Serena Bramble – Press Play Video Blog

Watch: ‘Mad Men’ Recalls Edward Hopper’s Paintings in Frame after Frame after Frame

If you’re still unconvinced that ‘Mad Men’ remains the most exquisitely crafted examination of loneliness, then study the ways the show closes out each episode. Resting on the power of its compositions over witty dialogue, the numerous backwards tracking shots, framing Don, Peggy and others dwarfed in their work and home environments, often framed within doorways and other frames, is as poignant in its reflection of urban solitude as any Edward Hopper painting. And it’s clear that Hopper would have adored ‘Mad Men’: just as Matthew Weiner so subtly captured the lives of ordinary, extraordinary New Yorkers over the course of 8 years, Hopper was obsessed with capturing the privacy of everyday people. In solitary bedrooms, offices, movie theaters, often solitary characters reflect in their environments, yet even when couples are together, as in Hopper’s Room in New York, they are occupied with their own devices and do not interact with each other, their intimacy as unattainable as Don’s constant chase for happiness in the beds of other women, or a new wife.

That isn’t to say that every shot ended in a back tracking wide shot; the close-ups of Don’s conflicted face accentuated his existential dilemma, and the frames within frames only heightened how trapped the characters were in their own fears and longings. But the back tracking shots are a basic staple of editing: start wide, go in, end, in a way that punctuates how far you’ve come. And that is exactly what makes the contrast between Don’s constant fading away, his dismayed face and the final filmed shot, a push-in to Don’s smiling face, so poignant. Stripped of his possessions, his family, his home of New York, he has found something close to internal peace at a hippie retreat on the California coastline, finding himself and, perhaps, a Coca Cola ad in the process.

Editor’s Note: The ending scenes are not in strict chronological order, to allow for some editing creative licensing. However, their respective seasons remain firmly in order. And I will be reminded that Don’s smile is not technically the last shot, or even the penultimate shot, of the series. A helicopter shot from the famous Coke commercial is the last shot seen of the series. However, it was the last scene of the original footage shot for the series, and for that, it is arguably the true final shot of the series.

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing, she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.

Watch: ‘American Sniper’ Quotes ‘Team America: World Police’

It would be too easy to praise ‘Team America: World Police’ for taking down the black-and-white depiction of American patriotism at all costs, the same that many have claimed seeped through ‘American Sniper,’ or at the very least the real man Chris Kyle. But it’s a testament to both Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s democracy in attacking both ends of the political spectrum and their own talent as satirists that they boldly pointed out the "three kinds of people" rhetoric, frequently repeated in the Bush Administration under the "you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists" mantra, a good decade before it was brought back in Clint Eastwood’s ‘American Sniper.’ The notion that humans can be neatly divided into three categories is contradicting the very complicated nature of humanity, perhaps as a coping mechanism to make sense of chaos (as the original writer of the "Wolves, sheep and sheepdog" analogy, Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, did in response to 9/11) but can also be the first step in dehumanizing the enemy and painting the speaker as a Campbellian Hero. As Parker and Stone suggest, maybe that’s the foundation of America.

Writer’s Note: For a history of Grossman’s "Wolves, sheep and sheepdog" analogy, if a politically charged write-up, read Michael and Erin Cumming’s piece at Slate: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/01/21/american_sniper_s_wolves_sheep_and_sheepdogs_speech_has_a_surprising_history.html

Watch: Why ‘Mad Men’ Is a Personal Experience

Mad Men is a show about the odd relationship that human beings have with the past—our desire to escape coupled with our desire to hang on. On Mad Men nostalgia is dangerous, deceptive, illusory.

When Mad Men first came out eight years ago, friends hosted theme parties with tailored clothes and twist and shout dances, bars had Mad Men themed events, with cocktails named after the characters, clothing stores like Banana Republic opened up their own Mad Men themed clothing lines.

Over the course of the last eight years we’ve acknowledged the casual sexism and racism of the 60s, while also distancing ourselves from it. I ran into people at parties who swooned over Don’s primal masculinity, who laughed at sexist and racist moments, as if they were an inside joke.

Mad Men’s construction has always been seductive, all the beauty and sex and money and cars. We keep coming back even after we see that its an illusion, when Don’s house is emptied, when Betty is diagnosed with cancer from those same cigarettes we couldn’t help thinking were beautiful and sexy and dangerous in all the best ways.

