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ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: Feminist Camp: Reclaiming the Booty in a Digital Age

I grew
up with thin white girl icons—with angry girl rockers like Fiona Apple crawling
half naked and hungry all over the floor, and Poe’s deep sultry voice, shifting
from ethereal to mad, everything about her skinny-armed longing. The feminist
rockers when I was a teen wilted and cried and clawed and spit. In the late 90s
a loud voice was always about rage, and female artists often sold a seemingly
contradictory image—a strong heart and fragile body.

My
mother, who emigrated from Cuba to America in the late sixties, could never
understand my obsession with thinness as a teenager. She drank water with heaps
of sugar in it to try and put on weight—curviness was seen as a sign of
sensuality, of sexiness. Certainly, there were curvier icons I could have looked
up to. The waif craze was in many ways a reaction to the aerobics-inspired look
of the 80s, with super models like Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell and pop
sensations like Madonna ushering in an era of sexuality that was large-bosomed
and muscular. And throughout the 90s, pop stars from J-Lo to Beyonce were famous
for their impeccable curves.

The waif
look appealed to me because it seemed defiant and dangerous. In reality it just
offered a different type of body as a fashion accessory.

To my mother,
my preference for thinness was more than a trend; it represented a kind of
cultural abandonment, a desire to be perceived as WASP-y and white, rather than
who I really was: a daughter of immigrants, a Latin American Jew. Two specific
markers of American assimilation—my thinness and blond hair, coupled with my
not having an accent, seemed to grant me access to things my mother never felt
she had access to.

But I
never felt as though I had complete access either, even if on the surface I
seemed to have it. I always felt like an imposter, as if I was wearing a mask I
could never take off.

We are all reduced to
our body parts.

The past several months
have been particularly depressing for anyone with a female body. Headlines
describing rape and sexual assault are virtually everywhere, from the numerous women speaking out against Bill Cosby, to the attention placed on
college campuses and how they could be doing more to prevent rape and sexual
assault.

In his essay on the rape
allegations against Cosby, Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on the horrors of rape,
saying, “Rape
constitutes the loss of your body, which is all you are, to someone else.”
Likewise, in a recent essay, Roxane Gay considers the language of a sexual
assault from a Rolling Stone article that chronicles the experiences of a UVA
student who describes being gang raped at a frat party, how she was reduced to
an object and referred to as an “it.” In her essay, Gay implores her readers to
think long and hard on that word, to let that “it” haunt us.

What does it mean to acknowledge that our bodies are all that we are?

And where does this “it” stand in relation to the droves of young,
female pop stars today commanding us to look at “it,” to check “it,” to
smack “it,”—“it” being, in this case, their twerking behinds?

To
some, these close up images of the booty dehumanize and victimize women,
reducing us to sexual playthings. But I actually see something else here: a
reclaiming of the “it,” a defiant assertion of bodily autonomy, a demand for women
to be able to be as big and sexual as we damn well please.

The recent big booty craze is still fashion, of course, and some aspects
of the current trend, from Miley Cyrus’s use of black women as props in her
2013 VMA performance to Kim Kardashian’s photo spread for PAPER Magazine, are
infuriatingly disrespectful to black women in particular. And, of course, while
songs like Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” preach body positivity, the
big booty trend really only praises a particular brand of curve, one belonging
to Kim Kardashian rather than Melissa McCarthy.

Yet
there is something also exciting about the way that some female performers are
reclaiming and celebrating the female body, about the way Nicki Minaj takes parts and
pieces of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s ode to women’s backsides in “Baby Got Back” and
transforms the booty from an object to be admired to a symbol of female sexual
appetite in “Anaconda.” The playful,
kitschy, over-the-top big booty shenanigans on Nicki Minaj’s video for the song are about self-love and swagger. “You love this fat ass,” she
manically cackles. It’s that cackle—wild, unhinged, defiantly unpretty—that
made me grow to love “Anaconda,” where the big booty becomes a symbol of
excess, sexiness, and silliness, all at once. Minaj’s “Anaconda”
doesn’t offer women a kind of empowerment fantasy, where women’s sexual
liberation will bring about a feminist revolution, but it does give women the
chance to reclaim that “it”: rather than being an object of someone else’s
consumption, it becomes a symbol of female sexual appetite and power.

The same thing could be said for Beyonce’s video for “7/11” where the
self-described feminist is seen hanging around in her underwear, having fun and
being silly, throwing her hands in the air and shaking her butt. Unlike her
classic ballads, or even her sexually explicit songs about getting it on with
her husband, this video focuses instead on women just having a good time, being
as loud, ridiculous, and playful as they want to be.

For the female body to be perceived as a source of pleasure, rather than
an object that is always on the brink of violation, is an incredible subversion
of our expectations about what it means to live in that body. The act of
reclaiming a word or an image is, of course, always fraught. I’m sure many
people feel there is simply no difference between a male-gaze-centric focus on
female curves and the booty-centered fashions surfacing in all sorts of media
today. Certainly, J.Lo and Iggy Azalea’s collaboration on the video for “Booty”
is no work of high art, and is replete with product placement and traditional
artifacts of the male gaze, but the delightfully campy videos of Nicki Minaj
and Beyonce, which showcase the female body as a source of unending amusement,
happiness, and power, are in fact changing the way we see that body. They
dare us to not only appreciate greater female involvement in the creative
process, but also challenge us to see a woman’s body as something inherently
powerful—as something, which can, and should, take up space.

Arielle Bernstein is
a writer living in Washington, DC. She teaches writing at American
University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The
Millions, The Rumpus, St. Petersburg Review and The Ilanot Review. She
has been listed four times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story
contests. She is currently writing her first book.

METAMERICANA: TOO MANY COOKS Is a Political Statement Worth Hearing

The argument for the recent viral short Too Many Cooks
being a postmodern parody is easy to make—too easy, in fact. Sure, on the face
of it, Casper Kelly’s eleven-minute video for Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim”
viewing bloc is a deconstruction of the opening credits often found on
cheesy 80s sitcoms, police procedurals, and sci-fi knock-offs. And yes,
the fact that the running conceit in the video is the power that language has
over us (the actors’ names, which appear beneath them in the usual way of all opening
credits, ultimately become a terrorizing force more human than the humans
they’re attached to) does tend to support the claim that the
postmodernist principle that we are all constructed by and in language is in play. But Too Many Cooks is mixing together too many opposite inclinations, effects,
and plot structures to be adequately described as “postmodern.” Instead, it
seems to intend, as so many Adult Swim videos do, to be inscrutable rather than
analytical, contradictory rather than instructive, and simultaneously
deconstructive and constructive rather than merely deconstructive.

For
all its fragmentation—the video moves rapidly between
television subgenres, even as it endlessly recycles the same theme song
(with
slightly different lyrics each time)—Too Many Cooks has a story to
tell that’s surprisingly conventional. First, there’s a villain: a
mysterious,
cannibalistic killer who’s introduced early on, whose name isn’t known,
whose
motives beyond bloodlust are inscrutable, who’s frightening in
appearance, whose
early victims are caught unawares, who understands his local environment
much
better than any of the good guys, and who towards the end of his
homicidal spree faces a “final girl” (an attractive young female more
canny than all the victims preceding her).
Sound familiar? It should, as it’s every horror movie ever made, other
than
meta-commentaries like Scream or Joss
Whedon’s A Cabin in the Woods. Too Many Cooks even features hapless law
enforcement, as several police officers fail to notice the killer even when
he’s literally right under their noses.

