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mst3kproject · 4 years

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She Freak

Oh, boy, this is going to be a fucking delight. If the 1932 movie Freaks were Invasion of the Saucer Men, She Freak would be Attack of the The Eye Creatures. Freaks is a very troubling movie, but it does go to great effort to present the denizens of the sideshow as human beings who can be loving, greedy, heartbroken, or naïve as much as anyone else, and who find family in each other when the rest of the world rejects them – and must be very careful who they let into that club. The horror of the story is derived as much from their predicament as from the fate of Cleopatra. She Freak is… not like that.

A woman named Jade Cochrane works at a little diner somewhere in the south, quietly (and sometimes not-so-quietly) enduring sexual harassment from both the customers and her married boss. Wanting more out of life, she quits her job and goes looking for work at a passing carnival, which she figures will at least allow her to travel. From there she sets her sights on marrying Steve St. John, the owner of the freak show and the richest man connected with this community. Unfortunately for everybody around her, even this very moderate form of power corrupts Jade to the core, and after too much of her mistreatment, the sideshow stars take a horrible revenge!

The opening sequence is a bunch of carnival footage in which everybody looks bored, worryingly reminiscent of both Carnival Magic and MUZ. Even worse, quite a bit of it is shot by somebody sitting on a moving ferris wheel or other midway ride. I’ve never been able to enjoy midway rides because I get motion sickness (I can’t see J. J. Abrams movies in theatres for the same reason), so this was not a fun experience for me, even on my tiny laptop screen. It goes on way too long, and most of it doesn’t even have any credits over it. Crow would have fled to go throw up in a corner.

The moment I knew She Freak belonged on MST3K, however, is this shot:

What the hell does that sign say? YHJCY A+ FTJB? What does it mean? Is it an acronym? A secret code? An in-joke? A message to or from aliens? That would have fascinated Mike and the ‘bots. They’d have built a whole host sketch around that sign.

She Freak is tooth-rattlingly bad in many different ways. I don’t know what any of the people in it think they’re doing but it sure isn’t acting. It’s relentlessly padded, full of pointless footage of putting the midway up, taking the midway down, putting the midway back up again, and carnival-goers wandering around looking dazed. At one point we have to watch a stripper do her act, to a chorus of background hooting and applause that sure isn’t coming from the bored-to-shit audience we see. Most of the film feels like nothing is happening, and then what ought to have been the entire plot is crammed into the last fifteen minutes.

The one place where there is a glimmer of competence is in a couple of quite nice directing choices. There’s a scene where Jade leaves her new husband with his buddies and sneaks off to bang the guy who runs the ferris wheel, Blackie (don’t worry, he’s white. She Freak has a little person called ‘Shorty’, but to my relief it wasn’t tasteless enough to cast a character named ‘Blackie’ as an African American) that makes a very good use of shadows to tell us what’s going on in two places at once. Pity the film stock is so crappy it almost ruins it. I also liked how Jade’s scenes with Blackie have proper dialogue, while Steve woos her in a series of montages. Jade wants to spend time with Blackie, while her marriage to Steve is something she goes through the motions of and gets out of the way.

She Freak really has no right to tout itself as a remake of Freaks, for the simple reason that it isn’t even about the sideshow. The older movie had characters like Hans the dwarf and Daisy and Violet the conjoined twins, who were people with relationships and roles in the plot. In She Freak we never even see the sideshow that so upsets Jade in an early scene. There’s Shorty, the little guy in a cowboy hat who works for the carnival, but when we see him he’s acting like he’s Steve’s friend and assistant rather than one of the exhibits. An armless woman and a few people in funny makeup appear at the climax, but we’ve never seen them before and we have no idea who they are. Where the hell is the ‘Alligator Girl’ the banners promised?

It’s probably all for the best. If there had been any ‘unusual people’ with major roles in the movie it would doubtless have treated them in a disgusting and exploitative manner. But what’s on screen shouldn’t even pretend to be a remake of Freaks.

As the owner of the sideshow, Steve insists that he cares about his employees and considers them ‘human beings, just like you and me’. He tells Jade that many of them came from abusive homes, and that in his show they’re able to earn a living and be around others who won’t judge them. This is a reasonably noble sentiment, but what we are subsequently shown is somewhat at odds with it. Steve says his employees are also his friends, but he hangs out and plays cards with the other carnies, not with them. When Shorty tells him that Jade is cheating on him, Steve slaps him like he would a misbehaving child. This is not how people treat friends and equals.

You may have guessed where this is heading: in one of my favourite running complaints, yep, we have nobody to root for in this movie. We’re probably supposed to like Steve, but he’s bland and his actions don’t agree with his words insisting he’s a nice, compassionate guy. The character from whose point of view we see the events is of course Jade, but Jade is the villain of the movie and we’re watching it to see her hubris destroy her. That means the protagonists ought to be the sideshow people themselves, but since we never actually meet them, their revenge is meaningless. In this context they are not human beings, they are not characters, they are merely what Jade has been calling them all along: monsters.

