tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50665530409212978552024-02-08T05:44:26.264-08:00The Second ScreenTheSecondScreenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12098001235296444906noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5066553040921297855.post-64387871044906331452020-11-30T18:10:00.001-08:002020-11-30T18:10:36.599-08:00Happiest Season: A Manifesto<p>(Spoilers for Happiest Season throughout - obviously)</p><p class="MsoNormal">I remember watching The Intervention – Clea DuVall’s debut
feature – huddled in my bed over my laptop screen, having bought the digital
download as soon as it was released, my plans to see it at Sundance London
thwarted by sold out screenings. I had been a fan of Clea’s for a while – as any
self-respecting lesbian with even a passing interest in movies and television should
be – and was excited to see her first feature, especially after hearing rave
reviews from the original Sundance festival months before. I was expecting to
enjoy the film, but I fell deeply in love with it instead. It was the kind of
film that you didn’t want to end, that seamlessly let you into the lives of
difficult, flawed characters and made you love them, that was equal parts funny
and sad, and all the while seemed completely effortless. The Intervention
quickly made its way onto my list of perfect films, films which I could not
find fault with, films I would always watch from start to finish without even
thinking of checking my phone.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So it’s no surprise that I was excited for Clea DuVall’s sophomore
feature – Happiest Season. I was excited when it was announced that she’d be
making another movie, I was even more excited when I read that it would be a Christmas
film about a lesbian couple. I was more excited still when cast announcements
started appearing and several actors who I loved were signed on – Kristen Stewart
and Mackenzie Davis of course, but also TV favourites Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza
and Dan Levy, not to mention comedy legend Mary Steenburgen and the always
welcome Victor Garber. I was very excited for this film – I had already pretty
much decided I’d love it before it was even released – but it was only when I
watched it – huddled on my sofa this time, alone, at night so as not to be
disturbed – that I truly felt like Clea DuVall (and co-writer and star Mary
Holland) had looked into my brain and made a movie just for me. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I recently finished writing my master’s thesis. After a
tumultuous two and a half years of research and writing, disrupted first by
redundancy – twice – then by family crises, unemployment and training for a new
job, oh and then an oral exam at the start of a global pandemic – I finally
submitted my work online, and received, months into lockdown, a paper copy of
my degree and an invitation to an (unattended) virtual graduation ceremony. I’d
put all thoughts of my thesis aside months ago, with far more pressing things
to worry about (redundancy, yet again) and pleased to no longer have to focus
all my spare time on finishing the thing. Then Happiest Season came along –
along with the subsequent discourse – and brought my thesis back to me. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For the past couple of years I had been researching and
writing about queer happiness and representation on television. My thesis
focused on the idea that marriage equality had fundamentally changed the way
network television presented its gay and lesbian characters – that they were no
longer tragic figures doomed to a life of sickness, loneliness or abuse, but
were now universally, ubiquitously happy, and that marriage equality had
provided the perfect way for network shows to find that happiness for them. My
theory was, that in an attempt to move away from the negative stereotypes of
old, network shows had veered gay representation to the opposite extreme,
presenting their gay and lesbian characters’ lives as frictionless, happy,
devoid of any homophobia, and of course, almost always married. My point –
which I got to in around 30,000 words, was that happy representations of
perfect gay couples who experienced little to no issues related to their
sexuality, or whose issues were resolved once they were married, presents a
skewed, homonormative image of what it’s like to be queer today. An image that
not only tells us that marriage equality solved all of our problems, but also
tells us that gay people can only find happiness in heteronormative
institutions like marriage. These images more often than not strip the
queerness away from gay and lesbian characters, and focus on that seemingly
progressive idea of “this character just happens to be gay” as if it’s better
that our queerness be removed from our identity, or demoted as something
negligible, that can be ignored if so desired. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">At the end of my thesis – which of course goes into an awful
lot more detail, I had quite the word count to meet – I wished for more truly
queer representation in media, queer characters who were allowed to be
difficult, allowed to experience sadness – and queer sadness at that. I wished
for characters who reflected our lives accurately, who felt authentic and were
provided with full, rounded stories that didn’t hide our identities or our
experiences away as a footnote to please straight audiences, but told them
front and centre. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Enter Happiest Season – which gave me all of that and more,
packaged in a Christmas bow. As mentioned, I was expecting to love this movie.
I was not however, expecting it to be such a brilliant example of the kind of
queer representation I had been wishing for in my thesis. Clea DuVall excels at
writing fully realised, flawed characters. Characters who fuck up, who make
mistakes and who are often blind to the damage they’re doing. She writes
characters who feel like real people, and she dares you to love them anyway,
despite their difficulties, and often in fact because of them – because nobody
is perfect all of the time, and because we all have our own shit to deal with.
I loved that she brought that skill to Happiest Season, which gives us Harper,
a woman living a happy life with her girlfriend Abby, who she brings home for Christmas
despite not yet being out to her family. Harper pleads with Abby to keep her in
the closet for the holidays, after which she promises she’ll tell her family
everything – and Abby agrees because she loves her, and shelves her plans to
propose to her on Christmas day. We then watch as Harper reverts back to a
terrified teenager, pulled back into family rivalries, her role as the perfect,
dutiful daughter, and the walls she built up to keep herself a secret. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Though the film is largely told from Abby’s perspective as
she navigates Harper’s waspy family, and feels the pain and rejection, over and
over again, of being dismissed as Harper’s friend/roommate and nothing more,
for me Harper is just as captivating and sympathetic a character. I’ve watched
the film twice now, and spent my re-watch shifting my focus to Harper
throughout. Mackenzie Davis’ performance is full of subtle nods to the internal
agony of her position – glances to Abby across a room, barely concealed panic,
and stolen moments of affection. The scene where she holds Abby’s hand during
her father’s speech, then pulls away as soon as her mother starts taking
photos, struck me as deeply relatable from both sides. I’ve been both these
people in my life – the person terrified that someone will see me, and the
person devastated by my partner’s fear. Harper puts herself in the worst
position possible for a closeted person. Bringing her girlfriend home sends her
reeling – she’s torn between wanting the woman she loves to be with her for her
favourite time of year, and being absolutely terrified that even being near her
will give away her secret. I remember the pain of being in the closet keenly –
I remember checking every part of myself, second guessing everything I did –
how I spoke, how I stood, how I sat in a chair, what I wore, the kind of bands
I liked, what my hair looked like. I remember panicking when a lesbian
character appeared on TV because if I looked too interested it would give me
away, but if I looked away that would be suspicious too. I remember feeling
entirely alone, and so far removed from myself and everyone around me. I
remember the never-ending guilt, and I remember the fear and the instincts I built
up to protect myself. I saw all of that in Harper, who switches almost immediately
from the woman who climbs on a stranger’s scaffolding to show the love of her
life how beautiful Christmas is, to the teenager who does everything her
parents ask of her, and falls back into her high school clique, leaving Abby to
deal with her fish-out-of-water-ness alone. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Over the course of the film, Abby doubts Harper’s love for
her as she doesn’t seem to notice how much her actions are hurting her. Abby
befriends Harper’s old high school girlfriend Riley, who tells her that their
secret relationship ended when Harper outed her to save from being outed
herself. This revelation reinforces how much Harper has regressed to her
teenage self and her old protective instincts to lash out at others and deflect
attention from herself. Things come to a head when Abby has finally had enough,
and tells Harper that she’s leaving at the family’s Christmas Eve party. Harper
finally realises what she’s about to lose, and pleads with her to stay. She
tells Abby that she’s not hiding her, she’s hiding herself, and that she knows
she’s been awful, but she’s so scared of losing her family, and now she’s so
scared of losing Abby. Harper thinks that hurting herself is acceptable, but
she hates that she’s hurting Abby as well. Harper’s sister Sloane then walks in
on them reconciling, and promptly outs her to their family. Here Happiest
Season refuses to do the expected – you’d think this was the point where
Harper, outed and facing her girlfriend who has just told her how much these past
few days in the closet have hurt her, would just come clean there and then but
she doesn’t. Her reflexes kick in again and she denies it, right to Abby’s
face, telling everyone that Sloane is lying. It’s devastating, for Abby yes,
but also for Harper, who realises at that point just how much she’s able to
hurt the people she loves when she’s scared and desperate. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What follows is a series of classic rom com “big speeches”;
Abby’s friend John provides the overall message of the film which is that
coming out is personal, that everyone’s journey is different and that just because
Harper isn’t ready, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love Abby, Harper finally comes
out to her parents on her own terms, acknowledging how much she’s hurt Abby
(and Riley) and vowing not to let that happen again, and Harper’s parents
realise just how much their need for perfection has damaged their daughters.
And of course, there’s a scene where Harper chases down Abby, declares her love
for her and promises she’ll spend the rest of her life making up for the hurt
she’s caused over the last few days. All of this nicely wraps up Abby and
Harper’s story – Abby realises that Harper still loves her, even though things
have been tough, and Harper realises how much being in the closet has hurt the
people she loves, not just herself, and finally plucks up the courage to put
herself, and her relationship first.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For me, the fact that this is a central storyline in a big
budget, mass marketed film is revelatory. This is a queer story, through and
through - not just in its cute moments of Abby and Harper’s love, Aubrey Plaza’s
effortlessly cool lesbian chic, Dan Levy’s quips about heteronormativity, or the
joyful cameos of Ben De La Crème and Jinx Monsoon – but in its fearless telling
of a story that is uniquely queer, an experience that resonates with every
queer person, and in its unashamed plea that you find compassion and
understanding for Harper, a person we have all been at one point or another.
Happiest Season also queers the rom-com, opting for a complex, layered
storyline over simple girl meets girl cheese. The film plays with its genre,
finding ways of turning some conventions on their heads, and fulfilling others
with earnest – see the aforementioned “big speeches”. One particular moment
that stuck with me was the Chekov’s Gun appearance of Jane’s beautiful
painting, which we all expected would be something as weird and wonderful as
she is, but turned out just to be wonderful. I spent the entire fight scene
between Harper and Sloane thinking someone would fall into that painting, and
then they didn’t. And then Harper breaks it on purpose instead, in another
symbol of how her fear blinds her to everything else, and allows her to hurt
the people closest to her. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I loved that Harper was flawed and that Happiest Season
asked us to love her anyway. I loved that this film, whose studio marketed it
like any other big release even when it got demoted to a Covid safe streaming
release, told that story and refused to be just another heteronormative rom
com. Clea DuVall gave us a story that spoke to us, that treated us like real
people with multi-faceted personalities and uniquely queer problems. She told a
story that was much like her own, but was also an awful lot like all of our
stories in one way or another. She could have made a cookie cutter rom com that
transplanted a lesbian couple into your typical heterosexual rom com storyline –
that probably would have been easier. But instead she gave us something
authentically queer, with a cast of queer (and queer adjacent) actors, that
didn’t shy away from the tricky stuff. And for that film to have such a huge
platform is a massive step towards the representation we should all be fighting
for. Yes, we should be able to see ourselves happy on screen – we should be
able to see Abby and Harper be cute and in love, and we do, a lot – but we
should also be allowed to see our sadnesses, to see our struggles, to see our
pain, and to see ourselves come out the other side. Happiest Season gives us
both, and provides a happy ending to boot. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When I wrote my thesis, I didn’t expect to see the kind of representation
I was hoping for on a mainstream stage. Maybe on cable, in an indie film -
definitely not in a winter blockbuster starring Kristen Stewart. The fact that
Happiest Season exists in this way is a marvel – and the more than
disappointing reaction from select queer audiences was unfortunately expected.
One of the drives behind writing my thesis was the frustration I felt with
reviews of queer media written by queer women who denounced any time a lesbian
character dealt with sadness or difficulties as “bad representation”, and were
constantly calling out television or films for not allowing their queer
characters to exist in some kind of happy stasis where nothing ever happened. I
knew as soon as I watched Happiest Season that this lesbian internet hive mind
would completely misunderstand it, and when this prediction proved sadly all to
true, I felt a deep sadness that this wonderful film would be pulled apart by
the people it should have spoken to the most. I’ve had to remind myself that
the internet is not the entire world – Happiest Season has received the rave
reviews it deserves and has done remarkably well commercially considering all
the challenges it has had to face. And I’ve seen plenty of queer women online
who have understood and loved the film as it was intended, and all this gives
me hope. I do wish though, that as a community we were more able to accept our
flaws and appreciate seeing them on screen. I wish that we could support a
queer movie, made by a queer woman, starring queer actors, that humanely and
sensitively tells our stories whilst also being funny and adorable and a really
good time, without the impetus to pick it apart, to focus on what the film wasn’t
instead of what it was, to find something to complain about. I wish we could
get past this juvenile obsession with demanding fan fiction, not stories, and
wanting gay-washed replicas of straight tropes. I wish we could all recognise a
great thing when we see it, and throw our support behind queer creators telling
honest queer stories, instead of revelling in tearing our own people down. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I hope that Happiest Season paves the way for more stories
like it, and I hope that when those stories come, those parts of the community
that so frustrate me (as a fan of good movies and a queer theorist) are ready
to love them. <o:p></o:p></p>TheSecondScreenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12098001235296444906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5066553040921297855.post-18251079992226988452014-03-07T07:17:00.003-08:002014-03-07T07:23:43.133-08:00Dallas Buyer’s Club: Hollywood Hypocrisy in Queer Representation<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(Warning: This post contains spoilers for too many films to list.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Last Sunday night Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto both
won Oscars for their work in the movie <i>Dallas
Buyer’s Club</i> – based on a true story about a man who contracts AIDS in the
1980s and turns to drug smuggling to treat his condition because the drugs with
the best chance of prolonging his life have not yet been approved by the FDA.