Just as it has a fairly conventional villain, Too Many
Cooks has a hero whose placement is conventional even if certain of his
descriptive particulars are not. Smarf the Cat, described by The New Yorker
as the product of “Alf mating with a cat rather than eating
one,” is
introduced early on in a way that makes him endearing. Smarf has special
gifts that
others don’t immediately see (e.g., he can shoot rainbows from his hands
and
lasers from his eyes), has an apprehension of danger that exceeds that
of law
enforcement and all the other good guys, and in the end kills the
villain but is
gravely injured himself. Smarf’s role in Too Many Cooks is undergirded
by such a human inclination that it belies the fact he’s the only
non-human in the video: he’s trying to put everything back to normal.
“Back to normal,” in
the terms of the world of Too Many Cooks, means finally ending the
opening-credits loop all the characters in the video are caught up in;
Smarf, though grievously wounded, does
this by pressing a giant red button, after which he appears to die.
But—surprise!—he doesn’t die. In fact he’s fine, though the
cliff-hanging ending of Too Many Cooks suggests that Smarf’s still
caught up in the cycle of danger we’d assumed he’d escaped. All of which
should surprise no one,
as it’s exactly how the hero of a conventional horror film is dealt
with.

So why are so many commentators in major media (including not just The New Yorker, but also The Daily Beast and others) referring to "Too Many Cooks" as postmodern, or using terms common to postmodernist literary theory
(like “parody”) to explain the operations of Kelly’s intricately networked art-house flick? The
answer seems to be that “postmodern” is the term we use habitually, even
instinctively, for things we don’t understand and don’t really care to. Too
Many Cooks is blindingly fast in its transformations, and
repeatedly obscure in its deconstructions of iconic images and ideas, so it
must be “postmodern” in some way—that is, beyond our understanding.

In fact, the new avant-garde in the arts, and particularly
in the visual arts, very much wants to
be understood. It wants you to be able to follow with little difficulty what
you’re seeing, even as the effect it has on you pushes you simultaneously
toward several internally contradictory extremes. Too Many Cooks is at once funny and
horrifying, mesmerizing and cloying, exhilarating and depressing, filled with
obvious references to popular culture and entirely disinterested in whether you
can catch even a fraction of them. If it seems in a sense ironic—as it clearly
does take a dim view of the formal constraints that typified 80s
television programs—it’s also earnest enough to want to give you everything you
expect from a fantasy: a villain, a hero, a plot, some tragedies, some
emotional manipulations, and a resolution that both satisfies and keeps you
guessing about what could come next.

“Classic” postmodern art emphasizes that meaning falls apart
at every critical juncture, and therefore usually requires specialized academic
training to fully interpret and appreciate. If and when it seeks a popular
audience, it does so to shock, distress, or otherwise disgust its viewers; even
Andy Warhol’s paintings, while easy enough to “get” on a first look, were
intended to provoke anxious debate over what is and is not art. Too Many
Cooks is a different breed of artwork entirely because it requires little debate
regarding its central premise but still provokes significant emotional anxiety among
its viewership. If postmodern literature usually sends us running to our scholars for assistance, Too
Many Cooks is much more likely to have you singing its theme song in
the shower. We’ve moved from a time when avant-garde art wanted to
unsettle our
minds to a time when it wants to unsettle our nerves and give us
immediate pleasure simultaneously. What’s at stake in this
movement from the postmodern paradigm to what’s lately being called
“metamodernism”? It’s a good question, and by now there’s enough visual
art like Too Many Cooks out there that we do well to consider the
omnipresence of contemporary art that ostentatiously combines opposing ideas in a way most of us can’t
readily process.

Metamodern art like Too Many Cooks is trying to
do an end-around past those institutions we once turned to for communal
sense-making: mass media, the academy, and non-academic "experts" within
their subfields.
When Too Many Cooks was released, everyone began forwarding it to
everyone
else via social media and email, whether or not anyone doing the
forwarding had
yet processed their emotional reactions to the video. The currency of Too Many
Cooks became attention itself, not understanding, and the power to pass
on that currency resided in any person with access to the Internet, not
just those specifically empowered with cultural capital (for instance,
via
higher education) to tell everyone else what’s worth sharing and viewing
and
what isn’t. If we live in a time of great cynicism about media,
academic, and
of course political institutions, art that’s designed to virally
infect all of us with emotions we can’t process is subversive by definition.

Consider the way Too Many Cooks moved through the culture:
it at once became a hot topic on The New Yorker, New York Magazine,
and CNN websites,
even as it was still burning its way through every discussion board on
countercultural hotbeds Reddit and 4chan. The disconnect between those
two
audiences—one attracted to High Art, the other, broadly speaking, to
Low—was so
great that Reddit and 4chan users were heard loudly complaining that
their
enjoyment of Too Many Cooks was being coopted by those whose values
and tastes they didn’t and can’t share.
In other words, Too Many Cooks was destroying class distinctions by
appealing
to basic human emotions all of us contend with, regardless of income,
education, or
institutional affiliation. To call Too Many Cooks mere parody when it
deliberately speaks directly to and about longstanding story structures
and
psychosocial conventions unfairly casts it as deliberately obscure. It’s
a strange thing: we
live in an age in which we treat as obscure that which is simple in
order to avoid
seeing that it’s our simplicities that unite us, and that we all
struggle daily to resolve contradictory ideas and emotions. Too Many
Cooks may suggest a worldview troubled by the overload of information
we all experience in the Internet Age,
but it’s also trying to remind us that, for now at least, we’re all in
the same kitchen
and eating the same food.

Seth Abramson is the author of five poetry collections, including two, Metamericana and DATA,
forthcoming in 2015 and 2016. Currently a doctoral candidate at
University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is also Series Co-Editor for Best American Experimental Writing, whose next edition will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2015.

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: Girl Found: GONE GIRL’s Boring Masochism

Before I saw Gone
Girl, I had seen enough plot spoilers to know that Amy Dunne was the icy
villain, a femme fatale who devours male victims like a praying mantis. I
expected rage; what I didn’t expect was her willingness to hurt herself. Amy’s
aggressive behavior and her ability to manipulate the system hinges on how she
cuts, bleeds, tears at and otherwise desecrates her own body.

I know, I know. Feminist champions of Gone Girl claim that Amy’s ability to play with the cookie-cutter roles
that women are cast in is somehow triumphant, but Amy’s self-inflicted wounds,
coupled with her meticulously constructed calendar, complete with yellow sticky
notes questioning whether now would be a good time to kill herself, struck me
as boring, rather than subversive. While male villains like Batman’s The Joker and American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman thrill
us as they play the role of sadists, female villains, even at their most evil
and vindictive, are still relegated to the role of masochists.