Mad Men has always also been a mirror, forcing us to look at our own choices and see how deeply they are marred in the culture we live in. I was first introduced to the series by an ex who smoked cigarettes and loved whisky and cinema and sad films as much as I did. When we fought I often felt like one of the women of Mad Men, desperate to keep up appearances, to hide tears with makeup, to throw used liquor bottles in the trash. I’ve seen myself in every female character on Mad Men: when Betty shot those birds, when Joan knocked her fiancé out with her flowers, when Sally got those go-go boots.

But I didn’t think of these women when I left that relationship and started my life ostensibly over; I thought of Don, those empty shots of office rooms and open highways, of New York skylines and the California sun.

Despite strange protests that Mad Men is really all about the women, the truth is Mad Men has always been about Don. No character on Mad Men is capable of evolution the way that Don is, if not for himself than for the advertising culture he lives for. The ending of the series is ambiguous—does Don find peace? Does he use his experience in California as the foundation for a beloved and manipulative Coca Cola ad that defined the 70s?

The final episode of Mad Men reinforces the show’s allure for me, as well as its fundamental tensions. I’m still half in love with and half terrified of what I’m being sold. In the beginning Don tells us that, “What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons.” By the end, Don is moved to tears by the unmemorable man named Leonard who explains how deeply unloved he feels even though he knows the people in his life who he cares about are trying. Don’s response to Leonard’s opening up is the exact opposite response he received when he opened up about his own past at the Hershey pitch the previous season, when he was basically fired from his position for opening up about a past he is deeply private and emotional about.

Don has tried to fill a void in his heart with any number of vices. It’s telling that when Don calls Peggy, he doesn’t lead with his secret past, but the myriad ways he has been disloyal to the people he truly loved the most. “I broke all my vows.”

We can’t help being who we are, even when who we are is so deeply shaped by the culture we live in. In some ways, the hippie retreat is a relief and respite from the stiff, unfeeling world of advertising that Don comes from. But, at the end of the day, it’s just peddling another set of wares. Does Don’s meditation forgive him of his sins? “You always run away,” Peggy tells him over the phone and it’s true. If anything, the hero of this series is Sally, dutifully cancelling her trip to Madrid, so that she can help her mother and brothers at home.

But that’s not who we are poised to identify with at the end.

Though Mad Men has always fiercely critiqued the patriarchy, it is also very much the product of the time in which it was created. For the past eight years we have seen many series featuring a white, male antihero who finds some kind of redemption—steely, hard eyed, with an emotionally soft core. The women in these series have been given a far greater capacity for rich interior lives, but we also are still poised to see other women in the series as mere objects. We view these women through the eyes of the ad men themselves, the camera panning up and down legs, breasts and other disembodied body parts, whether in pencil dress or mini skirt.

To be a woman on Mad Men is to endure hurt after hurt, and brief moments of sisterhood and solidarity. At the very end, Peggy is afforded a possibility for romance that is still predicated on a man wanting her, rather than someone she has been overtly longing for. At the very end, Joan makes a decision, but finds she can’t have it all either.

At the start of Mad Men, I hated Don—I couldn’t stand his smugness, his womanizing, his lies, his cruelty in the workplace and at home. But after watching this show for eight years I began to see myself in him in small ways, especially in moments where the façade of ease would break.

Many of the reasons I will mourn the end of Mad Men do feel intensely personal. If you watch something for eight years, even something you felt profoundly ambivalent about, you’ll eventually start to have feelings for it, or at least for the YOU that was watching it. A lot has happened over the last eight years. I lost friendships, gained them and lost and gained them again. I started and left different jobs. I lost my grandparents. I mended my relationship with my parents. I learned to love in new ways, to love more deeply, and more carefully. I felt my soul crack open and felt parts of me sewn shut, and then I let parts of myself be open all over again. At the end of Mad Men, Don is the same person he was at the start, older, wiser, slightly changed, but still with that same wonderful, terrible core. Our identity is as malleable as we let it be, except when it’s not. By the end of the series we still want more, but at least we’ve learned to listen.

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.

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing, she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.

Watch: David Letterman: The Late Night Television Anti-Hero

If you were alive in the 1980s and you turned on NBC at 12:35 AM,
the very last activity you would have seen David Letterman doing on
“Late Night” is fawning over baby pictures—as he did during his final
days of public life.

