Sexism in the Arts?

 

Guerrilla Girls get ready for war on the European art world

 

 

Screenwriters’ View of Women

 

A Hollywood producer has created @femscriptintros to expose the majority dolts who bang out this crap.

Twitter Account Shows How NOT To Introduce a Female Character

I would dispute the headline though. This is how it’s done. Not sure about the word “not.”

JANE pours her gorgeous figure into a tight dress, slips into her stiletto-heeled fuck-me shoes, and checks herself in the dresser mirror.

— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016

 

A gorgeous woman, JANE, 23, is a little tipsy, dancing naked on her big bed, as adorable as she is sexy. *BONUS PTS FOR BEING THE 1ST LINE

— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016

 

 

The Problem with Female Superheroes?

The Problem with Female Superheroes

Even Female Stars Paid Less than Males

No one should be crying for Jennifer Lawrence’s bank account, but there is more evidence here of systemic gender discrimination when it comes to money…

Sony emails reveal Jennifer Lawrence paid less than male co-stars

Gumpert added, “The current talent deals are: O’Russell: 9%; Cooper: 9%; Bale: 9%; [Jeremy] Renner: 9%; Lawrence: 7%; Adams: 7%.”

Emma Watson at UN: Call for Gender Equality

More Sexist Double Standards

MPAA now in the crosshairs…

Soloway directed this year’s Afternoon Delight, a story about a housewife, played by Kathryn Hahn, who discovers she likes to get it on far more and in different ways than she’d previously thought. In a discussion of her film, Soloway reveals that to get the film the R she promised to her distributors she had to cut the scenes depicting women enjoying having sex…

The MPAA is happy to give a pass to “boys being boys,” but any picture that portrays a woman taking pleasure in sex on her terms should be treated like obscene material.

more

Female Pleasure Censored Again

Evan Rachel Wood lets loose on the MPAA for double standards and bias…

Evan Rachel Wood Calls Out the MPAA for Sex Scene Double Standards on Deleted ‘Charlie Countryman’ Scene

This bolsters another recent complaint about female pleasure being censored on TV.

 

UTR: Byzantium (2013)

The slow burn of eternity weighs down this effort, which is more of a drama than a thriller.  The film fared poorly at the box office despite being well shot and well acted.  The media world has been inundated with the vampire menace, and these variety don’t have exceptionally magical powers.  They are the working class undead, struggling through afterlife.

Another point that may have sunk the film is that it is a woman’s story, a story of a prostitute and her illegitimate daughter, up against the patriarchy of the old world.  Lead actress Gemma Atherton called it a “post modern feminist” story.  The prostitute/vampire must adapt to sexism in life as well as in the afterlife. One would think the female movie going audience would support such a story, but it didn’t materialize.

Perhaps prostitution is still so taboo that it repulses the female viewer, although Julia Roberts didn’t suffer much for Pretty Woman.  Go figure.

Saoirse Ronan, of Hannah fame, is the main character here, the daughter of 18th century prostitute Clara.  The two are very different from one another, with Eleanor (Ronan) raised in a religious orphanage away from her mother’s life for her first 16 years.

Now the female empowerment may have been undermined by the crucial role of a particular male character in the plot. I doubt that this was important to the film’s financial distress.  It doesn’t have grand special effect laden, over the top, computer generated nonsense for the trailer.  It doesn’t try to outdo Avatar with big “wow” visuals to draw in the largely numbed audience.  As a small production, with small people and small lives, it’s more of a specialty film, despite its Young-Adult style main storyline.  This combination of an oversaturated vampire market, a numb over-marketed public and a more realistic universe killed the film.  Perhaps the hard edged sexual tinge kept away the young audiences as well, as they would need to sneak in to even see it.

But the movie may be vindicated with rentals.  Who knows?

Female Pleasure Verboten?

Article complains that sex, violence, torture and rape are allowed on US television, but not a girl masturbating.  Explanations?  (I don’t watch TV.)

Why female pleasure — not sex — is the real taboo on primetime television

Carrie (2013)

The Corruption of the Innocent

by KIM NICOLINI

I had (with notable doubt) high hopes for Kimberly Peirce’s remake of Stephen King’s Carrie. I know that taking on Brian De Palma, whose 1976 film starring Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie in iconic history-making performances, was no short order to fill. On the other hand, I thought maybe a woman director taking on a classic female body horror narrative would give it a fresh take. Carrie was originally written by a man in 1974 and filmed by a man in 1976; perhaps seeing Carrie through Peirce’s eyes would lend a fresh vision to the story. Kimberley Peirce’s other films – Boys Don’t Cry and Stop-Loss – are both very effective portrayals of class and otherness, two components which play in Carrie’s story.  So while it seemed like an impossible task to conquer a remake of a horror film that holds that holds such high theoretical, cinematographic and an acting import in the genre, I thought maybe, just maybe, Kimberley Peirce would be the girl who could do the job. I was wrong.