Just as horror films love to torture their female victims,
feminist films and literature are often obsessed with female debasement. We
watch brilliant 19^th century women slowly deteriorate into insanity
in stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper.” We lament the smart, talented young
women who try to off themselves in Girl
Interrupted. We watch Dove ads where rows of normal looking women shed
tears when talking about the pressure to have poreless skin and gaps between
their thighs. From Beyonce’s “Pretty Hurts” to the return to Twin Peaks and its obsession with the
tragic death of the young and beautiful Laura Palmer, what defines femininity
today is pain. The recently released short animated feature, “Sidewalk” by
Celia Bullwinkel, shows a girl’s journey to womanhood and old age, during which
she is always uncomfortable in her skin. She endures stares and whistles from
men as she enters puberty, the discomfort of pregnancy, the pressures faced on
older women’s bodies and, finally, the invisibility of old age. “Sidewalk” is
touted as a journey to “self-love,” but when the protagonist reaches old age
and helps a young girl walk along the same sidewalk, the mood is one of
resignation, rather than joy, the path to womanhood still presented as an
obstacle, rather than a pleasure.

This downtrodden story of what it means to be a woman is
just as limited a view of the female experience as the more cheerful,
empty-headed views of womanhood portrayed in such musical numbers as “I Enjoy
Being a Girl” from the 1958 musical Flower
Drum Song and “How Lovely to Be a Woman” from the 1963 musical Bye Bye Birdie. Both songs feature a
young, beautiful woman enjoying her sexy new curves and newfound attention from
men. Certainly these songs, along with 80s and 90s jams like Cindi Lauper’s,
“Girls Just Want To Have Fun” and Shania Twain’s “I Feel Like A Woman” aren’t
particularly deep or challenging of gender norms, but at least their view of
the female experience is upbeat.

In contrast our modern day obsession with female suffering
is as much a throwback to earlier tropes, as it is a kind of pushback against a
consumer culture that claims that by purchasing the right product women can be
happy and free. Amy Dunne’s desire to disappear certainly fits this model. In her
now famous “Cool Girl” speech, she describes the social pressure on women to
fit into a man’s fantasy, at once inhabiting and also casting off the “Cool Girl”
persona in the process.

Perhaps Amy’s “Cool Girl” theory would have been more
meaningful to me had I thought that Amy was truly making a feminist manifesto
and wasn’t just angry that her husband was having an affair with a “younger,
bouncier Cool Girl.” Throughout the
film, Amy is not only vicious to her philandering husband and other men who she
tortures using her feminine wiles; she is also equally hostile to women,
speaking ill of the “stupid” neighbor she tries to quickly befriend, and
throwing venomous barbs at the large-breasted student her husband is having an
affair with. Amy’s self-involved, beautiful, blond, white, trust fund brand of
feminism just rings tone deaf to me in a world where women of all colors,
creeds and classes are claiming the feminist mantle in the name of justice,
rather than a plea to “have it all.” Amy’s self-victimization presents feminism
as its worst possible caricature: one of spoiled rage and privilege, rather
than a very real call for women’s stories to be told and women’s voices to be
heard.

In this way, Gone
Girl’s heroine is not reclaiming her identity when she stages her escape;
she’s just another in a long line of self-destructive women, obsessed with
finding ways to disappear completely.

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: PARKS AND RECREATION, A Feminist Utopia

At the end of the penultimate season of Parks and Recreation, our heroine Leslie Knope gets everything—the
man, the kids, the high profile job. She even manages to move her new position right smack into the middle of her beloved hometown Pawnee.
Though the finale of the most recent season was wrapped up in a very pretty bow, it still felt genuinely satisfying, as well as genuinely
subversive. In a world where the T.V. show Girls
portrays sex and romance as empty and unsatisfying for its female leads, and
heroines in shows from Game of Thrones
to American Horror Story navigate a
landscape where sexism is rampant and men are often depicted as deeply
misogynistic, Leslie Knope’s triumphant success felt like a kind of joyful
respite and relief from a terrifying and cruel world.

One of the reasons Parks
and Recreation has succeeded as a feminist T.V. show is not simply because
the female characters have remained funny, dynamic, ambitious, unique and
interesting, but also because the show succeeds at presenting male characters
that are equal parts strong, vulnerable, silly and staunch advocates for the
rights and successes of female characters throughout the series. Male and
female characters in Parks and Recreation
actively root for one another, rather than tearing each other down. Ben and
Lesley’s marriage is a model of egalitarianism; April and Andy’s young, silly
love is presented as a string of silly, ridiculous games and make out parties,
with each character deeply invested in helping the other grow. Even Ron
Swanson, staunch individualist and rugged he-man, is distinguished throughout
the series by his commitment to women’s rights. By the end of the series he is
a proud dad and loving husband, all without having to give up his signature “strong
silent type” brand of masculinity. Ron’s appreciation of feminism doesn’t
diminish his hatred of vegans, or devotion to woodworking—it simply makes him a
much more interesting and funny character.

Many of the current debates about female representation
onscreen are about granting female protagonists access to male spaces. We saw
this in the 80s and 90s when there was a proliferation of women as warrior
motifs from Xena the Warrior Princess
to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Recently, a slew of articles have called for women to have access to the joys
and pitfalls of the antihero world as well, as we praise the glorious brutality
of Orange is the New Black’s character
Vee and go to theaters in droves to see the icy villainy of Gone Girl.

Heroines today are more diverse and complex than ever
before, yet few serious dramas that feature a cast of strong female characters
showcase romantic relationships that are genuinely egalitarian, the way we see
romance unfold in Parks and Recreation.
Often, female protagonists who are strong and willful are presented as
rejecting male romantic interest. In modern Disney Princess films like Brave, the heroine often makes a big
deal about not needing a man or romantic partner. In some films, like The Hunger Games, the romantic scripts
are flipped and male romantic interests are portrayed as doting, helpful and encouraging
mates. In truth, while many
cluck their tongues at the unhealthy dynamics presented in teen romances
like Twilight, and their adult
equivalents Fifty Shades of Grey, one
of the pleasures of both these series is the positioning of boys and men as
being the objects of desire, even if the female protagonists within these
worlds aren’t particularly interesting in and of themselves.

The suggestion that strong female characters are the sole
hallmarks of feminist media may simply not be setting the bar high enough. In
order to really dismantle the patriarchy we need to see more varied
presentations of men. This is not to say that we should do away with the
douchey bros, bullies and alpha assholes that have become a mainstay in popular
media. Complex villains are fascinating, but excellent dramas like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, American Horror
Story and The Walking Dead too
often pit men and women against each other, as if one gender’s success is
another’s loss.

The great T.V. dramas of today are about creating immersive
fantasies where we are transported to different times, places and worlds. The
adherence, then, to the narrative that men and women are consistently at odds
with one another is not about portraying a kind of gritty realism; it’s about
perpetuating the status quo and limiting our imagination about the
possibilities for a feminist future. I’d like to see a media landscape that
acknowledges the changing roles of men and women with greater nuance and
compassion, and also recognizes that there are many men today who are
incredibly happy to be living in a world where they aren’t shackled to one
particular model of male strength. Parks
and Recreation’s greatest feminist success is not simply that the heroine
is allowed to “have it all” but in creating a world where male and female
characters are equally one another’s allies.