In fact
Letterman was TVs first and now its last grumpy old man, except he was
in his thirties at the time and looking at this video essay, it’s hard
to believe a guy this thorny, someone who spent
this much time torching his bosses and ripping away at a pretentious
celebrity modus operandi—could be on television for more than three
minutes, much less over 30 years.

How does one explain his success?

In interviews
Letterman likes to give all the credit away for his success to his hero,
the great Johnny Carson, and more than occasionally, he even
acknowledges the influence of Steve Allen, the first helmsman of that
NBC institution known as the Tonight Show and perhaps its most talented
performer. (Before anyone insists Jimmy Fallon takes the crown on this
point, take a look at Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds,” which he created
and wrote for PBS, and tell me if our latest occupant of Tonight could
pull off something so erudite.)

While
Letterman’s approach to late night TV may have channeled his
predecessors in certain ways—like Letterman, Johnny Carson could
belittle and destroy his guests in a single sentence—the Letterman who
rose to cultural prominence at the end of the Cold War was a singularly
crass, awkward, slightly misogynistic, fearless truth-teller.

And that’s why we loved him.

Letterman’s
eternal brilliance lies in his expansive mastery of the components of
humor: the set-up and the punchline, i.e. the story and the funny
climax.

First, unlike
the 2015 version of himself, Letterman in the 1980s was absolutely not a willing member of America’s celebritocracy—that cult of celebrity
which had always been a large part of show business culture.

But, what
Letterman possessed from the beginning was an uncanny ability to search
for comedic set-ups in visual, verbal and intellectual spaces where no
other performer thought to look. He was intelligent, well read and
lightening fast. Any sentence uttered—stupid or intelligent—on “Late
Night with David Letterman” could be made a slave to his opportunistic,
devastating punchlines—with emphasis on the word “punch.”

And it didn’t
matter who you were—network executives, respected celebrities, stupid
humans, stupid pets and his most prolific target of all, Letterman
himself. No wonder Cher called him an asshole. No one was safe.

Before he
leaves for good, one must acknowledge his huge influence. “Late Night
with David Letterman” taught an entire generation not only how to search
for the perfect comedic set up but also what it means to deliver a
foolproof punchline. In college I watched this sweet anarchy day after
glorious day, as the comedian casually lobbed stick after stick of
verbal dynamite into the key light biosphere, this wanton behavior
continuing unabated for a decade and a half.

But, young
David Letterman was not stupid. He understood himself and his audience
extremely well, and he walked the line between hero and anti-hero,
between TV pioneer and social pariah for as long as he could and as he
aged and matured, he even knew when to step away from that line.

So, here he
is again in full “Dave,” before the anti-depressants, before the lessons
of the sex scandal, before the birth of his son Harry, before his
heroes had ascended to the next life and left him alone.

I was recently waiting in line at the post office.

The lines are
long these days at the busy location in central Plano, Texas because
that branch has staffed down, and one can be sure that sending a parcel
these days is a deeply boring and cynical experience as an impersonal
staff and an uninterested system wastes your time and pisses you off.

A half hour
or so later, I had placed my package in the system, and I was walking
toward the exit. I spied a middle-aged African-American man shaking
his head and sighing in frustration. He was at the end of a very long
line.

I walked up to him and extended a hand which he grasped as if it were a life line.

“The cocktail waitress will be around in a few minutes,” I said to him. “Buy yourself a rum and Coke. I hear they’re amazing.”

The man smiled and laughed.

For those of us who watched it, “Late Night with David Letterman” continues.

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose
montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching
and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and
Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing,
she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.

Ken Cancelosi is the Publisher and Co-Founder of Press Play.

VIDEO ESSAY: Anita Ekberg: Artist and Model

Even as a 16-year-old, it was impossible not to fall in love with Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita.
Her childlike glee when howling with the coyotes could melt the coldest
of hearts, and her physical curves made Marilyn Monroe, the clear
inspiration for her American starlet Sylvia, look like a stick figure.
As I tried to explain to my mom at age 16, "The word ‘voluptuous’ was
created for this woman!" (Now, at age 25, I still imagine gaining 15
pounds so I too can dress up in a black strapless dress and dance to
"Ready Teddy" one day on Halloween.) In Fellini‘s world view about the
shallowness of the 60s jet set, you still want to believe that Sylvia’s
joie de vivre will pull herself, and Marcello, out of the sadness of the
celebrity culture into which they find themselves sinking.