I read Stephen King’s novel and re-watched the De Palma film in preparation for the remake. While the King novel is written like crap, it does have nuggets that Peirce could have used to her advantage. Even when Stephen King’s writing is at its weakest, he is very good at describing environment and class. His books are very well crafted in the details of the characters’ lives. He is largely an author of place and the effect that place has on the people who occupy it.  (See The Shining for the most obvious example.) In the novel Carrie, King has many great descriptions of the environment that Carrie lives in – her house, the high school, the town in general including Sue’s house.

Most notable for grounding the book in place and class is the infamous trip to the pig farm where the villainous Chris and Billy slaughter a pig to get the blood to dump on Carrie in their great act of Prom Revenge. In the book, this is the scene in which King really exercises his chops, and we get a detailed scene of fucked-up working class suburban kids out for a blood thrill. De Palma handles this scene with the clean precision with which he handles the rest of his bloody masterpiece. Peirce turns it into a scene crafted more for shock value than social commentary, though her films generally lean toward the latter. In Peirce’s scene, we see a bunch of stick figure characters and watch as Chris ruthlessly cuts the pig’s throat. It is filmed more like “torture porn” than the American realism for which Peirce is known. Maybe Chris’s ruthless and gleeful killing of the pig is supposed to contain the heavy meaning of the film, which I guess is: “Look how bad and evil this rich girl is! She has no heart. All she has is privilege, envy, cruelty and greed.  She can cut a pig’s throat without flinching!”

 

Sissy Spacek in Brian DePalma’s “Carrie.”

Yeah, girls are evil. That’s a large part of the subtext of the original book and movie. But some girls are lesser evil (the “outsider other”) even while seeming more evil (than the popular girls who run in packs). Carrie ultimately is a tale of the “other” as monster, and the other is largely female. The original book and film were released at a time when the market was glutted with stories about girls who come of age only to find themselves possessed by demons or supernatural powers (The Exorcist, Audrey Rose, Firestarter). In other words, female sexuality is the way to the devil. Carrie is a kind of “hysterical” narrative in the original sense of hysteria (the root of hysterectomy). Those female reproductive organs and the bloody mess they make sure can fuck things up and are scary. In relation to Carrie, I like to quote Sheila Ballantyne’s hilarious feminist treatise Norma Jean the Termite Queen in which she describes a caveman’s initial fear of women. When he discovers that she menstruates, he says, “She bleed all the time and never die.” (One of my favorite quotes ever.)

But Carrie isn’t just about female horror; it’s about other horrors as well: bad mommies, bullying, Christianity, and high school in general. All of these things should have given Kimberly Peirce something to dig her teeth into, and she tried, but she failed big time. The movie starts promisingly, on an entirely different note than the De Palma version giving it space to stand on its own. De Palma’s film opens in the infamous shower scene where Carrie gets her period and thinks that she’s bleeding to death. Peirce starts with the birth of Carrie (a scene which is in the book but not the 1976 film) and which is probably the best scene in the 2013 version of the movie. The camera closes in on an old house with a non-descript 1980s car parked in the driveway. We don’t know where we are in time.  Horrific howls come from the house. Surely a horrifying act of violence is being committed. The camera enters the house and follows a trail of blood until we find Julianne Moore lying on the bed screaming and giving birth all on her own. The scene is maternity at its most horrific. You’ve got the blood of the womb, the crazy mother, the baby being pushed from her vagina like some kind of abominable act, all covered with blood, blood and more blood. (“She bleed all the time and never die.”)  Julianne Moore raises a pair of scissors to murder her Devil Child, but at the last minute has a change of heart and decides to keep her baby. Which is good because then we have the story of Carrie.