(Shorty, by the way, is played by Felix Silla, who is the closest thing this movie has to a star. He was Cousin Itt on the Addams Family TV show.)

She Freak presents us with several reasons why we ought to dislike Jade. She’s introduced working at the greasy little diner, where she turns down a date first with a customer and then with her boss. The customer accepts this gracefully but the boss does not. The scene tries to show us Jade as an uppity bitch who thinks she’s too good for other people, but her boss is such a slimy toad that we have to take her side. She tells us how her mother married too young and lost any chance at her own dreams, and while Claire Brennan is a terrible actress, the story is one that inspires sympathy. When Jade seizes on the carnival as her chance for escape she becomes downright pathetic. I mean, how awful is your life if a travelling midway and sideshow seems like a step up in the world?

Of course, as the movie continues we find that Jade really is just a snotty bitch whose idea of ‘getting more out of life’ is having a rich husband to carry her bags when she goes shopping. She sees others only as what they can provide to her – Steve for money, Blackie for sex. This attitude blinds her to others’ true intentions. She is entirely oblivious to the fact that Blackie is an abusive bastard or that Steve honestly loves her. The lesson of the movie seems to be ‘beware of women who want more out of life.’ She should have known her place!

This is a pretty nasty attitude towards women but there are other female characters who are treated a bit better. Pat the stripper tried marriage and domesticity and didn’t like it. She seems to enjoy working at the carnival and is gregarious and kind-hearted. We’re invited to leer at her performance but she’s presented as much less trashy than Jade, who considers herself above such things. Pat continues to try to be a friend to Jade for as long as she can, and keeps giving her second chances long after it should be obvious that Jade isn’t interested in reciprocating her kindness. There’s also Olga the fortune-teller, who needed to support herself after her husband died. The three of them even manage to have conversations that pass the Bechdel test. In a movie called She-Freak that’s almost impressive.

The ending of She Freak is the only place where it really even seems inspired by Freaks. The sideshow employees take their revenge on Jade, and we see her on display in the sideshow, licking a snake and wearing some unconvincing Harvey Dent makeup. This is supposed to feel like justice, in that she has become what she most hated, but it’s been so watered down by the movie’s refusal to humanize the sideshow, or even to show us Jade interacting with them at all, that it has no power to horrify. It’s a big letdown after the opening scene that promised us a horrible freak that was once a human being. Why does her burned side have an elf ear?

Invasion of the Saucer Men was not a good movie, at all, but it still deserved better than Attack of the The Eye Creatures. It’s up for debate whether Freaks was technically ‘good’ but it was an ambitious film with much to say about how human beings treat one another and about the eugenics movement of the 1930s. In fact, the US National Film Registry considers Freaks one of the most significant films ever made, and it currently boasts a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. The fact that writer David Friedman claimed She Freak was a remake of Freaks just proves that, like the audiences who booed that film in 1932, he never bothered to understand it.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #she freak #tw: abelism #all carnival no magic #60s

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silicabeast34-blog · 5 years

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What Happens When a Restaurant’s Toxic Culture Reaches Customers?

The deli had delicious sandwiches. The kind of food you crave suddenly and without warning, the kind that makes you wish you lived close enough to eat it every day. Andrea and her husband loved this deli, and when they found out Andrea was pregnant, it was where they went to celebrate. They were trying to take a photo of themselves with the ultrasound when the owner came over, joking that he didn’t know this “was a photo studio,” Andrea remembers.

It was innocuous at first, just an older man making conversation with them. He turned to Andrea’s husband, asked, “Are you the one who did this?” and it was uncomfortable but they said yes, it’s our baby. The owner gave them unsolicited advice: “You should get a private room so you can get started on number two before you even leave the hospital.”

Andrea was glad her husband was there as a buffer. “It seemed like it would be easier just to laugh along than to say anything,” she says of the drunk-uncle routine from a complete stranger. The owner was an older man, which probably changed her reaction to the increasingly outlandish things he said. “I think his intentions were good in asking [about the ultrasound], but then it went too far in joking around.”

In the midst of the #MeToo movement, restaurants have come under scrutiny for being hotbeds of harassment. Laws like the Equal Employment Opportunity Act make a hostile work environment illegal, but the industry is still clearly figuring out how to live up to the spirit of the law: Guests harass servers who have to put up with pointed comments and requests for dates; managers or owners hire staff based on their appearance, as though their businesses are a setup for a Bachelor spinoff; and of course, prominent chefs and restaurant owners have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct and harassment by their employees. The first wave of #MeToo stories in the restaurant industry has focused on these overt forms of harassment where employees, held hostage by their need for a paycheck, have been bearing it from guests and coworkers for far too long; the type of harassment that festers alongside unequal power structures of tipped and non-tipped workers or the long-stewing “boy’s club” mentality in professional kitchens.

