classification by the country’s chief censor (who also created an entirely new ‘RP18’ classification for the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, which eventually had a graphic suicide scene edited out two years after first landing on the streaming service).

“There is a duty of care to audiences, and there is also a duty of care to artists and filmmakers,” says Mayhew. “There’s got to be some way of meeting in the middle.” The middle, perhaps, can be identified by the filmmaker’s objective. “It’s about feeling safe in the material,” says Mia Bays of the Birds’ Eye View film collective, which curates and markets films by women in order to effect industry change. “With material like this, it’s beholden on creatives to interrogate their own intentions.”

Filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford is “forever interrogating” ideas of power. Their debut feature, Test Pattern, deftly examines the power differentials that inform the foundations of consent. “As an artist, human, and person who has experienced all sorts of boundary violation, assault and exploitation in their life, I spend quite a lot of time thinking about power… It is something I grapple with in my personal life, and when I arrive in any workplace, including a film set.”

In her review of Test Pattern for The Hollywood Reporter, Searles writes, “This is not a movie about sexual assault as an abstract concept; it’s a movie about the reality of a sexual assault survivor’s experience.” Crucially, in a history of films that deal largely with white women’s experiences, Test Pattern “is one of the few sexual-assault stories to center a Black woman, with her Blackness being central to her experience and the way she is treated by the people around her.”

Brittany S. Hall in ‘Test Pattern’.

* * *

Test Pattern follows the unfolding power imbalance between Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) and her devoted white boyfriend Evan (Will Brill), as he drives her from hospital to hospital in search of a rape kit, after her drink was spiked by a white man in a bar who then raped her. Where Promising Young Woman is a millennial-pink revenge fantasy of Insta-worthy proportions, Test Pattern feels all too real, and the cops don’t come off as well as they do in the former.

Ford does something very important for the audience: they begin the film just as the rape is about to occur. We do not see it at this point (we do not really ever see it), but we know that it happened, so there’s no chance that, somewhere deeper into the story, when we’re much more invested, we’ll be side-swiped by a sudden onslaught of sexual violence. In a way, it creates a safe space for our journey with Renesha.

It’s one of many thoughtful decisions made by Ford throughout the production process. “I’m in direct conversation with film and television that chooses to depict violence against women so casually,” Ford tells me. “I intentionally showed as little of Renesha’s rape as humanly possible. I also had an incredibly hard time being physically present for that scene, I should add. What I did shoot was ultimately guided by Renesha’s experience of it. Shoot only what she would remember. Show only what she would have been aware of.

“But I also made it clear that this was a violation of her autonomy, by allowing moments where we have an arm’s length point of view. I let the camera sit with the audience, as I’m also saying, as the filmmaker, this happened, and you saw enough of it to know. This, for me, is a larger commentary on how we treat victims of assault and rape. I do not believe for one goddamn minute that we need to see the actual, literal violence to know what happened. When we flagrantly replicate the violence in film and television, we are supporting the cultural norm of needing ‘all of the evidence’—whatever that means—to ‘believe women’.”

Ford’s intentional work in crafting the romance and unraveling of Test Pattern’s leading couple pays off on screen, but their stamp as an invested and careful director also shows in their work with Drew Fuller, the actor who played Mike, the rapist. “It’s a very difficult role, and I’m grateful to him for taking it so seriously. When discussing and rendering the practice and non-practice of consent intentionally, I found it helpful to give it a clear definition and provide conceptual insight.

“I sent Drew a few articles that I used as tools to create a baseline understanding when it comes to exploring consent and power on screen. At the top of that list was Lili Loofbourow’s piece, The female price of male pleasure and Zhana Vrangalova's Teen Vogue piece, Everything You Need to Know about Consent that You Never Learned in Sex Ed. The latter in my opinion is the linchpin. There’s also Jude Elison Sady Doyle’s piece about the whole Aziz Ansari thing, which is a great primer.”

Sidney Flanigan in ‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’.

Even when a filmmaker has given Ford’s level of care and attention to their project, what happens when the business end of the industry gets involved in the art? As we well know, marketing is a film’s window dressing. It has one job: to get eyeballs into the cinema. It can’t know if every viewer should feel safe to enter.

It would be useful, with certain material, to know how we should watch, and with whom, and what might we need in the way of support coming out. Whose job is it to provide this? Beyond the crude tool of an MPAA rating (and that’s a whole sorry tale for another day), there are many creative precautions that can be taken across the industry to safeguard a filmgoer’s experience.

Mayhew, who often sees films at the earliest stages (sometimes before a final cut, sometimes immediately after), speaks to journalists in early screenings and ensures they have the tools to safely report on the topics raised. In New Zealand, reporters are encouraged to read through resources to help them guide their work. Mayhew’s teams would also ensure journalists would be given relevant hotline numbers, and would ask media outlets to include them in published stories.

“It’s not saying, ‘You have to do this’,” she explains, “It’s about first of all not knowing what the journalist has been through themselves, and second of all, [if] they are entertainment reporters who haven’t navigated speaking about sexual assault, you only hope it will be helpful going forward. It’s certainly not done to infantilize them, because they’re smart people. It’s a way to show some care and support.”

The idea of having appropriate resources to make people feel safe and encourage them to make their own decisions is a priority for Bays and Birds’ Eye View, as well. The London-based creative producer and cultural activist stresses the importance of sharing such a viewing experience. “It’s the job of cinemas, distributors and festivals to realize that it might not be something the filmmaker does, but as the people in control of the environment it’s our job to give extra resources to those who want it,” says Bays. “To give people a safe space to come down from the experience.”

Pre-pandemic, when Birds’ Eye View screened Kitty Green’s The Assistant, a sharp condemnation of workplace micro-aggressions seen through the eyes of one female assistant, they invited women who had worked for Harvey Weinstein. For a discussion after Eliza Hittman’s coming-of-ager Never Rarely Sometimes Always, abortion experts were able to share their knowledge. “It’s about making sure the audience knows you can say anything here, but that it’s safe,” Bays explains. “It’s kind of like group therapy—you don’t know people, so you’re not beholden to what they think about you. And in the cinema people aren’t looking at you. You’re speaking somewhat anonymously, so a lot of really important stuff can come out.”

The traditional movie-going experience, involving friends, crowds and cathartic, let-loose feelings, is still largely inaccessible at the time of writing. Over the past twelve months we’ve talked plenty about preserving the magic of the big screen experience, but it’s about so much more than the romanticism of an art form; it’s also about the safety that comes from a feeling of community when watching potentially upsetting movies.

“The going in and coming out parts of watching a film in the cinema are massively important, because it’s like coming out of the airlock and coming back to reality,” says Bays. “You can’t do that at home. Difficult material kind of stays with you.” During the pandemic, Birds’ Eye View has continued to provide the same wrap-around curatorial support for at-home viewers as they would at an in-person event. “If we’re picking a difficult film and asking people to watch it at home, we might suggest you watch it with a friend so you can speak about it afterwards,” Bays says.

Julia Garner in ‘The Assistant’.

But, then, how can we still find this sense of community without the physical closeness? “It’s no good waiting for [the internet] to become kind,” she says. “Create your own closed spaces. We do workshops and conversations exclusively for people who sign up to our newsletter. In real-life meetings you can go from hating something to hearing an eloquent presentation of another perspective and coming round to it, but you need the time and space to do that. This little amount of time gives you a move towards healing, even if it’s just licking some wounds that were opened on Twitter. But it could be much deeper, like being a survivor and feeling very conflicted about the film, which I do.”

Conflict is something that Searles, the film critic, knows about all too well in her work. “Since I started writing professionally, I almost feel like I’m known for writing about assault and rape at this point. I do write about it a lot, and as a survivor I continue to process it. I’ve been assaulted more than once so I have a lot to process, and so each time I’m writing about it I’m thinking about different aspects and remnants of those feelings. It can be very cathartic, but it’s a double-edged sword because sometimes I feel like I have an obligation to write about it too.”

There is also a constant act of self-preservation that comes with putting so much of yourself on the internet. “I often get messages from people thanking me for talking about these subjects with a deep understanding of what they mean,” Searles says. “I really appreciate that. I get negative messages about a lot of things, but not this one thing.”

Michaela Coel in ‘I May Destroy You’.

* * *

With such thoughtful approaches to heavy content, it feels like we’re a long way further down the road from blunt tools like content and trigger warnings. But do they still have their place? “It’s just never seemed appropriate to put trigger warnings on any of our reviews or features,” White explains. “We have a heavy male readership, still 70 percent male to 30 percent female. I’m conscious we’re talking to a lot of men who will often have experienced violence themselves, but we don’t put any warnings, because we are an adult magazine, and when we talk about violence in, say, an action film, or violence that is very heavily between men, we don’t caveat that at all.”

Bays, too, is sceptical of trigger warnings, explaining that “there’s not much evidence [they] actually work. A lot of psychologists expound on the fact that if people get stuck in their trauma, you can never really recover from PTSD if you don’t at some point face your trauma.” She adds: “I’m a survivor, and I found I May Destroy You deeply, profoundly triggering, but also cathartic. I think it’s more about how you talk about the work, rather than having a ‘NB: survivors of sexual abuse or assault shouldn’t see this’.”

“It’s important to give people a feel of what they’re in for,” argues Searles. “A lot of people who have dealt with suicide ideation would prefer that warning.” While some worry that a content warning is effectively a plot spoiler, Searles disagrees. “I don’t consider a content warning a spoiler. I just couldn’t imagine sitting down for a film, knowing there’s going to be a suicide, and letting it distract me from the film.” Still, she acknowledges the nuance. “I think using ‘self-harm’ might be better than just saying ‘suicide’.”

Mayhew shared insights on who actually decides which films on which platforms are preceded with warnings—turns out, it’s a bit messy. “The onus traditionally has fallen on governmental censorship when it comes to theatrical releases,” she explains. “But streamers can do what they want, they are not bound by those rules so they have to—as the distributors and broadcasters—take the government’s censors on board in terms of how they are going to navigate it.

“The consumer doesn’t know the difference,” she continues, “nor should they—so it means they can be watching The Crown on Netflix and get this trigger warning about bulimia, and go to the cinema the next day and not get it, and feel angry about it. So there’s the question of where is the responsibility of the distributor, and where is the responsibility of the audience member to actually find out for themselves.”

The warnings given to an audience member can also vary widely depending where they find themselves in the world, too. Promising Young Woman, for example, is rated M in Australia, R18 in New Zealand, and R in the United States. Meanwhile, the invaluable Common Sense Media recommends an age of fifteen years and upwards for the “dark, powerful, mature revenge comedy”. Mayhew says a publicist’s job is “to have your finger on the pulse” about these cultural differences. “You have to read the overall room, and when I say room I mean the culture as a whole, and you have to be constantly abreast of things across those different ages too.”

She adds: “This feeds into the importance of representation right at the top of those boardrooms and right down to the film sets. My job is to see all opinions, and I never will, especially because I am a white woman. I consider myself part of the LGBT community and sometimes I’ll bring that to a room that I think has been lacking in that area, when it comes to harmful stereotypes that can be propagated within films about LGBT people. But I can’t bring a Black person’s perspective, I cannot bring an Indigenous perspective. The more representation you have, the better your film is going to be, your campaign is going to be.”

Bays, who is also a filmmaker, agrees: representation is about information, and working with enough knowledge to make sure your film is being as faithful to your chosen communities as possible. “As a filmmaker, I’d feel ill-informed and misplaced if I was stumbling into an area of representation that I knew nothing about without finding some tools and collaborators who could bring deeper insight.”

Carey Mulligan and Bo Burnham in ‘Promising Young Woman’.

This is something Ford aimed for with Test Pattern’s choice of crew members, which had an effect not just on the end product, but on the entire production process. “I made sure that at the department head level, I was hiring people I was in community with and fully saw me as a person, and me them,” they say. “In some ways it made the experience more pleasurable.” That said, the shoot was still not without its incidents: “These were the types of things that in my experience often occur on a film set dominated by straight white men, that we're so accustomed to we sometimes don’t even notice it. I won’t go into it but what I will say is that it was not tolerated.”

Vital to the telling of the story were the lived experiences that Ford and their crew brought to set. “As it applies to the sensitive nature of this story, there were quite a few of us who have had our own experiences along the spectrum of assault, which means that we had to navigate our own internal re-processing of those experiences, which is hard to do when we’re constructing an experience of rape for a character.

“However, I think being able to share our own triggers and discomfort and context, when it came to Renesha’s experience, made the execution of it all the better. Again, it was a pleasure to be in community with such smart, talented and considerate women who each brought their own nuance to this film.”

* * *

Thinking about everything we’ve lived through by this point in 2021, and the heightened sensitivity and lowered mental health of film lovers worldwide, movies are carrying a pretty heavy burden right now: to, as Jane Fonda said at the Golden Globes, help us see through others’ eyes; also, to entertain or, at the very least, not upset us too much.

But to whom does film have a responsibility, really? Promising Young Woman’s writer-director Emerald Fennell, in an excellent interview with Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién, said that she was thinking of audiences when she crafted the upsetting conclusion.

What she was thinking was: a ‘happy’ ending for Cassie gets us no further forward as a society. Instead, Cassie’s shocking end “makes you feel a certain way, and it makes you want to talk about it. It makes you want to examine the film and the society that we live in. With a cathartic Hollywood ending, that’s not so much of a conversation, really. It’s a kind of empty catharsis.”

So let’s flip the question: what is our responsibility, as women and allies, towards celebrating audacious films about tricky subjects? The marvellous, avenging blockbusters that once sucked all the air out of film conversation are on pause, for now. Consider the space that this opens up for a different kind of approach to “must-see movies”. Spread the word about Test Pattern. Shout from the rooftops about It’s A Sin. Add Body of Water and Herself and Violation to your watchlists. And, make sure the right people are watching.

Brittany S. Hall and Will Brill in ‘Test Pattern’.

I asked my interviewees: if they could choose one type of person they think should see Promising Young Woman, who would it be? Ford has not seen Fennell’s film, but “it feels good to have my film contribute to a larger discourse that is ever shifting, ever adding nuance”. They are very clear on who can learn the most from their own movie.

“A white man is featured so prominently in Test Pattern as a statement about how white people and men have a habit of centering themselves in the stories of others, prioritizing their experience and neglecting to recognize those on the margins. If Evan is triggering, he should be. If your feelings about Evan vacillate, it is by design.

“‘Allies’ across the spectrum are in a complicated dance around doing the ‘right thing’ and ‘showing up’ for those they are ostensibly seeking to support,” Ford continues. “Their constant battle is to remember that they need to be centering the needs of those they were never conditioned to center. Tricky stuff. Mistakes will be made. Mistakes must be owned. Sometimes reconciliation is required.”

It is telling that similar thoughts emerged from my other interviewees regarding Promising Young Woman’s ideal audience, despite the fact that none of them was in conversation with the others for this story. For that reason, as we come to the end of this small contribution to a very large, ongoing conversation, I’ve left their words intact.

White: I think it’s a great film for men.

Searles: I feel like the movie is very much pointed at cisgender heterosexual men.

Mayhew: Men.

White: We’re always warned about the alpha male with a massive ego, but we’re not warned about the beta male who reads great books, listens to great records, has great film recommendations. But he probably slyly undermines you in a completely different way. Anybody can be a predator.

Searles: The actors chosen to play these misogynist, rape culture-perpetuating men are actors we think of as nice guys.

White: We are so much more tolerant of a man knocking the woman over the head, dragging her down an alley and raping her, because we understand that. But rape culture is made up of millions of small things that enable the people who do it. We are more likely to be attacked in our own homes by men we love than a stranger in the street.

Mayhew: The onus should not fall on women to call this out.

Searles: It’s not just creeps, like the ones you see usually in these movies. It’s guys like you. What are you going to do to make sure you’re not like this?

Related content

Sex Monsters, Rape Revenge and Trauma: a work-in-progress list

Rape and Revenge: a list of films that fall into, and play with, the genre

Unconsenting Media: a search engine for sexual violence in broadcasting

Follow Ella on Letterboxd

If you need help or to talk to someone about concerns raised for you in this story, please first know that you are not alone. These are just a few of the many organizations and resources available, and their websites include more information.

US: RAINN (hotline 0800 656 HOPE); LGBT National Help Center; Pathways to Safety; Time’s Up.

Canada: Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centers—contacts by province and territory

UK/Ireland: Mind; The Survivors Trust (hotline 08088 010818); Rape Crisis England and Wales

Europe: Rape Crisis Network Europe

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drivingsideways · 4 years

Text

in search of a better dream

This is about three pieces of South Korean media that crossed my path recently: the dramas Search WWW and Flower of Evil, and the novel Kim Ji Young, Born 1982.

Disclaimer and context : I'm not Korean, I don't speak the language, and I've watched a very limited set of kdramas. The criticisms I make in this piece are not to single out kdramas, or kdrama fandom, as what I've described exists in Western and other Asian media and fandoms as well.

Under the cut for length:

There's a scene in the first episode of the hit 2020 k-drama "Flower of Evil" that made me want to quit watching the show within the first ten minutes. The scene goes like this: our protagonists, Cha Ji Won and Baek Hee Seung meet Baek Hee Seung's parents along with their four year old daughter. The occasion is Baek Hee Seung's birthday, and loving wife Cha Ji Won has set up a special birthday dinner for them. On the way to the restaurant, the daughter has already complained about how she's scared of her grandparents, and they don't like her. When we meet the grandparents, we see the truth of this- they are as cold as the Arctic to all three, but especially to their daughter-in-law and granddaughter. In a bid to smooth out the social awkwardness, Cha Ji Won instructs her daughter to greet her grandparents the way they had "practiced" earlier- a cutesy little greeting where the adorable Eun-ha makes a heart over her head and chirps "I love you grandma and grandpa". When this fails to soften them, Eun-ha retreats, looking scared and disappointed. Not to worry, Cha Ji Won has this completely figured out: if you try harder, she tells her four year old daughter, they'll eventually love you.