Children in Horror Films: The Kids Are Not Alright

Your life is going along normally, and then it happens: you
or someone you love suddenly finds that something is growing inside, a life
form that feeds. In the morning you are
nauseous, and as it grows you shift uncomfortably through the night, struggling
to sleep. You feel it moving inside you,
shifting, kicking, altering your moods, influencing your thoughts. And then, finally, after nine long months, it
wants to get out. You want this too,
desperately, but the emergence is violent, excruciating, prolonged. After what seems like days of pain, you hear
a cry, a wail, from the just opened mouth of a being who is at once a part of
you and utterly alien. As it grows, it
begins to do things, without warning, without discernible motive: knocking a
juice glass off the table, pulling kitty’s tail, hitting another child on the
playground. When scolded, it cries, and
you feel guilty for being so harsh, until later, with little provocation, it
breaks into a fit of rage, screaming, kicking.
Gradually, you become isolated, a veil drawn between you and the friends
you used to see; you sleep poorly, awakened by cries; even your spouse seems
far away, separated by the daily and nightly routine of caring for the
child who has taken over your life.

Is it any wonder there are so many horror movies about
children? We regard children with pious
adoration, yet lurking just beneath this reverence is a sense of dread, an
awareness of how little we really know about our kids. And for every family sitcom or melodrama
celebrating the wonders of parenting and childhood, there is a horror film that
dwells in the child’s dark shadow.

The mainstream rebirth of the horror film in the seventies
happened through a child. Linda Blair’s
uncanny performance as the possessed twelve-year-old Regan McNeil in The Exorcist (1973) remains one of the
iconic moments in the genre’s history, making audiences squirm as they watch
a loving daughter turn into a bile-spewing monster. The transformation is so horrifying because
we first experience the parental love of Ellyn Burstyn’s Chris through
touchingly candid moments of mother-daughter laughing and cuddling. As Regan is taken through a nightmarish
battery of painful tests to discover why her personality is changing, we
experience these horrors from both mother’s and daughter’s perspective. Yet when Regan goes entirely over to the dark
side, she becomes another being altogether, one that we have only glimpsed in
isolated moments. Although the tale is
one of demonic possession, it works because we have all seen such isolated moments
of uncanny child behavior—talking to no one, staring into the distance,
inexplicable bursts of anger—and wondered what it meant.

Before The Exorcist
there was Rosemary’s Baby (1966),
which focused on how a child can take one’s life over even before it’s
born. Roman Polanski’s vision is a
powerfully feminist one, as the narrative focuses on the ways in which a
woman’s body can be appropriated by men.
John Cassevete’s Guy Woodhouse essentially sells his wife’s womb to the
devil in exchange for a boost in his acting career, and while the supernatural
element is strong, his betrayal serves as a metaphor for all of the selfish
reasons men might have for wanting children—either for public prestige or for
want of an heir, a kind of immortality.
As Mia Farrow’s Rosemary grows increasingly ill, however, we enter the
special hell that for some women is the experience of pregnancy. Stymied at every turn as she seeks personal
and professional help, the film frustrates our and Rosemary’s need to discover
whether her fears are real or only in her head.
Yet when she finally discovers the truth, Rosemary’s acceptance of her
child is at once touching and repulsive, and we are left with the feeling that
the mother-child bond is something unknowable, uncanny.

Larry Cohen’s masterpiece It’s Alive follows a similar arc, as Frank and Lenore Davis are
initially repulsed by, but gradually learn to love, their monstrous
progeny. The film begins with one of the
most horrifying portrayals of childbirth ever filmed, with a delivery room strewn
with gore, and as the fanged, clawed child escapes, the body count grows. Desperate for sustenance, he attacks a
milkman, feeding on fresh meat along with that more traditional baby food, milk. Indeed, a
stream of milk and blood flows from the delivery truck, a raw image of the fluids with which mothers have always sustained their children. Yet somehow out of these horrors comes love. As Frank comes to understand and even embrace the creature he produced, the
film miraculously transforms into a moving meditation on the strange powers of
parental affection.

For the record, I must confess that I have never had such
feelings. My wife and I remain happily childless, and have no urge to change
that. The topic came up when we got to
the ticket counter to see George Ratliffe’s criminally-underrated Joshua (2007), and the usher asked, “Um,
do you have kids?” “No,” I replied. “Are you thinking of ever having kids?”
“Definitely not,” said my wife, laughing.
The usher smiled and said, “Then you’re going to love this film!” And certainly nothing I have seen better
expresses all of the reasons one might not want to have a child. Vera Farmiga gives a magnificent performance
as a mother who tries, but fails, to love creepy son Joshua. As she nurses their second child, a girl, the
older boy’s behavior grows increasingly strange, as he asks questions about
embalming techniques and hovers around his baby sister’s crib in the dark. Sensing his parents’ growing fear of him, he
digs out old videotapes of his childhood, and discovers that as a baby he
nearly drove his mother insane with his incessant crying and screaming. As his behavior grows more disturbing, father
Sam Rockwell begins to unravel, and Joshua knows just how to push him over the
edge without incurring any blame.

The precocious monster theme is fairly prevalent in child
horror films, but most compelling is the apocalyptic subgenre that imagines
such children taking over the world.
Perhaps the best example is Village
of the Damned (1960), which manages to conjure a fully realized alternate
world of dread in merely 77 minutes.
Everyone in the quiet English village of Midwich simultaneously falls
asleep, after which unexplained event all of the women of childbearing age
discover themselves to be pregnant.
Later, they all give birth on the same day, to children with golden eyes
and pale blonde hair, somewhere between alien humanoids and Nazi youth. Their uncanny mental powers place them in the
realm of science fiction, yet the fears they evoke—of our growing obsolescence
and eventual replacement by a new generation, better adapted to a changing
world—are very real.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I00mEPwRXM

More subtle and ultimately more troubling is the
slow-creeping apocalypse imagined in the Spanish horror film, Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), in which a
young English couple on vacation make the mistake of visiting an island where
the children have violently seized power from the adults. Director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador cunningly
opens the film with a montage of black and white photographs of child-victims
of war, juxtaposed with data recording the number of children fallen victim to
the world’s major conflicts. Although we
share the English couple’s horrified point of view as they struggle to survive
against the malicious onslaught of a new breed of children, we have also been
shown how little right we have to the sovereign power of adulthood. The film lays bare the naked self-interest
and condescension that lies beneath our sentimental reverence of childhood and
self-aggrandizement of parenthood, as we discover that the real answer to the
question asked by the film’s title is: adults.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

Why Alex Ross Perry’s LISTEN UP PHILIP Is the Kindest Movie You’ll See All Year

Alex Ross Perry’s LISTEN UP PHILIP, besides featuring Jason Schwartzman’s best acting job and wrestling remarkable turns from Jonathan Pryce and Elizabeth Moss, performs an act of kindness for its viewers. This tale of an abusive, alienated, successful novelist’s spiral into loneliness lays out, in excruciating detail, the relationship between cause and effect that can govern the shape a human life takes. In showing us, painfully clearly, the results of novelist Philip Lewis Friedman’s poor behavior, both within his own life and in the reactions of those around him, Perry advocates strongly against such behavior, making his film the equivalent of watching a Biblical punishment unfold on film. The critical reception has focused almost entirely on Philip’s meanness, and the entertainment value therein, and not on why such a story might be told. Philip’s behavior is not, in fact, the most interesting part of the film–there is no novelty in the idea of a cruel, clever writer. That story’s been told, many times, and without such a shaky camera. There is, however, a great deal of novelty and originality in holding that cruel clever writer accountable, at length, and in so doing, prodding at viewers’ consciences. The play’s the thing, after all.