It might be unexpected for, say, a bank teller to hit on his clients, but it’s not out of the ordinary for a bartender.

Yet the conversation has largely side-stepped what happens to guests at restaurants, a grayer area that’s informed (or not) by a lack of legal accountability, the strange dynamic between server and customer, and the fact that the definition of “good hospitality” varies from person to person. We assume not only that the customer is always right but that they always have the power — to walk away, to find a new place to eat, to complain to a manager — so little attention has been paid to how often misconduct happens to guests, too.

“I’ve never heard explicit rules about flirting or hooking up with guests at any of the bars and restaurants where I’ve worked,” Boston bartender and author Frederic Yarm wrote in an email. “I think the restaurant life attracts free spirits, so the culture is more permissive.” It might be unexpected for, say, a bank teller to hit on his clients, but it’s not out of the ordinary for a bartender. This creates a situation in which it can be hard to set boundaries between guests and staff; if those distinctions aren’t properly spelled out, problems can arise.

Hospitality in the U.S. tends toward gregariousness and treating customers “like family,” but the way a staff member may treat a customer, the amount of deference or familiarity between the two parties, ranges wildly. A lot of this is intuitive, the ability to tell if a customer would welcome a friendly conversation or prefer to be left alone to enjoy their drink quietly. Or, as Yarm puts it, “Hospitality is about being an advocate for the guest and looking out for their best interest.” The famous bar creed of “don’t be creepy” just isn’t specific enough.

New Yorker Suzy Exposito still remembers the time that a male barista held her coffee hostage until she smiled. Exposito refused. “It’s uncomfortable to be told to smile for a service I paid for,” Exposito says. “[He] might have thought he was being cute and flirty, but in reality, he was setting up a situation where he had the power to demand something from me because he had something I wanted — and literally bought.”

In college, Exposito used to visit a pizzeria every Wednesday with a boy she babysat. “It was a really fun tradition for us,” she remembers. “We’d sit and eat pizza and talk about our week.” But the store’s manager was an older man who insisted on serving them whenever she stopped in. “Every single time he would ask how old I was, if I had a boyfriend, if I lived alone, if I liked older men. He would make comments about my body in front of the kid,” Exposito says. It got so bad that she had to explain to the boy that they needed to find a new pizzeria. She was only 23 at the time, and there wasn’t a manager she could complain to about the man. “Today,” she says, “I’d totally rip this guy a new one on Yelp!”

When it comes to fighting against sexual misconduct or other behavior by employees or managers of a restaurant, one bad review feels like a puny weapon. But it’s often the only one: There’s little established support or recourse for guests who have encountered behavior ranging from uncomfortable to predatory at a bar, restaurant, or nightclub. They can complain to a manger, never patronize the establishment again, or leave a Yelp review to warn future customers (or all of the above). While there are organizations that protect consumers’ rights, they exist to prevent things like fraud — not to oversee behavior.

According to restaurant and hospitality attorney Kimberly Summers, even in particularly egregious cases involving assault, restaurant owners aren’t liable for the actions of their employees unless it can be proved that an employee committed a crime in the course of performing their job. In the case of a lawsuit filed against Houston restaurant Brennan’s in late January, which alleges that a former (and now deceased) bartender drugged a customer’s drink, over-served her alcohol, then sexually assaulted her, a bartender’s duty is to serve drinks, Summer says — drugging the drink is a criminal action outside that scope. That’s a marked difference from laws preventing harassment in the workplace under the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which only protect workers.

Relying on a feedback loop between businesses and customers to fix bad behavior isn’t a good model. Customers have complicated reasons for why they patronize one business over another — convenience, price, tradition, the food — and whether they had a bad experience with one employee is just part of the equation. Exposito kept returning to the pizzeria that made her uncomfortable until the manager crossed one line too many.

As for the deli owner with the inappropriate comments, Andrea says the food is good and there aren’t many other options in town at that level. “We’ll go back,” she says, though she adds that she’ll probably try not to make eye contact with the man and to avoid him if she can. “This is an institution that preexisted him and will outlive him. It’s not about this guy,” she says.

In other words, a Yelp review of the place might read, “Best sandwiches in town. Owner might make sex jokes about you. Weird vibes.” Four stars.

Tove Danovich is a freelance journalist and former New Yorker who now lives in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter @TKDano. Kevin VQ Dam is a Vietnamese-American illustrator currently based in Oakland, CA. Editor: Hillary Dixler Canavan

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Source: https://www.eater.com/2019/3/18/18252080/metoo-restaurants-customers-boundary-setting

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