Reader, I was, as they say, mad.

We find out soon enough that this stellar bit of parenting follows from an abiding principle in Cha Ji Won's life. Her romance with Baek Hee Seung starts when a handsome oppa walks into the family store, and is a saga of her stalking and pursuing a man who repeatedly tells her he's not interested, until he finally gives in. The power of her persistence pays off when the emotionally distant and abrasive man, in a classic beauty-and-the-beast transition, becomes a loving boyfriend, and then later, husband and father. It's a fantasy- some might even say feminist fantasy come true- he's handsome, supportive, reliable, artistic, the primary housekeeper and caretaker of their daughter while she pursues her demanding "dream" job as a police officer, and they have enough money to live in a charming and lovingly set up two-storeyed house in ruinously expensive Seoul. This is heterosexual female wish fulfilment at its peak, and it is all made possible because she persevered.

It all threatens to come apart with the discovery of the perfect man's dark past- for a brief period, she's forced to contemplate the idea that he's actually a serial killer who's conned her for the entirety of their relationship of fourteen years; that the perfect life was, in fact, a lie.

However, since this is written and billed as romance melodrama, this horror is short-lived. As the story progresses through increasingly improbable, violent and sometimes downright hilarious twists and turns, we grow closer to the (inevitable) happy ending. Baek Hee Seung/ Do Hyun Soo is no killer, just a traumatized child with a horrific past. The lies are the result of psychological damage inflicted by a society that unfairly deemed him a monster; the cage of repressed emotions that he'd locked himself in needed only the unshakeable conviction of Cha Ji Won's love to be broken open. "I wish you could see yourself as I see you" she tells him, in one of the show's endless supply of tearfully emotional moments, "I wish you could understand yourself the way I understand you."

This framework continues right to the end, when a bout of short term amnesia (!!) has Do Hyun Soo questioning himself and her: do you know, he asks her, when I'm lying to you, and when I'm not, because I don't. The show answers that almost immediately- it doesn't matter, because it's her vision of him that he wants to be; in other words, he chooses the version of himself that she wants. The horror of the lie was a red herring, Cha Ji Won was right from the start about her husband- all it took was the power of her love and her perseverance to overcome the lie at the heart of her marriage, to restore it to its previous shape- quite literally. The dream house they built together, which was destroyed by the villain, is shown in the last shots as unchanged from how it was in the beginning. One of the last shots we have of the couple is of them kissing in the artisan husband's workshop, an almost perfect recreation of the first time we see them. Paradise Regained, and all of us- and Cha Ji Won- can breathe a sigh of relief. You, the twenty-first century woman, are the architect of your own fantasy and can have it all. What could be more powerful than that?

In Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 , a novel published in 2016, and often credited with kickstarting a new conversation about feminism in South Korea, the eponymous protagonist's story is also one of perseverance. It's a starkly written tale, an everywoman tale, a dryly narrated fact finding mission report complete with citations and references, about a woman born in the late twentieth century into a rigidly patriarchal culture, whose very existence is an aberration- her parents didn’t opt for a sex-selective abortion unlike many of their contemporaries when they found that their second child would also be a girl. Kim Ji Young, like the rest of us, grows up immersed in a misogynist culture. Even before she understands it, she learns to work around it and through it, rationalizing the micro-aggressions, burying the anger at the casual and institutional sexism that permeates her life, compromising and coping with it all, and achieving some semblance of having it all: a job, a decent, loving husband, a child. However, it's when motherhood arrives that it all falls apart- Kim Ji Young, faced with the exhausting carework of having a baby at home and another regular, full time job, does what so many women in her position do- quits her "outside" job for her parenting one. Fighting exhaustion and depression, a casually cruel and misogynist remark from a stranger in a park proves to be the proverbial final straw; Kim Ji Young suffers a mental breakdown, dissociating herself completely from her own life, and "seamlessly, flawlessly" taking on the personalities of other women she's known- her mother, her friend, her colleague. The novel ends with a narrative twist that's both horrifying and appropriate: we learn that our narrator is actually her male psychiatrist. Kim Ji Young doesn't even get to be the voice of her own story; instead, it is told by a man cocooned in his own privilege, who displays the same paternalistic and misogynist behaviour that he correctly identified as the cause of her breakdown.

There is no escape here for Kim Ji Young save that of a complete break from reality. In the light of the narrative that leads her to that point, it feels both inevitable and even more horrifically, a blessing. This is a horror story told as it is shorn of any hope; the ending is death or insanity.

Reading Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 was to confront the familiar and heart-breaking and horrific neatly distilled into 200 odd pages; it's "fiction", but not really. My only surprise was how similar the culture described there was to my own in specifics; how incidents in Kim Ji Young's life were things I had actually experienced myself or seen other women experience, in a country several thousand miles away.

I read this novel just after watching the 2019's Search WWW, a show with a bit of a cult following, I think. Before I started watching it, one friend assured me that I would love it, that it was made for me; another said that she dropped it because it "rang false" to her at the time. I've seen the show described several times as a feminist power fantasy, sometimes, if the reviewer wanted to demean it, with the qualifier, unrealistic.

This seemed an odd sort of criticism to me- after all, who turns to k-drama romances or really, any romance, for realism? Female wish fulfilment, which is the cornerstone of romance as a genre, whether in books or film, is still written and recognized as fantasy. So what was particularly unreal about Search WWW?

Well, simply put, it is written like the patriarchy doesn't matter, and has never existed.

The three female protagonists are all in their thirties, in powerful positions in their careers. As such, they are constantly walking into meetings where women speak more than 33% of the time. There are men in the room, but they never outnumber the women, and they don't silence the women.

The interests and decisions and choices of women in the show- even the lead antagonist, who is an older woman whom we often see casually making beefy young men pose nude for her paintings- matter, not just to domestic and private realms, but to society at large; the antagonist is a power broker whose reach goes right up to the highest echelons of the country's politics; the younger women's ethical choices directly affect the republic's functioning as a democracy.

What about the men? It's not that they've been ignored; it's just that their place in the narrative has been decentered. Do with that what you will, the writer seems to say, as she writes in speaking roles for women wherever possible—every second side character is a woman— I have no time or inclination to justify that choice.

As for romance- it's not just that two of the three romances fall into the "noona romance" category, which is subversive in itself. It's that the power of decision making in these relationships clearly rests with the women.

In the "main" romance track, in a reversal of the usual trope, the woman is the one who is emotionally unavailable, and whom the man has to convince to take a chance on their relationship. What was hugely refreshing was that the reason for her emotional unavailability isn't trauma, that the man has to help her heal from, unlike the gender reversed versions we often see, eg in Flower of Evil. Instead, it's a difference in perspective that has its roots in the years of experience she has compared to him; it's the difference in life perspective of a twenty something man, and an almost-40 woman. She considers the implications and possibilities of entering into a relationship with a man who wants marriage and kids, while she doesn't want either and is unlikely to want them in the future. She thinks through it, and sees the pitfalls of it, perhaps all too clearly. In the end, when she makes a decision to commit, it's with the understanding that she's choosing to live in the moment, that he makes her happy; that they make each other happy and it is worth something, even if it doesn't last. But both of them understand that her happiness is not centered in him or their relationship being successful. The other two romances end on a similarly open note- the possibility of love with the man you just divorced, but there's no hurry to get there; and a long distance relationship that may or may not last the two years of military conscription the man has to undergo.

The happily ever after in this series is not the perfect heterosexual family unit; it was always going to be the complicated, thorny and intense queerplatonic relationship between the three women, who, in the end, literally drive off along an endless open road under a blue, blue sky, to "a place with no red lights", as one of them describes it.

For a week after watching Search WWW, I wandered around in a daze. How did this show get written, I kept asking myself? How did it get produced? Aired??? What magic was worked to put it in my eyeballs, and how can it keep happening?

That feeling intensified when I read Kim Ji Young, Born 1982. But the book also provided the answer, at least to the first question. Because it is Kim Ji Young's voice in Search WWW. This is the fantasy that Kim Ji Young would have wanted to live in; a society and a life where she's seen as a person, entire, and it's not something she has to fight every day for. The gigantic leap of imagination that the writer of Search WWW took was only because that fantasy has been yearned for, in a way only a person growing up in Kim Ji Young's world- our world- could.

"Flower of Evil"- and other dramas like it— are also, undeniably, products of this world. It's unsurprising to me that in many ways, Cha Ji Won's little fantasy domestic world in Flower of Evil, on the surface, looks exactly like a post-feminist world. If the real revolution is men doing housework and childcare, then that fantasy has already been achieved on the individual level for Cha Ji Won. Sure, she's the only female member on her squad, and maybe the entire police force, for all you see women in her workplace. Sure, the other female characters with speaking roles exist mostly to be tortured for manpain by the narrative or literally by men as part of the plot. She seems to have no friends outside of work, which means that all her friends are men. As for relationships with other women, except her mother, who exists mostly to share the burden of childcare, and her mom-in- law who turns out to be an evil sort herself, there are none. When she meets her sister-in-law, the entire scene gives off a strange catfight vibe- her sister in law is the only other woman who can legitimately be said to have a claim on knowing the real Do Hyun Soo, and Cha Ji Won's reaction is to deny that claim and tell her to buzz off, basically. "I'm his family now" she tells her sister in law, "He has a wife"; firmly establishing the primacy of a heterosexual romantic relationship over all others.

Her "dream" job means nothing much despite the work she has put in to get it; for most part of the narrative she ends up betraying every professional ethic and her squad- her only friends. Of course, she is easily forgiven for it, without doing any of the work to earn that forgiveness, but that's really because who has the narrative time to develop those relationships which do not matter, like her work, which is shown up for the narrative prop it is, just like her daughter? Even her sociopath (but not really, poor baby) husband ends the series with a tentative sort of friendship with a person he's not married to, but not Cha Ji Won, whose entire world by the end of the series has narrowed down to the four walls of her perfect little house and her perfectly-rescued husband. "I can't be happy if he's not happy," she tells her mother, who suggests that maybe it's time she let go of her not-so-perfect husband. "So please accept him."

In the end, the fantasy is based on this : self-improvement as the winning strategy, not structural change. Try hard enough and you'll get what you want. In the fine print, easily ignored: as long as what you want falls within the bounds of heteronormative patriarchal standards. It's an attitude that is passed down to the next generation; Cha Ji Won's early conversation with her daughter is an example.

The writer's vision is clear- what could have been an interesting and intimate look at our deepest fears in a relationship- that the other person will see us for who we are and horror-struck, leave; or even a deconstruction of the heterosexual woman's fantasy of The Perfect Man, is instead a tired repetition of the Beauty-and-the-Beast trope. You can dress it up and put a gun-toting, career woman wig on it, but that disguise falls apart pretty quickly. Cha Ji Won openly states not once, but several times, that she would rather live the comfortable lie; it's only when even that isn't an option- and not because of her choice or agency, but circumstances and the man coming to a decision, that she begins to let go. But only for a little while- barely ten minutes in show time- because ultimately, this is a female wish fulfilment fantasy, isn't it? Her longsuffering perseverance is rewarded when he decides to mould himself to her fantasy version of him, and the past is erased, and time reset, complete with soft lighting and soaring soundtrack.

Some love stories are horror stories, but others are horror stories masquerading as love stories. Why are we so often sold the latter, and so accepting of the narrative gaslighting? When I look at the popularity of Search WWW vs Flower of Evil, I feel bitter despair and quite a lot of anger. Why do so many women- and it is women, who are producing this work, for women, primarily (I mean, romance, as a genre)- settle for so little? It's the twenty first century, I think, why are we still here, I rage, gnashing my teeth, and indulging in the vicious satisfaction of giving Flower of Evil a single star rating that will make not a dent in its popularity. If we can't demand and aspire to a better class of fantasy, what hope do we have? As you dream, so you will do.

I often think that these days feminism is made toothless because we're shaping it into something that will validate every little feeling of ours; we don't want to be made uncomfortable by it. But feminism is not meant to make anyone comfortable; interrogating your own desires and pleasures is as much a part of smashing the patriarchy as fighting for fundamental human rights like bodily autonomy.

I guess, in the end, what I want to say is this: for the love of sanity, dream better.

#flower of evil #search: www #kim ji young born 1982 #unpopular opinions cw

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thebluelemontree · 4 years

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I’m sorry, @anabel7631 but there are some very incorrect assumptions here. Lady did not die because Sansa lied.

"Joff told us what happened," the queen said. "You and the butcher boy beat him with clubs while you set your wolf on him."

"That's not how it was," Arya said, close to tears again. Ned put a hand on her shoulder. "Yes it is!" Prince Joffrey insisted. "They all attacked me, and she threw Lion's Tooth in the river!" Ned noticed that he did not so much as glance at Arya as he spoke.

...

"They were not the only ones present," Ned said. "Sansa, come here." Ned had heard her version of the story the night Arya had vanished. He knew the truth. "Tell us what happened." -- Eddard III, AGOT.

Sansa had already told the truth of what happened to her father the day Arya went missing. That’s how Ned knew immediately that Joffrey was lying and confirmed it with Joffrey’s tells. Let’s be real. Ned is the only adult in that room that even remotely cares what the truth is. Robert will admit on his deathbed that he knew all along Joffrey was lying too, yet he did nothing.

Sansa doesn’t lie about placing the blame on her sister or Mycah or Nymeria at this moment. The most dishonesty she exhibits is saying she didn’t remember or see what happened:

His eldest daughter stepped forward hesitantly. She was dressed in blue velvets trimmed with white, a silver chain around her neck. Her thick auburn hair had been brushed until it shone. She blinked at her sister, then at the young prince. "I don't know," she said tearfully, looking as though she wanted to bolt. "I don't remember. Everything happened so fast, I didn't see …"

"You rotten!" Arya shrieked. She flew at her sister like an arrow, knocking Sansa down to the ground, pummeling her. "Liar, liar, liar, liar."

The reason Arya is calling Sansa a liar is because she could not have known Sansa had already told Ned the truth. This is the first time all three of them are together since Arya had run off. When she was found by Jory, they were ordered to go directly to the king and queen. Sansa is guilty of failing to support her sister when she is being interrogated; however, this is still a patriarchal society, and she is being asked to speak against her future husband who is also the crown prince. Sansa tries to mitigate the pressure from both sides by attempting to take a neutral position. Ned never blames her at all for this. Again, Ned already knew what the truth was and he can see that clearly Robert and Cersei don’t really care what Sansa has to say anyway.

Cersei was already gunning for a wolf skin no matter what. She knew Lady had nothing to do with any of this by all accounts, but one wolf was as good as any other. You think Cersei’s history with Lyanna Stark both “stealing” Rhaegar from her as well as Robert obsessing over her since day one of their marriage, PLUS the prophecy of someone younger and more beautiful coming to take all she holds dear doesn’t have something to do with Cersei wanting to punish a Stark girl? Any Stark girl? Take that wolf skin trophy and strip her rival Sansa of her power and protection? This has less to do with Joffrey and more to do with Cersei’s insecurities and need for petty vengeance against a Stark scapegoat.

It’s not only Cersei making her crazy demand to kill Lady. Robert’s response is to just walk away from innocent parties being killed (passively giving his consent) because he doesn’t want to be harangued by his wife. This business is all a big buzzkill and he just wants to get back to having fun. We already established that Robert knew full well that Joffrey was lying. Ned begs him to spare Lady, but Robert just fucks off. So Cersei’s authority as queen stands, which even as Hand, Ned can’t defy it once Robert co-signed. The only thing he can do is put Lady down himself so Cersei can’t have her trophy.

That, obviously, still has a negative impact on Ned and Sansa’s relationship as a breach of trust since Ned volunteered and avoided talking to Sansa about it afterward. This was a decision Ned came to regret later when he wondered if he had made a big mistake in killing Sansa’s dire wolf.

Sansa doesn’t have to regret anything about Lady’s death because she was in no way responsible for that happening. Does she still owe Arya an apology for some of the mean things she did say and the times she didn’t stick up for Arya when she should have? Absolutely. Is the onus still on Sansa to make the first moves in repairing their sisterly relationship? Absolutely. Arya doesn’t hate Sansa at all. She was justifiably angry and hurt, but she doesn’t hate her. They will definitely resolve those past issues and reconcile.

Even though Sansa tried to take the neutral position, that doesn’t stop Joffrey from refusing to see or speak to her for a long time. She had nothing to do with Joffrey’s injuries but he shows contempt for her all the same. While Sansa is “in love” with the person she thinks Joffrey is or wants him to be, we have to remember this is still a patriarchy. Sansa has been raised to be deferential to her husband. Joffrey’s cold displeasure leads Sansa to alter her view of what happened after the fact and misplace the blame on Arya for a good while. Joffrey is still her betrothed, so she has to rewrite the narrative because the idea of spending the rest of her life married to a liar and a cruel bully is psychologically intolerable. I’m not saying this part is a good thing at all. Sansa is in the wrong for blaming Arya and Ned to the point of fully excusing Joffrey and Cersei. She is burying her head in the sand and refusing to deal with the truth, which she has known all along because she told her father.

Sansa will voice that truth when she is warning Margaery and Olenna of what kind of person Joffrey is.

A shiver went through her. "A monster," she whispered, so tremulously she could scarcely hear her own voice. "Joffrey is a monster. He lied about the butcher's boy and made Father kill my wolf. When I displease him, he has the Kingsguard beat me. He's evil and cruel, my lady, it's so. And the queen as well."