This reviewer will confess that it is a great relief to see Schwartzman out from under the thumb of Wes Anderson’s coddling genius. So deft and believable is his performance as Philip that I hated practically every nasty word that came out of his mouth. I disliked his smarmy smile. I found his walk annoyingly stridant. I was aghast that his girlfriend, played with reserve and likable cool by Moss, might find herself, for even one second, happy in his presence–unless her character was, in fact, akin to his. At some points, I hated his chin. When Philip discloses, in an intimate moment, that his parents died when he was young, and describes that as the source of "sadness," I will confess to thinking, "Cry me a river, you stupid, pathetic cliche. Are you even telling the truth?" In any event, what of the story being told here? It’s a simple one. Philip decides, upon the release of his second book, to forgo all tours or publicity, choosing instead to go upstate and lick the boots of Ike Zimmerman, a well-established and successful novelist who is Philip’s elder spiritual doppelganger: blunt, anti-social, manipulative, in search of the perfect quip at all times, vigorously dismissive. And alienated from his daughter, who, while not exactly a charmer herself, has a few beautifully executed moments of pain at Zimmerman’s hands. In so retreating to the country, Philip lands himself an adjunct teaching position–which most holders of such positions would chuckle at, given that it’s a cruel hand dealt upon Philip; such jobs are generally unglamorous, poorly paid, uninsured, and short-lived. As circumstances prove true to that latter characteristic, Philip makes no friends and finds himself bounced from his position, nevertheless managing to charm a French colleague whose initial action upon meeting him was to persuade all of his colleagues to dislike him. Throughout the film’s miserable sojourn, Philip is told off numerous times, by people from various walks of life, including a former college roommate who calls him a "Jew bastard" and a former girlfriend who responds to his request for a kiss by running away. The sad part, but the part which is the root of the film’s charity: Philip has it coming. He is arrogant towards his students in the face of open worship; he treats his agent badly (and is called an "asshole" for it); when he learns that a journalist who was supposed to intervew him committed suicide, he pines that it would have been a great piece for him. These moments of cruelty have some entertainment value, but for anyone who’s known a lot of writers, they’re unremarkable, since most writers know that, from the time of James Joyce onwards, the capacity for cruelty in literary sorts is as bottomless as the River Lethe. What’s remarkable here is what happens. And what is that? Well, Philip happens. In our last sighting of him, we see him walking down a crowded street, carrying a box of his belongings, alone, bereft of his former girfriend, who wouldn’t even open the door for him; the suggestion is that he’s walking towards more of the same. Are these his just desserts? Does he deserve to be this alone, to have all these people shouting at him, to be patronizd by a writer he worships, to be shown such anger by those around him? Yes, he does. If you have to ask why, then perhaos you should watch the movie again.

American culture, it must be understood, generally congratulates selfishness. It’s not typically seen as such, this quality, but it manifests itself that way. Slavish attention to career advancement, fierce competition with others, establishment of political alliances solely for the purpose of said advancement, dismissal of people, things, and ideas lying outside of one’s world view: these actions will, typically, make one successful and content in the world at large. The better car, the better phone, the better TV set, the better shirt, the better face: these things matter. Celebrity homes, celebrity surgeries, celebrity photos, celebrity "selfies," celebrity photo leaks: these things matter as well, perhaps more than we even think. The impact on human behavior of the absorption of these values is insidious. Talking becomes less important; a phone call becomes a rarer and rarer thing; and a handwritten letter? Forget it. The self is all. And if, one day, there’s a shooting in a mall, or a school, we cry mental illness, when in fact what we mean is national illness. It’s doubtful that Perry, in telling this story–and an old-fashioned story it is, with plenty of contrasting motivations, an antagonist, a protagonist, a climax, and a resolution (though perhaps antagonist and protagonist) have switched costumes here–intended it to be a fable, with a clear moral. It’s a character portrait, after all, an experiment as such, to see what happens if, instead of ignoring callousness and accepting it, we hold it up to a "hard Sophoclean light." The experiment, as conducted, performs a valuable service, providing a cutaway, of sorts, into a human psyche in the process of decay, or hardening; the cutaway is explicit, and gory, and eye-opening about the potential rebound effects of cruelty. It could be said that such a cutaway speaks out strongly in favor of kindness, of the opposite of Philip’s behavior. Beyond this, though, in the manner of all good experiments, Listen Up Philip points a way forward: towards different movies about writers, and perhaps different films about people, in which we take a good look at characters’ flaws and virtues, instead of waiting for them to sprout wings or replace their microchips. One might then hope that, as time passes, life might come to imitate art.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

METAMERICANA: Hawkeye, Normcore Avenger: A (Mellow) Revolution from Marvel Comics’ Matt Fraction and David Aja

METAMERICANA: Hawkeye, Normcore Avenger: A (Mellow) Revolution from Marvel Comics

So-called “normcore fashion,” a bizarre combination of countercultural
radicalism and bourgeois complacency, is the only way anyone has found thus far
to re-envision mainstream culture as avant-garde. In normcore culture,
twenty-something hipsters who have already established their countercultural
bona fides by dressing in the uniform of their kind for years (think
thick-rimmed glasses, skinny jeans, sportcoats, bow ties, and brogues) turn
these customs on their head by returning to the white, upper-middle class clothing
stores of their youth. Thus, a herd of excruciatingly self-aware young people seems
to dress like either their parents or their suburban peers, and outside
observers are none the wiser about their intentions. Normcore is ironic to
those who know it when they see it, and painfully earnest to those who see
someone wearing clothes from The Gap or Abercrombie & Fitch and assume it’s
the result of thoughtlessness rather than design. Of course, the more generous
view of normcore suggests that those who subscribe to its fashion wing simply
no longer wish to be distinguished from others on the basis of their attire.
Better, then, to say that the wearing of jeans and tee shirts by normcore
aficionados is merely a “detached and knowing” decision, and not necessarily an
“ironic” one. But what happens to our hipster calculus when normcore culture
goes supernatural?

Superheroes are the hipsters of English-language graphic novels: discernible
almost immediately by their accoutrements, superheros may want to be like you
and me (hence, secret identities) but before long are sure to do something—lift
a car, shoot an eye-beam—that places them outside mainstream culture. They can’t
help themselves. And millions of us read about their exploits in comic books
because we, too, can’t help ourselves. Following the adventures of costumed
counter-culturists is the nerdy equivalent of sitting on a park bench
people-watching in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Which is why, when
comic book writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja decided to portray the
least-popular Avenger, Hawkeye, not as a bow-wielding badass but an
unremarkable, hoodie-wearing bro hanging around his apartment, it felt—to those
of us who enjoy comic books but are tired of their poor writing, cinema-ready
plotlines, and cutout characters—like something of a revolution.

Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye depicts its titular character in his
traditional (at least since the Avengers movie) purple and black get-up on the
cover of its first two paperback collected editions. In both cases, “Hawkeye”/Clint
Barton—Iowan; former carnie; superpower-less master archer—is carrying his
trademark bow. It’s an intentional misdirection, as in the pages of My Life
As a Weapon (collecting Hawkeye #1-5 and Young Avengers Presents
#6) and Little Hits (collecting Hawkeye #6-11) Hawkeye rarely
uses his bow and is almost never in his Avengers uniform. Instead, he putters
about his Bed-Stuy apartment and does, well, not very much. A breakdown of the
early issues:

Hawkeye #1: Hawkeye recuperates in a hospital, adopts a dog, attends a
neighborhood barbecue, helps a single mom avoid eviction, and buys his
apartment building so he can become its landlord.

Hawkeye #2: Hawkeye practices shooting his bow, attends a gala event,
stops a gang of petty thieves (but in a tux), and has a long phone call with a
young female protégé who has a crush on him.

Hawkeye #3: Hawkeye organizes his arrows, buys a new car, sleeps with a
stranger, and fights off some heavies hired by a slumlord who wants Clint’s
apartment building back.

Hawkeye #4: Hawkeye attends a neighborhood barbecue, gets interviewed by
the Avengers, travels to the Middle East, has his wallet stolen in a taxi, and
attempts to buy at auction an item that could destroy his reputation if it
falls into the wrong hands.

And so on. Clint virtually never gets into uniform, virtually never faces a
super-villain, never uses any superpowers, and views any excitement he
experiences as a distraction from what he really wants to be doing: hanging out
with his neighbors at rooftop barbecues and petting his adopted dog (“Pizza
Dog,” so named because this iteration of Clint Barton isn’t very witty, either,
so he simply names his dog after the mutt’s favorite food). In Little Hits,
the second Hawkeye paperback collected, the low-key vibe continues, and
if anything is doubled down upon by Fraction and Aja:

Hawkeye #6: Hawkeye sets up his stereo system, saves the world from a
terrorist organization (presented, however, via just a two-page pictorial
summary), argues with the maintenance man at his apartment building, attends a
neighborhood barbecue, fights off some slumlord heavies, watches TV, and
considers going on vacation.

Hawkeye #7: Hawkeye helps a neighbor move during a hurricane, and later
rescues him from drowning in his new basement. Hawkeye’s protégé Kate Bishop
attends a wedding, goes to a pharmacy, and stops a robbery in progress.

Hawkeye #8: Hawkeye deals with a new (and crappy) romantic relationship,
tries to fight slumlord heavies but ends up in jail, and complains about his
new girlfriend messing up his comic book collection.

While the news recently came down that the Fraction/Aja Hawkeye series
will come to a close with issue #22, the fact remains that this writer-artist
duo has given us an entirely new way of thinking about not just comic books but
ourselves. There are a number of things Hawkeye does in this series that no one
without superlative archery skills could do. However, these acts of heroism are
overwhelmed in both number and vividness by the roster of things Clint Barton
does in Bed-Stuy that nearly any of us could do: make an effort to meet
and befriend our neighbors; help someone move or avoid eviction; finally unpack
our boxes and set up our new apartment; adopt a stray; or make a property
investment with an eye toward making the lives of others a little less bleak.
There’s nothing preachy about Hawkeye, however—it can’t be said that
Fraction and Aja have any evident interest in making us all better people. What
they want, I think, is no more than what Barton himself wants, and what, if we
go back into the annals of Western literature, David Copperfield once wanted:
to be the hero of our own life stories, whatever banalities and unremarkable
tribulations those stories will so often, inevitably, entail.

In other
words, Fraction and Aja have somehow captured the temperament of our Age:
neither naively fixated on the possibility of heroism nor (anymore) captivated
by anti-heroes. The earnestness of the conventional superhero has begun to irk
us, but so too, however slowly, has an unwilling and unlikely hero like
Deadpool, a mercenary whose running commentary on his own antics—droll,
fourth-wall-breaking—is steeped in petulant cynicism. In an ongoing tug-of-war
that mirrors what’s happening now in video games (cf. “#gamergate”), there’s a
divide between those who want a comic book that simply “plays well”—meaning, it
touches all the usual plot, tight-pant, and monologing-baddie bases—and one
that is reflexive enough about its aesthetics and ambitious enough about its
aims to qualify as Art. Fraction and Aja have given us a comic book series that’s
decidedly in the middle in all particulars—even its interior art is somehow,
despite its stylishness, understated—and in doing so find a sweet spot that’s
exactly where most of us already live. This new Clint Barton is neither a hero
nor an anti-hero, he’s simply . . . unremarkable. Which makes him as
remarkable a superhero as we’ve seen in a very, very long time.

Seth Abramson is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013). He has published work in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Southern Review.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, he was a public defender from 2001 to 2007 and is
presently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He runs a contemporary poetry review series for The Huffington Post and has covered graduate creative writing programs for Poets & Writers magazine since 2008.

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: Images and Illusions: On Aging, Beauty and Renée Zellweger’s “New” Face

It’s scary to see actors age.

In her essay, “The Theory of Receptivity and Some Thoughts
on Ethan Hawke’s Face,” Michelle Orange reflects on watching Ethan Hawke’s face
grow older:

Life began to show itself as more than a series
of days, or movies, all in a row, which I might or might not attend. He was
gaunt and slightly stooped, but it was his face—rough skin and sunken cheeks,
with an angry, exclamatory furrow wedged like a hatchet blade between his
eyes—that transfixed me. Some said he’d come through a divorce, and it took its
toll; that that’s what life does to people. I’d heard about such things but
never really seen it in action on the face of someone only a few years older than
me. There was something awful and yet so marvelous, so real and poignant and
right, about Ethan Hawke’s face, and about getting to see it in this beautiful
meditation on what life does to people, a ten-years-in-the-making sequel to a
film about people too young and smitten to be too concerned about what life
might do to them.

The public response to actors’ aging is uncomfortable, but it is
also inevitable and it isn’t necessarily always about sexism. We comment on the
changing appearance of actors and musicians like Ethan Hawke, Jared Leto, Elvis
Presley, Christian Bale, and Marlon Brando, their bodies held to similar
scrutiny as new lines and wrinkles emerge and bodies grow fatter or more gaunt
with age or for deliberate movie roles.

Actresses are afforded a different type of pity than aging
male actors, one that lacks the same tenor of existential gravitas. While we worry
about a fading sense of self in men, we worry about fading beauty in women.
When Renee Zellweger attended Elle’s 21^st Century Women in Hollywood
event recently, tabloids immediately started reporting on Zellweger’s “new”
face, which does look significantly different and probably is the result of
both natural aging—as well as a heck of a lot of plastic surgery.