McConaughey won Best Actor in a Leading Role and Leto Best Actor in a
Supporting Role. Neither actor’s acceptance speech mentioned the real life
people their roles came from, the impact the AIDS crisis had on the queer
community (or even AIDS itself) or the hardships that trans people faced back
then and now. Contrast this with the speeches of the stars and creators of <i>12 Years A Slave</i> who all paid respects
to Solomon Northrup, Patsey and anyone who experienced – and is still
experiencing – slavery, and you start to see why people aren’t all quite so
happy to see McConaughey and Leto be so commended.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The trouble started a while back when Jared Leto started
winning awards and making speeches which revealed his ignorance of the trans
experience. It’s easy to understand the crushing disappointment when the chance
to draw attention to a real issue in today’s society is botched so badly or in
the case of The Oscars, ignored completely. No one is saying that either actor
gave a bad performance, or that their awards were undeserved, however their
success this past season shines a light on the hypocrisy that has been plaguing
Hollywood for decades: that of awarding straight actors for playing queer roles
whilst simultaneously black balling openly queer actors and pressuring the
closeted ones to stay quiet. It’s also yet another example of queer stories
being told through a straight lens – another AIDS film which focuses on a
straight male lead whose homophobia is challenged and eventually tempered when
he is forced to spend time with queer AIDS sufferers (See 1993’s similarly
Oscar winning Philadelphia).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Firstly I want to focus on the issue of straight actors
playing queer roles – or more specifically the disparity between the
celebration of queer roles as played by straight actors and the lack of openly
queer actors in Hollywood. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jared Leto is just the latest cisgendered actor whose role
as a trans character has been critically praised and garnished with awards.
Hilary Swank won a Best Actress Oscar for her role as Brandon Teena in 1999’s
Boys Don’t Cry, Felicity Huffman was nominated for the same award for her role
in 2006 as a trans woman in Transamerica, Jaye Davidson (who is gay, but not
trans) received a Best Supporting Actor nom for his role in The Crying Game
and, to bring this up to date, there is considerable buzz surrounding Jeffrey
Tambor’s role as a trans woman in the new Amazon Prime series Transparent. I
can name five cis actors praised for their performances as trans characters off
the top of my head, yet I can only name two trans actresses – Laverne Cox, who
is best known for her work in television on Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black,
not (yet) Hollywood film, and Harmony Santana who starred in the low budget
indie Gun Hill Road. My inability to name more than two trans actresses – and
any trans actors at all – may of course be down to my own ignorance, however my
point still stands. If I, as a keen cinephile and queer person, can only bring
to mind two trans actresses the average straight person with no exceptional
interest in films, TV or LGBT issues, may not even be able name one. There is a
clear imbalance here – Hollywood celebrates trans characters but not trans
actors. The fiction is admirable, award worthy, the reality is seen as
something to be ignored or in some cases actively shunned. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The numbers are even more disparate when we compare straight
actors awarded for playing queer roles against openly gay Hollywood actors.
(Firstly a proviso: my repeated specification of “Hollywood” is used in order
to distinguish big money, widely released films and Oscar nominees from low
budget, small release indies and television – where queer representation is
much more prolific if not quite as widespread and unproblematic as we’d like.
What I refer to as a Hollywood actor is, to me, someone who is often in
contention for big roles in big money films, an “A Lister” if you will.) Until last month I could only think of three
openly queer actors who are big names in Hollywood; Jodie Foster and Ian McKellen
– who have both taken more of a backseat recently – and Zachary Quinto – whose
only major film role has been in the Star Trek franchise. On Valentine’s Day
this year Ellen Page joined the list. (Note, I haven’t included Angelina Jolie
here because I’m not sure rumours of her bisexuality were ever really confirmed
so I can’t in good conscience describe her as openly queer.) Tom Hanks in <i>Philadelphia</i>, Philip Seymor Hoffman in <i>Capote</i>, Sean Penn in <i>Milk</i>, Christopher Plummer in <i>Beginners</i>, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath
Ledger for <i>Brokeback Mountain</i>, Ed
Harris, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore for <i>The Hours</i>, Greg Kinnear for <i>As
Good As It Gets</i>, Colin Firth in <i>A
Single Man</i>, Natalie Portman <i>in Black
Swan</i>, Anette Bening in <i>The Kids Are
All Right</i>, Catherine Keener for <i>Being
John Malkovich</i>, Charlize Theron in <i>Monster</i>
and Salma Hayek for <i>Frida</i> – all
nominated for Best Leading or Supporting Actor/Actress at The Oscars, all
played by straight actors. That’s 16 nominations and I am almost certain I have
missed a few.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The trend is again clear – Hollywood likes gay characters
not gay actors. It is also important to note just how many of the films listed
were based on true stories and that the vast majority of the queer characters
end up dead. Brandon Teena was raped and murdered for being trans. Tom Hanks’
character in <i>Philadelphia</i> succumbs to
AIDS like Rayon in <i>Dallas Buyer’s Club</i>
and Ed Harris’s Richard throws himself out of a window to escape the same fate
in <i>The Hours</i>. Jack Twist dies at the
end of Brokeback Mountain – officially from an accident changing a tire but
it’s suggested he was really beaten to death like the man in the story Ennis
told him, Virginia Woolf puts rocks in her pockets and wades into deep water.
Natalie Portman’s Nina dies of a possibly self inflicted stab wound in <i>Black Swan</i> and Harvey Milk is assassinated. Christopher Plummer’s character in <i>Beginners </i>is dead even before the film
begins and only appears in flashbacks, and Aileen Wournos is executed for the
murders of six men. The closest any of these characters really gets to a happy
ending is Greg Kinnear’s neighbour not being quite as awful to him anymore –
and even he had to endure a savage beating to get there – or Nic’s
reconciliation with her wife in <i>The Kids
Are All Right</i>, implied with a hand clasp in the closing shots.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This biased celebration of films where the queer character
dies is hugely problematic. Of course with the films inspired by true life
events, this ending is unavoidable, but one does have to wonder why Hollywood
doesn’t want to turn any triumphant queer stories into movies instead choosing
to focus on the tragic and the maudlin. The broadcasting of stories such as
Brandon Teena’s to a wider audience is of course commendable but the question
persists: how much of a line in the sand are you drawing when you don’t
consider a trans actor for your trans role?
The fact remains that the lauding of so many films where queer
characters meet an untimely end creates a biased representation of the LGBT
experience. Those who are less likely to seek out queer cinema specifically,
and so will only really register the films that everyone is talking about, get
a particularly dark picture of what it means to be queer. There’s a reason that
even the most supportive parents are often worried or upset when their child
comes out, they’re scared that being queer means we’re going to die of AIDS,
get killed or commit suicide seen as they’re the only fates Hollywood affords
us. Representation needs to be more than
just fictional or dramatized real life tragedy. We need to see queer<i> people</i> being successful, not just queer
stories and we need to see queer people who <i>live</i>.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is not to say that straight actors shouldn’t play queer
roles, they should of course have as much right to them as queer actors have to
straight roles. However it’s plain to see that queer actors just don’t get cast
in lead straight roles in Hollywood. There’s a kind of unspoken idea that queer
actors just can’t convince as straight, that the public knowing that part of
their personal life will infiltrate their experience when watching the film and
any heterosexual romance will feel fake. This of course is total bullshit, it’s
an excuse so that producers don’t have to admit their own prejudices, or
perhaps more accurately, their own fear of other people’s prejudices and the
financial impact that may have on ticket sales. This creates a catch 22 which
results in the dearth of queer actors working in Hollywood. Straight roles go
to hetero actors and cis roles go to cis actors because queer people “just
wouldn’t be convincing” but then gay roles and trans roles go to straight
actors as well, because the queer ones aren’t big enough names to carry a niche
movie into a wider market. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Take as an example <i>The
Kids Are All Right</i>. Co-written and directed by Lisa Chodolenko – an openly
queer woman who took inspiration from her own use of a sperm donor to start her
family with her wife – the film was nominated for four Oscars in 2011 and
starred Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as the leads, a lesbian couple who
deal with the fallout when their children decide to contact their donor father.
Without its high profile leads, the film would most likely be a small critical
success, popular with critics and queer audiences but not given a wide release,
funded to the same extent or backed for awards season. Queer films about queer
issues with queer creators are often consigned to a niche market. They’re
popular within the LGBT community and may become classics of a sort amongst a
queer audience. Films like <i>But I’m A
Cheerleader</i>, <i>Itty Bitty Titty
Committee </i>and <i>Weekend</i> all fall
into this category and also, notably, all star openly queer actors. However, if
you’re looking to broaden your film’s audience, get a bigger distribution deal
and a wider release you have to make compromises and one of those compromises
is often the casting of a big name actor, who as we have established earlier,
will most likely be straight. Now on the one hand, this is seemingly a hit
worth taking, a queer movie being seen by a larger audience means more people
are exposed to queer issues which can only be a good thing. However, this
shutting out of queer actors from the only roles Hollywood seems to think
they’d be convincing in is only perpetuating the lack of real life
representation on the red carpet. If queer actors are not cast in queer roles,
they are far less likely to ever be considered for straight ones. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is especially difficult for trans actors, for whom
“convincing” can be a contentious issue in their personal lives as well as
professionally. Trans actors need to be sought out to play trans roles in order
to pave the way for the possibility of cis roles being given to them as well.
Not only would this create more visibility for the trans community and hold up
vitally needed role models to young trans people, it would also prevent the
kind of misinformation and confusion evident in Jared Leto’s speeches about
“the Rayons of the world”. A trans actress with a real understanding of the
trans experience would be far better positioned to educate uninformed audiences
and would therefore be a far better advocate for the trans community. Leto does
not understand how to talk about trans issues and his choice to ignore those
who have tried to explain this to him indicates he doesn’t really care to
learn. The wider audience for trans issues that was seemingly afforded by
casting a well known cis actor, has not materialised. Instead those with a
limited knowledge of the trans experience were only fed more ignorance and distortion,
more trivialisation and focus on anatomy, this time from a seemingly
trustworthy and educated source. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What needs to change is not excluding straight actors from
queer roles altogether but making it easier for queer themed movies to cast
queer actors if they want to. Producers need to be willing to fund films with
openly queer leads and awards season needs to start recognising more
independent films (rather than the cursory token indie they seem to include for
appearances sake and that never actually wins anything). The issue comes down
to money - of course it does, it’s Hollywood – queer films are deemed risky and
queer actors even riskier. Producers don’t want to chance their money on
projects which might not make a profit and anything that is seen as the
slightest bit controversial is far less likely to be funded. It’s the same
reason why cinemas are full of superhero movie franchises and animated sequels,
Hollywood loves a safe bet. The industry needs to start making films for art’s
sake again, rather than for profit. It needs to start trusting its audience
more and it needs to recognise that the tides have changed. Queer people are no
longer the pariahs we once were, we’ve
come a long way and studies have shown that homophobics are in the minority.
Essentially, the potential ticket sales lost from homophobes boycotting a film
for its queer content or queer lead would be negligible, and more than made up
for by the potential ticket sales gained from queer audiences grateful for the
representation. The bottom line is that we need to see real life representation
in Hollywood, we need to stop being told that our identities are only ok if
they are fictional, if we are characters rather than people. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is not only the lack of queer actors in Hollywood that <i>Dallas Buyer’s Club’s</i> recent success
highlights. It also shines a light on another disappointing trend, that of the
Oscars rewarding films about queer issues that ignore queer people altogether. <i>Dallas Buyer’s Club</i> is set in 1985, at
the heart of the AIDS crisis yet focuses on a straight white male, leaving
queer people as secondary characters in his story. AIDS is the biggest tragedy to
hit the LGBT community. Queer people were dying in droves, and the lie that
AIDS was solely a gay disease – exemplified in its former name GRID (Gay
Related Immune Deficiency) – attached a stigma to being queer whose
ramifications are still felt today. It’s due to this stigma that gay men are
still not allowed to donate blood without being celibate for a year, despite the
fact that now statistically heterosexual people are far more likely to contract
AIDS than queer people. AIDS was and still is a huge burden for the LGBT
community. It killed us back then and its legacy is still oppressing us today.
Yet the two major films about AIDS that were celebrated by The Academy both
focused mainly on its impact on heterosexual characters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Both Ron Woodroof in <i>Dallas Buyer’s Club</i> and Joe Miller in <i>Philadelphia </i>are straight, openly
homophobic characters whose knowledge of the disease is limited and influenced
by their prejudices. Woodroof contracts AIDS and is forced to associate with
queer sufferers through his drug smuggling enterprise; Miller – a lawyer – takes
on Tom Hank’s Andrew Beckett as a client and helps him sue his former employers
for unlawful dismissal after he is set up and fired for having AIDS. Both
characters’ homophobia is “cured” throughout the courses of their respective
films as they learn that queers are people too and befriend their corresponding
“enlighteners”. Both Woodroof’s friend
Rayon and Miller’s friend Beckett die at the end of the film, giving the
heterosexual characters chance to show just how much they’ve changed by weeping
at their bedside or having an epiphany about the value of life over money. It’s
plain to see that Hollywood is interested less in queer stories, than how queer
issues affect the straight, homophobic, everyman. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hollywood’s treatment of queer stories in this way is
similar in process to the white-washing of the stories of people of colour. One
example that springs to mind is the casting of Angelina Jolie in the film <i>A Mighty Heart</i>. Jolie played the
character of Mariane Pearl, journalist and a woman of colour whose husband was
kidnapped and killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. The film was based on
Pearl’s memoir and a white woman was cast to play her. Hollywood clearly found
the story captivating enough to turn into a film, but was scared that casting a
woman of colour <i>as a woman of colour</i>
might damage their profits. Another example would be the casting of Jennifer
Connelly in <i>A Beautiful Mind</i> in the
role of real life El Salvadorian Alicia Nash, or Ben Affleck playing Tony
Mendez who is of Hispanic descent in <i>Argo</i>.