It’s not regret over what other people did that Sansa needs to express. Its dealing with the fact that the reflags were there early on but she couldn’t accept them. Arya had been right to dislike Joffrey and the queen, but Sansa didn’t listen. She thought Arya was crazy and just wanted to ruin things out of spite. In this reversal of positions, Sansa is trying to warn another girl, someone she will view as a sister, about her abusive ex.

Sister. Sansa had once dreamt of having a sister like Margaery; beautiful and gentle, with all the world's graces at her command. Arya had been entirely unsatisfactory as sisters went. How can I let my sister marry Joffrey? she thought, and suddenly her eyes were full of tears. "Margaery, please," she said, "you mustn't." It was hard to get the words out. "You mustn't marry him. He's not like he seems, he's not. He'll hurt you."

Yes, there is a dig at Arya. Change doesn’t always happen in a smooth progression. Sometimes there are flaws, missteps, and micro-regressions; however, she also thinks “how can I let my sister marry Joffrey?”

Once Sansa eventually experiences rejection by Margaery and the Tyrells, she will come to understand a bit more of how Arya must have felt when the support of her sister was withdrawn. It’s not conscious thought process, but she is having experiences that should make her more appreciative, mature, and understanding of Arya. ASOS is where Sansa’s thinking on Arya really starts to take a shift toward the positive.

If Lady was here, I would not be afraid. Lady was dead, though; Robb, Bran, Rickon, Arya, her father, her mother, even Septa Mordane. All of them are dead but me. She was alone in the world now.

We have to keep in mind, until Winterfell is sacked and Bran and Rickon are reported murdered, Sansa believed Arya was at home safe. Now everyone is dead.

King Joffrey looked as if he wanted to kill someone right then and there, he was so excited. He slashed at the air and laughed. "A great sword must have a great name, my lords! What shall I call it?"

Sansa remembered Lion's Tooth, the sword Arya had flung into the Trident, and Hearteater, the one he'd made her kiss before the battle. She wondered if he'd want Margaery to kiss this one.

Her remembering of the Trident has gone from Arya being the aggressor to Arya being the hero that disarms the aggressor. That’s a total 180 in Sansa’s view of Arya’s actions, where Sansa is now justifying them as an appropriate response.

Then if you just do a search on Sansa’s mentions of Arya in ASOS, AFFC, and TWOW it’s all positive stuff. It’s all good memories, but Sansa thinks Arya is dead and they’ll never see each other again. When the sisters reunite, Sansa will be overwhelmed with gratitude that someone else in her family survived. She’s thinking of Arya quite frequently and the relationship they used to have, so Sansa will be more than willing to do the work of getting back to that relationship. She is primed to have that heartfelt, apologetic conversation to lay the rocky past to rest. The first step in being able to analyzing her own faults is accepting the whole truth and understanding Arya’s point of view and how she must have felt. That’s all there. She’s shown she has done that. ^^^ All that’s needed is for them to meet face to face and be able to hash it out.

So no, I can’t agree with your assessment of Sansa’s characterization when what you’re basing that off of is fundamentally wrong.

#sansa stark #sansa stark meta #arya stark #the stark sisters #lady #ned stark #joffrey baratheon #fandom wank #this old chestnut #we can never get away from the Trident can we?#It's been 84 years...

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freedom-in-the-dark · 4 years

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James Flint Is Gay: A Meta Post

[slides into the Black Sails fandom late with Starbucks]

Hey! What’s up! Here’s a post no one asked for but I wrote mostly for me. Before we get into it, I’ve got some big notices to put on the top here.

DISCLAIMER: If you interpret James as bi, and you prefer that, I am not trying to say you can’t do that or to convince you otherwise!

You do you! If you’re not cool with seeing him as gay, please do us both a favor and keep scrolling past this post! I’m mildly aware that this fandom has a history of rough discourse surrounding this topic, but I cannot emphasize enough that I am new here, and this post is not an attack. Please do me the courtesy of not attacking me or blocking me or whatnot because I’m not trying to start drama lol. And for what it’s worth, I myself am bi (well, bi ace), so I’d like to think I’m being objective.

This post exists simply because I like to write meta out with my arguments / evidence lined up in a row; it gets things out of my head and onto a screen, and I find it satisfying. And if I’m doing it anyway, I might as well share.

So if you see James as gay, or have an open mind to that interpretation… please allow me to take you on this adventure under the cut. I’m sure it’s obvious, but this contains spoilers? Lol.

Here we go!

Compulsory Heterosexuality vs “Bi Erasure”

Firstly… to address some stuff I’ve seen in my limited Black Sails fandom travels right out of the gate: I’ve seen people imply that interpreting James as gay is “bi erasure,” or they ask “Why are you erasing that James was attracted to Miranda and had an affair with her?”

But to that I say: it’s far more complicated than that.

Gay people can have sexual relationships with people of the opposite sex, especially until / or before they identify as gay. This is how so many gay people can be married to the opposite sex and have biological kids, and then later realize their truth and come out to themselves and their families. Having those experiences or even some variation of actionable attraction to people of other sexes in the past doesn’t negate their ability to later identify as gay, once they stop burying those parts of themselves and/or experience something that “brings that part of them into the light.”

This is why the phrase compulsory heterosexuality exists. The phrase was originally coined by Adrienne Rich in a 1980 essay titled “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience.” So yes, let me make this clear: this term originated in reference to lesbians and feminist theory, and then the idea was later expanded upon to include discussions of gay men by other academics in the early 2000s. I’m not gonna dive too deeply into it here, but in essence–as the name implies–this is the idea that patriarchal and heteronormative societies are viewed as the default, so individuals are assumed (by themselves and otherwise) to be heterosexual until “proven” otherwise. Through these standards that are seen as “normal,” people are also taught from a young age–whether explicitly or subconsciously through society–that anything that deviates from those ~straight norms~ leads to negative consequences. And so, society encourages people to avoid sexual exploration, because having experiences with someone of the same sex is what can often bring their gay identity into focus.

In the case of Black Sails, this is all very much emphasized at the forefront because it’s a historical drama. Aside from racism/slavery, patriarchy and heteronormativity are what the characters are actively going to war against.

So, the point in me defining all of this? No one—or at least, not me—is saying that James didn’t have a sexual relationship with Miranda. That’s not in question. But that doesn’t necessarily make him bi, and it doesn’t mean the narrative isn’t structured in various ways that indicate otherwise.

Just keep this in the back of your brain, because I’m going to circle back around to it.

Anne, Flint, & Gay Rage

In the wise words of an old pirate captain: “Fruit, fruit. Tits, tits.” This show thrives on parallels, and gives us lines / scenes that apply to more than one character; it’s partially why the themes are so consistent, and if you ignore that, you can miss a lot of the nuance. Our resident angry gay gingers are one of the paralleled sets of characters.

This is not a meta about Anne… but talking about parts of Anne’s story can help to highlight some things about James’ story.

I tweeted this once: “Flint and Anne’s sexualities paralleled to show struggles with compulsive heterosexuality, fighting for the sake of fighting, bringing parts of themselves into the light, wrestling with being told they’re monsters and their distorted senses of self, etc.” and really, now I’m just here to elaborate.

-----

The word “monster” is a recurring theme in this show. It’s tied mostly to Flint and how he is told he is monstrous for loving a man, fears being “the villain” or “monster” in everyone’s stories, and eventually embraces that monstrous portrayal in service of his goals–even as the violence is slowly devastating to him. But the other character the word “monster” is used in reference to? Anne.

A quote by Max:

“Idelle, how would you feel if the one man you thought would never betray you did? If he purchased for himself a future through that betrayal? If you were told by a world full of men that that betrayal confirmed for them that they were right to see you as a monster to be shunned? She's not mad. She is adrift.”

In some ways, this quote is also the story of what has happened to James in his life, over and over. (Not to say this is what Jack intended to do to Anne, but the parallels inherent in Max’s line itself cannot be denied.)

James is repeatedly betrayed by those he trusts: Admiral Hennessey; Peter Ashe; Hal Gates. All of them try to get him to conform to heteronormative society–including Gates, because even if he didn’t know it, that’s what he was doing by trying to get James to take a pardon. That’s why James reacts with such instinctual panic and kills him; the idea of being forced to apologize to and assimilate back into heteronormative society puts him at a breaking point. (It can even be argued that Miranda “betrays” James in this way too by trying to get him to take a pardon and go to Boston–which is where his “and they called me a monster” speech comes in–and that also contributed to how James later panics and kills Gates for trying to force him to do the same. Miranda tried in a well-meaning way to get James to move on, because she isn’t fully understanding what James wrestles with; but I’ll go back to that.)

Again, these parallels are deliberate. Anne and Flint are the two main gay characters who wrestle with their supposed “monstrosity” in the eyes of everyone else, because they don’t fit in. They are “othered.” It’s not simply about their violence; for these characters, it’s about what their violence is in service of achieving, which is tied to their sexuality.

Anne is seen as a “monster” for slaughtering the men who abused Max, who is not only a fellow woman but also a fellow lesbian, in a way that Anne is undeniably drawn to even before she lets herself acknowledge the feeling. We as viewers are meant to see this and understand this, and we do. Anne is ostracized for violence that was motivated by her sexuality, which is partially why Max tells her that she understands her violence and will protect her–because Max is not only also a woman in a patriarchal society, but she is gay too.

Flint is seen as a “monster” first and foremost by England, for his sexuality… and then, later, by everyone else for the actions he takes because of his sexuality. Again: the violence he commits cannot be divorced from his sexuality because it is the reason for it. It’s what informs it.

I tweeted about this once too, but in many ways Anne and Flint’s kindred displays of brutality and anger and “fighting for the sake of fighting” (a quote by Miranda which applies to them both) are informed by their desire/need for gay tenderness. The world has too often denied them that tenderness and their expressions of their sexualities, or demonized them for wanting it, and their violence is the result.

Here’s a quote from Deborah Tolman with regards to how compulsory heterosexuality affects men, which she calls “hegemonic masculinity”:

"These norms demand that men deny most emotions, save for anger; be hard at all times and in all ways; engage in objectification of women and sex itself; and participate in the continuum of violence against women."

The anger and hardness is a huge part of the personas both Flint and Anne have to put on for survival. I include Anne in this because she uniquely lives her life in a “male” role to survive the male-dominated world of piracy, and she’s clearly not immune from these unspoken masculine guidelines: she refers to Max as “the whore” half the time as a defense mechanism. Flint and Anne lash out, they’re hard and angry and violent for the sake of their personas, and it’s all because... inside, they just want to be soft and gay with who they love.

Anne, Flint, & Compulsory Heterosexuality (Not Bi Erasure)

In Black Sails, we are shown the story of a gay person who has a consistent sexual relationship with someone of the opposite sex, but is running from internal truths about themselves in some ways in the process. That person is Anne.

Struggling with compulsory heterosexuality is explicitly Anne Bonny’s prime storyline in the show and that is not up for debate (and I’ve rarely seen people disagree); but I argue that it is also part of James’ storyline, and he is paralleled significantly with Anne to make that clear. It’s just overall more subtle because it’s not the prime focus of James’ story the way it is for Anne, because James’ realizations happened largely in the past and we’re seeing the aftermath of it. The parallels are there, and I’ll be breaking some of them down.

----

From episode one, we are told that Anne has a sexual relationship with Jack…. But later on, she tells Jack that she “can’t be [his] wife,” even though they’ll be partners forever. Why? What changed? The answer is that she’s been with Max and realized that she’s gay. It doesn’t mean Anne didn’t have sex with a man in the past and even enjoy it on some level, but it does mean that she knows now that she was using that sex partially to distract from things about herself that she was doing her best to ignore.

Multiple lines by Max (to Anne) tell us this:

3x03: “When you and I began you did not choose me. Something that lives inside you beyond choice made it so.”

2x01: “But perhaps there is something else underlying it. Something hiding in a place not even you can see. Perhaps… we would do well to bring it into the light.”

Before I continue, let me remind you of something: when writers decide to show viewers something on screen, that is done with intent, especially in a show like Black Sails where not a single moment is wasted. Remember this. What they show us, and what they don’t show us, are both deliberate choices.

So what are we shown about Anne’s sexual relationship with Jack? We get exactly one scene of her having sex with him. We are shown Anne riding Jack in a way where neither party was particularly enthused. Does this mean they definitely never had sex in the past that they both enjoyed on some level? No. But they showed us this one scene on purpose: to emphasize the stark difference when Anne has enjoyable sex with Max, an experience that forever changes her.

So what are we shown about James’ sexual relationship with Miranda? We get exactly one scene of him having sex with her. It is the most depressing sex scene of all time, James is just lying there to try to be helpful for her to chase her own pleasure, and he doesn’t even touch her. Does this mean they never had sex in the past that they both enjoyed, especially back during their affair in London? No. But we are never shown any of that. We never see them have sex in London before James’ relationship with Thomas; we never see them having good sex with each other after it all goes to hell. And that is a deliberate choice.

Why? Because all of the above info about Anne and her compulsory heterosexuality journey also applies to James McGraw, and his relationships with Miranda and Thomas.

“They paint the world full of shadows... and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn't true. We can prove that it isn't true. In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it.”

The realizations James came to about his sexuality (just like Anne did) inform much of his tangled story with the Hamiltons, and much of the tragedy of Miranda and James’ situation after the loss of Thomas. We are shown the way James and Miranda are no longer perfectly aligned after that loss, and grief is undeniably a part of it… but it goes beyond that. It’s more complicated than that.

That sad sex scene is not solely about grief; remember, that scene takes place ten years after they lose Thomas. It takes place during a time where Miranda is already thinking about and will soon actively try to tell James that they need to move on, without understanding why the loss of Thomas affects him in a profoundly different way than it affects her. I am not minimizing her loss or her grief whatsoever; but it is undeniably more complicated for James, and it’s why he can’t move on.

In episode 1x07:

James: “Have you no memory of how we got here? What they took from us?”

Miranda: “What does it matter now? What does it matter? What does it matter what happened then if we have no life now?”

James is, of course, appalled by this. I’ll talk about why momentarily.

The next time James is in Nassau (2x03), he goes to see Miranda and tries to apologize that night, but she’s otherwise engaged. So he stands outside of her window looking in, surrounded by darkness, while she’s playing the clavichord with children in the light. It is symbolically the domestic version of a heterosexual ideal. He is “othered” by the camera angles / framing, and the dark / light aspects. James is relegated to being an outsider literally because as Flint he’s a pirate, but metaphorically because he’s gay; the reason we as viewers are given that scene is to underscore that he feels he has no place in that display.

Ultimately, James is misaligned with Miranda after the loss of Thomas (shown in both the sad sex scene and arguments) in a way that goes beyond grief. The implication is that things cannot ever be the same for him again since the loss of “his truest love” and the truths he learned about himself.

If James and Miranda were simply at odds with one another because of grief, it would be far less of a “tragedy” in some ways. But James cannot heal the way Miranda slowly finds the way to over ten years, because Thomas signifies things for James that Miranda cannot relate to. In London, when Thomas is taken from them, Miranda even yells to James, “He is my husband!” Her grief and rage are shown as equal to James at the start and have extreme validity; the two of them are partners in the plan to kill Alfred Hamilton for revenge; but then she is able to somewhat move on, whereas James is not.

Why? Because, for James, Thomas was not just his (truest) love; Thomas was the awakening of his fullest self as a gay man.

In the same way that Anne can’t be Jack’s “wife” after she’s been with Max and realizes she’s gay, James cannot content himself with fulfilling the role of Miranda’s “husband” after he’s been with Thomas and realizes he’s gay. Neither of these facts minimize Anne’s love and devotion to Jack, or James’ love and devotion to Miranda; they are undeniably two sets of partners. But Anne and James are forever altered by their experiences with same sex lovers, and the truths about themselves that were brought into the light as a result.

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Another part of the tragedy of James and Miranda is what happens right when we see Miranda grasp the significance of all of the above. Whether or not she grasped it before in the past, we are shown it only once on screen, and that’s in Charlestown.

Peter Ashe says this in 2x09:

“You will tell them about the affair with Thomas. You will tell them how it ended. You will explain to them what it drove you to do. You will reveal everything. And when you do, Captain Flint will be unmasked, the monster slain. And in his place will stand before all the world a flawed man, a man that England can relate to and offer its forgiveness.”

This is James’ worst nightmare; we know as such from what he told Miranda back in 1x07, and from when he killed Gates. And yet, here and now in 2x09, he is exhausted from pushing back against heteronormative society, all he wants is to retire the mantle of Flint born of gay rage, and he actually contemplates playing by their rules and giving into their judgements of his sexuality... until Miranda comes to his defense.

In season 1, Miranda didn’t seem to fully understand James’ thoughts on this, but here–in combination with her realizations about Peter Ashe’s betrayals–she finally does. And she’s not having it.

“What forgiveness are you entitled to while you stand back in the shadows pushing James out in front of the world to be laid bear for the sake of the truth? Tell me, sir, when does the truth about your sins come to light?”

And the moment she is yelling in rage on behalf of James, and their combined loss, and how Peter would dare to force James to experience shame about his sexuality again–she is instantly shot for it. A woman who’s yelling on behalf of a gay man? In a patriarchal heteronormative society? It has no place. England makes that clear.

It all further underlines James’ sense of “otherness”... and now he decides to embrace it, even at his own emotional detriment. He will no longer try to fit in or reason with them; he will no longer accept their halfway measures of pardons. He can’t, because in the eyes of England, all that he is as a gay man is abhorrent.

2x10: “Everyone is a monster to someone. Since you are so convinced that I am yours, I will be it.”