In some ways it is easy to criticize Zellweger and other
women who have gone under the knife. We call them vain, or brainwashed, or stupid
for making these choices. It’s harder, for whatever reason, to assess a culture that is
unforgiving about every single body change that a woman will go through over the
course of her life from puberty to after menopause. We judge whether a women
weighs too much or too little. We judge whether women have children or don’t
have children. We judge whether or not they breastfeed. We judge whether women
dye their hair or still wear miniskirts past the age of 40.

As Anne Helen Peterson points out in her article, “What’s
Really Behind The Ridicule of Renee Zellweger’s Face?”, Zellweger is
particularly vulnerable to this kind of treatment because she was sold to her
audience as a symbol of youth. Zellweger’s efforts to essentially retain her
trademark “look” by way of surgery is perceived by many as especially gauche since she
is meant to symbolize a type of effortless prettiness. We hate seeing bad
plastic surgery on aging female faces, because it represents an acknowledgement of how
much the Hollywood image is mere smoke and mirrors, how the bill of goods we
are sold is so often just a bag of lies.

In an age where selfies are a dime a dozen, and the past is
hidden under a barrage of newer and newer tweets, we are constantly in the
process of building our “brand,” of crafting our identity. In this kind of
culture, the worship of youth feels almost inevitable, but then again our
obsession with female beauty always began and ended with the ultimate Hollywood
image of soft, exquisite, female perfection. Think of Marilyn Monroe, a woman
whose outside effectively masked that which was inside from the dawn of her status
as an icon onwards, and whose early death ensured that, even after we’d learn about her
frustrations, heartache and unsung potential, we’d never see that gorgeous
façade crack.

GONE GIRL’s Cool Girl: Hero or Villain?

Spoiler Alert: The following piece contains spoilers.

Gone Girl is a prickly, cerebral film, not unlike the dazzling villain who sets Gillian Flynn’s immaculately constructed
story into motion. It’s shot in bruised grays, with cold, antiseptic lighting;
the plot leads to a dénouement that has sparked a thousand
thinkpieces and awkward dinner date conversations about gender and violence,
and the nature of marriage itself. However, I left the theater thrumming with
emotion: inchoate half-thoughts made more potent by their rawness. I couldn’t
articulate the power of what I’d seen until the following night, when I sat in
the back row of a burlesque show. One of the performers took the stage in a
gold sheath dress, fabric wings, and a dragon mask. She whipped her lithe, muscular body around
the stage, shimmying out of her dress, down to g-string and pasties; towards
the end of the song—Lorde’s “Royals”—she removed her mask, revealing an
elaborate make-up of jewel-bright gold, blue, and green that made her face look
as if it were covered in scales. Underneath her dragon’s head was a female
body, pale and pliant. Woman as fantasy. Woman as monster. Object of desire.
Destroyer of worlds.

I
return to this image, and the awe it inspired in me, as I take stock of the
discussions buzzing around Gone Girl, film and novel alike: the importance of
likeability in male and female protagonists; the ethics of constructing a
central character like Amy Elliott Dunne, who falsely accuses men who’ve
angered her of rape and abuse; and feminist deconstructions of the Cool Girl.
Gone Girl is a sardonic horror story that upends the tired Primetime tropes of
the suburban hubby with a heart of darkness beating under his pastel polo
shirt and his angelic-looking blonde victim by repositioning that
angelic-looking blonde as the predator. The story has a chokehold on the zeitgeist because it offers something
exceedingly rare and unimpeachably vital: a protagonist who shows that women
don’t have to be the sheep fleeing as the winged shadow swoops down. We can, in
fact, be the beasts with the long teeth.

In an essay
excoriating our cultural scab-picking over “likeable” female characters, the novel’s author and the film’s screenwriter Gillian Flynn writes: “[Men] have
a vocabulary for sex and violence that women just don’t. And we still don’t
discuss our own violence … women have spent so many years girl-powering
ourselves—to the point of almost parodic encouragement—we’ve left no room
to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important.” Most mentally healthy
women who settle down in the dark to watch Amy Elliott Dunne frame her
philandering husband, Nick, for her murder, and take a box-cutter to the throat
of her Nice Guy^TM ex-boyfriend, the king of condescending micro-aggressions,
certainly wouldn’t follow suit or agree that her reactions were proportional to
the offenses against her. Similarly, most men who watch American Psycho don’t
get their jollies shooting homeless people with nail guns. And yet, any woman
who has ever been cast aside for “a younger, bouncier Cool Girl” or had a man
explain to her what her best interests are has burned with the incandescent
rage that lights Amy’s torch, that glints off the axe she grinds.

Gone
Girl is the first film in recent memory, and, arguably, one of the few films,
period, to offer a female villain who isn’t just the token henchwoman to the
true nemesis—the figure who exists so that the hero, amidst the rock ‘em-sock
‘em violence, can demonstrate his fundamental goodness by agonizing over
whether he can hit a woman, as in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World; or so that
the hero’s love interest can prove her pluck (and be counted as a “strong
female character”) by relieving him of the burden and fighting the evil bitch
herself, as did Mariko in The Wolverine—but
a vicious mastermind out for her own ends. Her drive for power and control
doesn’t manifest in a rah-rah “girls run the world” way; it emerges with an
arctic darkness that aligns her with characters like Michael Corleone or
Patrick Bateman or Walter White. These men’s violence and cunning often
articulate—and complicate—particular modes of masculinity: the boss of all
bosses, the soulless executive, the one who knocks.

The novel winks
slyly at the conventions of the anti-hero, the man who transfixes us
despite—or, more likely, because of—his badness. Nick is a case study in
internalized misogyny: “… my father, a mid-level phone company manager who
treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee … his pure, inarticulate
fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid,
hard to breathe … He just didn’t like women. He thought they were stupid,
inconsequential, irritating.” At first, we think we’re reading yet another
account of another white man struggling with his savage nature; then Amy wrests
the narrative from him in ways that the Carmela Sopranos and Sklyer Whites, or
the countless movie femme fatales who need the love of a good man to get out
from under a bad man’s thumb, never do.

The
machinery of Amy’s plot whirls and grinds on the standards and ideals of
feminine identity: “Amazing Amy … Ultimate-Frisbee Granola and Blushing Ingénue
and Witty Hepburnian Sophisticate. Brainy Ironic Girl and Boho Babe … Cool Girl
and Loved Wife and Unloved Wife and Vengeful Scorned Wife.” Her Lecter-like precision in orchestrating
Nick’s trip up the river; the machete-sharpness of her observations about
gender, power, and identity; and the tremulous divide between the Amy who
outlines her plan and her motives with a crisp alacrity and the Amy who churns
with a pure, inarticulate fury make her a more compelling, even charismatic
character and a more effective predator.

Amy shifts through
a Kaleidoscope of identities to court, hold, and ultimately destroy the man of
her dreams. More than that, she wants to thrive—to win—in a world that still
just doesn’t like women. She uses the tropes of female victimhood—“a wonderful
good-hearted woman—whole life ahead of her, everything going for her, whatever
else they say about women who die—[who] chooses the wrong mate and pays the
ultimate price”—as the scaffolding of her plan. She is Snidely Whiplash in
damsel’s clothing, and this feels like a liberating alternative when women’s
suffering is treated like the wallpaper decorating so much of our
entertainment.