From there, Peirce cuts to the shower scene. Here we see a different Carrie than DePalma’s. The girls in the shower room are skinny “Plastics” of the now. They wave their pink i-Phones in their hands, and waggle their bony asses in their Victoria’s Secret underwear. Carrie, on the other hand, is a voluptuous, curvy, sexpot of a freak played by Chloë Grace Moretz. Peirce has inverted the bodies of the original Carrie film in which Sissy Spacek is skinny as a rail and completely desexualized, but her tormentors, especially Chris and Sue, are curvy sexpots with boobs and hips. Peirce’s Carrie is somehow “other” because she is so overtly female (with a sexual fleshy unadorned body as opposed to the bulimic assless bitches in the locker room). This is interesting for sure, but Peirce doesn’t know where she’s going with it or how to get there. She piled on a sub-narrative where Sue is pregnant with Tommy’s baby  (who over course is a girl as Carrie points out at the end) trying to tie together the opening childbirth scene, Carrie’s sexuality, and Sue’s maternity, but it’s all very shallow and brushed over quickly because Peirce has to make room for all of the tedious special effects which weigh down and ruin the film.

Chloë Grace Moretz in Kimberly Pierce’s “Carrie.”

The shower scene is the last effective scene in Peirce’s movie. Carrie stands in the shower washing herself. She puts the soap between her legs. The soap comes out bloody and drops to the floor, and the image is terrific. The soap slowly falls to the drain with blood running off of it is cinematic poetry at its best. The dirty and the clean, the corruption of the innocent, all in one singular image.  It’s the last good powerful image in this film, and there are still 80 minutes or so left to go.

Peirce does allude to the idea that Carrie’s otherness stems from class as well as her mother’s religious fanaticism and her steaming uncontainted sexual power. Clearly her classmates are rich. Tommy shows up at Carrie’s house in a limo not a beat up pick-up truck like in De Palma’s film. Chris throws fuel on the fire of Carrie’s humiliation by posting a video of Carrie’s menstrual shaming on Youtube from her sprawling rich girl bedroom. Chris is kind of like the female equivalent of Mitt Romney and looks like a Kardashian knock-off. Tommy plays Lacrosse (the rich boy’s sport) not baseball like in the book or track like in the 1976 movie. In the meanwhile, Carrie’s mom slugs away hemming and ironing at the town dry cleaners, clearly a woman from the wrong side of the tracks. When Sue’s mom stops by to pick up a prom dress, the tension between the women is driven as much by class as by religious crackpotism.

Julianne Moore’s “Momma” is in some ways terrifying, and if Piper Laurie weren’t looming over her shoulder in every scene, perhaps Moore’s performance would be noteworthy. But because it’s impossible to watch “Momma” without the magnificent spectre of Piper Laurie (“They’ll all laugh at you!”) hovering close by, it’s hard to give Julianne Moore a place to breathe. The best scenes of her are when she says nothing – when she sits pounding her head on the wall, cuts herself with a seam ripper, or claws at her arms. Silence is Moore’s best ally in this film because every time she opens her mouth, we can’t help but think, “You’re no Piper Laurie.” This is a shame, because Julianne Moore is a great actor. She never should have taken on this role.

In fact, this film never should have been made. Peirce clearly wanted to do something interesting. She has the pieces – class disparity, female body images, religious fanaticism – but as soon as Carrie gets her period, the film is smothered with shitty special effects. Carrie does this ridiculous arm gesturing with goggling eyes every time she exercises her telekinetic powers (making books float in her room, lifting furniture off the floor, etc) This Carrie is actually kind of a snotty bitch getting her rocks off by exercising her superhuman brain power. She is not sympathetic, not Sissy Spacek’s confused woman-child. Chloë Grace Moretz’s Carrie is a total, though pretty, dud, and her pouty Carrie plays to the very teen audience that the movie and book supposedly critique. This Carrie is shallow and vengeful, ridiculously pretty without any tension to fuel the prettiness (e.g. overt expressions of jealousy from the bulimic crowd). She becomes a kind of special effects joke, and the real tragedy of the film is not her character but how badly she is depicted.

De Palma’s film is so clean and precise in what it’s doing. There is no extraneous anything. He very clearly knows exactly what he wants his camera to do and why. The changing “look” of DePalma’s film between Carrie’s house and the high school play in great contrast. Carrie’s house is a dark, grainy den of religious fanaticism whereas the high school is a super-crisp, uber-glossy place of artifice and social construction. De Palma masterfully manipulates POV as we actually occupy Carrie’s body, follow Carrie as she ascends stairs, and watch Carrie in horror as she slaughters us with her power. Peirce shows none of these nuances in perspective. The camera basically is a tool to show-off ludicrous prolonged unnecessary special effects. Do we need to see Chris’s face pushed through the windshield and still talking even when it’s sliced to bits? No, we don’t. Do we need to see Carrie reconfigure the pieces of the mirror after she breaks it with her powers? No, we don’t. These are devices used to sell tickets to high school kids who could care less if this adaptation of the film is any good or has interesting class, gender, and religion subtext.