3x05, to the Maroon Queen: “...England takes whatever, whenever, however it wants. Lives. Loves. Labor. Spirits. Homes. It has taken them from me. I imagine that it has taken it from you.”

The Way James Views Miranda

And here is where I simply give you more food for thought–or further “evidence” of James being gay, if you will.

All of Flint’s lines about how he views Miranda are worded very, very deliberately.

Here’s a minor one, from 1x05:

“So you can probably guess it isn't as much fun to tell stories about how your captain makes a home with a nice Puritan woman who shares his love of books.”

There is nothing overtly romantic or sexual about this. It’s said in a one-on-one conversation with Billy, where Flint neither has to make the relationship sound like something it isn’t nor refuse to give any info whatsoever. So he goes with what is the seemingly-mild truth.

But 3x01, convincing the men to forego pardons:

“But what price surrender? To beg forgiveness from a thing that took my woman from me? My friend?”

“My woman” is what Flint says for the benefit of the men… these men who are part of the heteronormative world they all live in, and still value sexual relationships with women above all else. It’s about hegemonic masculinity, remember? (“Objectification of women and sex itself.”) He’s doing his best to speak their language.

But “my friend” is a secondary line that was not needed for the purposes of this speech, but James could not keep himself from adding it in a quieter tone–because that’s who Miranda was to him. His friend. Not his woman, which drips sexism and sexual undertones. Not his wife. Not even his “love,” which he could’ve used if he wanted to be ambiguous and sneak a Thomas reference in; he said “my woman” to appeal to the men, and then he added “my friend” because in the face of her memory he couldn’t help it.

And lastly, in 3x03, we begin to hear from “ghost Miranda.”

But what is ghost Miranda? She’s a voice from James’ traumatized mind. Everything she says to him is about truths he already knows and/or things he is hiding from himself. So what “she” says here is a voice from James’ mind; it’s about how James sees her, and subtly elaborates on his sexuality in the process.

“When I first met you, you were so... Unformed. And then I spoke and bade you cast aside your shame, and Captain Flint was born into the world... the part of you that always existed yet never were you willing to allow into the light of day. I was mistress to you when you needed love. I was wife to you when you needed understanding. But first and before all... I was mother. I have known you like no other. So I love you like no other. I will guide you through it, but at its end is where you must leave me. At its end is where you will find the peace that eludes you, and at its end lies the answer you refuse to see.”

This does not diminish Miranda’s importance to James in the least! In fact, it emphasizes it, and it is all part of why he is so ruined over her! But it is also, in the oddest way, an elaboration upon how he isn’t bi: Miranda was his partner in many things, including shared grief and revenge and some semblance of life for ten long years; and she was also was instrumental to his formation of himself as a person (“mother”), and his acceptance of himself as a gay man (“love” and “understanding”). This is how he sees her. Mistress and wife were roles she filled in his life, but above all, she contributed to the birth of Captain Flint–the personification of James’ gay rage.

Of course, the “answer” that ghost Miranda (the depths of James’ brain) alludes to here as well as her later words of “you are not alone” are all about James needing to recognize that Silver is a newfound partner and love for him… but that’s a whole other meta entirely.

Closing Thoughts

Look, did I consult a couple of specific scenes and look up transcripts to put quotes in this? Yes. But have I still only seen the show in its entirety once? Also yes. My point in mentioning this is that, if I did a full rewatch, there might even be more evidence I haven’t mentioned here. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but I do feel that it... certainly conveys the gist of the mood.

You may still agree to disagree if you prefer to see James Flint as bi; I’m not here to fight you on it and what queer characters mean to you personally.

But for me, when surveying all available evidence, the narrative screams that he’s gay. In that sense, my thoughts on this matter are similar to my thoughts on the ending; sure, you can interpret it one way if you look at certain details, but if you take in all the evidence and the big picture as a whole… there’s a specific conclusion to be drawn.

Last thing I’ll say is this: Steinberg himself has said that Flint is gay, which I found out way after watching the show and forming this interpretation. And like... not that if I wanted to hardcore argue he was bi I wouldn’t disregard Steinberg’s words, because in my experience the narrative speaking for itself is always more important than than creators’ words, but... in this instance (as in all Black Sails instances I’ve come across), his words just underscore what the well-crafted narrative is already telling us, because the creators wrote this show with intent. They knew what they were doing.

And thus, I will quote him (from these GIFs) below.

��When we were trying to build the story, we wanted whatever this thing was that made [Flint] feel alienated to be so deeply tied into who he was that there was no way he was every going to dismiss this thing that happened to him. We wanted to make sure we understood what the reality was in England in terms of how homosexuality was perceived. In some ways it was more tolerated, in some ways it was significantly less tolerated. I think in terms of Flint being gay, it’s about the fact that it is a tool that is used politically when convenient to make somebody be a monster… and it isn’t even really about the relationship.”

(If you buy the series on iTunes, you get an “inside” look at every episode, including this one from 2x05.)

EDIT: I had no idea Toby Stephens basically confirmed my thoughts that James' relationship with Thomas was his actualization as a gay man, so excuse me as I lose my mind for a moment:

“I think his relationship to Thomas Hamilton, the initial friendship and then becoming lovers is sort of like the realization of himself. I think he became himself with Thomas Hamilton. His potential was unleashed with Hamilton.”

And just for fun, since I’m here anyway, here’s a piece of a Steinberg quote about Anne from the Fathoms Deep podcast.

“In terms of Rackham and Bonny, I think that was another thing that I assumed for a long time could never go away. That they were essentially, you know, that they were married. You know not legally, but they were functionally married. And then this story happened in Season 2 with Bonny, that I think with like with a gun to my head of things that I’m proud of with the show, probably at the top is this story of this woman coming out and understanding that she’s gay. . . And so when we got to a point where it was like, I think she’s gay? Like I don’t think this is something we want to be wishy-washy about. It required getting over that hump with Rackham of, ‘Well like what am I going to do with this relationship? I don’t want to split them up?’ And I think it became something way more interesting.”

Thanks for coming to my TED talk. I love James Flint and his gay rage, I love you if you read all of this, and I love my friend @sunbardy who dealt with me yelling about this in DMs and then proofread the doc.

Hit me up on Twitter @gaypiracy if you want, where I do most of my Black Sails related yelling. And shitposting. Because I contain multitudes.

Know No Shame, my friends.

#black sails #james flint #know no shame #flinthamilton #captain flint #anne bonny #meta #black sails meta #miranda hamilton #jackanne #maxanne #legit have no idea what else to tag #my meta

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i-could-be-so-much-more · 3 years

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So I just finished watching The Wilds on Prime, and I got some thoughts... like I really enjoyed it, some of the plot twists got me good, others were entirely predictable... I just.. got some thoughts (spoilers ahead) (I would insert a ‘read more’ break but I have no idea how to on mobile, I’m sorry)

What’s the weird obsession with Pink? Was it supposed to be a running joke? Is there a point to be made? Did she sponsor the show? She comes up literally at least 4 times, and as far as I can remember is one of the only named music artists?

While I entirely agree with the feminist rhetoric, it felt a little ham-fisted. Like I do think a patriorical system is what’s wrong with the world, I do think too many men have too much power, and statistically female led countries are doing better in most/if not all areas (especially with COVID right now), and cataclysmic change and reform is very likely the only way to balance the scale. But for Gretchen to be so convinced of her cause that she would run such a risky study, it just takes me out of the realm of believing.

Plus the whole ‘being a girl in high school sucks’ thing is also pretty ham-fisted, like yes it does it really fucking does, and yes it ties into the feminist themes. But it also made me roll me eyes a bit, especially in the first episode, I genuinely thought about turning it off. And I definitely think it will turn some less than liberal minded people away ... and like obviously they’re not the intended audience, but also if we exclude them from the conversation we’re not going to finish the discussion..

That final plot twist at the end was so glaringly obvious. It kinda killed the mood, I’m not gonna lie.

The fact they set Dot up to be the other confederate when it was Nora was actually pretty good, like I was lowkey rolling my eyes at how glaringly obvious it was that it was Dot and then they completely flipped it and I was straight up that shocked cat meme

I know I’ve just been talking about obvious twists, but if there was any setting up of Shelby/Toni, or if it seemed obvious to anyone else before they kissed, then somehow I completely missed it. I really enjoyed them, their beef at the beginning, and then their growing relationship, it was really lovely

I really think they missed the mark making this SO... teen. Like the way they were trying to make it.. relatable is kind of my biggest issue with it, it didn’t feel is the tone matched the narrative, so I spent like 25% of my watch time trying to decided if I was actually enjoying it (I was, I think)

I’m not normally a fan of non-linear narratives (mostly because most shows don’t do it well and it end up being more confusing than entertaining,) but they did pretty well here; revealing enough to keep you watching, building up the characters’ backstories in the right order so it fits in the narrative and builds the story of the island. They made some good editing choices with it, the story board was a*

Where they chose to end of the series was pretty rubbish ngl.. I don’t see how they’re going to have another whole series worth of story to tell. If Leah has gotten out, the secret is out, clearly they got A LOT more story left on the island (what happened to Martha, how Shelby went from a positive person discovering her sexuality to a dissociative unstable wreck (that could’ve been just the eventual exposure of the whole shebang I suppose though), how things went down after Rachel gets attacked) but it just feels like they’ve not got a lot of story to tell outside of the island... I feel like either they should’ve lobbied for a few more episodes and made it a 1 series deal, or revealed Nora as the confederate to the audience earlier, and made that the cliffhanger at the end of the episode where the plane flys overhead and started season 2 from there... then you’ve got the mystery cliffhanger as well as the dramatic one... I mean, I might be wrong maybe they’ve got a lot planned for the next series, I just hope they don’t stretch it thin or over complicate it.

I hope they don’t flip it on it’s head and make the boys camp(s?) more successful. I know I said the feminism is heavy-handed, but I also don’t want them to kill the message. For all the trauma they’ve put these girls through, I hope the study is at least a success for Gretchen, because she’s gone about it completely wrong, but I still agree with her cause.

This sounds like I’m really shitting on the show, but I honestly really enjoyed it. I think it’s important to analyse media and enjoy things critically. This show does some important things for POC and LGBT representation, empowering women whilst not putting them on pedestal of perfection, showing imperfect women (the decision to actually have them dirty and sunburnt throughout and then skin damaged after), challenging sterotypes, starting discussions about the real damage of patriarchy. I hope they stay true to message and maybe get a little clearer on how to demonstrate that message, in the next series ☺️☺️☺️

Ps, I got more thoughts I’m just tired

#The Wilds #The Wilds Prime #I’m honestly open to discussion about this #I’m not trying to shit all over the show

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gaylorlyrics · 4 years

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Better Than Revenge

I’ve been seeing a few posts on this lately, so I wanted to do some analysis. The mainstream narrative of this song is that Taylor and Joe Jonas broke up (in the infamous 27 second phone call) and Joe then immediately dated Camilla Belle.

It does seem that this song is about that triangle, but rather than it being real relationships, a closer look shows that it was about Taylor’s beard being used by Camilla Belle.

Additionally, this song serves the purpose of getting more publicity for all involved in the triangle, although it definitely seems like Camilla Belle got the short stick. Joe Jonas & Taylor both got a lot of press from their break up and wrote multiple songs hinting at the details. Taylor’s first song that was alleged to be about Joe was Forever & Always.

The Jonas Brothers (except Kevin)) have always used their public relationships to bolster their careers - Miley, Selena, Taylor, and Demi. Now they incorporate their wives (”wives”) into their songs, music videos, merch, and overall marketing. Note that both Nick and Joe just happened to get married just as they were releasing their new album and staging their comeback. The use of contractual relationships has been a constant in their strategy to stay relevant. (Not dragging - I love the Jo Bros - just being honest)

"Now go stand in the corner and think about what you did."

Throughout the song Taylor infantilizes Camilla and compares the situation to a playground fight. Also Taylor loves to talk in her songs!!!

Time for a little revenge The story starts when it was hot and it was summer and... I had it all, I had him right there where I wanted him

Taylor and Joe started bearding in Summer 2008 and bearded for 3 months, July 2008- Oct 2008, a fiscal quarter. It seems like this was the first of many 3 month long contracts for Taylor (Jake, John, Connor, etc). In general this was the first highly publicized “relationship” that Tay was in, seemingly her first beard. Note that is started just after Camp Rock came out, which starred Joe and featured him and the Jo Bros on the soundtrack, and it was just before Taylor released Fearless in Nov 2008, so both were trying to maximize their press coverage and promote their respective projects.

My complete and total guess (plz feel free to correct me if I’m missing something or just totally wrong) is that Taylor wanted to extend the contract since she was releasing Fearless in Nov 2008 and was doing a ton of promo for that, and potentially thought that bearding would help? But that Joe already had the Camilla narrative lined up. Seems like it would be very beneficial for her, given how famous Joe was at the time. Idk just a thought!!

She came along, got him alone and let's hear the applause She took him faster than you could say "sabotage" The line “let’s hear the applause” indicates that that it’s all for show and a PR relationship. It sets the stage for the song as being a literal stage, a performance for an audience (the public).

I never saw it coming, wouldn't have suspected it I underestimated just who I was dealing with She had to know the pain was beating on me like a drum She underestimated just who she was stealing from My best guess on this is that it’s referring to Camilla Belle being significantly less famous that Tay, and Tay being angry that her business plan didn’t go as she anticipated.

ALSO - Camilla Belle seemed to be a beard as well. It was rumored that Camille was with Maria Sharapova at this time and then the relationship with Joe popped up (”Waiting outside the room was a Hollywood actress, Camilla Belle. Seated inside was the world's highest-earning female athlete, a woman who has become synonymous with racket-swinging glamour, and a close friend of Belle's - Maria Sharapova”). Interestingly, this post talks about Maria specifically and her bearding.

She's not a saint And she's not what you think She's an actress She's better known For the things that she does on the mattress

Okay - this is a super cruel line. The being an actress line refers to Camilla bearding and acting straight. The mattress line is a play on words, saying - sure, she’s an actress, but she’s only known for, and famous because of, the people who she dates, i.e. “dating” Joe. Tay is saying without the contractual bearding relationship Camilla would not be known. Soon she's gonna find Stealing other people's toys On the playground won't make you many friends

“Stealing other people’s toys”?? This is one of the first times that Tay clearly objectifies the men she is supposedly in love with and talks about them as an thing that is hers to use as she likes. Other examples include “Cruel Summer” (Bad, bad boy, shiny toy with a price/You know that I bought it) and “Don’t Blame Me” (Toyin' with them older guys/Just to play things for me to use). Also this brings the child imagery back.

She should keep in mind She should keep in mind There is nothing I do better than revenge She looks at life like it's a party and she's on the list She looks at me like I'm a trend and she's so over it

This alludes to the cyclical nature of stardom and how people have a ton of press and a huge following, but are then quickly “over”. Taylor is saying that, by dating Joe, Camilla is able to get into parties and thinks Taylor is “over”.

I think her ever-present frown is a little troubling She thinks I'm psycho 'cause I like to rhyme her name with things

This line keeps me up at night. All I can come up with for this rhyme is “What the hell, Camilla Belle?” If you have something better please message me. But sophistication isn't what you wear or who you know Or pushing people down to get you where you wanna go They wouldn't teach you that in prep school so it's up to me But no amount of vintage dresses gives you dignity

This line, honestly as well as the ones before it, clearly refers to dating someone for social status and celebrity standing. It’s about looking a specific way to social climb and gain more clout - aka bearding in order to get more famous.

Camilla went to the elite all-girls Marlborough School, speaks multiple languages, and trained in classical music - hence the “prep school” line.

Chorus I'm just another thing for you to roll your eyes at, honey You might have him but haven't you heard I'm just another thing for you to roll your eyes at, honey You might have him but I always get the last word

Even just a couple albums in, Taylor already had a name for being honest and confrontational in her writing. Here Taylor is saying that without Joe she still is relevant, and they should know that she will address the situation head on. She gets the last word in the “relationship” with this song, but she also gets the last word with the general public by building a longer lasting career, and growing her career even though she is no longer in her contract with Joe.

Chorus Do you still feel like you know what you're doing? 'Cause I don't think you do. Do you still feel like you know what you're doing? I don't think you do I don't think you do Let's hear the applause Come on show me how much better you are (so much better, yeah?) So you deserve some applause 'cause you're so much better

This directly references the Jonas Brother song Much Better, that says “I get a rep for breakin' hearts/Now I'm done with superstars/And all the teardrops on her guitar/I'm not bitter“. There are a few other JB songs that are supposedly about Tay (Paranoid for one, which has a video that randomly has some similar imagery to the Lover music video?? I don’t have time to unpack if that’s a coincidence or not.)

She took him faster than you could say "sabotage"

*****worth noting that Tay has said she regrets some things she said in this song. Slut shaming and bashing other women isn’t cool and is just doing the patriarchy’s dirty work for them!!!! Don’t do it!!!!*****

#taylor swift #speak now #better than revenge #gaylor

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doomonfilm · 3 years

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Thoughts : Antebellum (2020)

I’ve been intrigued about Antebellum since trailers for it began to pop up prior to COVID-19′s decimation of the theater industry. My father used to pitch an idea to me of a slave and a modern day man who somehow find themselves switching places, so it made me excited to see that this concept may be getting its chance to find life. After waiting patiently, the film recently popped up on Hulu, giving me the opportunity to finally see it, and I certainly wasn’t ready for the wild ride I signed up for.