Hollywood likes these people’s stories, just not the colour of their skin. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not only does Hollywood cast white actors to play the roles
of people of colour in the same way that it casts cis actors to play trans
characters, it also has a nasty habit of using “white saviour” characters to
tell the stories of minorities. <i>The Help</i>
focused on a privileged white woman helping black women working as maids in the
south of the early 1960s. It is Skeeter’s story, the black women are features
who show her benevolence and cast her as the sympathetic non-racist in a
bigoted society. At the end of the film Skeeter gains success as a writer off
the back of her book “The Help” which is made up of the stories of the black
maids, including those of the secondary characters Aibileen and Minny. Aibileen
is fired from her job because of the stories she told Skeeter leaving her
separated from her charge, unable to pay her rent and left to move in with
Minny who already has a large family to support. Aibileen’s circumstances are
largely side-lined, the focus squared instead solely on Skeeter’s happy ending
to the extent that Aibileen is shown to not be concerned at all about her
recent unemployment, only proud of her friend’s success. This trend is also
seen in the “inspirational teacher” genre where upper class white teachers like
Hilary Swank in <i>Freedom Writers</i>,
Antonio Banderas in <i>Take The Lead</i> and Michelle Pfeiffer in <i>Dangerous Minds</i> save largely black and Hispanic inner city kids from gang life. Instead of
focusing on the people of colour these issues are actually happening to,
Hollywood instead prefers to show how racism affects white people or how white
people can help people of colour escape the vicious circles that institutional
racism so often forces them into. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now of course the effect of Hollywood whitewashing the
stories of people of colour is very different from the way that it
“straight-washes” queer stories. Queer characters cast with heterosexual actors
are still queer whereas representation disappears altogether when characters of
colour are cast with white actors. However parallels can still be drawn between
the two. Hollywood takes advantage of the drama created by racism and
homophobia whilst still eschewing queer actors and actors of colour and in some
cases queer and non-white characters as well. The awards success of queer films
like the ones previously listed is hollow. It’s The Academy’s attempt to show
they’re not bigoted, to pay lip service to the stories and experiences of queer
people without actually making any attempts at real representation. The same
can be said for the success of films like <i>The
Help </i>and <i>Driving Miss Daisy</i> whose
black characters are all supporting roles and are, tellingly, all servants to
the white lead characters. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hollywood is not only giving queer roles to straight, cis
actors – and so excluding queer actors almost altogether - it is also giving
queer stories to straight characters and diminishing representation even more
so in the process. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One film that may be set to buck this trend is the upcoming <i>Freeheld</i>. Based on fact, and developed
from the Oscar winning documentary short of the same name, <i>Freeheld </i>tells the story of police lieutenant Laurel Hester who,
dying of cancer, fights to be able to leave her police pension benefits to her
partner of five years Stacie Andree – a mechanic who the board of freeholders
do not recognise as her legal partner. The film version is set to star Julianne
Moore as Hester, and Ellen Page as Andree. Page has been attached to the
project for years and has often stated in interviews that she was working to
get the film financed. <i>Freeheld</i> will
be a film about queer issues, focusing on two queer main characters and
starring an openly queer actress as one of its leads. Having already won an
Oscar as a documentary, the story is likely to be in consideration for awards
season again if the film lives up to its predecessor. The state of queer cinema
in Hollywood might seem a little unpromising right now, but with <i>Freeheld</i> finally on its way and Ellen
Page finally out of the closet this may be about to change. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Freeheld</i> could
break a little of the glass ceiling preventing queer actors from working in
Hollywood and also bolster the numbers of breakout films about queer issues
that actually focus on queer people. Of
course this can only happen if the film is any good and if it gets enough
funding for a wide release. If not, it will just join films like <i>Pariah</i>, <i>Gun Hill Road</i>, <i>Weekend</i>, <i>But I’m A Cheerleader </i>and <i>Tomboy</i> – celebrated by LGBT audiences
but remaining unwatched by bigger, heterosexual crowds. I’m hopeful though,
Ellen Page usually makes good career choices and I trust her judgement that
this is a film worth making. I’m watching this space. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
TheSecondScreenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12098001235296444906noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5066553040921297855.post-24976549428506164802013-09-15T14:07:00.000-07:002013-09-15T14:07:58.029-07:00Miley and the Virgin/Whore Dynamic<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First of all, I have been remiss in posting on this blog
recently. This is mostly because I’ve been busy graduating and trying to find a
job but also because I haven’t found a subject I’ve wanted to write about
enough to feel like the post would be good. I write at my best when I’m
passionate about something, or more often, when something pisses me off.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, to Miley Cyrus.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This isn’t really a post about Miley Cyrus herself. I’m aggressively
annoyed every time anything like this happens – someone does something remotely
controversial and “news” outlets everywhere keep on writing about it long after
the story is dead. I’d love to not write about this, I’d love to live in a
society where people don’t care about this kind of thing. But, unfortunately,
culture is so often dictated by the masses and the masses care about this, so
it becomes important to discuss the real issues in play here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The majority of the coverage of Miley’s VMAs performance and
her new music video has ranged from misogynistic slut shaming to people “genuinely
concerned about her welfare”. People seem to either think she’s a harlot or
that she’s “going through something” when in reality it’s probably neither.
Miley Cyrus is just doing what everyone expects her to do. She’s doing what
society wants her to do, being the person society needs her to be for her to
stay interesting, stay relevant. All these “think-pieces” about her mental
state or whether her performance was “inappropriate” are just reinforcing the
virgin/whore dynamic which so insidiously and wholly permeates every aspect of
our culture and our society. To be a woman means treading a fine line between
these binaries. It means picking and choosing which one would best suit the
situation, which one will get you judged the least. Miley spent years playing
the virgin as a child star surrounded by sexualised images of women and being
prevented from actually coming of age in her own time in order to continue the success
of the franchise. She’s not a child star anymore, so what is there left for her
to do? What else can she be now other than “the whore”? The public has been objectifying
and sexualising her way before it was legal or decent to do so, but now she’s
taking that into her own hands, now she’s sexualising herself, now she’s
choosing to be naked in a music video or to dance provocatively onstage, now
she has agency, the very same people who posted the egregiously creepy and borderline
paedophilic “all grown up” articles as soon as she hit 16 are denouncing her
for being a slut. Denouncing her for doing the thing they wanted her to do, for
being the person they forced her to be.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This isn’t even new. It’s been going on for decades. It
happened to Drew Barrymore, it’s the entire reason for the movie Spring
Breakers and now it’s happening to Miley Cyrus. Every time a female child star
stops being a child she is shunned for becoming too sexual, too wild, too much
of a “whore”. Drew Barrymore stopped being Gertie, stopped being the girl the
patriarchy wanted to take care of, to protect, and started being a woman,
started having power, having agency, and so she was denounced. Miley Cyrus
stopped being the wide-eyed country girl and now society has no idea how to
handle her. The world is scared of women with power and Miley – rich, famous
and only 20 years old – has a hell of a lot of it. So they put her in her
place, they dismiss her as a slut, as someone having a breakdown, rather than
confront the possibility that perhaps this woman who can and should do exactly
as she pleases, is merely playing the game by the rules they invented for her.
It’s telling that the words being thrown around about Miley are the two most
commonly used insults to dismiss women or to “put them in their place”. Slut- a
word with no real meaning intended to shame a woman into hiding her sexuality,
or perhaps more accurately, only showing it to the male using the slur –
chastises her for owning that which society commodifies anyway. Crazy tells the
world that she is not worth paying attention to, that her voice shouldn’t be
heard. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This issue is overwhelmingly gendered. Male child stars come
of age by taking on a serious role – Daniel Radcliffe in Equus, Josh Peck in
The Wackness – whereas female child stars must exhibit their sexuality to mark
their transition into adulthood. The attention paid to Lindsay Lohan and more
recently to Amanda Bynes, rarely centred on their substance abuse issues or
their criminality but instead revelled in stolen upskirt photos and explicit
tweets. Society is both fascinated and repulsed by female sexuality, especially
that of women in the media whose lives have been public since they were
children. It is interesting to note the recurrence of comments akin to “what
must Billy Ray think?” in all the talk about Miley Cyrus, the media themselves
acting like an overprotective father abhorred by the idea of their “little girl”
growing up. In a society where adult women are reduced to their sexuality, how
else could Miley show the world she’s no longer Hannah Montana? The world gave
her no choice but to trade on her sex appeal and then demonised her for it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This double standard forced upon women invades every aspect
of female life. You are expected to wear make-up but then chastised for trying
too hard. You are expected to look “attractive” when you go out but are
reprimanded for taking too long to get ready. You are told you must be
beautiful but when you make the effort to conform to their ideal, you are
ridiculed for your work. Women have too many shoes, too many clothes, too many
beauty products but the world tells us time and time again that without those
things we are ugly and if we are ugly we are worthless. We are expected to be
sexually available for any male who wants us, expected to take street harassment
as a compliment and never turn down a come on, but if we adhere to those rules
we’re whores who’ll put out for anyone who asks. As Ally Sheedy’s Allison so succinctly
puts it in The Breakfast Club “Well, if you say you haven't, you're a prude. If
you say you have you're a slut. It's a trap”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Society fetishizes innocence which is both a linguistic
oxymoron and an impossible reality. Catholic
school-girl porn, the demonization of female pubic hair and of course the
afore-mentioned “all grown up” articles, all make youth, and by association
virginity, desirable yet when a woman who society is used to seeing as a girl
wields her sexuality like a weapon she is shunned, painted with a red A and
assumed to be mad. The camera sexualises women no matter their age. The media
asked why Jodie Foster’s parents would let her play a prostitute at 13 but no
one questioned the director or the writer for creating a character sexualised
so young. Taxi Driver is a classic and Bugsy Malone is still performed in
schools. Similarly no one directed their ire towards Robin Thicke, the 36 year
old married man writing songs about date rape, using women as objects and simulating
anal sex with a 20 year old on stage. No one asked about the VMA directors, or
those responsible for putting the show together, no one blamed the guy directing
Wrecking Ball. They blamed the woman, and they blamed her for becoming what
they all wanted her to be.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course there are issues surrounding cultural
appropriation and the racism involved in Miley’s VMA performance but I am
nowhere near qualified enough to comment on them. These issues however are of
course not what the media is focusing on. The world is just yet again punishing
a woman for owning the sexuality they define her by and it’s sending a
sickening message to women everywhere: your sexuality is not your own, and as
soon as you claim it for yourself, as soon as you try to take control of the
identity we’ve forced upon you, we’ll hound you for it. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
TheSecondScreenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12098001235296444906noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5066553040921297855.post-66646403910549112862013-08-17T15:27:00.000-07:002013-08-17T15:27:20.461-07:00I Don’t Fucking Care If You Like Her: The gendered double standard of likeability in television.<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Everyone knows there’s a huge disparity between roles for
men and women in TV and film. We’ve all seen the stats – 80% of the speaking
roles in movies this year were male, there are more non-human roles on TV right
now than roles for women – and it doesn’t look like much is going to change in
the next couple of years. To find female led films you have to steer away from
the blockbusters and look towards indie film and to find the TV show with the
most female cast and crew you have to go to Netflix and watch Orange Is the New
Black. Major corporations just don’t want to invest in women or in female led
projects. This trend is maddening and I have taken it upon myself to enact my own
small, personal protest and make sure my money only goes to films with female
leads. This hasn’t been a difficult choice to make as I’m finding myself
increasingly disinterested in the dude-oriented blockbuster fare filling my
local cinema regardless of my feminist sensibilities. This isn’t to say that I
won’t watch any male led movies, just that I won’t be seeing them in the
cinema. I will not be funding the erasure of my gender on screen any more.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This abject lack of women on screen is a huge problem, but
there is another, more evasive issue plaguing female representation in film and
television – the issue of likeability. There has been an overwhelming trend
recently – in television especially – of unlikeable male characters, of stories
revolving around men who are serial killers or drug dealers, men who live
squarely in the moral grey. These characters like Walter White, Dexter Morgan
or the definition of the anti-hero cliché Ray Donovan, are not supposed to be
liked by the audience. It is the show’s goal to make these characters
relatable, to make you root for them despite your better instincts, to show the
complexity of the world’s villains, whilst ensuring their characters remain
just as selfish, violent and sociopathic as they began. Another example is the
NBC show Hannibal whose eponymous character is both a serial killer and a
cannibal yet has earned the sympathy and borderline obsession of many of the
show’s fans. Sherlock Holmes is a sociopathic narcissist, self-absorbed and
arrogant, yet he is seen by the audience as complex, interesting and layered.
It seems with this type of programme that the more unlikeable the protagonist,
the more skilled the writing and production team are seen in order to get the
viewer to sympathise with them. If you look over the most highly praised TV
shows of the past decade, an awful lot of them revolve around unlikeable male
leads and are praised for their deft handling of difficult subject matter and
construction of a compelling anti-hero. The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, House
– all celebrated for their complicated male leads.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, this is entirely not the case when it comes to
female characters. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are very few outright female anti-heroes on screen in
the vein of Walter White and Dexter. Unlikeable female characters tend not to
be psychopaths or murderers, rather they are average people with difficult
personalities. There are not many of them, but they exist and they are almost
universally derided. Take Lena Dunham’s Girls for example. Leaving out the
racial diversity issue (which I have discussed in this previous post: <a href="http://butmyopinionisright.tumblr.com/post/42382454900/in-defence-of-lena-dunham-and-girls">http://butmyopinionisright.tumblr.com/post/42382454900/in-defence-of-lena-dunham-and-girls</a>
along with why I feel the backlash was mostly caused by misogyny) the main
problem Dunham’s critics seemed to have with Girls was that the characters were
unlikeable and “too privileged”. Now I’ve never seen anyone complain that
Batman was “too privileged” or that Superman “only got where he was because of
his parents”, but that’s another issue for another post. What those critics
didn’t seem to understand was that Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna were
supposed to be unlikeable, they’re supposed to be self-involved and annoying
and naïve – they’re 20 somethings, we’re kind of like that. Hannah Horvath
never murdered anyone like Dexter, she didn’t rape anyone like Walter White
raped his wife on Breaking Bad, she hasn’t eaten any corpses like Hannibal and
she’s not even as selfish and narcissistic as Sherlock Holmes yet her
unlikeable qualities render her unwatchable, unrelatable and badly written.