The biggest thing that Peirce’s film is lacking is the complexity of its main character. In De Palma’s film, Carrie is both monster and heroine. We cheer for her even as we’re frightened of her. She is an innocent abused child (abused by her own mother and her classmates), and he is also a terrifying scary “other” girl. Certainly Sissy Spacek allows this effect to come through, but so does De Palma’s restrained though bloody filmmaking. In the prom scene, Sissy Spacek simply looking out of her eyes to wreak havoc is way more effective than Moretz’s twisted arm waving which looks like some kind of cheesy CGI overlay on her body.

Really, watching Peirce’s film only reinforces how great De Palma’s movie is. The sad thing is that the elements are in the film to make in interesting, but they fall flat and are smothered by an industry-produced FX extravaganza marketed to the teen market that the story attempts to critique. What a disaster.

 

Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic living in Tucson, Arizona. Her writing has appeared in Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Souciant, La Furia Umana, and The Berkeley Poetry Review. She recently published her first book, Mapping the Inside Out, in conjunction with a solo gallery show by the same name. She can be reached at knicolini@gmail.com.

Horror Essays: Siding With the Victim

From Press Play:

I don’t go in for “torture porn,” and I don’t know if I agree with this series.  I’m still catching up with part 2 right now.  You can watch and decide for yourselves.

 

 

Another Gender Bias Rant

Hollywood’s Glass Ceiling: Why Doesn’t the Film Industry Trust Women?
by Mellissa Silverstein

There’s a myopia to some of these articles that irks me.  It’s that she doesn’t seem to care what the stories themselves are saying — the entire point of this blog, btw — but only if they are directed by women, produced by women, or about women’s issues.  It’s a hard numbers kind of argument, without regard for the actual propaganda content of the films.  I tend to see it a bit differently, to say the least.  Kathryn Bigelow’s pro-torture opus does not end up in my plus column, least of all because she happens to lack a penis.  There are issues beyond who gets to direct, important issues, society-wide issues of war, peace, empire and authoritarianism.

That’s my simplistic response to the article, I admit, but it does cover my main gripe:  Hollywood is part of a fascistic system of social control, selling authoritarianism in partnerships with increasingly despotic surveillance states.  Whether those hammering out the next propaganda extravaganza possess dicks or not is not my primary concern.

Her myopia is the expected result of issue politics, where support is thrown behind tyrants based on narrow sets of interests and narrow understanding.  The counterargument to that will of course cite how this isn’t strictly “narrow” when talking about half the population (gender bias).

The concept holds though.  By obsessing over one metric, one parameter, we ignore the rest.  This is why Obama can turn America into Orwell’s worst nightmare: at least he’s not Bush.

Now I’ve heard debates over this Hollywood gender problem, the underrepresentation of women in Hollywood,and usually the first thing trotted out by the defenders of the establishment is that the box office dictates the decisions.  Is this true?  It’s not just perception, they argue, but actual ticket sales that determine these movies getting made the way that they are.  After all, these shlock Superfests sell tickets, and they sell them to male and female.  Hard to argue against that.

Women do make films about women all the time, but they aren’t the ones raking in the dump trucks of money. Melissa Silverstein:

“… but the sad news is that the numbers have remained consistently dismal for the last decade. In 2012, in the US, women made up 18% of the directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films.”

On the top grossing films???

Well who made that happen?

That’s the audience, not a dark cabal in suits smoking cigars and sticking voodoo needles into Barbie dolls.

Now if an argument could be presented for more marketing dollars affecting this equation, and male movies being typically funded at much higher levels (probably true) then there would be a more solid foundation, but Silverstein doesn’t even bother to go there.

The counterargument will remain that this is what the movie-going audience is “demanding” according to the strict economic dogma of supply and demand.

So if we’re talking gross box office, at what point does the audience share in this responsibility, this culpability?

If women themselves aren’t supporting women up on the silver screen, then how can this be considered some great intractable problem?

“When we don’t see women, and we don’t see women’s stories, we get the message that women don’t matter as much, that our stories don’t count, that our experiences are less valid.”

Ever tried watching TV?

It’s ALL WOMEN ALL THE TIME!

Perhaps women prefer the comfort of their living rooms compared to the excursion to the overpriced, smelly, crowded MultiPlex where you overpay for popcorn, candy, liquid junk and have to endure the cell phones and blather of nincompoops while you try and follow the film.  Then you must miss scenes while you head off to pee in the middle, and perhaps some jerk will start a fight or shoot up the place and kill everyone.

Maybe there are other factors involved.