On a Louisiana plantation, Eli (Tongayi Chirisa) watches as his wife attempts to run away, but she is captured and killed in front of him. Overseer Jasper (Jack Huston) not only punishes Eli in front of the other slaves, but he later punishes Eden (Janelle Monáe) in private for her part in the act by beating her, whipping her and branding her. Six weeks later, a new group of slaves arrives, including a pregnant woman named Julia (Kiersey Clemons). Due to her pregnancy, Julia requests Eden’s assistance in an escape attempt, but after Eden turns her down with a warning to bide her time and keep her head down, Julia attempts to confide in a young Confederate Soldier named Daniel (Robert Aramayo) who requests to bed her, but Julia is swiftly punished and beaten. After Eli is later forced to clean the crematorium where his wife was burned, a sudden shift in perspective brings Eden into the modern world as Veronica Henley, a young woman married to Nick Henley (Marque Richardson) with a young daughter named Kennedi (London Bryce). Veronica travels for a speaking engagement at a fancy conference, but after a night on the town with friends and colleagues Dawn (Gabourey Sidibe) and Sarah (Lily Cowles), an earlier strange encounter with a mysterious woman named Elizabeth (Jena Malone) leads Veronica down a disjointing and perplexing path.

The severity of the plantation context is not only an immediate mood-setter, but it contextualizes Eden/Veronica as a victim of systematic oppression, which we later learn flies directly in the face of her intellectual background and personal drive. With her main stated desire being a deconstruction and reformation of the patriarchy, then the most logical nightmare to insert her into would be that of a slave who faces assaults of a physical and sexual nature. While the difference of perceived danger is made clearly evident by paralleling the two existences, the very real danger and repercussions of plantation life are not used to minimalize the struggles of being a woman with agency in the modern day, but rather they are used as a way to show the proportional scale these existences share in terms of the removal of a woman’s agency. Even if the additional subtext of the William Faulkner and Assata Shakur quotes were not present in the film, the displays of Elizabeth and Sarah’s privilege as white women, or the way that Veronica is held on a pedestal rather than as an equal to her peers, serve to show that women have often been the ones left out of sweeping and revolutionary change.

That being said, it’s not very hard to see why this film was such a divisive one amongst audiences and critics. For those unfamiliar with or unwilling to accept America’s violent and tragic history with Black men and women, the plantation setting would be confusing in regards to a horror vehicle, and directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz spend little to no time providing viewers with a shorthand or background in regards to how things operate in that world. The lines are further blurred when it is made deeply unclear when and where we are in terms of a larger timeline and location, as the fear that would normally be associated with the captivity and bleak existentialism of slavery is turned on its head in order to apply to the context it is used in the film (which I hope I have not spoiled in my attempts to remain vague).

The writing on the film is strong, as it finds a way to bridge a dark and complicated part of the American past with the generational trauma it is responsible for without having to rely on narrative tropes or movie magic. As a location, the plantation stands as a momentous star of the film, making its presence felt through its sheer size and bleakness of potential outcomes. The scoring used for the plantation sequences has a high theatricality to it, helping to ratchet up the fever-pitch inducing tension. While a mostly general color pallet is used throughout, it is drenched in a world of eventual darkness where only the reds and oranges are allowed to stand out. The big budget cinematography helps add to the larger than life nature the film builds up and maintains.

Top to bottom, this film is filled with strong performances, but first and foremost Janelle Monáe must be recognized for her dignity, quiet strength and fierce drive she exhibits as the protagonist of the film. Jena Malone matches her energy as antagonist, though I would have liked to see a bit more of her in the film. Jack Huston, Eric Lange and Robert Aramayo balance the savageness of superiority with hints that things may not be quite what they seem in the world presented. Tongayi Chirisa displays the pain of loss and the unchecked aggression that comes with wanting to free yourself from captivity to a strong degree, while by comparison, Kiersey Clemons exhibits the desperation and eventual fear that comes with defeat in the face of hopelessness. Nick Henley provides a loving foundation along with the innocence of London Bryce, while Gabourey Sidibe and Lily Cowles stand strong as Monáe’s support system. Arabella Landrum, Achok Majak, T.C. Matherne and a number of others step if for supporting roles.

The reviews and thoughts I heard on Antebellum could not have been more mixed, but in my opinion, the film definitely lives up to the hype it presented in its promotional material. Films like these are not only taken in the best when expectations are set aside, but also when there is a lack of knowledge about the specific story as well, as these two steps will provide the most rewarding viewer experience.

#ChiefDoomsday #DOOMonFILM #GerardBush #ChristopherRenz #Antebellum #JanelleMonae #EricLange #JenaMalone #JackHuston #KierseyClemons #GaboureySidibe #MarqueRichardson #TongayiChirisa #RobertAramayo #LilyCowles #LondonBoyce #ArabellaLandrum #AchokMajak #TCMatherne

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matildainmotion · 3 years

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My Cure for the Blues, thanks to my Daughter who Loves Pink: What Might Yours Be?

I am blue. I don’t know why. There are many blatant reasons for blueness in the world right now - more than there have ever been in my lifetime - yet still I don’t know why. If I did I wouldn’t be blue. I would be sad with purpose. Or angry. Or upset. But what I have is a slightly pointless feeling. Being blue is vague. Vaguely low. A big wash of a dark colour, devoid of detail.

Meanwhile my four year old daughter is definitely not blue - she’s pink. “What’s your favourite colour today?” She asks, everyday. I find it a hard question to answer with accuracy, perhaps because of my vague blue feeling. She does not: “What’s yours?” I say. “Pink,” she replies with absolute certainty, “And gold.” Another favourite question of hers, that she poses most evenings at supper: “What are you the fairy of?” The grown-ups round the table come up with various quips in answer: Daddy is the fairy of mashed potato; Granny is the fairy of hearing aids; Mummy is the fairy of tiredness.

“And you, Tenar?”

“I’m the fairy of beauty, sparkly things and everything I like,” she replies, while skipping up and down beside the dinner table, because the fairy of beauty is much too busy to pay any heed to the fairy of meal time manners. Her favourite Christmas present was a gold princess gown, which she dons daily, and Snow White-like, checks in the mirror to see if she looks suitably fair. She wants to grow her hair down to just above her bottom.

This all comes as rather a shock to me because I was not a pink girl - my favourite colour as a child was navy blue, no pastels please. I refused to wear dresses. I had a party boiler suit- dark blue - for birthdays. I climbed trees, ran along garden walls and lived in trousers. I was inconsolable when my father once brought me back a kilt as a present from a trip to Scotland - imagine being given a skirt! Despite being told this was a skirt meant for men, despite the photos in the family photo drawer of my father, a proud soldier in a Black Watch regiment kilt, I remained unconvinced. I have stayed relatively consistent in my tom-boyness into adult life. As a mother my children rarely see me in dresses, hardly ever in make up. Mummy has long hair under her armpits and on her legs but often shaves her head.

Given the version of womanhood I have presented to my daughter, I assumed her predilection for pink princesses was a result of the vicious marketing to which children, especially girls, are subjected - the bright pink magazines with plastic toy lipsticks and hair curlers sellotaped onto the front, placed at just her height on the wracks near the supermarket check out. This is just one example of the many things about the world that make me blue so, when her pink princess phase began, I set to work.

I had already consistently switched pronouns around in books - mostly from he to she - or had discussions with my daughter about the absence of active female heroines. More recently, her questions such as “Why is it girls that have long hair?” Or, “Which one of these princesses is the most beautiful?” lead to long discussions about the history of fashion, gender as a colourful spectrum, and how peacocks are just one example of a species in which it is the boy that gets to wear the gorgeous feathers. None of this seems to make the slightest difference to my daughter’s commitment to pink, but two developments recently have eased my concerns and made me think that there is more than 21st Century patriarchal capitalism at work in her choices, and that the pink thing - or the thing for pink -that is sustaining her spirits through this hard time might actually contain within it a clue to the medicine I need for my blues.

Firstly, last weekend, after a day on which I had had to work and so had resorted to letting Tenar watch Disney’s Cinderella (the 1950 animation) she ran back and forth during supper and told us her version of the story. In her rendition, she played the part of the fairy godmother, and having magically rustled up a stunning dress for Cinderella, she thought she should be the one who got to enjoy it. So it was she, the fairy godmother, who danced the night away with Cinders. And what of the prince? No princess for him - he was left with a slice of pizza. After three nights of dancing together, Cinderella married Tenar, the fairy godmother, and they lived together happily ever after, with an ever-expanding wardrobe of fabulous dresses. The prince married the pizza, and was, apparently, content with his lot.

I was reassured by this that my daughter is in no way either a passive consumer of pink-ness or likely to become an easy victim of social norms. Soon after marrying Cinderella, she came up with the second thing which allayed my concerns, and made me question my fast feminist assumptions as to what is at work in her psyche. She announced, seemingly out of the blue (that colour again), that one day she wants to acquire a white, calm, mare.

We have some chickens, but on the whole we are not an animal-focussed family. No cats. No dogs. Certainly nothing as large and demanding as a horse. My daughter accepts the fact that owning a horse is a big deal - you need a stable, a meadow, and various other bits of kit, so she is going to be patient - not a quality that comes to her easily - and wait, but it is important that she gets the mare when she is still young, she says, by the time she is twelve. By then her hair should have grown to her full desired length and both she and the white mare can ride over the fields with their locks streaming behind them. She is also keen on a cart to go with it, which will, she says, make shopping much easier and less boring. She will look after it very well: she will dress it in garlands of flowers, feed it hay and apples and exercise it daily. Its stable will be right beside the pink, gold and violet-painted bedroom of her own, into which she will also have moved by the time she turns twelve.

I am not entirely sure from where this horse has ridden into her mind. She has a sticker book of white unicorns, but much of the dream seems to be of her own invention. I am not about to surrender to an essentialist narrative and suggest that all little girls harbour a horsey dream - how could I when I myself never have?- but it has touched me, this sudden passion for a white horse, the oddly mature way in which she discusses the details of it, and it makes me think there is more than magazine marketing at work in her.

My husband plays Tenar the theme tune to White Horses, the 1960s TV series, whilst I remember all the stories I know that feature a woman and a horse. One of my favourite Ted Hughes’ tales concerns the first woman complaining to God that she is bored - she wants a playmate. After trying out various creations and getting it horribly wrong, God finally gets it right when, out of the crests of the waves, he conjures a horse, who rides ashore to greet the waiting woman. Going further back in time, there are the tales of Epona and Rhiannon, Celtic horse goddesses which I know of thanks to mother-maker, Jackie Singer, who made a brilliant show about them that explored women’s power and sexuality - both its repression and liberation. Rhiannon in particular, who can outride any man with ease, is no passive princess. Whilst the image of a girl dressed in pink is no more than eighty years old, the image of a woman riding a horse is clearly a good deal older. However, irrespective of age (simply using the fact that something has been around for a long time is a highly dubious reason for justifying it - patriarchy, for example, is ancient!) it seems to me, listening to Tenar, that she has somehow tapped into an image-geyser - it has sprung up mysteriously, and with tremendous energy. It feeds her. Life is tough, we are confined in a tiny house, while we try to stay well, stay sane, shield Granny, but my daughter is buoyant, not blue, because she is dreaming of horses- I need some of what she’s got.

But I never dreamt of horses. They don’t do it for me. I think back to when I loved navy blue and try to recall what else I was dreaming of then. What made me run around the kitchen table with delight like my daughter does? And then the answer comes: I wanted a meadow too, but not for a horse. I wanted a cabin in one corner - I was going to run across the meadow, barefoot, marvel at the wonder of the world and then head into my cabin and write. I didn’t want to be a princess, I wanted to be a poet. With the same passion, the same weird mix of realism and fantasy as I see in my daughter and her horse ambitions, I made plans for my poetry cabin. I remembered this when I watched the amazing Amanda Gorman, not dressed in pink or blue but brightest yellow, reciting at Biden’s inauguration - a young poet woman warrior. I can feel it does me good to summon up this archetype, this image. It starts, slowly, to dispel the blue. It’s a dose of a meaning-of-life medicine, the first iteration of it that I ever brewed for myself and so, because of this, it still holds a certain potency. As Victor Frankl argues in his classic Man’s Search for Meaning a sense of purpose, of meaning, is what we (man, woman, or betwixt and between) need to survive the hardest times - a holocaust, a global pandemic, or, closer to home, just a tough day of schooling with the kids.

So, here are your questions for the month - actually a mix of my daughter’s questions and mine:

What is your favourite colour today? What are you the fairy of? What do or did your children, if you have them, dream of? And what were your own childhood dreams? And can your answers to these questions change the colour of your days?

As I type this, Tenar is sitting on my lap, and she has asked for the last word. I have said she can dictate and I will type. Over to Tenar, then, to finish this off:

“I ask my mum so many questions that I feel in my body and I say my heart is the thing that controls my feelings. I ask every night to my mum, why she was a tom boy? And I say that I love you as much as I am going to love everything around me, and I love my heart, and my horse. And I am a girlie girl, not like my mummy. I love princesses, I say, every night.”

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the-desolated-quill · 4 years

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She Was Killed By Space Junk - Watchmen (TV Series) blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. if you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

The first episode was a shaky, but intriguing start. The second episode was both incredibly provocative and intelligently written. What about the third episode? Um... I’m honestly not too sure what to make of it, if I’m honest. I watched it twice like I do with everything I review and I genuinely don’t know what to say about it. I couldn’t even tell you if I liked it or not. I think I liked it.... but I couldn’t tell you why.

Okay. Sorry. Hi guys. Let me explain what happened. I wrote that first paragraph and then I got writer’s block, so I decided to step away from it. I had a nap, played a video game and then decided to watch the episode again for a third time with fresh eyes. Now my thoughts are a little more concrete. So. She Was Killed By Space Junk. Having watched this episode three times now, I’ve decided that I don’t like this episode very much at all, and that’s less to do with what’s in the episode and more to do with what isn’t.

Let me explain.

Reviewing episodes like this one can often be very frustrating because it’s hard to tell what is a genuine flaw and what is merely setup for what’s to come. I have a number of problems with this episode, but for all I know, what I’m about to talk about might not actually be problems at all and will all be explained in a future episode. Or they are genuine problems and I’m inadvertently giving the writers way too much credit. I don’t know. That’s why it’s so frustrating.

My main point of contention is with the character of Laurie. First of all, let me just say that Jean Smart doesn’t put a foot wrong. She gives a great performance and is a good choice to play an older Laurie. The problem I have is with her characterisation. Or, at the very least, bits of her characterisation. I don’t know. It’s complicated.

Laurie’s inclusion in the TV series was something I was actually most looking forward to because I felt her character was kind of shortchanged in the graphic novel. Initially starting out as an effective and scathing critique of how women are often presented in comics, over the course of Watchmen’s story her role was reduced until she ended up becoming little more than a prop for the male characters’ stories. It was disappointing and it’s led to me arguing multiple times that Silk Spectre is one of the most underrated and wasted elements of Watchmen. The HBO series felt like a perfect opportunity to right some wrongs and give Laurie the attention she deserves. She Was Killed By Space Junk certainly gave her the focus and attention she didn’t receive in the graphic novel, but I’m very much struggling to ascertain what the show was trying to achieve here.

Let’s quickly remind ourselves where the graphic novel left us with her character. She had recently discovered that the Comedian, the man who tried to rape her mother, was her biological father, she was in a relationship with Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl, and they were both on the run from the law, hellbent on continuing their lives as vigilantes. Okay. How does the HBO series continue this? Well it turns out she and Dan are no longer together. I know some fans really don’t like this, but I personally don’t have a problem with it. In fact I’m perfectly happy with it. In my review of A Stronger, Loving World, I explained how I didn’t believe their relationship could possibly last long term because it was clear that they were together not because they were in love, but rather because they were indulging in each other’s fantasies, and the fact that Dan’s seeming fascination with the Silk Spectre porn comic supported this. Showrunner Damon Lindelof clearly agrees, so cool. It’s always nice to be proven right.

Anyway, at some point between the graphic novel and the HBO series, the fantasy was shattered and the pair split up. I’m assuming what shattered the fantasy was them getting caught by the FBI. It’s unclear what’s happened to Dan at this time. Judging by the fact that the police in Oklahoma are using Owlships and goggles, I’m assuming that Dan was arrested and his equipment was appropriated by law enforcement. Laurie meanwhile has struck some kind of deal and now she’s working with the Anti-Vigilante Taskforce and enforcing the Keene Act, which is an interesting parallel with how her father, the Comedian, served the American government during the Vietnam War. But you see this is where I start to get a bit confused.

The episode opens with Laurie setting a trap for a vigilante known as Mister Shadow (basically Fake Batman) and shooting him, either not knowing or not caring whether or not Mister Shadow’s body armour would save him. She’s also taken on the Comedian’s last name Blake and displays a very similar nihilistic attitude, making dark jokes and exhibiting uncaring, unsympathetic behaviour. Now I don’t necessarily have a problem with Laurie becoming more nihilistic, given what she’s been through. Having witnessed Ozymandias and his squid of doom, it’s bound to affect her worldview. However, her turning into a female Comedian doesn’t really marry up with her character at all. And yes, I know at the end of the graphic novel she talked about getting a gun and body armour, like the Comedian, but it didn’t work there either. It felt too drastic a character shift and was painfully on the nose. I didn’t like it there and I don’t like it here either. I just don’t buy that she would want to emulate the man who tried to rape her mother.

I especially don’t like her violent, uncaring attitude toward Mister Shadow. Why does she have such a disdain for vigilantes? Is it because of what happened with Dan, and she’s projecting that onto everyone else? Has she become so nihilistic that she just doesn’t give a shit anymore? There’s a moment later in the episode where she asks someone if their civil rights are being violated only to then turn around and say she was being sarcastic. That really didn’t sit right with me. It just doesn’t feel like something Laurie would say.