Girls is brilliantly written and Hannah and her friends are endlessly
watchable. They are far more realistic than the male anti-heroes flooding our
screens, they are far more relatable but their gender means that audiences will
always expect them to be likeable and will be angrily disappointed when they
are not. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another current example is the character of Piper Chapman in
Orange Is The New Black. I’ve already written extensively on Orange on this
blog but Piper’s character warrants a mention here too. I’ve seen so much
criticism of her character online, about how self-involved, naïve and privileged
she is, without anyone noticing that she is supposed to be that way. People
seem to think this was a mistake, that no one could ever have intentionally
written a woman to be annoying or unlikeable whilst still making her the
protagonist. Women are allowed to be unlikeable as long as they are the
villains or figures of hatred. Female characters are allowed to be selfish and
annoying if they are the nagging wife or girlfriend of a “more relatable” male
lead, they are allowed to be sociopaths or violent as long as they are the
antagonists who a male (or occasionally female) hero has to destroy, but if the
women are themselves the protagonists or the heroes of the story they must be
immediately likeable and perfect. Piper’s annoying traits, her naivety and her
privilege are crucial to the story OITNB is trying to tell – the story of a
woman who thinks she is a good person, imprisoned and forced to confront her
flaws and her privileges. Just because a character is the lead of a programme
doesn’t mean they have to be liked by the audience, their position as
protagonist doesn’t mean they have to be perfect, always do the right thing and
never annoy anyone. This has been proven by the success of the anti-hero trend
with shows like Breaking Bad, Dexter and The Sopranos. A main character can be
contrary to every social value we hold dear but still be compelling enough to
make us watch the show and even begin to understand their motives – as long as
that character is a man of course. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This double standard is also visible in cinema. There are a
raft of unlikeable male anti-heroes in recent films; we all know how much I
hate Wolverine but he fits this category regardless of my personal loathing of
his character. There’s Batman too – both despite their general hero status are
gruff, anti-social, emotionally stunted loners who are decidedly unlikeable
personality wise, yet they loom large in the box office and in popular culture.
However, when Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman released their second feature
together after Juno – Young Adult starring Charlize Theron – it was largely
ignored by audiences, and critics, although mostly positive about the film, almost
all commented on the unlikability of the main character Mavis Gary. Mavis is a
distinctly awful person. She was the girl you hated at high school and she
never grew out of the bitchy mean girl mould. Mavis ghost writes a series of
relatively unsuccessful YA books and feels she is hugely superior to her former
classmates because she moved to the city and has a white collar career. She is
lazy, addicted to diet coke and the film follows her as she attempts to seduce
her old high school boyfriend away from his wife and newborn child in order to,
as she puts it, “save him” from his dull suburban life. Mavis Gary is not a
good person, she is not someone you would want as a friend or even someone you’d
ever want to encounter, but she is a good character. There are people like
Mavis Gary in the world, you can see how someone might end up like that, she is
complex and interesting and her story is compelling and darkly hilarious. Yet
for many, a female character as unlikeable as her was a dealbreaker, especially
as (SPOILER ALERT) she doesn’t end up changing a bit in the end. Young Adult
was nowhere near as successful as Juno or as talked about as the notorious (but
in my opinion still great) Jennifer’s Body which both featured markedly more
affable female leads. In contrast, the Batman movies got more popular and more
lucrative the darker and more morally questionable his character became, and
Wolverine’s brand of brooding anti-heroics continues to sell out theatres. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s clear there’s a huge double standard here. Audiences
find unlikeable male characters complex and fascinating, they praise the
writing and production behind them and, in some cases, manipulate the source
material in order to render that character as “just misunderstood”. Look at the
way that Loki, the villain in both Thor and The Avengers, has been glorified by
the fanbase. In Thor he’s jealous and petty, motivated by revenge and sibling
rivalry. In The Avengers he’s a Hitler figure, bent on dominating the people of
Earth as his minions. Loki isn’t even the protagonist here and he’s still
forgiven for the unlikeable parts of his personality and his villainous
actions. The audience still tries hard enough to understand him, to relate to
him, that they twist his character and his story into one of a misunderstood
outcast bullied by his favoured brother and largely just mischievous instead of
evil. Hannibal – of the NBC series rather than the movies, probably because
Anthony Hopkins isn’t as attractive as Mads Mikkelsen – is undergoing the same
kind of treatment at the moment. Viewers seem willing to go to lengths in order
to turn unlikeable male characters into someone they can root for, or at least
someone they can understand, so why not with female characters with the same –
and in most cases less severe – undesirable traits? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I would argue that this disparity is all down to the way
women are viewed in society as a whole. The patriarchy renders us as objects
for male consumption. We are viewed as accessories or rewards for men and are
reprimanded or shunned when we don’t fit that mould well enough or reject it
altogether. Unlikeable female characters are rejected for the same reason that
we don’t see fat women on screen, for the same reason why actresses are
photoshopped to death on magazines and why words like “friendzone” exist.
Female anti-heroes are admonished for the same reason why women are harassed on
the street and then vilified if they turn down a man’s advances. The patriarchy
requires women to be desirable to men, more often than not at the cost of their
own identities and freedoms. We are expected to change ourselves in order to
become more attractive to men and those of us who choose not to comply with
these expectations are demonised by society at large. So, art mimics life and
life mimics art. If a woman’s sole purpose is seen to be as a prize to be won
by a male or as an object to enhance the male’s experience, a woman on television
is treated in the same way. For the same reason we never see ugly women on
screen (although I would argue that beauty is really only what we’re told is
beautiful and not in any way empirical) but actors like Steve Buscemi have made
a living out of being creepy looking, female characters are expected to be
amenable, to be nice, to be someone a man would want to spend time with. Men
are allowed to be assholes because a man’s life and purpose is his own. Women
have to play nice because why else are they there in the first place?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a time where it is hard to even get a likeable female led
show on the air, it must be even harder to get a programme to series where the
lead woman is allowed to be imperfect. When the attitude is “why does there
need to be a woman in it?” as if, yet again, the male is default and female
representation is merely tokenism despite us making up more than half the
population, one can only imagine the difficulty in convincing a studio to
invest in a female character who isn’t likeable. There are however critically successful
unlikeable female characters to act as precedent, even if their flaws aren’t
anywhere near as severe as their male counterparts. Jenna Maroney of 30 Rock is a vapid narcissist with violent
tendencies and a propensity to threaten suicide for dramatic effect. She was a
constant highlight of a series already full of brilliance and was largely loved
by critics and the show’s niche audience alike. Nurse Jackie is the only series
I can think of with a true female anti-hero as the protagonist – Jackie Peyton
being a nurse with a severe addiction to prescription meds who bends the rules
in order to help her patients whilst cheating on her husband with the
pharmacist she manipulates in order to get her drug fix. Weeds could be another
example – Nancy Botwin starts off as a mother trying to do the best by her sons
but loses track of her morals as the series continues and has some decidedly
undesirable character traits. The short lived but critically loved HBO series
Enlightened featured Laura Dern as Amy Jellicoe, a woman who suffers a breakdown
and returns from a retreat determined to force her new “enlightened” philosophy
into her old life. There are examples of unlikeable female characters being
enjoyed by fans and critics, however it’s telling that all these examples are
either comedies or comedy dramas. Perhaps it’s only ok to be unlikeable as a
female character if that character’s purpose is to make viewers laugh. Are
women ever allowed to be both assholes and taken seriously?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A show which exemplifies this double standard is HBO’s Game
of Thrones. GoT features many unlikeable characters, the worst offenders perhaps
being Joffrey and Cersei Lannister. Joffrey is universally despised but he has
reached the status of “the character you love to hate” whereas Cersei, his
mother is largely just plain hated. I love Cersei – perhaps marginally down to
the fact that, as a lesbian, I am obliged to love everything Lena Headey has
done since Imagine Me & You – but also just because she’s such a bitch. She’s
not a likeable character; she had an affair with her brother and gave birth to
his son who she turned into the insufferable and vindictive person he is, she
instructed her brother to throw Bran out of a window when he saw them fucking
in a tower – a fall that ends up rendering him a paraplegic – and she’s
consistently cruel to her brother Tyrion and to Sansa who she forces to be
betrothed to her son. Cersei is an awful person, but she is a good character.
She’s a powerful woman in a man’s world and her actions and personality are
easily justified when you consider the sacrifices she has to make to be as
powerful as she is. It’s certainly less of a stretch to put yourself in Cersei’s
shoes and understand where she is coming from, than it is to turn Hannibal
Lecter into someone who is just misunderstood. And yet, Hannibal has thousands
of fans singing his praises online and Lena Headey is called a bitch at fan
conventions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Women are not only expected to be physically attractive to
men in order to “deserve” their place on TV, they are also expected to have an
attractive personality as well. Male characters are allowed to get away with
rape, murder, drug dealing, incessant infidelity and rampant narcissism,
whereas woman have to be pleasant and affable in order to be tolerated on
screen. The role of anti-hero is almost exclusively reserved for men, and for
white men at that. There is an argument to be made that it is the whiteness as
well as the maleness of characters like Walter White and Dexter Morgan that
allows audiences to sympathise with them. A black or Latino meth dealer might
not be so well received. So while we’re stuck in this trend of “complicated”
protagonists, it seems the only complex characters we’re likely to see are
white males, thus further erasing women and people of colour from our screens. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As is often the case, I feel an Amy Poehler quote is useful here. As
recounted in Tina Fey’s Bossypants, Poehler responded to the light-hearted
criticism that a joke she had just made wasn’t “cute” so the person in question
(I think it was Jimmy Fallon) didn’t like it, with “I don’t fucking care if you
like it”. It’s already evident that a protagonist needn’t be likeable in order
to be interesting. That logic now needs to be applied to female characters and fast.
So the next time you hear someone complain about how Hannah Horvath or Piper
Chapman just isn’t likeable enough, paraphrase Amy – I don’t fucking care if
you like her, she’s interesting and that’s all that matters. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
TheSecondScreenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12098001235296444906noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5066553040921297855.post-44062130997754276332013-08-02T13:29:00.000-07:002013-08-02T13:29:09.845-07:00How X-Men: Days of Future Past Crushed My Dreams<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Whilst spending the week of San Diego Comic-Con at home in
Lincoln observing the festivities enviously online, I read the news from the
Marvel panel about the new X-Men movie Days Of Future Past and wished even more
that I had been there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was looking forward to this movie for many reasons; I was
happy that Bryan Singer would be back as director, I was pleased it would be
including characters from the original trilogy as well as First Class, but
mainly I was happy that Ellen Page would be reprising her role as Kitty Pryde
and from the title of the movie, it looked like she’d be driving the plot. Full
disclosure: I haven’t read many X-Men comics. I’m reading the new all female
series, I’ve dabbled in X-Men Noir and the Civil War event and I plan on
reading Joss Whedon’s run once I can afford the omnibuses. I’m not well versed
in the comic lore but I do make a point to read about the comics’ canon before
I watch the movies based on it. So, after the announcement of Days of Future
Past as the title of new X-Men movie I did some research and was really happy
with what I saw. In the comics Days of Future Past features Kitty Pryde going
back in time to warn the X-Men of the Sentinel ruled future so they can
manipulate the past and therefore stop the future from happening the way it
did. This arc was hugely popular with readers, it seems largely down to the
heavily featured fan favourite Kitty Pryde. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The news of this arc being the focus of the new movie was
brilliant. Not only would the plot be focused around Kitty Pryde – a character
universally loved – but this would be the first superhero movie in recent times
to feature a female character in a starring role. Of course X-Men is an
ensemble series and has always featured female characters in its films.
However, despite the fact that the first film included Rogue, Storm and Jean
Grey the events of the plot were inarguably centred around Wolverine. X2
similarly focused on Wolverine as the main hero and his journey to uncover his
past, and X-Men: The Last Stand managed again to keep focus on Wolverine and
his relationship with Jean Grey despite its overabundance of characters. Every
X-Men movie so far has featured a male character who drives the plot along,
ending up becoming the lead and leaving the others in the ensemble as back up.