In
a modern context, we might cynically categorize Sylvia as a "Manic
Pixie Dream Girl," the childlike foil whose purpose to the script is to
be emotionally available to a vacant man and give him a reason for
living, but even the term’s coiner, Nathan Rabin, would be against that,
for Fellini’s greatest gift to Ekberg’s career was to contextualize
her–and, yes, her curves as well–into the emotional territory of his
scripts, instead of merely making her a sex object or plot device, as many of her
American films did before Fellini granted her cinematic immortality. He
celebrates her body in La Dolce Vita and Boccaccio 70, where
Ekberg plays a billboard come to life, but in both films, her sexual
prowess is used to expose the insecurity of man while capitalizing on
Ekberg’s trademark wit and comedic timing. On screen, she was the dream
you never wanted to stop chasing, even though you knew she’d never give
you her full attention. But she gave hope in an otherwise depraved
world, who knew that la dolce vita boils down to this simple line: "I like lots of things, but there are three things I love most: Love, love, and love."

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose
montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching
and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and
Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing,
she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.

VIDEO ESSAY: Electric Sheep: How Female Power Is Limited By Consumer Culture

[The script for the video essay follows.]

In the opening montage to Do The Right Thing, Tina, played by Rosie Perez, dances to “Fight
The Power,” the only figure in an otherwise empty urban landscape. In this opening sequence, Tina symbolizes
everything we associate with female power: a delicate body in a kung fu pose,
her big beautiful eyes coupled with tight fists. In the world of the “strong
female character,” sex is a snarl, fingers are clenched and punches are thrown,
even though the camera zooms in and lingers on curves.

In the opening credits Tina seems active and empowered, In
the actual film, Tina is house-bound. We see moments of her talking to Mookie,
begging him to come home or lecturing him about being a man. However, we don’t
have any scenes of interiority, where Tina is established as a character, with
her own hopes and dreams.

Her existence in Do
The Right Thing is less about unpacking the world that women of color live
in than showing a sexy female figure in a poor urban landscape. After that
opening sequence, Tina is actively disempowered. Her role goes from
revolutionary to mere eye candy. Tina’s big moment in a film about individuals
making hard choices is when Mookie finally shows up and rolls an ice cube over
her segmented body.

The image of the female revolutionary has often been adapted
to fit different time periods. In the 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, we see close ups of Joan’s face
crying. In a ’48 version we see Joan in full armor leading the charge, as well
as images of her bound and crying. In
the 1999 film, The Messenger, Joan’s
hair is shorn, her eyes looking intently, her lip curled into a snarl. Is Joan
of Arc’s strength from her religious conviction, or her prowess on the
battlefield?

We focus less on the substance of icons of female strength
than we do on their image. We worry about what Wonder Woman is going to wear
when she fights evil. We get concerned about whether Super Girl’s breasts look
fake. We cheer when Beyonce dresses up as Rosie The Riveter; her curled bicep
is lauded as a powerful statement about female empowerment. We care less about
what celebrities actually do to help women than whether or not they are
willing and proud to proclaim themselves feminists. We want the quick sound byte,
the 3:00 minute Upworthy video, the clever meme.

We don’t want women to be objects, but we sure as hell want
them to be symbols.

The powerful woman is defined first by how she looks and how
she holds her body. The “strong female lead” is always beautiful and fierce,
sexy and tough. She has a tragic back-story and a yearning for justice as solid
and strong as any male action hero. In today’s world, Xena, Buffy, The Bride,
and Lara Croft, as well as superheroes like Wonder Woman and Super Girl, are read
as powerful because of their physical prowess. Often their power is meant to
surprise us precisely because, despite their physical strength, they appear
pretty, delicate, and sweet.

The ubiquity of these images of female strength and power is
exacerbated in a world of Instagram images and constantly generated GIFs.
Beyonce’s allusion to Rosie the Riveter is one part homage and one part
marketing initiative. It’s a beautiful, brazen and, above all, familiar image,
a picture of feminism that we generally don’t question, an idea about power we
all agree we can get behind.

Beyonce and Janelle Monae are two artists at the forefront
of today’s feminist movement. Beyonce is deeply invested in claiming space for
female experience in a man’s world and insists on a woman’s right to “have
it all.” In contrast, Monae demands change. Monae doesn’t want us to “ban
bossy” or “lean in”, she wants us to open our minds. To embrace creativity,
queerness, sensuality.