And then there’s the whole thing with Doctor Manhattan. Throughout the episode we see her in a phone booth trying to tell a joke to Manhattan (quite what the purpose of these phone booths are, I don’t know. Considering that people in the world of Watchmen believe that Manhattan was giving people cancer, why would anyone want to call him?). She clearly misses him to the point where she has a large blue dildo hidden a briefcase that’s clearly a direct reference to Pulp Fiction. I REALLY don’t like this. At all. The reason Laurie left Manhattan in the first place was because he couldn’t emotionally satisfy her, being an omnipresent demigod and all. So why would she be pining after him? The blue dildo joke in particular just felt kind of degrading. Just... why?

Weirder still is the joke she spends the whole episode trying to tell him. It’s clearly an indirect reference to the Pagliacci joke from the graphic novel, except the Pagliacci joke had a specific purpose in the graphic novel and its meaning was clear. Rorschach was remarking on how America was relying on the Comedian to save them from violence and corruption, which was futile considering what a violent and corrupt person the Comedian was. Here, however, I have no idea what Laurie is trying to say with the brick joke at all. I’m assuming the bricklayer is her father and she’s following in his footsteps. Okay, I kind of get that (except not really for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, but whatever). But then we come to the whole bit with God at the pearly gates sending Nite Owl, Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan to Hell, only to then get killed by the brick from the previous joke. Now... what the fuck is that all about? I’ve been racking my brains, checking what other people said, and I can’t find any satisfying answers. It just feels like pretentious, unnecessary fanwank. The best I can come up with is that Laurie is expressing how she’s not letting men dictate her life anymore. But... she’s spent the whole episode pining after Doctor Manhattan, she’s modelled herself after her rapist father, and at the end of the episode, she sleeps with her assistant Petey, an agent who claims to not to be a fan of superheroes, but is totes a fan of superheroes. So... is that the joke? She wants to escape from the shadow of the men in her life, but can’t? Or she intends to overcome the patriarchy that has kept her down, but she still ends up choosing to indulge in the power fantasy of Petey? Or does it refer to something else she’s planning to do later? It’s all so frustratingly vague.

As I was watching this episode, I honestly lost track of the number of times I thought to myself ‘I don’t know where Lindelof is going with this.’ Sometimes this approach works, keeping the audience in the dark in order to build intrigue and suspense, but for Watchmen, a story that’s famous for its dense material and subject matter, it’s just plain annoying. In fact this whole episode feels really off to me. Instead of focusing on character narratives and thematic storytelling, She Was Killed By Space Junk relies more on a plot heavy story that moves the pieces of the larger arc forward and keeping certain specific details vague in an attempt to keep people watching. Except that’s not really what Watchmen is about and it results in leaving the more integral aspects of the story in the dust. Angela barely gets a look in here, and considering a significant portion of the episode focuses on Judd Crawford’s funeral, it feels like a massive, missed opportunity. How does it feel discovering that the man you liked and respected wasn’t the man you thought he was? Does that change your feelings toward him? Does it invalidate the good times you had with him? And with Laurie there, the show could have compared and contrasted the two. How these two women move forward knowing these uncomfortable truths about the men in the lives? But the show never really capitalises on this.

And the annoying thing is, for all I know, all the things I’m talking about could actually be addressed in a future episode, thus rendering what I’m saying moot. I don’t know. I can’t tell if this is all just really bad setup for an eventual satisfying payoff or if it’s just plain bad.

That being said, while I do ultimately dislike this episode, there are a few things I like. For instance, I do like what we learn about the larger world of Watchmen. We learn that Oklahoma is the only state that’s allowing the police to mask up and that this law was passed by Joe Keene Jr., whose father was responsible for the Keene Act that was passed outlawing vigilantes. Joe Keene Jr. was briefly introduced in the previous episode and it looks like he’s going to be playing a larger role from here on out. Let’s wait and see where that goes.

We also learn that Looking Glass knows Laurie and has prior history with her. He even confirms Sister Night’s secret identity to her, albeit reluctantly. So is he a plant? Maybe sent by the FBI to try and sabotage Keene Jr? Hmmm, what’s going on here then?

And then there’s Ozymandias.

While I dislike how Laurie is being handled so far, I love, love, LOVE what they’re doing with Adrian Veidt. After the events of the graphic novel, it seems he’s gone into self imposed exile. Whether this is as a punishment or as a way to make sure he doesn’t inadvertently blab about his involvement with the squid is unknown. Anyway, he’s been here for three years now, judging by the candles on the cake, and he seems to be going a little bit stir crazy. He’s sacrificing his clones in order to try and find a means of escape and now he has to contend with a bloodthirsty game warden (another clone). The idea of Ozymandias being hoist by his own petard and being oppressed by the very tools and instruments of his own vanity is absolutely tantalising, and I love what Jeremy Irons is doing with the part and the way he’s depicting the character’s slow descent into lunacy.

Also a special shoutout has to go to the costume department for the Ozymandias costume we see Adrian finally don. It’s gloriously, breathtakingly terrible. Truly one of the worst superhero costumes ever seen on screen... which is exactly what it should be!

One of the things I intensely disliked about the 2009 movie was Zack Snyder’s attempts to make the characters look cool and stylish when in reality these characters are supposed to be the complete opposite of that. Rorschach looks like a hobo, puts on a gruff voice and wears lifts on his heels in a pathetic attempt to look more imposing. Nite Owl wears a ridiculously tight fitting costume that shows off his belly bulge. Silk Spectre’s outfit looks more like something a stripper would wear and is not even remotely practical. They look stupid to us, the outsiders, but to the characters, it makes them feel powerful. That’s the whole point, and the HBO series captures that perfectly. Adrian is going to war with the game warden and wants to feel powerful, so he puts on his objectively silly purple and gold shawl in an effort to reclaim the power he once had. It’s laugh out hilarious, made all the more funnier by the fact that he’s clearly far too old to be playing dress up. It’s moments like this that demonstrate that Lindelof clearly does understand the source material, which is what makes the way Laurie is treated all the more baffling.

She Was Killed By Space Junk isn’t a bad episode. There’s stuff to like, but it doesn’t have any of the intelligent thematic storytelling or characterisation the previous two episodes had. Coupled with the apparent mishandling of Laurie’s character and the deliberate vagueness of some of its plotting leads to it being an episode that’s ultimately more frustrating than enjoyable to watch.

#she was killed by space junk #watchmen #watchmen hbo #damon lindelof #dc #hbo #review #spoilers

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revoevokukil · 5 years

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On the character writing of Captain Marvel’s antagonists

How is Captain Marvel’s villain game?

The MCU’s story of how Carol Danvers comes to realise what gives her the capacity to do heroic things is rooted in an intimate tale of self-discovery, knowing oneself, and embracing oneself as one is. It is not a classic story of confrontation between good and evil and therefore the classic hero’s journey formula does not apply. Carol is exactly the same personality at the end of the film as she is at the beginning of the film, with the crucial difference that by the end, she is in a position to control and honestly evaluate her own life narrative – she has regained solid ground under her feet without which no one can pass moral judgments or make decisions that affect the lives of other people.

Carol’s origin story is not about punching someone into remorse and submission, but about finding herself (almost literally) – which means that the antagonists of the film are the friends she makes along the way. The opposing force is a deeply personal one and climbs into the protagonist’s soul rather than threatens their life. That makes Yon-Rogg not as one-dimensional as people seem to think. He’s more of a foil than an outright antagonist to Carol on a personal level, but it’s hard to say whether he is overall meant to be represented as a misguided Kree patriot or a hammy villain because the former gets too vague a development and the latter just does not work – war is war, they’re all dirty, and Supreme Intelligence takes the cake here. Since Yon-Rogg’s motivations are strongly informed by his role as the poster boy of the Kree military, the Kree-Skrull plotline actually should be elaborated upon if they wanted to convey him as “the guilty party” in both storylines that push the story forward.

I’ve tried to identify with the villains of the film in order to write the following; consider that it is not a pleasant exercise but an intriguing one nonetheless.

Storylines

There are two storylines that intersect in the film and push the plot onwards: Carol’s unfolding quest to make sense of her past, and the Kree-Skrull war. The twist in Carol’s personal storyline results in a change up in regard to how to view the Kree-Skrull war, but it’s not ground-breakingly illuminating, since the war between these races is never sufficiently elaborated upon and it is not the main emotional centre of the film – how Carol feels about the Kree and her mentor is! Therefore, the antagonists’ character development unfolds in layers.

Consider for a minute, the Kree ideology. Collectivist, imperialist, hyper-militaristic, superior in technology and culture. Roman Empire seems like an appropriate comparison. They see themselves as the rightful rulers by conquest who have a duty to maintain order, safety, and stability within their empire. Realpolitiks of empires. Hyper-militaristic inclinations translate onto the individual level as well where the collective interest is set before one’s individual interests. And it translates into Yon-Rogg’s motivations and outlook very clearly, though with some interesting exceptions that add to his character writing.

· He is a devout warrior, unshakably loyal to the Kree’s cause and their claims of superiority.

Yet he is not fond of the scorched earth tactics of the overly zealous Accusers.

He avoids entangling civilians in the Kree-Skrull conflict to the very last second (he also avoids shooting Carol outright in their very first meeting).

He genuinely cares about his soldiers’ lives, and they trust him a lot in return, even when he is misleading other high-ranking officers in the Kree army (Ronan).

He prioritises the good of all Kree above all else (instead of, notably, personal power).

He genuinely believes in what he is trying to teach Vers (emotions should not rule your good judgment in a conflict situation; the Kree’s enlightened rule is for the better for all); it is not only part of their cover-up scheme.

He views the Skrulls’ means of fighting as dishonourable because of their penchant for subterfuge rather than direct combat. In another context that would be called being “honourable” in combat.

So, as a Kree, an authoritarian space fascist, he is pretty reasonable and a more rounded than your standard evil for evil’s sake goon.

What to make of him in relation to Carol?

It’s twisted from its very beginning, since Yon-Rogg effectively saves Carol’s life by stealing it from her. He hesitates to kill Carol outright by the lake. Then, ironically, saves her life by abducting her as she verges between life and death. And then, metaphorically, the Kree kill Carol Danvers anyway. Only to “bring her back to life” through the blood transfusion from Yon-Rogg and through the presumed genetic meddling to make it stick (her entire blood supply and blood reproduction has to get replaced). A “rebirth” with no memory of past life, but with cosmic powers and superior physiology to contain it. It’s as messy as they come.

That bit of writing also establishes how unnervingly intimate a bond they share (something that comes to underlie a sense of possessiveness and ownership on his part, and confirms that this is not healthy). To see Carol succeed strokes Yon-Rogg’s ego – he made the right call as a soldier, he is part of the origins of her powers, and he is a good teacher. It also makes you think, was it (stupid) curiosity, principles, or admiration that stopped him from shooting Carol? She had almost brought him down in a plane fight, after all. And while he acts under orders from SI, I doubt Yon-Rogg protests its wisdom too much – it is highly likely the Kree see themselves as genuinely benevolent for saving this human and giving her so much by making her one of them (see their sense of superiority, again). If anything, I would expect an AI (not Yon-Rogg) not to want to risk leaving Carol alive and liable to turn against them.

It is said in interviews that Yon-Rogg both appreciates and is irritated by Carol’s “humanity” and quirks. He also seems to me as perfectly aware that what he is doing is wrong on a personal level. Over six years, he and Carol grow close – he is her crutch in Kree culture, Carol trusts him a lot (coming to him after her nightmares) and looks up to him/wants to prove herself to him, and there is even some implicit flirtation between them at the beginning of the film (“it’s me you see, isn’t it?”). That level of friendship entails some empathy. He may be ruthless, but he is not a psychopath (or is only a psychopath to the extent all devout patriotic soldiers are). For despite all that happens to Carol, she is not aware of any of it, and she ends up liking her life with the Kree by the time the film starts. She has military background, she likes to prove herself and be good at things, and the Kree never treat her badly (minus the grand deception part, ofc). From Yon-Rogg’s perspective then, as long as the lie is not found out, it is not objectively a bad life, is it? He has a soft spot for his favourite student (their relationship has been described as “tender” among other things). He has faith in her (“She’s stronger than you think!”), is (over-)protective of her, but wants to genuinely see her succeed - albeit on the Kree’s terms and not her own. He is trying to do his best as a mentor to a soldier and as a soldier to his people, and sincerely believes it will make everything easier for Carol, but because of the manner in which Carol has come to be his pupil, all of what is happening here can only become one huge poisoned chalice. However, you can see how someone like him can justify lying to a person for 6 years - longer still, had Carol not happened to crash on C53.

The truth of the matter is, of course, that Carol due to her amnesia does not have a choice regarding the narrative into which she is thrust, and that is the inherent evil that she overcomes in the film – taking back control over her life’s narrative and thus also gaining the necessary faith in oneself that comes with knowing oneself. The Kree have given her plenty, making up a big part of her (literally), but by infringing on her right to self-determination most horribly in the process. “The best version she could be” can ever only be pushed upon her in this state, like it happens so often in overly controlling families and partnerships.

Consider seriously that while Yon-Rogg’s advice to “control emotions and not let them cloud your judgment” may echo the belittling gender dynamics of our world, it is only an analogy – the Kree are not putting Carol in this situation in the film because she is a woman (they’re arguably rather progressive about their gender and sexual politics by the looks of it). It is not inherently a wrong or bad advice to drill into a soldier, and that is what Carol is – a soldier. However, as it happens, autobiographical long term memory triggers most strongly based on emotions, so suppressing them also counteracts the possibility that Carol might regain her memories. The Kree may well not even know what Carol could do if she was more in touch with herself and her powers – their foremost concern is winning “her heart and mind” so that she doesn’t turn against them. Again, they are personal, psychological villains. So, by tying her more strongly to Kree culture and ways, as well as training her according to that dictum, Yon-Rogg’s hitting two birds with one stone, really. I do not doubt that his orders from SI were, and his mind is set on, ensuring her loyalty by any means necessary. However, in comparison to, for instance, Bucky, the Kree do not literally constantly torture and brainwash her to turn her into a vegetable. It’s a “golden cage” type situation from the perspective of these “benevolent” aliens.

In that sense, the ‘enemy’ of the film is not so much the meme of a “debate me guy” or your ordinary our world chauvinist, or patriarchy (they are analogies, but not inherent to the conflict of the film), but the insidious disregard the Kree show toward individuals and their right to self-determination. As a culture, that is not their thing. And as other cultures are seen as lesser than them, they see their ways as backwards. Arguably that disregard underlies and precedes gendered readings because it applies universally (would they have done anything differently if Carol had been a man? I don’t think so) (also, it underlies the war ideology behind subjugating other races). And war justifies everything, of course, which is the second strongest ‘evil’ motif in the film. That’s pretty good, layered writing, in truth.

Both ‘evils’ are represented in Yon-Rogg’s and Supreme Intelligence’s characterisations, but only the latter remains abstract enough to be the literal representation of it whereas Yon-Rogg is still written with some “humanity” for the lack of a better word. He is very much conveyed as a product of his society, but not even a one-dimensional caricature of that. Sure, we do not get any insight into his inner thoughts, but not once did the details I have written out here give me the impression that Carol is as upset as she is because of betrayal by a lump of evil with no moving parts inside. I can appreciate that in an antagonistic force, because it adds to the hero’s internal confusion if their starting out premise is “friends with my enemy”. There is extreme pragmatism more than there is cruelty in the villain’s intentions. But cruelty follows anyway, because freedom and predetermination cannot not be in conflict, and very rarely does cruelty not follow when ends justify the means quite as brutally as in the case of sacrificing someone’s freedoms for another’s greater cause.

For Yon-Rogg that is not an issue, though he himself is as deprived of freedom under this ideology as Carol is. But Carol’s moral system hails from a different place.

I can relate to it and find it interesting, and not at all one-dimensional. Best of all, it is possible to build upon it.

#captain marvel #carol danvers #yon-rogg #supreme intelligence #kree #character analysis #plot analysis #story deconstruction #brie larson #jude law

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alexsfictionaddiction · 5 years

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Review: The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

It has been a while since I’ve read a YA dystopian novel but The Grace Year sounded like a unique take on an incredibly over-saturated genre. Marketed as a speculative thriller in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Power, the feminist theme was definitely what drew me in.

In the small close-knit patriarchal community of Garner County, girls grow up believing they have a magic inside of them that lures men to temptation and sparks jealousy in other women. So when girls reach the age of 16, the brink of womanhood, they are banished into the wild for a year to rid themselves of their magic in preparation for marriage on their return. But the wilds are full of internal and external dangers around every corner and no one ever talks of the events of the grace year.

The protagonist Tierney wants a life of freedom, untied to a husband and living by her own rules. She also dreams of revolution and a future where women aren’t pitted against each other. She ticks a lot of YA dystopian heroine boxes -humble beginnings, quiet feistiness, fierce determination, a hunger for change. There’s more than a touch of Katniss about her but I didn’t really care about her or her fate in the same way. When I first read The Hunger Games, I remember being completely taken in by Katniss from the start and my heart was in my mouth for the entire trilogy because I was so invested in things working out for her. I didn’t have the same reaction to Tierney and her story and this continued for the entire course of the narrative.

There is a lot of Biblical imagery littered throughout the book and it made the ending feel almost allegorical. Like Christianity, Garner County indoctrinates its inhabitants with certain beliefs, honours certain rituals and adheres to strict misogynistic rules. I really enjoyed picking out all of the parallels and thought it was really clever how Liggett managed to weave them in without spelling everything out.