X-Men First Class was similarly about the two male leads Charles Xavier and
Erik Lehnsherr, their friendship turned rivalry and subsequent development into
Professor X and Magneto. This isn’t even including the two Wolverine spin off
movies; X-Men Origins: Wolverine and this summer’s The Wolverine. If we count
those films as part of the X-Men umbrella, Wolverine has five movies where he
is either the star or the main focus of an ensemble film, he even stole focus
with his brief one line cameo in First Class. So, considering the last female
fronted superhero film released was 2005’s Elektra – itself a spin off
featuring Daredevil’s love interest in a starring role rather than an original
concept – and all the previous X-Men movies revolved around male characters, it
was way past time we had an X-Men movie whose plot was driven by a woman. So I
was pretty psyched for Days of Future Past a superhero movie with a female lead
played by all round badass Ellen Page.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And then SDCC happened and all my hopes and dreams were
crushed. You see, having announced that the new film would be adapted from the
Days of Future Past arc and let all of Kitty Pryde’s fans believe that she
would lead the film, the producers revealed at their hotly anticipated panel
that it would in fact be Wolverine who goes back in time in the movie not
Kitty. So, Fox/Marvel decided that five films weren’t enough for Wolverine
despite the fact that his last two solo efforts bombed both critically and at
the box office. The next X-Men movie will be just another male fronted
superhero movie. I wouldn’t be quite so pissed off if the writers had chosen a
canonical Wolverine arc to adapt. I would have been disappointed, I would have
sighed in dismay at the unoriginality and the perpetuation of the cinematic
boys club which seems especially prevalent in superhero films, and I probably
wouldn’t have seen the movie. However I wouldn’t have been angry. My anger
stems from the fact that not only did Fox/Marvel decide to give Wolverine
another movie to star in, they stole the storyline from a female character in
order to do it. Days Of Future Past is a fan favourite arc and its success is
largely down to its focus on Kitty Pryde, another fan favourite. The movie
version has taken Kitty’s story and erased her from it, giving the starring
role to a male character instead and relegating her to the helper role in his
hero story. In the comics it is Wolverine who helps Kitty Pryde travel back in
time. In the film these roles are reversed. Todorov’s narrative theory lists
“The Helper” as a recurring character in the archetypal hero story. The Helper
gives the Hero something they need to succeed in their quest, furthering their
development into a hero and helping them achieve their goals. In the comics
Kitty Pryde is the hero, going on her journey to save the world. She is helped
by Wolverine who assumes this lesser role in order to further her arc. It seems
the people behind the film version of Days of Future Past just couldn’t handle
a female hero story, so demoted Kitty Pryde out of her own story and gave it to
Wolverine instead. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This action speaks volumes about how women are seen by the
film industry and, specifically by the superhero film industry. To them we
exist as plot points, as side characters to inspire or aid the male hero. We
are love interests or sexual objects, we are evil temptresses or damsels in
distress. In best case scenarios we are back up, the sidekicks or the people
fighting in the background whilst the male hero takes out the main villain and
completes his hero journey, usually ending in a kiss of victory from the
cardboard cutout female love interest. We are not the heroes, we do not propel
the story, we are passive, not active. Things happen to and around women, we do
not make things happen ourselves. We do not save the world, we are only there
to fuck the men who do. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even in the last two female superhero movies we’ve seen in
the past decade, the main characters have fit these stereotypes. Elektra was
Daredevil’s love interest who he tried and failed to save, making him even more
determined to defeat both Bullseye and The Kingpin. Her solo movie centred
around her crisis of conscience when her job as an assassin after her
resurrection requires her to kill a teenage girl. Her womanly maternal
instincts take over and she decides to protect the girl instead, then falling
in love with her father and becoming a protective mama bear figure and
renouncing her former ways. Catwoman is best known as Batman’s “evil temptress”
foe turned love interest and occasional sidekick. The much maligned Halle Berry
movie featured her discovering her sexuality, turning from bookish, restrained
Patience Phillips into the overtly sexualised, seductive Catwoman. She then
defeats a female villain – Sharon Stone playing the head of a cosmetics firm
who is obsessed with youth and beauty. It seems even in superhero films where a
woman is the protagonist, we are still forced into the roles the industry has
set out for us. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not only is the fact that Kitty Pryde has been ousted from
her own story arc heinously misogynistic in itself, we only have to look at the
character who has replaced her to see that it’s not just a lack of female
heroes the industry is perpetuating, it’s the abundance of hypermasculinised
ones as well. Wolverine is the epitome of the male power fantasy. He’s
testosterone incarnate, a literally animalistic male who seems to only have two
emotions – clichéd anti-hero brooding and angry screaming with his claws out.
Every movie poster for his films shows off his muscles telling us without doubt
that Wolverine=strength, and male strength at that. His claws are obvious
phallic symbols and any trace of homoeroticism
is denied by the inevitable arbitrary female love interest who exists
solely to prove his heterosexuality/ heteronormative masculinity. Wolverine’s
films are typical of the superhero movie market today as every film’s narrative
seems to be an affirmation of the protagonist’s heterosexual masculinity. They
almost all involve big, muscular, often bearded men fighting other big,
muscular, often bearded men, blowing stuff up and saving/kissing the girl in
the end. The studio’s choice to make Days of Future Past about Wolverine tells
us they are happy with the way things are. It says unequivocally that superhero
movies are for men, that their storylines are exclusively male power fantasies
and that the female fans of such films cannot and should not have a protagonist
they can relate to. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I mentioned at the start of this post that the SDCC panel
where this news was announced made me want to be at Comic-con even more. I
would have loved to be at that panel and to be able to ask the writers and
director why they chose to give Wolverine a sixth film instead of doing
something new and having a female lead. I would have loved to have seen them
try to answer that question without revealing the real reason behind the
decision – good old misogyny – and I would have loved to have been able to
point out that this is a problem. You see, after this announcement was made I
expected to see more outrage. I expected to see more people like me, angry that
studios would rather take a popular female led arc and turn it into a male led
film than try and make a movie with a female protagonist. I expected more. I
got nothing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can imagine the kind of reasons the studios would give. I
can imagine the bullshit they’d roll out in defence of this move, it’s the
exact same crap we’ve been hearing for years. It’s the same reasons DC give for
making a Superman/Batman crossover movie before giving us a Wonder Woman film.
“Women don’t read comics/watch superhero films”, “Female led movies don’t do
well at the box office”, “A Wonder Woman movie would be tricky to do”. It’s all
lies. Women read comics, women see superhero films. We’re 51% of the population
and we’re at least 50% of the comics buying, cinema going audience. Female led
films do just as well as male led films at the box office, there are just a
hell of a lot less of them. Studios will use films like Elektra and Catwoman as
examples of how female superhero movies don’t do well. They’ll ignore films
like Daredevil, Superman Returns, The Green Lantern, The Punisher, Ghost Rider,
Spider-Man 3 and the two Wolverine solo efforts as just bad films, as the
exception rather than the rule. Two bad female led superhero movies means all
female superhero movies are bad whereas nine terrible male led superhero movies
(and countless others I haven’t mentioned) are just mistakes. Non genre female
fronted successes like Bridesmaids or Pitch Perfect are largely ignored as
exceptions and one offs rather than as examples of how hungry female audiences
are of representation. The studios will do anything other than admit that they
should be making more films about women, even ignoring the success of female
led films in favour of trotting out the same old clichés.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s the last quote about Wonder Woman though that pisses me
off the most and that I think really gets to the core of why we aren’t seeing
superhero movies with female protagonists. That quote is paraphrased from
something a DC exec said at SDCC about why we have yet to see a Wonder Woman
movie. If I remember correctly “tricky” was the exact word he used. The male
executives, writers and directors of superhero films (because, yes they are
almost all male) genuinely don’t know how to present a woman as a hero. They
can’t imagine how a female might save the world, how a woman could fight bad
guys and protect the innocent, how a male character could be the love interest
instead of the hero. The thing they think would be “tricky” in making a Wonder
Woman movie is essentially how they can create a female character who stands on
her own, whose story doesn’t revolve around a stronger male, who isn’t there to
be objectified. The men in charge of making superhero movies do not know how to
create a female subject. The idea of a film where the men in the audience are
asked to identify with a female hero instead of to objectify a female love
interest is terrifying to them. They can’t see themselves identifying with a
female protagonist so they can’t imagine any man doing so either. The studios
don’t dare make a female superhero movie because they’re terrified they’ll lose
the misogynistic male comics reader fanbase they imagine they have. The studios
think their audience is full of MRA, fedora wearing douchebags who complain
about “fake geek girls” and “getting friendzoned” and they know that asking
those people to identify with a woman would horrify them. The fact is they’re
wrong. That section of the superhero movie fanbase is very small and the
audience they might lose in confronting that section’s misogyny would be
outnumbered by the audience they would gain by offering female viewers a woman
to cheer for. The studios would rather play into that kind of misogyny and
alienate female viewers than challenge it and try to change the discourse. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Days of Future Past has now not only followed the trend of
guy centric superhero films, it has actively chosen not to feature a female
lead in her own story. I was excited not only to see Kitty Pryde head up the
first female focused X-Men movie, but also to see Ellen Page be the star of the
first female led superhero movie in an awfully long time. It would seem apt for
Page to take on this role as she’s an outspoken feminist who has frequently
spoken out against the male domination of the film industry. She recently
worked with Brit Marling another actress who was so fed up with the lack of
decent roles for women in Hollywood she decided to just fucking write her own
and she does it damn well too. I was psyched to see a feminist in a role which
would counter the overwhelmingly male trend and stand up as an example of how
to write female heroes. And yeah, I was excited to see Ellen Page kick some
ass. But, of course, that would have been too good to be true, and instead we
have yet another X-Men movie of Wolverine being angry, yet another superhero
movie perpetuating heteronormative masculinity and yet another movie with a male
lead. If I had been at that SDCC panel, I would have liked to ask Ellen Page
how she felt about this. I can’t imagine she was all too pleased to find out
her character was being side-lined in her own story arc to make way for another
male centric movie. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And so I will probably be avoiding Days of Future Past when
it is released in cinemas next year. Although I usually aim to see all of Ellen
Page’s movies at the cinema and I’d love to see more of Halle Berry’s Storm and
Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, I don’t know whether I can bring myself to give
money to a film which screwed over its female audience so blatantly. I imagine
I’d spend the whole film mourning what could have been if Marvel’s properties
weren’t split and Joss Whedon was overseeing this film as well. I can’t see
Whedon, a champion of female heroes and a noted fan of Kitty Pryde let the film
demote her to a secondary helper role. Just think, we could have had a Kitty
Pryde movie written, directed by and starring proud feminists leading the charge
into female fronted superhero films. Instead we have this. Wolverine stealing
the spotlight for the sixth time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can’t be the only one bored of this.</span> <o:p></o:p></div>
TheSecondScreenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12098001235296444906noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5066553040921297855.post-53932140555066695502013-07-29T10:49:00.002-07:002013-07-29T10:49:41.882-07:00The Emmys<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sorry this post is late, right now in the UK we’re in the
middle of a heat wave. I do not do well in heat so this week I don’t have the
mental faculties to write anything in depth. Hopefully, if it stops being so
insanely hot, next week will return to normal service (although Sunday is my 21<sup>st</sup>
birthday so it may be a little late). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Today I want to talk about The Emmys. The nominations for
this year’s Emmys were released this month to a decidedly unenthusiastic public
and a lot of very angry Orphan Black fans. Here are my thoughts on the categories
I care about:<br />
<br />
Best Actress in a Drama Series:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Vera Farmiga for Bates Motel<br />
Michelle Dockery for Downton Abbey<br />
Claire Danes for Homeland<br />
Robin Wright for House of Cards<br />
Elisabeth Moss for Mad Men<br />
Connie Britton for Nashville<br />
Kerry Washington for Scandal<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who I think Will Win: Claire Danes for Homeland<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Claire Danes is the predictable choice as she won for
Homeland last year and the Emmys do like repeating themselves. She’s brilliant
in Homeland and the show is great so the award would be deserved even if a
little obvious. If they wanted to go a little more left field this year they
might go with Kerry Washington who knocks it out of the park every week in
Scandal. Out of all the nominees I’d love to see her win. As much as I adore
Connie Britton and her magical hair, Nashville just isn’t great yet and the
nomination seems like an apology for never recognising the genius that was Mrs
Coach from Friday Night Lights. Elisabeth Moss is also a possibility; she’s
been nominated twice before for Mad Men and this might be the year they finally
give her her dues. Bates Motel and House
of Cards seem too obscure to win for their first seasons and I can’t see the
Emmys giving an award to the British Downton Abby over their own homegrown
talent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who Should Win: Tatiana Maslany for Orphan Black<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In yet another example of the Emmys completely ignoring
science fiction, Tatiana Maslany was snubbed this year as the committee haven’t
even acknowledged her extraordinary performance in BBC America’s breakout
series Orphan Black with a nomination. In Orphan Black Maslany plays seven
different characters, all clones whose various environments and upbringings
have made their personalities different although their genetics are the same.
Maslany not only plays these seven characters individually, she often plays
them in the same scene opposite other characters who are also played by her.
For a large portion of the series Maslany plays one character – Sarah – who is
pretending to be another clone – Beth. This kind of multi-layered performance
is common in Orphan Black where many of the clones pretend to be other
characters throughout the series. Maslany’s performance is not only a technical
marvel – requiring great skill and intelligence – but it’s also intensely
likeable. She imbues even the deranged serial killer Helena with a sense of
depth and charm rendering her endearing and sympathetic despite her violence. I
can’t be the only one who really hopes Helena survived that finale. It’s an
outrage that the Emmy’s ignored her performance(s) and if I was in charge I’d
give this award to her and make sure she got seven statues. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anna Gunn for Breaking Bad<br />
Maggie Smith for Downton Abbey<br />
Emilia Clarke for Game of Thrones<br />
Christine Baranski for The Good Wife<br />
Morena Baccarin for Homeland<br />
Christina Hendricks for Mad Men<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who I Think Will Win: Maggie Smith for Downton Abbey<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Everyone loves Maggie Smith. In the words of Avery Bishop
“She is a treasure!” And the US does seem to be obsessed with Downton Abbey.