The week before Gone
Girl was released in theaters, I saw The Equalizer, an extravaganza of
slow-motioned, nü-metal soundtracked, fetishized violence; the scene in which
our hero, a former black ops assassin, drives a corkscrew into his mafioso
opponent’s throat is almost loving in its meticulousness. However, his
berserker fury is acceptable, even heroic, because he is taking on the Russian
mob to ostensibly save a teenager trafficked into sex work—a character that
only exists to sport mini-skirts and black eyes, to be beaten and degraded so
that our hero can be stirred into righteousness. By contrast, Amy is her own
avenger; she will play victim, but she will not be one.

Gone Girl has been
rightfully praised as a satire of our media’s bloodlust, especially for the
stories of violated women: kidnapped co-eds, teenage sex slaves, battered
wives, rape victims; stories that are intended, on the surface, to shock and
appall with the scope of women’s suffering but can, instead (and perhaps
deliberately) turn that suffering into something titillating. Amy weaponizes
this suffering. When she’s forced to turn to Desi, her controlling ex, for
shelter and support, she plies him with sob stories of being beaten into a
miscarriage, fearing for her life; to con him, she becomes a fusion of broken
girl and happy housewife. In a New York Times interview, Flynn says that, “She
embodies [these stereotypes] to get what she wants and then she detonates
them.” And after Amy murders Desi—slitting his throat mid-coitus in a moment of
Grand Guignol that rivals Hannibal Lecter’s face-eating or Patrick Bateman
shimmying to “It’s Hip to be Square” as he hacks a rival to death—she plays to
the chivalric impulses of the mostly male FBI team handling her case, spinning
a graphic yarn of rape, torture and debasement; the things that, on some level,
every woman fears when she walks through a parking garage with her keys between
her knuckles or leaves a Match.com date’s name, number, and photo with a good
friend.

As she gives good
victim, Amy wears the blood of the man she fucked and killed, blood that mocks
the willful naiveté and complacency of the cops—who prove all of her theories
about how men regard complex, difficult women correct when they silence the
lone woman detective who dares to ask probing, potentially damning questions.
Home from the hospital, she strips down in front of her husband, and that blood
is war paint; her naked body isn’t an object to be punished or desired—it is a
threat. The remainder of the film is a sly inversion of the typical domestic
violence narrative: one shot of Nick locking himself in the spare bedroom,
pensively staring at the door as the monster-he-married sleeps one room over,
is a mirror image of “Diary Amy,” the persona Amy created to frame Nick,
cowering under the covers, confessing on the page that the man of her dreams
may truly kill her. That shot provoked a nervous twitter of laughter throughout
the theater I attended, a sign that we’re still so ill at ease with a woman
assuming the full potency of the villain archetype, an archetype that will keep
its hold on us as long as there are slasher flicks and crime dramas, action
blockbusters and gritty indies.

There’s been a lot
of editorial hand-wringing over whether Amy’s actions make her Bad For Women.^TM
Yet, we don’t wonder whether Patrick Bateman, skinner of women, represents a
misandrist’s wet dream. We don’t insist that Hannibal Lecter or Alex De Large serve
as exemplars of masculinity, or Michael Corleone be led away in handcuffs for
ordering the hit on his brother—in fact, we don’t want to see him humbled or
reduced. We want the vicious, vicarious thrill of watching him get away with
it. Think of the fans who study that diner scene that ended The Sopranos as if
it were the Zapruder film, searching for proof that Tony lives to lie and
scheme and kill another day. Male
characters don’t have to be moral in order to be complex or aggressive.

Novel Nick unwittingly
articulates how our culture’s supposedly full-throated endorsement of the
strong, independent woman is, in some ways, merely a hiccup: “I can celebrate
and support and praise—I can operate in sunlight, basically—but I can’t deal
with angry or tearful women. I feel my father’s rage rise up in me in the
ugliest way.” We embrace Katniss Everdeen and Danerys Targaryen and Michonne
because they are heroes (even if they don’t want to be). Though they can be
killers, their anger and tears are funneled into liberating innocents and
protecting the people they love. Each of these women is an important,
empowering figure; still, she is lethal, but not dangerous. And we need
dangerous women on-screen; women who can claw open and bite down into the scarred
center of any woman (every woman) who has suppressed an unfathomable anger, a
will-to-power that can’t be contained in a pin-stripe suit. We need women whose
talons break through skin and spread bones to rip out the great, thick
throbbing heart. We need women who breathe fire.

Laura Bogart’s work has appeared on The Rumpus, Salon, Manifest-Station,
The Nervous Breakdown, RogerEbert.com and JMWW Journal, among other
publications. She is currently at work on a novel.

FAST CLIP: Video for Waxahatchee’s “Misery over Dispute” by Joshua Mikel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykjkZaL9RLk

At their best, music videos can function as small films unto
themselves, underscoring the talents of their subjects by placing them
within scenarios that enhance lyrics, music and ambience all at once. In
so doing, these filmlets may recall, either
consciously or subliminally, other films. It is difficult, when watching
Joshua Mikel’s
recent video for southern rocker Waxahatchee’s (Katie Crutchfield)
“Misery Over
Dispute,” not to think of a few different films. The two that ring the
loudest
bells, though, are “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Raging Bull.” An
appropriate mix,
perhaps, for the story the song tells. In 12 lines, the song describes a
collapsed relationship, with the singer’s departure the only option, a
choice
of “misery over dispute.” The video is just under two minutes long,
pounded out
in the musician’s signature fashion, guitars heavy, voice somewhat
raspy, in
some senses more a chant than a song, melodic arc absent, almost
irrelevant in
a song this brief. The singer spends most of her time dancing, under a
spotlight, kicking dust up around her, and catching what look like
cinders as
they fall. Tom Waits fans may find some corollary here to some of the
stunts
Waits has pulled in his live shows, with scattered sparkles and a
semi-shuffle
that kicks up a glowing cloud around him. But what a contradiction of
impulses
this is. The freedom of the dance Crutchfield does here recalls the way
Gene
Kelly danced in a puddle in “Singin’ in the Rain,” with a seamless
optimism
that would be both foreign to contemporary viewers and something of a
standard
to reach toward—reflective, here, of the singer’s ability to leave,
leave and
not look back, choosing loneliness over argument. But, on the other
hand, when
Jake LaMotta dances alone, under dim lights, in a boxing ring, in “Raging
Bull,” we
see a figure who relishes battle, who relishes conflict, and whose
movements
around the ring have acquired, with time, an epic quality, however raw
and crude
his activities while actually boxing might be. As Waxahatchee sings of
feeling
“spineless and sick in your eyes,” we can’t help but feel the pull of
the
battle, of argument, of rage, a feeling conveyed in very few words. The
director has chosen a dark, shadowy room and soft, black-and-white hues
for the
video, usually code for realism, but in this case a code for the
dreamlike
state we find ourselves in when within that most beguiling of situations, the
human
relationship.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.