There’s a reason Beyonce can be heralded as both a feminist
icon, and also have her lyrics used to support a mainstream film like Fifty Shades of Grey, which is less
about S&M than a relationship that meets all the criteria for abuse. In
reality, Queen Bey isn’t worried about power dynamics as long as she gets to
call the shots, which is why her rallying call of “bow down bitches!” is less a
call for female revolution than an assertion that she wants a seat in the boys
club.

Beyonce’s feminist message, though visible and important,
does not actively disrupt the mainstream. In contrast, Janelle Monae is an
R&B artist who is actually deeply invested in dismantling the way we think
about power. In her debut studio album, The
ArchAndroid, Monae plays the character Cindi Mayweather, an android who
time travels to save a civilization from forces trying to suppress freedom and
love. In her recently released Q.U.E.E.N.,
Monae also calls for revolution. She encourages solidarity amongst the
disenfranchised, the wacky and the just plain weird. Women in Monae’s videos
don’t bump and grind, objects for the camera, the way they do in almost every
single music video. They smile, they dance, they play records, they sing. While Beyonce croons slow ballads about
yearning to be an object of allure for her husband, Monae tells a male lover on
“Prime Time,” “I don’t want to be mysterious with you.”

In a world where female sexuality and power is
still often obscured, rendered strange, unintelligible, or made to exist to
fulfill a male fantasy, Monae’s insistence on being seen as a full person is
far more radical than any power pose you can copy and share on Facebook or
Instagram. While Beyonce’s brand of feminism might be a more attractive model
for consumer culture, it’s artists like Monae, who insist on questioning the
ways we are labeled, that will ultimately help us do what Tina in Do The Right Thing strives for in her
opening dance, but never ultimately achieves: get a chance to actually fight the
power.

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.

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose
montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching
and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and
Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing,
she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.

VIDEO ESSAY: R.I.P. Lauren Bacall

What defines sex appeal on the big screen? This is a question that has been pondered in countless essays, sometimes with extensive scholarship attached, sometimes not, but the answer remains elusive, as it should. When watching Lauren Bacall in her early films, it is impossible not to think of "sexy" as one of the adjectives to describe her, and yet where is that sexiness coming from? In part, it comes from a sort of conversational fear, a sense that she, or rather one of the characters she plays, might say something barbed, or worse, at any turn, and that if she doesn’t, she’s choosing not to. There’s a "nothing ventured, nothing gained" quality in the act of watching her; unless there’s some risk involved in any experience–in this case, the risk of shock–there’s no point in having the experience, or so the platitude goes. There’s her voice, of course, the deep-toned, husky, "bedroom" voice, which is, in its own way, permissive; it sends a mood of acceptance, as well as engagement. I first saw Bacall in The Big Sleep when I was quite young, almost too young to understand her, or the importance of the film, or Bogart’s presence in it–but I did understand that she represented a comfort with, and an embodiment of, specifically adult sexuality, for grown-ups, a quality I still consider somewhat removed or Parnassian, even at my current, seemingly mature age. She seemed then, and she seems in retrospect, like a pinnacle, evidence of a time when on-screen sex appeal might emanate from other sources than it does currently.

For now, what we consider sexy has a not-so-subtle price tag attached to it. Many viewers only consider the star or starlet a sex symbol if their image has appeared a certain number of times, on a certain number of billboards, in a certain number of high-profile films. The quality of that appearance is a factor, as well. Viewers know how much money is invested in the films in which the Symbol appears. They know how much money the Symbol is paid for each film. They know who the highest paid stars are. They know what the most expensive films are. Or they can easily find out. They know that technology can easily modify a star’s appearance to make it look however a filmmaker might want it to look. We know that this equipment is highly costly. They know that the said Symbol eats expensive food, gets exercise through an expensive trainer, and wears more expensive clothes than are imaginable to us–or if they’re imaginable, they aren’t within financial reach. All of this ultimately enters, oddly enough, into popular conceptions of sex appeal–and because of the integration of star culture into the larger body of cultural or even news reporting, one might begin to take a matter-of-fact attitude towards this appeal itself. Is the set of reactions, subtle and not-so-subtle, physical and otherwise, to sexiness, lessened with this development? Somewhat. It’s not so much that the stars of yesterday were better, or sexier, it’s that they may have been playing by a slightly different set of rules.