Though I’m not sure it will triumph over American shows in the other categories
it’s nominated in, I think this might be where the Emmys gives it recognition.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who Should Win: Christine Baranski for The Good Wife<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I love all the characters in The Good Wife even the ones I’m
supposed to hate. It’s just that good. Even amongst such stiff competition
Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockheart is one of my favourites. She manages to be
both formidable and lovable at the same time. She’s a powerful independent
woman, a liberal feminist who sticks to her convictions and has a photograph of
her with Hillary Clinton behind her desk. Baranski makes her seem like both
someone you’d want on your side in a court case and someone you’d want to get
day drunk with and rail against the patriarchy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Best Guest Actress in a Drama Series:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Margo Martindale for The Americans<br />
Diana Rigg for Game of Thrones<br />
Carrie Preston for The Good Wife<br />
Linda Cardellini for Mad Men<br />
Jane Fonda for The Newsroom<br />
Joan Cusack for Shameless<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’d be happy for any of these actresses to win but my hopes
are pinned on Carrie Preston for The Good Wife. I have loved Linda Cardellini
since I first crushed on Nurse Sam Taggart in ER when I was about 14. This
intensified when she played every bookish young lesbian’s hero Velma Dinkley in
the Scooby Doo movies and I was completely head over heels by the time I finally got
around to watching Freaks and Geeks last year. I’d be overjoyed if she won but
I haven’t seen Mad Men yet so I can’t in good conscience root for someone whose
performance I can’t evaluate for myself (although I’m sure she rocked it). So
Carrie Preston. As aforementioned my love for The Good Wife knows no bounds. It’s
horribly underrated and it’s one of the best drama shows on TV right now.
Carrie Preston’s recurring guest role as eccentric but brilliant lawyer Elsbeth
Tascioni is just one of its many, many delights. I’m always happy when I see
her name in the opening credits as I know she’s going to be hilarious and
something clever is going to happen. Preston gives her an otherworldly quality,
like she’s functioning on a completely different plane to everyone else where
all her oddities make sense. It takes a great performer to make an impact on a
show with such a strong core ensemble and Carrie Preston is memorable even
amongst the host of brilliant guest stars The Good Wife manages to wrangle. I’ll
be cheering in her section. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Best Drama Series:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Breaking Bad<br />
Downton Abbey<br />
Game of Thrones<br />
Homeland<br />
House of Cards<br />
Mad Men<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This category seemed notable to me because I usually have an
opinion on the big awards and this year I honestly couldn’t care less. Every
choice here seems predictable, like a list you’d come up with if asked what the
most obvious choices for the Emmys would be. There’s nothing inspiring here,
nothing which I want to root for. Breaking Bad – although I’m sure it’s
technically very good – bored me intensely, so much that I barely made it
through the first season. Downton Abbey seems to only be nominated because of
the US’ bizarre obsession with British period dramas which seems to stem from a
lack of their own more distant history to explore. Sure, people here in the UK
like it too but it airs on ITV, a channel renowned for being completely average
and barely registers on my radar. If the Emmys wanted to award some quality
period drama they should have looked to Canada’s Bomb Girls which is quite
frankly amazing, gave the world the sheer brilliance that was Betty McRae and
will be sorely missed. Again, I’m sure Game of Thrones is still as good as its
first season (the only season I’ve managed to watch so far) but it’s somewhat
dismaying to see that the only genre show to get Emmy recognition is made, of
course, by HBO. It gives the impression that the Emmys only see quality in
genre programming when it goes out of its way to seem “adult”. Game of Thrones definitely
deserves its nomination but it’s a shame that it seems like it’s the only
fantasy show that will ever be taken seriously by the committee. Homeland is
also a solid show which I really enjoyed but I don’t feel like it did anything
particularly new this past season. Season two was good, Claire Danes is
brilliant and they managed to retain the tension they built up in the first
season – which seemed like an impossibility seen as the main plot “Is Brody a
terrorist?” was concluded in the first season’s finale. Homeland is a good show
but I’m just not raving about it anymore. I haven’t yet seen either House of
Cards or Mad Men but from what I have seen they both seem to fit the mould of programmes
the Emmys take seriously and neither premise has me all that enthused. I’m glad
that House Of Cards’ nomination shows that Netflix’s original series are being
taken seriously as it gives me hope for Orange Is The New Black to get some
recognition next year, but overall I’d have loved to see shows like The Good
Wife and Orphan Black on that list.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Best Actress in a Comedy Series:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Laura Dern for Enlightened<br />
Lena Dunham for Girls<br />
Edie Falco for Nurse Jackie<br />
Amy Poehler for Parks and Recreation<br />
Tina Fey for 30 Rock<br />
Julia Louis-Dreyfus for Veep<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here is another category where I’ll be happy whoever wins. I
never got into Enlightened but I’m told it improved vastly from the godawful
pilot I saw and I know its fans will be happy with the nomination especially
considering its cancellation earlier in the year. I love Girls (insert lesbian
joke here) and Lena Dunham is a major hero for me. Her speech at the Golden Globes
last year made me cry and I’m happy to see her get recognition for her truly
original work despite the misogynistic backlash she’s received. I devoured the
first two seasons of Nurse Jackie and am waiting impatiently until I have enough
money to buy the others on DVD. Edie Falco is brilliant and the character of Jackie
Peyton is a brilliant and sadly rare example of a rounded female anti-hero on
TV. I’d love to see Tina Fey win again for the last season of 30 Rock and
although I’m yet to discover most of Veep’s brilliance for myself, all the gifs
I’ve seen on Tumblr suggest it’s every bit as good as I’ve heard. My choice for
the win though is of course Amy Poehler. It’s insane that Parks hasn’t been
nominated for best comedy and it would be insulting if she didn’t win after
they’ve snubbed her so many times. Her Leslie Knope is a shining beacon of joy
amongst the rabid cynicism which runs through most sitcoms today and she really
deserves an award.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mayim Bialik for The Big Bang Theory<br />
Jane Lynch for Glee<br />
Sofia Vergara for Modern Family<br />
Julie Bowen for Modern Family<br />
Merritt Wever for Nurse Jackie<br />
Jane Krakowski for 30 Rock<br />
Anna Chlumsky for Veep<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For me the only winner here is Jane Krakowski. She’s owned
Jenna Maroney for seven seasons and her performance in the final season was
stunning. She’s the only person who could make me cry over the line “these were
the best days of my flerm” and it’s insane that she hasn’t been awarded for
Jenna before. I’ll miss Liz Lemon terribly now 30 Rock has gone but part of me
will miss Jenna and her Mickey Rourke
anecdotes even more (even if she’s really never met him). I love Merrit Wever in
Nurse Jackie and I’m pleased she’s nominated but if I’m honest I’ll be
incredibly disappointed if anyone other than Jane Krakowski wins. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Best Comedy Series:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Big Bang Theory<br />
Girls<br />
Louie<br />
Modern Family<br />
30 Rock<br />
Veep<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who I Think Will Win: 30 Rock<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">30 Rock is one of the best comedies of the past decade and
it would be ridiculous if the Emmys didn’t recognise its final season. The last
thirteen episodes were 30 Rock on top form and the double finale episode was a
masterpiece. They should go out on a win.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who Should Win: Parks and Recreation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Words are not adequate to describe the sheer ire I felt when
I saw The Big Bang Theory had been nominated for best comedy and Parks and
Recreation had not. Parks is the best comedy on television hands down, there’s no
argument against it. This travesty is enough to call into question any
judgement made by the Emmys for me. They clearly have no idea what they’re
talking about. <br /><br />In the words of Ron Swanson “Awards are stupid.”</span><o:p></o:p></div>
TheSecondScreenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12098001235296444906noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5066553040921297855.post-63092070525792332832013-07-21T04:26:00.000-07:002013-07-21T04:26:47.695-07:00Orange Is The New Black Is The New Black<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Spoilers abound, from the off.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I couldn’t not write about Orange Is The New Black. I, like
everyone else with a brain and a Netflix subscription, am obsessed with it. I
finished the first season yesterday, having rationed myself to one or two
episodes a day from its release. Everyone said it worked brilliantly as a binge
watch but I prefer to savour good TV like Charlie Bucket does chocolate. Now
I’m done I’m feeling somewhat lost. For the past week it’s been pretty much all
I’ve thought about. Like Piper Chapman I too had become embroiled in the prison
drama to the exclusion of real life. Now I’m out and, like Taystee, I’ve no
idea how to handle it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We’ve needed a show like Orange for a long time now, for far
too long actually, and it couldn’t have had better timing. In a year where 80%
of speaking roles in film output were male and television’s second place status
was being seriously questioned, Orange stood out from the crowd as both the
proud owner of a diverse, overwhelmingly female cast and as yet another example
of television doing what movies should be. This is also the year that Veronica
Mars got crowdfunded on Kickstarter, proving that the networks don’t always (or
in my opinion, often) get things right. Netflix showed once again with Orange
that the best, most groundbreaking television is found outside of the networks,
proving itself to be the place for risk-taking, original, diverse TV. Orange Is
The New Black would have looked very different if it had been made for standard
television. Not only does Netflix as a format allow for longer run-times, it’s
also the reason why Orange’s cast is so racially diverse and why the show can
portray such a frank depiction of female sexuality. It seems completely
ridiculous to me that before Orange I’d never once seen a vagina on television,
especially when – thanks to Game of Thrones – there’s penises everywhere. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It also seems somewhat strange to be talking about Orange
being groundbreaking. Surely, in 2013, seeing that many non-white people on TV
shouldn’t be something new. Surely an honest depiction of female sexuality
should be old news by now. This should be commonplace, but the fact is it’s not
and this is something Orange deals with brilliantly both in world and on a
meta-textual level. Amongst the almost universal praise I’ve read online, I’ve
seen a few posts bring up the point that it’s a shame that, in a cast so full
of non-white characters, the protagonist still has to be white. To an extent, I
agree but this isn’t a problem with Orange Is the New Black, it’s a problem
with television as a whole. Orange is based on a book written by a white woman
and is very specifically the story of a white woman’s experience. You could see
this as being a compromise, as the industry only accepting non-white people’s
stories from a white perspective or as the industry recognising an audience who
would only accept things that way. However, I think Orange is in fact doing
something very different and very clever with its white protagonist. Instead of
showing her as “the normal” and the non-white characters as “the other” it asks
us to identify with the women of colour at least as much, and in some cases
more, as we do with Piper Chapman. As a middle class white woman I identify
with Piper but not in a good way. I see my bad qualities in her, I see my
naivety and my privilege. Through Piper Chapman, Jenji Kohan is asking us to
recognise and examine our own white privilege as Piper does hers. In the first
few episodes I often found myself having to confront the fact that I would have
made many of the same mistakes that Piper did. I too would have studied for
prison, I would have been shocked at the self-imposed racial segregation
(despite the fact that it seems in Lichfield it’s not about supremacy at all,
rather finding a family based on an assumed common experience) and I probably
would have inadvertently insulted someone on my first day and received a tampon
sandwich for my trouble the next morning. Piper Chapman is not a particularly
likeable character, she’s supposed to be like me but like the bad parts of me,
like the parts I’m ashamed of. At the start of the series she’s vastly
self-involved, she refuses to accept responsibility for her actions and is
often accidentally cruel. We watch her be confronted with these unlikeable
parts of her personality as the series continues and as she realises that she’s
perhaps not the “nice white lady” she thought she was, we (I) realise that too.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Orange Is the New Black reveals its characters’ backstories
through flashbacks framed subtly as memory threads throughout the series. In
the pilot, when Piper talks in voiceover about how she used to love to wash
herself, we see her memories of bathing – one scene with her current fiancé
Larry, and then once with her drug runner ex girlfriend Alex – which inform us
about her character. We see some of Alex’s childhood, growing up poor with her
single mother and getting bullied for not having the right shoes, when she is
accused of being a “rich girl” by the hateful Pennsatucky. These flashbacks
tell us about the characters’ backstories but also reveal to us their headspace,
how they think and why they are how they are. Miss Claudette’s obsession with
cleanliness is explained by her past as a scared child sold into indentured
servitude as a maid in the US to pay off her parents’ debts, who then becomes
the boss of the girls she used to be and kills a man who dared hurt her workers.
Sophia’s need for her hormone medication is given further emotional depth once
we see how much she sacrificed to transition. Yes, Piper Chapman is the
protagonist and we see more of her life on the outside than we do the other
characters, but crucially those characters are never relegated to secondary
status, they’re never periphery, never supporting players. I care just as much
about Sophia and Nicholls and Miss Claudette as I do about Piper and sometimes
even more. None of the characters are there as tokens, every woman is fleshed
out as a person, as someone with their own story to tell and as someone who
never thought they’d end up in prison either. The inmates aren’t even the only
ones whose stories we care about, the guards and the administration are shown
as human beings with their own motivations as well and of course Piper’s family
and friends are rounded characters too. This is particularly hard to do with a
large ensemble cast and is one of the reasons why Glee, although inclusive on
the surface, fails to reach this level of diversity. No character is on Orange
to fill quotas, Jenji Kohan doesn’t just want to seem inclusive, she wants to
tell everyone’s story and so far, she succeeds. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The episode which I think best embodies this equal
opportunities approach to storytelling is episode 11 “Tall Men With Feelings”.