‘Heaven is a boy in a treehouse with cold hands and a warm heart.’

Around halfway through the book, a twist occurred that I was expecting but that I knew wasn’t going to turn out well. I can’t talk too much about what it actually is without spoiling a turning point of the plot that I think you should discover for yourself. However, this section of the book had some truly beautiful, heartrending passages, as seen above. Although I had issues around my non-investment in most of the characters, I felt quite anxious about this situation and knew that it would end in bloodshed. As well as being wonderfully written, it made for a welcome break from the total chaos that was the rest of the book.

The fact that the girls tear each other down, sabotage each other and are even violent towards each other during the grace year did ring true for me in many ways. Although it turns out that their vicious behaviour is not actually entirely natural in the case of these girls, Liggett clearly doesn’t subscribe to this school of thought. I went to an all-girls comprehensive senior school and I can safely say that this isn’t the case for teenagers. Despite the fact, there are no men around to impress or perform for, this weird need to be queen bee and to eliminate all other rivals is still prominent.

There is an argument that without the presence of men, women actually behave quite harmoniously and co-operate as a nurturing, thriving community. For example, the Amazons lifted each other up and fiercely protected their own but maybe this is because they were privileged enough to have never known men. Perhaps once girls have experienced a patriarchy, it infects them with an innate aggression that never fully goes away without an active feminist revelation.

I smiled to myself when Tierney finally managed to convince them that none of this was necessary and that they have the power to collectively overthrow the system. I felt the wave of hope that passed through the girls at this point and I was incredibly happy for them.

The Grace Year is an incredibly violent and often confusing novel. I found it difficult to understand what was really going on during a lot of the killings and so they didn’t quite have the emotional impact they perhaps should have done. A lot of the action scenes aren’t terribly descriptive and I feel that it may actually translate better on screen. I’m delighted that rights to a film adaptation have already been optioned, so I guess I’ll watch this space!

Overall, The Grace Year isn’t quite as unique as I was hoping it would be. It is very tropey, the setting isn’t vivid enough and Tierney is very much a cookie-cutter dystopian heroine. Despite there being some really lovely writing in there, I know that in a few weeks from now, all I’ll remember is a lot of blood, dismemberment and something about flowers.

#the grace year #kim liggett #dystopian #ya #book review #review #books #bookworm

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elenajohansenreads · 4 years

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Books I Read in 2019

#166 - Ice Massacre, by Tiana Warner

The Reading Frenzy’s Holly Jolly Readathon -- A book with a wintery word in the title

Rating: 1/5 stars

Another hugely hyped book that was a vast disappointment to me. The concept is cool, I'll give it that, or I wouldn't have picked it up in the first place. But the world-building is thin, the plot full of gaping holes, the characters mostly without personality, and the action is jaw-grindingly constant to the point where it leaves no room for character development or better world-building. And calling this a sapphic love story is just laughable. Literally the last thing in the book is the main character realizing she's in love with her childhood best friend who's also a girl who's also a mermaid--but they spend most of the books at odds with each other because of misunderstandings, because of the fact that they're both supposed to want to kill each other, and because they can't truly trust each other for most of the story. Eventually there's a small measure of devotion, but there's no romance to speak of. Everyone's too busy fighting, and I do mean everyone. But okay, if it's setup for the future installments, I could give that a pass. What I can't forgive is the insanely stupid logic of this thin, nonsensical world-building. First, the simple idea of the merpeople's "allure"--their hypnotizing magic--being effective against the opposite gender only is heteronormative in the extreme. My bisexual self is plenty attracted to women, so for most of the book I felt like it should work on me just fine. (And I can't even address the issues of trans or nonbinary characters, because there aren't any.) When it eventually became obvious that allure working on everyone would break the plot (the two friends can't fall in love with each other if magic is involved because then it's fake, also then the entire idea of sending girls out instead of boys to fight is a moot point and there's no story) I threw my hands up in the air and said to myself, "I'll accept it but I don't think it's good." Second, that leads to another problem; if the merpeople sent their women to fight because the human warriors had always been male before, when they discover the new ship of warriors are female, shouldn't they send their men instead? Oh, wait, they're all lampshaded to be fighting somewhere else entirely, in a different ocean. Except...are they all really gone? Because if they are, then who's making babies? We know there are babies because the crazy girl kills an infant. Which, by the way, is a war crime if you consider the mermaid "people," because clearly an infant is a noncombatant. So that's fun. (Also she ends up murdering a crewmate, but that's not tied to any of my complaints, actually, which almost surprises me. It was terrible but it actually sort of made sense at the time that it would happen the way it did.) But really, why keep sending the mermaids to kill the girls when mermen would have the advantage? Third, the structure of the Massacre itself. Would you have me believe that a group of twenty girls who have been training together for five years can't put aside petty high-school-style drama long enough to not get each other killed? Do you mean to tell me that the position of captain is assigned by their trainer, with a list of captains to follow in case of death or incapacitation, and it never once occurred to anyone organizing this thing that that's a recipe for constant mutiny? Do you seriously expect me to believe no adults went with them for supervision? That no adult women could have been trained alongside them to sail the ship, if not to actually fight? That no adult woman on the entire island was capable or available to be their captain and keep all those little shits in line? Weren't those people fishermen before the mermaids invaded, and that's why they're being starved out now? Sure, in modern military we train people about their age for combat, but we don't send them out on their own without superior officers, older and more experienced and hopefully with a little more wisdom! And if the problem is that they can't send the men who have survived their Massacres because now we send women because of the allure, then why were they ever sending men in the first place? Why did it take so long to decide to train girls instead? (The story's answer: unquestioned patriarchy. Girls aren't warriors. Because.) Fourth: no one has much of a personality, they're too busy getting killed. Of the twenty girls who set sail, I believe only seven or eight survive. They are mostly names on a page who die. Even some of the survivors, I couldn't tell you anything about, be it their physical appearance or their demeanor. They are mermaid fodder, some are there to be Captain Crazypants' cronies, they are faceless and interchangeable in death. Back to the "romance" for a second: I don't read Meela's constant distaste for her compatriots talking about boys or their boyfriends as her actually being in love with her female mermaid childhood best friend. That early, it doesn't even seem to allow for the possibility. It was far easier for me to read Meela as ace and/or aro--she seems completely uninterested in romance with the guy back home who's in love with her, and she says outright at one point that she can't imagine kissing him or having kids with him. Yes, it's all coded, but to me that's all code for aro-ace, possibly even to the point of sex-repulsed ace. The depth of her aceness would be open to interpretation, but nothing about her characterization for most of the book, such as it is, says to me, "no, she doesn't like Tanuu or boys in general but she's got confused feelings for girls she doesn't understand." She just doesn't seem to think romantic love or sex is important. So throwing it out there at the very end that she thinks she's in love with Lysi doesn't ring true to me at all, even though I could see it coming from the structure. Final problem: the plot takes a completely unexpected and illogical turn at the last second. The whole book has been about the Massacre, and then when it's almost over, our main character sacrifices herself (kind of) and gets captured by the mer-king (sort of) who agrees to let her and the few remaining crew go home so she can find a MacGuffin that's apparently a legend of their home island...that none of them have ever heard of. So if they don't know their own legends, how does the mer-king? There's no foreshadowing for this (or if there is it's so subtle as to be invisible), it makes no sense with the rest of the book, narratively speaking it's a deus ex machina to get them home when they're basically doomed otherwise. And obviously it's setting up the next book. But I don't care. I don't care because this one is so bad I don't want to read any more.

#booklr #book review #ice massacre #tiana warner #book photography #my photos #my reading challenges #the reading frenzy

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kcwcommentary · 5 years

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VLD1x02 – “From Days of Long Ago”

1x02 – “From Days of Long Ago”

(Note: With the large amount of characterization/Lion-lore in this episode, the following is kind of long.)

With the second episode, we get the actual opening sequence. The sequence that never changes at all despite significant changes in the show that should have resulted in it being revised (the Lion pilot switch, Zarkon’s death, the destruction of the Castle of Lions). It’s good for now, but they really should have changed it, or at least the relevant shots within it as the show changed content.

The group bickers a bit during the descent to the planet’s surface, most notably Lance and Keith, until Shiro, again demonstrating his authority to be leader of the group, tells everyone to focus. Shiro uses appropriate team management skills by recognizing the division of labor and asks Lance, in his capacity as pilot, where they’re heading. Lance can’t help getting in another joke before turning back to being serious.

We arrive at the Castle of Lions. Shiro, ever the protector, advises caution. The Blue Lion roars open the Castle’s doors. The Castle eventually reacts, saying “Hold for identity scan.” This is very much a minor complaint but how does the Castle’s systems know English? Space shows with aliens all have this issue; sometimes shows handwave it with a quick line or moment about the use of technology or other methods allowing for instantaneous translation, but this show gives nothing. If this was my only complaint about this show, everything would be golden. But I still would have liked it addressed, or at least have something that indicated that the producers and writers of this show realized the challenge of language and communication that comes with the setting of a story in space with aliens.

Our team wanders through the Castle until they get to the stasis pods holding Allura and Coran. Allura emerges first, and the first word she speaks is: “Father!” The presence of patriarchy in this show begins early. Her focus on her father is literally the first word we ever hear Allura speak. Lance then can’t help himself but to try to flirt with her (learn some timing, man). She doesn’t return his interest. Allura does display some prejudice by being disgusted by human ears. She’s bound to have seen plenty of non-Alteans before, so why recoil so significantly over someone having slightly different ears than she has? She’s really not making the best introduction of herself.

Shiro, the one with any sense, tries to get Allura to recognize that they are as much in the dark about what all is going on as she is, and that they need her to provide answers but are also willing to work with her.

Out comes Coran, and immediately shows himself to be in charge of the department of comic relief on the show. “How could you do that when I’ve already come at you like this: Ha! Ha! Hai!” I laughed.

Allura introduces her and Coran’s 10,000-year time gap. Having reflected on this detail over the course of watching the show in the past, I think 10,000 years ended up being a ridiculous, overly large time frame. That our major antagonists now (Zarkon, Haggar) are the same as the antagonists from 10,000 years ago, it’s too much.

Flashback to King Alfor, who has a disagreement with Allura over whether they should fight Zarkon. Alfor uses the magic of patriarchy to touch his daughter on the cheek and render her unconscious. Nothing says that, as a father, you love and value your daughter like depriving her of agency and knocking her unconscious indefinitely.

The sides of this conflict are clearly established. Team Voltron, our heroes, and Altea versus Zarkon, Haggar, and the Galra. Haggar introduces herself with her cryptic behavior. Her being cryptic now is okay because this is the beginning of the story, but that behavior from her becomes more and more bothersome, distracting, and disruptive of the development of the narrative the more seasons of the show we get. We then get the introduction of Sendak.

We also have the introduction of the mice, who have more presence and significance in the show than Shiro’s “significant other” Adam or his last-minute husband ever got.

Lance and Keith continue to bicker, and Shiro again uses his authority to get them stop. I miss Shiro as a leader.

“Good, let them come!” Allura declares. At this early stage of the show, Allura’s prejudice depicted earlier and this angry, brashness now feel like the show is setting her up to be naïve now but to grow in wisdom as the show progresses. By the end of the show, she’s not naïve, but she’s not the beacon of wisdom that it feels like she was supposed to become.

Allura gives the team, and thereby the viewers, a major presentation of the show’s lore. She tells us, “The Lions choose their pilots. It is a mystical bond and cannot be forced. The quintessence of the pilot is mirrored in his lion. Together they form something greater than science can explain.” This is the establishment of rules on the show’s system; this is a promise the show is making to the viewer that this is how things work. I’m not personally fond of the mysticism “greater than science” aspect though, especially since the Lions were built by Alfor and the Alteans of long ago. This lore from Allura, until revealed otherwise later, made me think that some other super ancient and very powerful aliens built the Lions and that the Alteans had only acquired them. How Alfor could build the Lions without understanding how they work defies the nature of the process of engineering and construction. Also, if Alfor created the Lions, then where did their consciousness and personalities come from?

That last line aside though, the premise that the pilot and the Lion mirror one another is intriguing. It creates a narrative framework that allows us to understand the characters through their bonding with their lions.

“The Black Lion is the decisive head of Voltron. It will take a pilot who is a born leader, and in control at all times. Someone whose men will follow without hesitation. That is why, Shiro, you will pilot the Black Lion.” I do object to the idea that anyone is a “born leader.” Leadership is a skillset; you learn and practice and grow as a leader. No one is born a leader. That aside, this proclamation cleanly assigns the position of the leader of the group to Shiro (until the show decides to unceremoniously take it from him in later seasons to shove him off to the side as no longer a member of the team). The qualities Allura ascribes here – decisiveness, leadership, self-control – those are all qualities we’ve already seen demonstrated by Shiro in the first two episodes of the show. Shiro’s discipline is what gives him the authority to tell Lance and Keith to stop fighting. His decisiveness is what prompts Lance to ask Shiro for orders at the end of the first episode, and it is what enables Shiro to diplomatically manage Allura’s initial freak-out when she comes out of stasis. Shiro is the leader of this team. The Black Lion says so. (The show never gives us a reason for Shiro to not be in the position of Black Paladin and leader of Voltron despite his removal in later episodes.)

“The Green Lion has an inquisitive personality and needs a pilot of intellect and daring. Pidge, you will pilot the Green Lion.” And we’ve totally seen this in Pidge. She’s clearly inquisitive as shown by her constructing her own equipment so that she can gain transmission and observational data from Kerberos toward her goal of busting the GG’s lie about the Kerberos mission. We saw it in this episode in a quick, subtle two-part moment where she first sees the computer interface in the stasis pod room, expresses a wonder how it works, and then, once Allura activates and uses the terminal, declares, “That’s how that works.” It’s a small moment, but it’s one of Pidge’s in the first three episodes that really gets to me. It’s not just about intelligence for her, but also curiosity. Also identified in this proclamation is the need for daring in the Green Paladin. That’s definitely a quality we see very prominently in later episodes, sometimes much to my annoyance (because in those moments it makes Pidge incredibly short-sighted).

“The Blue Lion…” Allura’s interrupted. Lance makes a declaration of his own. He’s cocky. Allura’s annoyed and moves on without providing a description for the Blue Lion’s preferred qualities. This gap in the lore is never actually filled in, so we, as viewers, can only ever make suppositions ourselves. I wonder if the Blue Lion might like what we got from Lance in this very moment. Rather than allow Allura to make a proclamation about his qualities, Lance engages in an act of self-definition. With Lance’s story arc (at least before this show ceased to understand its characters) set up as him struggling with his sense of self-worth in light of the skills and reputation of others, I could see the Blue Lion with a value of self-determination as setting Lance up to come to terms with his insecurities through the process of self-definition.

“The Yellow Lion is caring and kind. Its pilot is one who puts the needs of others above his own. His heart must be mighty. As the leg of Voltron, you will lift the team up and hold them together.” This makes it seem the show is setting Hunk up to function as best able to ensure the team remains unified or regains unity in stressful, fractious situations. It also suggests Hunk can be self-sacrificial, with placing others’ needs above his own. Unfortunately, I’m not sure any of this ever really manifests narratively for Hunk as the show goes on. Maybe in a few, smaller moments here and there, but never anything narratively significant. While the show does retain Hunk’s skill with engineering/technology, I mostly feel he’s reduced to an ongoing joke about food. There’s nothing wrong with loving food, of course, but that should be a comparatively minor detail in defining Hunk’s character. Most of the description associated with him proclaimed here feels forgotten/lost as the show goes on.

“The Red Lion is temperamental and the most difficult to master. It’s faster and more agile than the others, but also more unstable. Its pilot needs to be someone who relies more on instincts than skill alone.” Keith’s the hothead, the aggressive one. Yup, definitely have seen that in him so far. The declaration that Red is difficult to master implies that Keith has an aspect of himself that he isn’t in control of, part of himself that he hasn’t mastered yet. The problem with the show abandoning the lore that there are qualities each Lion expects of its pilot is that Keith no longer has to master himself as part of being the Red Paladin. Lance replacing Keith in Red does not connect Lance to the qualities ascribed here. It also invalidates the idea that Lance in Blue is about self-determination; rather than finding his own value, Lance always remains a substitute to Keith – he only got into the fighter pilot program because Keith was no longer in it, and he only got into the Red Lion because Keith was no longer in it. Keith in Red was about him learning to harness himself, to hone his instincts (aka his wildness) and find mastery over himself. Any of that kind of character growth happens for him offscreen and never as a result of his piloting the Red Lion.

The team splits up to track down and acquire the other Lions. The Green Lion is in some jungle environment. There is a really nice peacefulness to this location. “I’ve been locked up by aliens for a year. This is nothing,” Shiro says. I love this line. Shiro has been through some severely traumatic events in the past year, so his calmness here in the face of an expedition to another planet, it’s all good to him. Can someone let Shiro have two weeks of vacation on this planet please?

Lance and Hunk have less easy of a time getting Yellow. Lance literally throws Hunk out of Blue, further demonstrating Lance as being an instigating influence. We saw that in how he was responsible for the group coming together in the first place. I love Hunk’s little monologue while he’s trying to hotwire the platform: “Oh yeah sure, just drop me off on an alien planet. That’s cool. It’s only occupied by big, mean, purple aliens that want to kill me, but whatever. Just ignore them and go connect with a big, yellow, mechanical cat.” This is a moment of Hunk’s voice acting that I really love. The sarcasm, the quick-fire delivery. It’s fun.

Shiro’s retelling of Commander Holt’s comment, “If you get too worried about what can go wrong, you might miss a chance to do something great” is so nice. Shiro’s so supportive. Can I have one of him in my life please? The quiet calmness of Shiro’s voice in this part is so nice; I could listen to him talk like that all day long.