Which brings me to Bacall’s face. When she was introduced to me as a classic sex symbol as a child, my very first thought was Her? Really? She looks so . . . normal. And then I caught on. There is an approachability in her features that doesn’t bear much similarity with the Pitts, the Jolies, the Greens, the Stones, or even the Geres, the Fondas, or the Dickinsons. As theatrical as her movements, her carriage, and her phrasings might be, there’s a sense of the human being beneath it, there, as well; as she herself said, "the look" began because she was lowering her head to keep from shaking too much. In the right light, watching Lauren Bacall could be a powerful reminder of the difference between being an actor and being a human being, and how the best actors show viewers both experiences. Sex appeal at present is more likely to be measured in near-mathematical terms: are the proportions correct? How perfect are the features? If we compare the Symbol to other Symbols, how does this Symbol match up? The simplest way of saying it is that viewers have gotten colder, and the simplest question about a star—sexy? or not sexy?—is filtered through a set of criteria that have little to do with lust and more with what makes a good screensaver. It would be difficult to trace the series of cultural seismic shifts that have led to this attitude, but one thing remains certain. To say Bacall represents another era in moviemaking is unquestionable, and to say that era is bygone is an understatement.–Max Winter

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose
montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching
and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and
Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing,
she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

VIDEO ESSAY: White Knights and Bad People

[The text of the video essay follows.]

When I watched Back to
the Future with my parents as a child, I remember my shock at seeing Marty
McFly’s mom sexually assaulted by the high school bully, Biff, in the backseat
of a car. The assault was confusing. I remember my first viewing of this
relatively tame movie as a garble of images–the backseat, the fluffy curls of
the pink prom dress, the feet poking out, the muffled screams.

Of course, this entire scene is about Marty’s dad having the
guts to punch the rapist in the face, to tell him to “leave her alone.” By the
end Marty’s mother is all smiles, relief, and pride in having chosen a man who
would defend and respect her.

My exposure to cartoon gender relations was similarly
violent. The female cartoon characters in shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs
liked to don skimpy outfits. The male characters’ eyes would pop out of their
skulls, tongues hanging out lecherously. Of course, these shows played on old
cartoon favorites. Betty Boop often had to avoid unwanted male attention, poor
Olive Oyl was constantly placed in supposedly comic situations where she was
being either kidnapped or harassed, and in Tex Avery’s Little Red Riding Hood,
“Red” is a full grown woman who must be careful of the predatory wolf who
stalks her nightclub.

When I was a child, the images of a female cartoon character
being catcalled, or a woman being assaulted, did not seem especially unusual. I
assumed that warding off male attention was met by most adult women with a
mixture of pride and mild annoyance. As I got older, I became more and more
concerned about this phenomenon. When even strong, powerful women are victimized
in films and television, a dashing hero saves the day.

Today, in the age of Steubenville, we still worry about the
ways boys and men prey on girls and women. Social organizations often still
rely on the white knight trope when they address this matter. Actors and
musicians who regularly objectify women on screen and in music videos are shown
looking sad as they pose with Real Men Don’t Buy Girls hashtag signs. In the
White House PSA on sexual assault, Daniel Craig and Benicio Del Toro are among the male
participants calling for heroic behavior.

Stepping in when someone is in trouble is certainly
honorable, but the moral lesson in these PSAs provides men with the same
options they had in Back to the Future.
Are you a Marty, or a Bif? Will you defend womanhood, or assault it?

The threat of rape is often used as a device for male
characters to become heroes, which contributes to the idea that sexual assault
is a normal part of growing up female. Rape is still seen as unchecked lust
rather than an expression of violence.
This myth has far reaching repercussions, as girls and women live in the
very real shadow of sexual assault constantly. We get inured to sexual violence
on shows like Game of Thrones, where
rape is often presented in the background of a scene, something bad, brutal men
do to helpless women.

It’s exhausting as a woman to constantly see the female body
on the brink of violation. I’m tired of the voicelessness of those bodies, by
the fact that we still need to spread awareness about how horrible sexual
assault actually is. I know I’m supposed to be grateful when people express
that they are aware, when men who seem poised to protect me when I go out, when
someone develops an app designed to help get me home safe by checking in with my
family and friends.