In this episode Piper’s fiancé Larry (who is one of the few characters I
really, really hate and not just because he’s a barrier to goddess Alex’s
happiness) does a radio interview on NPR where he talks about how hard it is
for him to have a fiancée in jail. He constantly appropriates Piper’s
experience as a vehicle for his own success as a writer (the main reason for my
hatred of him, that and he watched Mad Man without her) and during the
interview tells a story from one of his first visits. This story is not his to
tell and he reduces all the people we, and Piper have grown to love and
understand, to ciphers, to characters in his girlfriend’s story. Piper, having
changed somewhat by this episode and having formed connections with these
people and grown to understand and relate to them, is horrified and berates him
for minimising her experience and offending her friends. During his interview
he directly refers to people like Red and “Crazy Eyes” Suzanne as “characters”
and he reduces them to tropes with his repeated use of the phrase “the girl
who…” through his retelling of Piper’s first impressions of prison. We are
reminded here, late in the season, of who Piper used to be, of what she used to
think and she is confronted with this as well. We also see what this does to
the people Larry talks about. Miss Claudette initially looks angry at
Larry/Piper’s <i>characterisation</i> of her
as terrifying and Piper’s claim that she “slept with one eye open” for fear
she’d kill her in her sleep, but is later revealed to just be hurt that someone
she thought was her friend had ever thought of her in that way. “Crazy Eyes”
Suzanne’s reaction is perhaps the most heartbreaking. Earlier in the episode we
saw Suzanne as a whole person with feelings for the first time during the
series. Previously she had just been “Crazy Eyes” who was slightly deranged and
couldn’t take a hint when Piper told her she didn’t want to be her prison wife.
In episode 11 we see her recognise the boundaries Piper has set for her when
she helps her back to her room after she slips and falls. Suzanne explains her
mental problems and why she’s allowed to stay out of psych. She asks, with a
look of sad confusion, why everyone calls her “Crazy Eyes” and we realise that
Piper is the only one to ever call her Suzanne. She is given layers in this
episode, Piper and we as an audience start to realise the depth of her
personality and Larry’s interview reduces her back to a trope, to an amusing
anecdote his fiancée told him about prison, and she lies in her bunk in tears. “Tall
Men With Feelings” shows us the importance of being seen as a whole person – we
even briefly sympathise with Pornstache, the tall man of the title, when he
wonders why no one asks how his day went – rather than just a character in
someone else’s story. In Orange Is The
New Black, the characters Piper encounters are never secondary, they aren’t
there to impart wisdom and make the pretty blonde white lady a better person.
They have their own stories, their own ways of coping, their own reasons for
being inside – and the only person who can make Piper better is herself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This sense of equality is reinforced by the fact that the
only person to see Piper as separate from or better than the other prisoners is
Officer Healey, who is revealed to be a homophobic villain who singles her out
because he finds her attractive. As soon as Piper reveals herself to be more
similar to the other prisoners than to him, he drops her as his pet project and
punishes her by throwing her in the SHU. He originally thinks that she is like
him, that prison isn’t meant for heterosexual white people who made mistakes.
He sees her as different to “the others” and as the series develops and Piper
realises she’s just like the other inmates, he’s forced to confront this as
well. She becomes “the other” to him and is therefore no longer deserving of
his help. He ends up leaving her for dead when Pennsatucky tries to attack her
in the finale, siding with the lower class white woman with bad teeth over
Piper because she hates her homosexuality as much as he does. The only
character to see Piper as any different from her fellow inmates is shown to be
wrong in almost everything he believes and does. His opinions are ridiculous
and bigoted which emphasises the spuriousness of his putting Piper on a
pedestal. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It also seems ridiculous that this is the first time I’ve
seen a trans-woman on TV who is actually played by a trans-woman (Laverne Cox)
rather than a cis-male in drag or a cis-female like Felicity Huffman in
Transamerica. Sophia’s story is groundbreaking not just because trans
representation is so rare, but also because she is a trans-woman of colour with
a wife and a son whose crime is white collar identity theft. Trans-women on TV
are all too often represented as either sex workers or drag queens –implying a
less than optimistic life for any trans-woman with stage fright. Sophia was a
fireman when she was Marcus, who stole credit cards and identities from the
burning buildings she was called to on the job in order to pay for her
transition. This is a trans experience we are not used to seeing on television,
or anywhere in the media for that matter – an African American trans-woman in a
traditionally masculine job, married to a woman who supports her transition
despite the risk of alienation from her family and church community and her
personal emotions about losing her husband and gaining a wife, with a son, who
goes to prison because she stole the money for her operations and medication. Sophia
is not a stereotype and her identity is never questioned. Those who
discriminate against her are almost exclusively the villains of the show – meth
mouth Pennsatucky and Pornstache (who, I feel it right to mention, even despite
his crudeness when talking about her with Bennet, still never misgenders her and
readily accepts her identity as a woman) – and we as an audience sympathise
completely when her hormone medication is taken away from her due to “budget
restraints”. Sophia is in prison because of how much she was willing to risk to
actualise her identity. This shows us the desperation felt by many in the trans
community and also leads to frank discussions of how Sophia’s transition and
subsequent incarceration affected her family. We see in flashback Sophia’s wife
help her to find the right dress to suit her figure but also beg her to keep
her penis. We see her wife struggle to combine her acceptance of Sophia’s trans
identity and her wish for her to be happy, with her resentment that she is no
longer around to raise their son. These are trans issues being discussed on
television in a way I have never seen before. We’re seeing the realities of
Sophia’s trans experience portrayed and explored in the same way that we see
Piper’s relationship with Larry or Alex’s experience growing up in a low income
single parent family. Her trans-ness isn’t stigmatised or singled out for
special treatment. Everyone has their shit, everyone has experiences which got
them to this point, Sophia’s happens to be that she was born with a penis. She
isn’t token trans representation, she’s a whole person with a life like everyone
else, and in a landscape with very few trans characters let alone trans
characters with depth, that seems revolutionary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another character who I’ve never seen properly represented
on TV before Orange is Lea DeLaria’s Big Boo – an unashamed fat, butch lesbian.
It’s widely known that you only really see classically attractive lesbians on
TV – there were no characters like Big Boo on The L Word or Lip Service. For
the patriarchy to accept women who love women and therefore don’t need men,
they at least need to be attractive to look at so that in some way they are
still for men and not their own. Big Boo
is the first truly butch lesbian I’ve seen on television. Shane from The L Word
may have worn suits and ties but she was far from butch and still ridiculously
universally attractive. Big Boo on the other hand is overtly not for the
patriarchy. She’s butch in both her style and her attitude and she too is shown
as a character with depth. She’s not just comic relief, a position which
stereotypically butch lesbian characters are often relegated to in non-speaking
roles as a punchline in a sitcom, she’s a person who we sympathise with when
her ex girlfriend seems to no longer care about her. Her bond with the puppy
she’s training “Little Boo” is adorable and lets us see past the hardened
exterior she is introduced with. There’s a scene which shows her masturbating
with the handle of the screwdriver we were led to believe she might use to hurt
her ex girlfriend in revenge before her release date. This scene seemed
particularly striking to me as both a rare example of female masturbation on
television and as a subversion of the type of female sexuality we are usually
shown on screen. Female sexuality, and female nudity, are almost exclusively
shown in order to titillate men. We rarely see a naked woman shot or lit in a
way which isn’t supposed to be sexual (the reason I expect behind the shock of
seeing Lena Dunham’s naked body reported by men who’d never been forced to see
a naked woman as a subject rather than an object) and women having sex on
screen is almost always shot in a way that makes them appealing to men, even –
or sadly especially – when that woman is having sex with another woman. Big
Boo’s sexual pleasure is entirely her own both because of the fact that it is
self induced and because it is clearly not intended to be sexy for the audience
– at least not for a male audience anyway. This scene is both confrontational – making us
question the way we see female sexuality – and humanising, as we see Big Boo
choose orgasms over violence and her own pleasure over jealous revenge. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another way in which Orange Is The New Black stands alone in
its representation of sexuality is through Piper and Alex’s relationship. At
the start of the series Piper claims she “used to be a lesbian”. This rang
alarm bells for me as the idea of lesbianism being a phase is a far too often
used cliché and is essentially a shitty way of describing bisexuality. Later on
though, once Piper has stopped being the person she thought she should be, she
explains to her friend at visitation that sexuality is a spectrum, referencing
the Kinsey Scale. Piper realises she didn’t stop being queer just because she’s
dating a man largely because she is forced to confront her feelings for Alex
now they’re in the same prison. Larry, his family and Piper’s friend Poppy all
seem confused about her sexuality and how she can be attracted to both men and
women at different times. Piper’s brother at one point tells Larry that his
problem is the idea that she needs to be one or the other. This is the main
reason why people get confused about bisexuality and why many people refuse to
believe it exists at all. People like binaries – male/female, black/white, straight/gay
– and when something falls outside those binaries it scares them because it
threatens their world view, it stops them from being able to see someone as the
same or the other and forces them to consider that they might be both, or even
scarier, neither. Piper’s sexuality falls outside the binary so Larry is
threatened by it, it confuses him, he needs her to be straight or gay, he can’t
accept that she might be both at the same time. We as an audience however, are
shown that this is entirely possible. We see Piper’s relationship with Larry
both in flashback and in present day, and her relationship with Alex, again
both her past and present. Both these relationships are shown to be genuine.
Piper may have dated Alex for the adventure but we completely believe she was
in love. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the season for me was Alex, in
tears after her mother’s death, begging Piper not to leave her and Piper going
anyway. The phrase “Please don’t leave me” is echoed when Alex is locked in the
dryer by Pennsatucky and Piper’s decision to stay this time sparks the renewal
of their relationship in the present. We see Piper and Alex’s relationship as
just as valid as Piper and Larry’s. In fact, for me Piper’s love for Alex
seemed at times more genuine but I am very aware that I’m incredibly biased. Piper’s
claim that she “used to be a lesbian” turns out to be just something she said
to affirm her new identity as the “nice white lady she was always meant to be”.
Before prison she thought she couldn’t be bisexual and still attain her middle
class suburban married life with Larry. In prison with Alex she realises it’s
not as simple as one or the other, with her it’s both and right now it’s both
at the same time. We very rarely see this kind of exploration of bisexuality on
television and it’s so refreshing to see it done so well. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I want to talk about Alex because I’m obsessed with her and
the way she puts her glasses on but I’m already way over 3000 words and it
would really just be me talking about my crush on her. There is so much more
that needs to be said about Orange Is The New Black which I don’t have room for
here and to be honest I could talk about this show for days. To be really
honest I already have. OITNB is truly incredible. It’s original, diverse and
groundbreaking in so many ways, but most of all it’s just damn good TV. It’s
entertaining, it’s funny and heartbreaking and real and I can’t wait for season
two in 2014. Orange Is The New Black I heart you. Please don’t leave me. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
TheSecondScreenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12098001235296444906noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5066553040921297855.post-14571617966462044712013-07-14T13:53:00.001-07:002013-07-14T13:53:45.754-07:00Sharknado: What the hell happened to television?<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I was planning this blog I thought I should limit
myself to one negative post per month. I want the content on here to be mostly
positive, a celebration, a place to inspire instead of bemoan. I find it all
too easy to be negative - it’s kind of my default setting - and I thought I
should instead challenge myself to focus on the good things.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then Sharknado happened and I thought to hell with that. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And so here is me complaining for a while. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First I should mention that I have not seen Sharknado, nor do
I plan to ever witness it. It seems like the kind of television which could be
used to torture me if I ever come into contact with government secrets. I have
a rule against criticising things I haven’t seen. I try very hard not to do it,
to the extent that I sat through the first two High School Musicals and the
first Twilight movie just so I could complain about them legitimately. This
post isn’t really about Sharknado. It’s about what it represents, which is a
general decline in quality programming on network television (by which I mean
general channels funded by advertising, excluding subscription based channels
like HBO and Showtime). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s easy to forget that SyFy Channel used to be the home of
quality genre programming when you look at its productions today. This used to
be the channel which gave us Battlestar Galactica, aired Farscape in the US
and, more recently made Alphas, Warehouse 13 and Eureka. Now it seems to be
mostly populated with reality television and for some bizarre reason WWE
wrestling. Currently, the only fictional programming SyFy actually makes itself
is Defiance, Haven, Being Human US and Warehouse 13 (which ends next season).
If you discount the recently cancelled WH13 and the remake of the British
series (and therefore not an original concept) Being Human US, that leaves SyFy
with only two original fictional programmes to call its own. For a television channel which claims to be
for science fiction and fantasy shows, having only two original scripted series
on your schedule seems a little ridiculous. How can SyFy still claim to show
genre programming when the vast majority of its schedule is taken up by reality
television? Science fiction and fantasy are as far away from reality as you can
get so why focus on reality shows instead of putting effort into new fictional
ideas which actually fit your remit? The reason behind this inane decision is,
as it always seems to be with television and life in general, money. It’s
simply cheaper to make crap reality shows like Ghost Hunters than invest in
developing new scripted show ideas. Making reality TV doesn’t involve a team of
writers or a long development process, you don’t have to hire actors or, as
this is SyFy Channel after all, pay for special effects. It’s cheaper and
easier to make crap so networks go that route instead. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It has pretty much always been this way. It’s always been
cheaper to make something bad than it is to make sure your finished product is
decent quality. Shitty writers don’t need to be paid as much as good ones – or
will be more likely to accept a lower wage – crap actors are the same. You
don’t need to spend as much on post-production if you don’t care about
something looking good on screen. However TV didn’t used to be quite as full of
crap shows as it is today, or at least it didn’t seem that way. If it’s always
been cheaper to do a bad job, why didn’t networks do this all before? Why did
they bother investing money into something good? I think it has to do with the
amount of respect a network has for its audience. Back in the golden age of TV
whenever that was, reports differ; networks respected their audiences enough to
assume they’d just stop watching if the product they delivered wasn’t good
enough. The networks were there to serve their audiences and give them quality
programming lest they defer to another channel or just switch off altogether
and go read a book instead. They expected their viewers to be intelligent,
active participants who wanted good TV. This is especially true of the BBC,
which is funded by the taxpayer in the UK so had to make sure it was worth the
price of the license fee. Networks were at the behest of the viewer, we had the
control because they assumed us to be discerning. This, it seems, is no longer
the case. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When the craze of reality TV set in, around the introduction
of Big Brother in the year 2000, the networks realised they’d overestimated the
vast majority of the viewing public. If 4.5 million people would tune in to
watch average people live in a house for nine weeks with no script, basic
camera work largely done automatically, no real sound design and only editing
for the highlights shows, why the hell should they continue trying so hard to
make good scripted TV? Why should they pay out money to make quality
programming when Channel 4 were getting mega-ratings from cheaply made footage
of random people sleeping? Big Brother showed just how stupid we all really are
and the networks realised this. So they stopped trying, they stopped respecting
their audience and started making crap. And we watched it. Wife Swap, Jeremy
Kyle, The Hills. People watched these shows in droves. People tuned in week
after week to see constructed “real life” drama which cost the networks a
fraction of the price of a scripted show. At least for a while anyway. Then the
faze was over, we’d all gotten over seeing average Joes on our screens and were
bored of it. The curtain had been pulled back and we’d realised what we were
seeing on television wasn’t really reality at all, channels started having to read
out disclaimers before reality shows explaining “some scenes have been created
for entertainment purposes”. We were all kind of done with reality TV. It
wasn’t cool anymore, it wasn’t new. Now it resides as guilty pleasure viewing –
we sit watching Real Housewives with the furtive shame of a meth addict getting
our fix of schadenfreude for the week. It’s not water cooler talk anymore, at
least not with people whose opinions you value anyway. We’ve moved on to
greener, more intelligent pastures now. We talk about Game of Thrones, Scandal
and Girls. We’re interested in programmes which challenge us, both
intellectually and socially, which make us question our ideas about life and
society and which require concentration to enjoy. We binge watch, we watch
communally and tweet each other in the ad breaks. We’re proud that we watch
this kind of television, proud we understand and value the artistry and happy
we get to discuss it with others at the click of a button. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the thing is network television doesn’t seem to have
caught up yet. Two out of the three shows I just mentioned are on HBO, a
subscription based channel which doesn’t have to rely on adverts for its
funding. It’s common knowledge that the best television is coming from this
type of channel in the US, that the most original shows are being made by HBO, Showtime
and the previously non-ad funded AMC. Along with the Netflix phenomenon, it’s
become even clearer that people are willing to pay more for better quality TV.