Lance ends up in a precarious situation and Hunk and the Yellow Lion come to the rescue, though apparently by accident. Conveniently, Allura’s ability to hold the wormholes open begins to fade just as the Lions are acquired. Also conveniently, they’ve located Red. Inconveniently, Sendak issues his threat. How does communication systems for the Castle Ship work? Sendak establishes communications and makes his demand without anyone in the ship having to activate the system; really?

Part two of what functions as a three-parter complete.

#voltron legendary defender #voltron #vld #voltron criticism #vld criticism #voltron critical #vld critical #vld season 1 #vld 1x02 #commentary

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taz-writes · 6 years

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10 Questions Tag Game

@micastarsandmirrors tagged me on my main blog for this, but I’m posting it here because it seemed more appropriate. :>

1. Which author(s) inspires you the most?

Oof, hard question! Recently I’ve been really inspired by Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series--I love how he deconstructs fantasy as a genre. Guards! Guards! is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time.

2. Someone from a different world asks you, “Show me the song of your people” which earth song would you play for them?

Madeon’s Pop Culture. It’s such a genius reimagining of SO many other songs, and it encapsulates modern pop musical culture in a way that’s really fantastic. I love it. It’s not actually my favorite song, but as an example to an alien of what Earth music is, it’s a pretty good case study.

3. How did you get the idea for your current WIP?

Feilan is drawn from the mythology of a recess game I used to play with my friends in elementary school. My friends and I would team up and LARP as our super cool powerful fairy avatars and fight the annoying boys from the classroom next door evil! As we grew up, the lore of Fairyland grew darker and more complicated, and I borrowed bits and pieces of dozens of other stories to glue them to my self insert and my friends’. We grew out of the game, but the paracosm we’d created stuck with me. Around sixth grade, I started putting those old recess games into writing!

4. Which of your characters is a lover not a fighter and which is a fighter not a lover?

Honestly, most of my characters are both! Feilan is an action story and the majority of the cast is prepared to throw down at any time. I think Lavender is the lover-not-a-fighter. She’s a healer, after all, and she prefers to avoid conflict. The fighter is definitely Amalie.

5. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what do you listen to?

Sometimes! It depends on my mood, and what kind of scene I’m trying to write. Usually, I prefer instrumental music. I have a class at school where the homework is just listening to a few hours of classical music, so I’ll do that a lot while I write. Otherwise... video game music is the way to go. Undertale has a freaking amazing soundtrack. Also, I’m still quite fond of the Homestuck music albums.... They have a lot of great songs for setting a mood.

6. What’s the best way to piss off your main OC?

Tell her she’s not good enough to be worthy of something. Bonus points if you imply her opinions don’t matter, or bring up her birth status. That’ll get her riled up in half a second flat.

7. What inspired you to write your current WIP(S)?

Oh boy here we go, here’s the novel. Feilan’s backstory is long and very emotional.

When I was growing up, I could never find stories to read that actually gave me what I wanted. I was raised on that early-2000s strand of Girl Power(tm) that was really obsessed with characters who are girls fighting the patriarchy and everyone cares that they’re girls because there’s clearly nothing more important about their characters........ Either that or they were just straight up annoying. I adored Winx Club but every time the girls went shopping another piece of me died. I had a well-established Not Like Other Girls complex but at the same time reading characters who thought like that was really annoying? There were a lot of things I hated in the stories I read growing up: inescapable love interests, tiny sparkly boring fairies, the anti-sue genre of Plain Modest Protagonists who aren’t allowed to be powerful or even aware that they could be, female characters who can’t do anything without reminding us that they’re girls and girls can’t normally do this but I can and look how special that is!!, the inevitable Girl Media Shopping Montage... et cetera.

I didn’t want that. I wanted Lord of the Rings, but with girls, and maybe a cute boy!Galadriel. I wanted a story where girls being heroes wasn’t a big deal, or even worth questioning. I couldn’t find those things, so I decided I’d make my own, drawn out of my shameless childhood power fantasies. Feilan is an aggressive defiance of pretty much all the tropes in the last paragraph. I’ve stuck to it so doggedly because even now, I still have trouble finding stories with the kinds of characters I want to read about. I’ve always been super invested in stories about characters who are Like Me, who are girls with feminine and masculine interests, who have ADHD but are still smart anyways, who are short and built strong instead of slender. I used to refuse to watch cartoons unless there was at least one blonde girl that I could latch onto who wasn’t a stereotype Popular Girl. More recently, I want to see characters who are bi like me, where nobody makes a big deal out of it. I don’t even like romance stories, I don’t understand why it has to matter if X likes girls and boys! Just let her do that and get her girlfriend and get back to saving the world! And I fucking hate stories that pretend to be progressive by driving in over and over again how X character is a girl, X character is so gay--the ultimate result is just reminding me that I’m weird somehow. By... being a person, I guess. I hate those narratives so much but especially in mainstream YA, they’re practically inevitable?

So I wanted to write Feilan so I could have the story I wanted to read but never found, about characters who are like me and dealing with my problems and my strengths and my fears. And I’ve kept writing it because I still want that, and I want Feilan to be that story for other people too, because I don’t think I’m alone here. It’s also a major outlet for my emotions.

This is a long answer, but I think it’s pretty clear why. :)

8. What is the last book/series you finished reading?

The last book I read was an English translation of Ghost Opera by Mercedes Roffe, which I read for a class I’m taking right now in the art of translation. It’s very far away from my usual fantasy genre, but I really enjoyed it! If you like neat artsy poetry, give it a look sometime, especially if you speak Spanish and can experience it in the original language.

9. What finally made you say, “Wow! I really like writing, I’m gonna keep doing this”?

When I was in fourth grade I won a local writing contest with a cute little poem about nature, and I got to go to a book fair event and read it out loud in a fancy auditorium, and I was SO UNBELIEVABLY STOKED. My mom was really proud of me, too. A couple people complimented the poem to me afterwards and it made my year. I decided that I wanted to win again the next year, and started taking poetry more seriously.

10. What’s your favorite thing about writing?

Rereading my work. It’s so incredible to me sometimes, because I can and will cry over events in my own story, and I get so happy reading over the triumphs of my own OCs that I wrote out with my own hands and there’s something so beautiful and powerful about seeing these ideas that I created in my brain grow wings and fly. I cried a lot, when I printed out the first draft of Feilan’s book 1 and held it in my hands. That’s mine! I did that! I did all of that, and now I can hold it and see it and show people!

I’m now tagging @pumapauus @greenhousewriting @jaidynwrites @hklunethewriter and anyone else who’s interested to answer these 10 questions, then write your own and pass it on! Feel free to ignore if you don’t have the time :) Anyone else who sees this and is interested, you’re welcome to answer too and say I tagged you!

1. What does your workspace look like? Do you have a designated ‘writing area’?

2. Do you prefer to write solo heroes or ensemble casts?

3. Which of your characters reminds you the most of yourself?

4. What’s one trait your main OC has that you wish you had, too?

5. Have you changed or removed any major elements of your current WIP since its original draft/concept? What was the biggest change, and why did you make it?

6. If you had to give your main WIP a theme song, what would it be?

7. What’s your favorite non-writing-related hobby?

8. What are some of your favorite books?

9. What’s your favorite trope to read and/or write? What’s your least favorite?

10. What do you love most about your own work and why?

#taz talks #tag game #i got reasonably emotional over some of these answers lol

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movietvtechgeeks · 6 years

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Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/andrea-riseborough-talks-hollywood-sexism-mother-sucker-four-films-sundance/

Andrea Riseborough talks Hollywood sexism, Mother Sucker and four films at Sundance

Andrea Riseborough is having quite the banner year at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival as she is featured in four films including the U.S. Dramatic Competition films Nancy and Burden, the Midnight selection Mandy (in which she acts alongside Nicolas Cage), and the Spotlight film The Death of Stalin. From one film to the next she not only plays a completely different character, she’s thoroughly unrecognizable, transforming herself physically and vocally, whether it’s as a raven-haired eccentric in Nancy or as a country girl with a deep southern drawl in Burden. But the moment that Riseborough wanted to discuss in this interview wasn’t hers, but the collective one pushing for change in the film industry. More women have felt empowered to speak out about sexism, harassment, and abuse in Hollywood and independent film, and in this conversation and others throughout this week and in the months prior, Riseborough has added her own impassioned voice to the call. As she discusses below, she’s also working to change things systemically, having formed a production company called Mother Sucker that is run entirely by women. After several years of development, the company’s first completed project is Nancy, on which it served as co-producer. When an actor turns up at the Festival with multiple films, the inevitable question is how you managed to work this much over the course of the past year. The reality of production is more complicated though, in that you might have completed a few of these films at an earlier time, and of course, some films take longer than others to make. But still, four films at Sundance demonstrates an actor working hard and in demand, so clearly you’re doing something right. The pay disparity has been bad for the last couple of years. It’s actually gotten worse than it had been in the past. I found myself really just needing to accept more work in order to keep up as a woman. Generally the projects I really care about, the ones that push the needle, the ones that have diversity and eventually one day affect some sort of social change, are not ones that pay a great deal. You have a choice of doing one really terrible movie a year—which I’m just not interested because I end up wanting to kill myself—or, as a woman, you can do five projects to make up the same sort of pay. I would’ve liked to have not worked as much. But that’s the reality. That’s the honest truth. I did do them all back to back, and in one of the films I was paid 1/24th of what my male co-star was paid. Did you know the extent of that disparity at the time? Yes, I did. I knew that. And I went into it with my eyes open because I believed in the director, in his unique perspective and voice. That he’s not a run of the mill, mainstream director. As women, we make our money from being involved in more male-driven projects that make the money. We have to balance between doing some of that, where hopefully you don’t feel too compromised because it’s normally a male-heavy situation on set, and putting money back into films like Nancy with my company, which is an all-female film company. You’re referring to Mother Sucker, right? Yes. And then you take a hit financially, of course. Not many people want to invest in diversity. Though I do feel like that has changed in the last few months, which is a wonderful, wonderful feeling. And I feel now like I can actually step into a room and say, “I would like equal pay with my male co-star.” Not that they’ll give it to me. But I feel like I could say it and the option wouldn’t be off the table. Which is what used to happen in the past. If you asked for more money, they would just offer it to somebody else. Because they could. The long-term message being that you’re disposable. And that’s the opposite of what we’re all striving to come to believe in life, isn’t it? And that’s coming from a deeply fortunate position—I cannot even imagine what an actor of color goes through. When and why did you start Mother Sucker? In 2012, and the original concept was: What would it be like to see a film that was, from beginning to end, a female construction? Beyond that, I wondered what it would be like to live in a world where town planning had been done by women, rather than men. Where we didn’t live in concrete boxes, separate from one another, but in communal spaces where we all breast fed each other’s children. I’d really like to walk through a world of female constructs because the patriarchy has been in place for so long. I had been going through a very difficult moment with a film that I was on. I was originally the protagonist, and then I was bumped down to a secondary role in order for the male to be the protagonist. I tried to get out of it but couldn’t. So I just started writing ferociously—I’ve always written. A couple of projects came about, and we developed a few things, then I met Christina Choe and we started the Nancy journey. I quickly realized that was going to be the first film Mother Sucker was going to be part of co-producing. Because Christina’s voice is so strong. She truly is the definition of an auteur. What did you learn from the making of a film co-produced by an all-female company? We wrap early on set. Meaning you’re actually able to have a life during the shooting of the film? No, let’s not be crazy. Just very efficient. The experiment concept has not yet been fully had, because Nancy was made with several other companies, and mine is the only one that is all female. But for another film coming up I would really like to try it, to see how the energy shifts on screen when everyone around it is a woman. I mean, it might be a shitshow, who knows? But I think it’s a very interesting social experiment. I’ve spent so many days being the one woman surrounded by lots of men—and a makeup artist. Sometimes it’s very hard to do my work. Sometimes I have felt unsafe on set. People say weird things to you. You feel very outnumbered. You come onto the set and you feel virtually invisible. It’s hard to command focus on a set. I don’t mean the way a director [commands focus], I just mean to be very silent and do what you need to do. Imagine giving birth. Imagine being raped. To have that silence where it’s not just joke time for everyone else. It’s very difficult with a woman. We often do most of the emoting. We often need to get in that headspace, and it’s just tough. I just imagine getting in that headspace and being surrounded by a bunch of women. Why not just see [what happens]? We almost did it on Nancy, which was really wonderful. Let’s talk about your performance in Nancy. I would imagine it’s a tougher role because she’s somebody who makes it hard for the audience to read—she’s a bit of a fabricator and lives in her own head a lot of the time. As the performer, you have a much better sense of who Nancy is, but you also can’t always reveal that. From the beginning of Nancy, it was always very clear to me. She was an entire human being, which I really appreciated. Flawed, confused, disenfranchised, isolated. Desperately wanting to connect. Feeling isolated and disconnected from the rest of the human race, which we all feel with the advent of social media. That feeling of wanting to connect and not knowing how to do it is very timely. Christina and I used to joke that if Nancy had been brought up on the Upper East Side of New York to very liberal parents, perhaps she might have been one of the great writers of our time. But what actually happened was that she was smart enough and unusual enough that she ended up being the madwoman in her hometown. I mean, what would’ve happened to us if we hadn’t have gotten out of where we were from? We probably would have ended up as the mad people, too. You could see how, with a different writer and different performer, that role could be played as a madwoman. But you definitely pull back from that. Well, she’s just a woman. All of us, in some respect, felt that. It’s so real and accurate to portray a woman as flawed. We have a film culture in which men are portrayed as flawed consistently. And a history of portraying women born to a few narrow things, and generally not all of the things together. They rarely make up a whole person. We can all identify with Nancy. We can all laugh at the manipulations that we’ve all been part of to some extent in our lives. Whether it’s for survival, or for gain. That unhealthy behavior is very familiar to me. And then, when she reaches out to Leo and Alan, the moment is too much. She doesn’t quite know where to put it. There’s a feeling of deep discomfort as a response to being loved. I think that is something we can all identify with. That’s very human. When it’s just too much. We crave it. We pull for it. And once we get it we don’t know what to do with it. I’d like to also talk about Burden, another of your films in the Festival, with both of these appearing in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. Judy is technically a supporting character, to Garrett Hedlund’s character of Michael Burden. Yet Judy does carry a huge moral weight in the narrative but is integral to his transformation and redemption. I think of the reverend as the hero. I would like to have seen [the story] from that perspective. But yes, Judy was the catalyst for most of the change, and she suffered for a lot of the actions that Mike took. I wanted to show how much of a part she actually played, which wasn’t quite reflected in our story. The facts about what actually happened are very interesting if you look into it. Did you meet the real Judy? Oh yes. Many times. Was that helpful? I would imagine sometimes it can be intimidating or derailing. It’s tricky when you meet the real people and you get the real facts. It’s always difficult to set those aside. It was very helpful to see that Judy was the person whose heart was open to change. She was the person who stayed changed, and didn’t go back after all of this. The reverend runs up to her and yells “Super Judy” when he sees her in the supermarket. She grew up in an environment where most of the people she knew joined the Klan at 16, yet she still felt innately like it was wrong. And the way that society still is wrong. In a different time, years down the line, will a black writer have the resources to tell the story from the reverend’s perspective? I hope so. I’m kind of sick of seeing it from the same perspective all the time. I really like seeing things from a different perspective. I’m a white woman. I’ve spent so much time in my body. I’ve known enough of that. I go to the cinema, and I want to see other people. I want to see other walks of life. Different perspectives. As an actor, you’re a great ambassador for the power of story to take us out of ourselves. Part of why you do what you do is following an impulse to inhabit other experiences. And that’s also partly why we’re drawn to the cinema. Why we’re drawn to stories, no matter who we are or where we are coming from. I don’t think anyone wants to hear their own story told over and over again. I think you’re absolutely right, and I think that’s the beautiful thing about humans. We’re really hungry to understand each other. Part of the gossip and the voyeurism comes from wanting to learn more about each other, to know more about what’s going on with other people behind closed doors. This a great time because now I think studios are so focused on the way they are set up, and on the white patriarchy specifically, they are really having to be held accountable now. Whether they are interested or not, whether they are morally invested or not. We just need to make sure that the door doesn’t close. It’s open and we cannot allow it to close. That’s why I think putting women in power and into creative positions is really important, because we can’t let the change be superficial, we can’t let it all be about show and checking a box. I can honestly already tell you though that this year, going into 2018, I know that I can say I want equal pay with my male co-star who has a smaller part than I do. They may not listen, but that I can bring that up and the job won’t necessarily go away. That’s huge. It’s so huge! I feel a bit like I won the fucking lottery. It’s so weird. I have a meeting this afternoon and I’m going to bring that very thing up with my agent. She’s a wonderful agent at CAA and been in a powerful position for a long time. And we’re going to bring that up today and it feels like Christmas. It’s very empowering and hopeful. And I don’t see that as irrelevant to the art itself. As someone invested in the life and evolution of the form, I can’t help but think that if we stop thinking about actors and performers as replaceable, as types and commodities, then the casting and the performances will get better, more diverse, and truer to our experiences. I can’t help but think that. Absolutely. The more diverse voices we get, the more perspectives that stories are told from. The story is often a similar story. We can tell Star Wars from a different character’s perspective, you can tell it from the eyes of the Wookies. There is a way for every perspective to be valid. We can tell a story that we’re all familiar with, but from the perspective of somebody else, somebody’s whose shoes we may not have walked in.

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#Andrea Riseborough #Featured #Garret Hedlund #Interviews #Mandy #Nancy #Sundance Film Festival

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