The way rape is portrayed today is not so different from how
it was portrayed in 80s exploitation films, where rape is intended to shock and
titillate in one fell swoop, like it often does in the current series Game of Thrones. A film like Extremities, for example, promises the
sweetest of revenges for a female protagonist, but it is the image of Farrah Fawcett
cowering and sobbing, forced to take off her clothes, while her rapist looks on
and calls her beautiful that has become the ubiquitous Hollywood rape scene,
where a gorgeous woman is exposed and shamed and, despite the fact that we are
told to root for her, we are also given permission to ogle her, to see her
through the rapist’s lens, before we see her own experience.

This is one of the reasons that Joan’s rape scene on Mad Men is so effective is that it
portrays her quiet terror without fetishizing her body or her fear. We don’t
see her ample curves illuminated, the way they normally are. Joan’s sexuality
is a point of pride throughout the series, and the camera makes it clear that
what we are witnessing is a power play and violation. There’s nothing sexual
about it. The camera ends not on a close up of her body, but a close up of her
staring at a point just ahead of her in an office that isn’t hers, as she waits
for what is happening to stop.

A Video Essay on THE X-FILES: Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head

What is the American Dream?

Is it wealth? Power? Or it is something more existential like raising a family with a particular set of values?

By season 4, the X-Files was already considered one of the sickest, most graphic expressions of pop culture ever to be featured on a major network. That reputation could only have encouraged writers Glen Morgan and James Wong to craft “Home,” with imagery so disgusting that it transcends its place in X-Files lore and stands next to the classics of the horror genre.

In October of 1996, 18 million viewers watched their favorite paranormal FBI investigators, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, enter the realm of The Peacocks, a mysterious family living in an isolated village called Home, Pennsylvania.

A grotesquely disfigured baby has been discovered near the Peacock house, buried at home plate on a baseball diamond frequented by young boys.

But what the writers of this story really want you to know is that this traditional American town is really . . . . Mayberry.

Yep, that Mayberry. And Mulder can’t help but lose himself to the allure of Main street America, its nostalgia proving too strong to resist.

Sure the town of Home has baseball, cadillacs, a sheriff named Andy Taylor, a deputy named Barney and the traditional small-town architecture. But, don’t be fooled. If this represents the pinnacle of traditional small town American values, then what we see portrayed in “Home” are the rat-infested ruins of those same ideals. But, like Mulder in the opening scenes, Sheriff Taylor doesn’t see the rotting corpse.

An examination of the dead baby’s body reveals the Peacock’s are somehow breeding with each other, producing offspring with serious physical and health defects.

It is at this moment in the episode where Scully and Mulder make the fateful decision to invade the Peacock’s homestead with guns drawn.

Do the Peacocks deserve to be invaded this way? There doesn’t seem to be authentic evil shrouded beneath their lifestyle choices. For certain, an investigation into the baby’s death is warranted. But, is this an FBI matter? When you consider that incest law varies from state to state–in New Jersey, for example, there are no criminal penalties if both partners are over 18–Mulder and Scully’s case looks weak. They are entering this house under false assumptions. One can argue this is an out-of-control government provoking a confrontation. No one is in danger — that is . . . until Mulder utters this single sentence:

“The mother of the dead baby is listening. She’s not only having sex with her grown boys, but she is also out to protect her children. And that threat to arrest her children leads to this :

The Peacocks remind us that baseball bats have many uses.

Under what circumstances does the government have the power to abridge the civil liberties and personal freedoms of American citizens?

The town of Home had few problems.

Until the FBI got involved.

And besides . . . .

Scully is flat wrong.

And the sheriff and his wife would be alive had the government handled this case differently.

“Home” is beautifully directed by the late Kim Manners, who packs this episode with unforgettable images, all of which contribute to the horror.

In the end, it is Mulder who finally comes to understand the Peacocks. Morally speaking, they are less like humans and more like wild animals.

And as everyone knows, if you do something stupid or dangerous to a wild animal, you might get killed. [cut to Mulder and Scully pulling a screaming Mrs. Peacock out from under the bed.] This is not their finest moment. Agent Scully is the first to realize the case against the Peacocks isn’t open and shut.

With this simple ending, the writers of this episode remind us that with in every cherished axiom — there exists the very opposite of that truth. The Peacocks may not look like your family, but the love and fierce loyalty they have for each other is not hard to understand. Besides, when was the last time you told your mother how much you love her.

There’s always tomorrow. The Peacock’s future is just an American dream away.

Ken Cancelosi is the Publisher and Co-Founder of Press Play.

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose
montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching
and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and
Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing,
she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.

VIDEO ESSAY: Female Sexual Agency in a World of Blurred Lines

VIDEO ESSAY: Female Sexual Agency in a World of Blurred LInes

We live in a culture where female
bodies are constantly on display. However, most images of female sexuality we
see are passive and two-dimensional.

For the past two weeks Miley Cyrus’s MTV
VMA performance has been decried by parents’ groups and feminists alike. The
response to Cyrus’s performance is more interesting than Cyrus’s performance
itself. It hit on every cultural nerve about what is appropriate and inappropriate
for a young woman to do with her body. Of course, this dialogue has been going
on for years. Female artists from Madonna to Lady Gaga to Rihanna to Nicki
Minaj all have used sexuality to express themselves.

The main reason that Cyrus’s
performance stood out is twofold. Cyrus grew up in the public eye. Like Britney
Spears, Christina Aguilera, Selena Gomez and other child stars, Cyrus’s sexual
display is not seen as a natural transition to adulthood. Instead, critics are
concerned to see a coveted virginal
starlet transforming into just another sexual object.

We are still uncomfortable with the
idea that young women have sexual agency. In general, our media depicts
powerful women as direct and aggressive on the streets or on the battlefield. In
the bedroom, however, they are still prizes to be won over. The trope of the
strong female who needs the male lead to work extra hard to win her over is
commonplace. The theme here is that strong women don’t put it out for just
anybody, and sexual and romantic longing make a woman weak.

This can be seen in any range of shows,
such as Daria and 30Rock, where the smart, savvy female seems
patently disinterested or not good at garnering male attention. In the film Bridesmaids, Annie Walker puts up with
male bad behavior until a sweet guy she initially pushes away wins her heart. In
Iron Man we root for Pepper Potts, a
higher quality woman than the types Tony Stark bangs early on.

Today, strength and sexuality are
perceived as mutually exclusive. This trend became even more readily apparent
this past summer. Look at songs like “Blurred Lines,” for instance, or our
obsession with the female submission narrative 50 Shades of Grey, which is less about a sexually secure woman
exploring her own kinks (a la Secretary)
than a genuinely meek young woman submitting to a man’s control.

Lena Dunham’s Girls has been lauded and reviled
for its focus on young women’s unhappy sexual encounters, which are perceived
as being more authentic than those of Samantha in Sex in the City. Indeed sex is different for young women in 2013
than it was in the late 90s. What is public and private space has changed and
the risks associated with getting naked have increased. In this culture, a
woman’s body can easily become shared public property, whether or not she wants
it.

To me, what is most shocking about Miley
Cyrus’s performance is that it is devoid of pleasure. Cyrus looks gawky and
uncomfortable, her tongue sticks out cheekily, rather than sensually, her
twerking looks like something she practiced in the mirror for a few hours. If
Cyrus was offensively appropriating symbols of “blackness” in her act,
she was also appropriating elements of raunch culture. When Madonna and Lady
Gaga present sexual displays they own it, while Cyrus seems to be figuring out
how she feels about her own sexual awakening.

Most displays of female desire are so
prescriptive that it is hard to differentiate between raw want and
commercialized longing. In many ways the pre-packaged version of sexuality is
less threatening than the unscripted version. We question whether or not
Rihanna really loves S&M, or whether Madonna’s sexually provocative videos
were merely about capturing attention.

Women can rarely be seen as sexual
beings without being reduced to objects or otherwise exploited. This is part of
what keeps women from being viewed as whole people, capable of intellectual bravado,
as well as great desire.

Of course, opening up this kind of
dialogue means listening to women. Films such as Easy A and The To-Do List attempt
to dismantle the stereotype that young women cannot be in control of their
sexuality, but the idea that young women can be sexual agents is still not
mainstream. We believe that young women cannot possibly be sexual agents, and that
sexuality for young women is about display and attention, rather than desire.

Allowing women the space to be sexual,
either in pop culture or in society at large, matters. When female sexuality is
most commonly depicted as either incredibly dangerous or incredibly vulnerable,
the narrative that coming-of-age for a girl is a time of loss needs to change. Girls
and young women deserve to be offered the possibility that their sexual
awakening could signal that a world is opening up.

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 three times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story
contests. She is currently writing her first book. She is Associate
Book Reviews Editor at The Nervous Breakdown.

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose
montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching
and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and
Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing,
she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.