The odd thing is that network television seems to be leaving them to it. The
networks seem incapable of making good new shows and keep cancelling their
decent old ones. NBC is a prime example. Last season marked the end of both 30
Rock and The Office, two of NBC’s most critically acclaimed, if not always well
watched shows. They shortened Community’s run to only 13 episodes, both for the
woeful Dan Harmon-less fourth season and the shock renewal upcoming fifth
season with Harmon back as showrunner. The only comedy they renewed fully last
season from its previous golden Thursday-night-is-comedy-night schedule was
Parks and Recreation. Instead they packed their rota with new comedy shows like
Animal Practice, Guys With Kids and 1600 Penn, none of which made it past their
first season. NBC also cancelled the Matthew Perry led comedy Go On, which
seemed to be its only real critical success from the last season, because of
less than stellar ratings. Any sensible television fan with an ounce of taste
could see this coming a mile off. The promos for NBC’s new comedies reeked of
mediocre half-assery. They all looked so terrible and clichéd that they ended
up fitting the description given by Kenneth Parcell in the last season of 30
Rock of how television comedy should be – where a man looks at his dog and says
“Don’t even say it!”. You can almost imagine the pitch for Animal Practice
being something like “See it’s funny cuz there’s a monkey. Monkeys are funny
right?” Annie’s Boobs was far too good for that show anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was glaringly obvious that NBC had become fed up of being
the channel critics raved about that got left out of the ratings race. They
didn’t like their reputation as the home of intellectual, irreverent comedy
that only garnered a niche audience so they catered for the lowest common
denominator instead, hoping to entice the idiots away from The Big Bang Theory
and Two and a Half Men. The very fact that these two shows, and Chuck Lorre
himself are still so successful, shows just how far the stupid vote will get
you in television nowadays. I mean in a world where Rules of Engagement is
still getting made, what hope is there that TV will smarten itself up again? It
seems with comedy, the masses appreciate a laugh track. The fact that crap
comedy still gets made annoys me immensely on its own. I happen to think that
television airtime should be reserved for shows of merit, you should have to
work hard to get your show on the air, you should have talent. Getting a show
commissioned should be an achievement for good work. However I’d be much less
annoyed at the presence of the bad comedies if it weren’t for the fact that
they’re destroying the good ones. Community’s fourth season was terrible
because NBC fired Dan Harmon. NBC fired Dan Harmon because he wouldn’t make his
show more ratings friendly (and because they valued Chevy Chase more than him).
NBC wanted Community to be more ratings friendly because The Big Bang Theory
aired at the same time and so many people watched that instead. I wouldn’t mind
if the shit stuff just stayed quietly in the background, being watched by
perpetually high stoners or drunk people, and of course the idiots – but it
doesn’t, people watch it, a lot of people watch it. This means that networks
renew bad television, shows which people watch half-heartedly, stuff viewers
have on in the background because it’s dumb and doesn’t require too much
attention. They see the good ratings and renew the crap, they see the mediocre
ratings and cancel the good stuff. Bad comedies on television mean that good
comedies get cancelled, like Happy Endings and Go On, or changed beyond
recognition like Community’s season four. Good comedies getting cancelled means
that networks stop making good comedies, they stop trying so hard and do a
botched job because they think audiences will lap it up like they do anything
that Chuck Lorre makes (I <i>really</i> hate
Chuck Lorre). They stop respecting their audience and they stop trying to
impress us. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Which brings me to Sharknado and the SyFy Channel. For the
past few years SyFy had been developing a trifecta of shows which all shared
the same universe. First there was (A Town Called) Eureka, then Warehouse 13
and later Alphas. The common universe was more obvious in Eureka and Warehouse
because of their crossover episodes but minor characters from WH13 appeared in
Alphas for the eagle eyed viewer to spot. This seemed to be a plan by the
channel to build up this shared universe and further tie together the three
shows’ mythologies. It was an ambitious and impressive idea, to have three
programmes running simultaneously whose storylines could intertwine at any
moment and whose characters could appear anywhere in the three series. It also
seemed like a clever move by SyFy to attract more viewers to its scripted
shows. If you watched Eureka, you should watch Warehouse 13 too because there’s
a crossover episode and you’ll understand more of the universe it’s set in. If
you watch Eureka and Warehouse you’ll want to watch Alphas too because its
storyline might shed light on something in the other two shows. It was a canny
way of cross advertising the network’s new content and reduced some of the
inherent risk involved when taking on a new original project. But then
something went wrong. I was watching all three shows, hoping for something big
to happen which explained their connections, when I heard that Eureka had been
cancelled. It baffled me seen as they’d just introduced a WH13 character into
Alphas and confirmed it too shared the same universe. Why put so much work into
that idea and then cancel the show that started it all off? SyFy then cancelled
Alphas after only one season leaving them left with only Warehouse 13 from its
common universe trilogy. In the past month it was announced that Warehouse 13
is too going to end after its next, fifth truncated season, meaning the ambitious
and impressive idea never reached its potential and was essentially a waste of
time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I enjoyed all three of those shows. They were by no means
perfect and both Eureka and WH13 suffered from their family friendly vibes, but
the characters were good and I cared about what happened to them. Alphas was an
interesting take on the superhero genre and I was looking forward to where it
went. Considering again, that this was the network that brought us Battlestar
Galactica and was clearly at a time capable of great, adult storytelling,
Alphas –the most adult of the three – could have developed into something
great. So why cancel? Warehouse 13 especially was SyFy’s most watched show for
most of its run and both Eureka and Alphas had their devoted fanbases – Eureka
being a geek haven with its guest starring roles for Felicia Day and Will Wheaton.
SyFy claimed it was money issues, as they would – that they couldn’t afford
such expensive programming when it wasn’t bringing in as many viewers as the
other channels. It seems a shame to me that so many networks compete against
other channels in the ratings instead of competing with themselves. Surely you
want to retain your loyal fanbase more than you want to poach new viewers who
probably aren’t interested in your content anyway. This seems especially
relevant to SyFy Channel seen as they have always been aimed at a niche, cult
audience and would surely be aware that they were never going to beat out the
broader ranging channels like CBS or Fox. This brings me again to the fact that
SyFy aren’t even really making Sci-Fi anymore – hence the ridiculous name
change. They have Defiance and they have Haven but they hardly reach the
heights of say Fringe or The Walking Dead. When broader channels are making
better niche TV than the channel dedicated to that niche there’s a serious
problem and that problem is this: SyFy just doesn’t care about being good
anymore. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sharknado (I hate having to type that so much) is just the
latest in the line of the crappy B movie type creature features that SyFy
Channel thinks are more worthy of their investment than decent scripted shows
like Alphas or Warehouse 13. It follows such classics as Sharktopus,
Piranhaconda and Mansquito. These films are actively made to be terrible.
That’s their supposed appeal – that they’re bad and everyone knows it.
Originally B movies played before the main feature, they were made very cheaply
and so were often of bad quality and featured ropey special effects. The appeal
of B movies now is their nostalgia, seeing old techniques in filmmaking,
laughing at what once was and recognising how far we’ve come. SyFy doesn’t seem
to get this, it thinks that people like laughing at badly made films so they’ll
make something terrible and people will enjoy it. They get viewers on the cheap
and everyone’s happy. But for me it stops being funny once someone actively
tries to make something bad. SyFy are investing millions of dollars into
purposefully making a lot of awful films instead of trying to bolster their
original series slate and make something decent. To me this shows an utter lack
of respect for both the medium and the audience. To spend that much time and
money to churn out something shitty that people might tune in and watch for a
laugh at its poor quality and never watch again seems almost sacrilegious to a
medium that’s close to my heart.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s a waste of both money and airtime but
more importantly it’s disrespectful. Sharknado says SyFy channel thinks you are
stupid and you watching it just proves them right. “But I’m watching it because
it’s stupid!”, “It’s entertaining because I know it’s bad!” The problem is
Neilson ratings don’t measure your intention. They don’t measure how much of a
show you can remember, whether you’ll buy it on DVD or how many times you’ll re-watch
afterwards. Neilson doesn’t know that you’re watching Sharknado ironically, it
just knows you’re watching it. So SyFy gets its ratings for a change. It sees
everyone tweeting about their shitty movie and it’s happy it’s trending, it
doesn’t care that everyone’s taking the piss out of what they’ve made </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">because that’s what they’ve made it for</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.
Sharknado was everywhere last week, it’ll be forgotten by next, but SyFy will
remember the publicity and they’ll remember the ratings and they’ll know once
again that they can make bad TV and still get an audience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Until audiences start demanding better television, and start
voting with their remotes, it seems we’re destined to a wasteland of actively
terrible network TV. Things won’t change unless we start changing them, and quality
TV will continue to be solely available to those who can afford it.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
TheSecondScreenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12098001235296444906noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5066553040921297855.post-35090678395162779642013-07-07T14:05:00.000-07:002013-07-07T14:05:21.483-07:00Gender and Queerness in Matilda<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It seems somewhat incongruous for my first real post on my
largely TV themed blog to be about something which has been adapted into
everything but a TV series, but this been running around my head for a while
and I wanted to get it down onto virtual paper while it’s still fresh.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First let me start by saying this has probably already been
said. I haven’t checked but I assume there’s already been much written about
the queer themes in Matilda, it seems far too obvious for no one else to have
noticed. However, if I only wrote about things which I thought no one else had
written about I wouldn’t write about anything at all. So here goes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was obsessed with Matilda when I was a kid. I watched the
bright green VHS tape over and over again to the extent that my family no
longer let me choose which film to watch lest I make them watch it for the
tenth time that month. I loved the movie and I loved the book. To my six year
old self, Matilda was my reflection on screen. I was a bookish kid; I learned
to read early and prided myself on being able to read two levels above my year
group in school. I remember walking across my primary school hall from the
infant classrooms to the junior library and feeling dwarfed by the shelves. I
was also convinced I was going to be a prodigy. I was sure that someone would
recognise my genius in an area I had not yet discovered myself. Of course I was
delusional; I could read well for my age but that was about it. In any case,
Matilda fed into my childhood fantasy of somehow being special, and my
bookishness being part of that. None of my friends read like I did, my brother
was more interested in sports – I had Matilda as a role model of sorts, as
someone who read and as someone who triumphed because she was smart. Now, as I
was at the time only six years old, I also genuinely believed that I could at
some point develop magical powers and spent vast amounts of time glaring
determinedly at a glass of water, trying to make it tip. Needless to say, this
never worked. I also remember being further convinced of this kinship because
in the movie, when trying to make her parents send her to school Matilda tells
them she was “six in August”. The first time I watched the film, I too had
turned six in August. Clearly we were long lost twins. <br />
<br />
So Matilda was kind of my jam when I was young. It’s been a while since I
re-watched the film and I haven’t read the book since I was a kid, but
recently, what with the stage musical being a hit and the reunion photos
surfacing online, I started thinking more about the story in all its forms from
my now much more well informed perspective. Specifically I wondered whether
there was any other reason why I loved the story so much, other than my strong
identification with the protagonist. This train of thought led me to realise
just how queer the story of Matilda is and how, for a children’s story
published in the 80s and a kids’ film released in the 90s, it flagrantly
subverts the heteronormative family dynamic. This essay will focus on three
main points; Miss Trunchbull as the evil lesbian stereotype, Miss Honey as a
possible queer character, and how the ending of Matilda rejects
heteronormativity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So Miss Trunchbull right? Obviously as a six year old child
watching Matilda the movie for the first time and later reading the book, I
didn’t see in Trunchbull what I do today as a queer 20 year old with a degree
in reading into things. I also didn’t see the problems inherent with her
character as the villain. She was an evil headmistress and nothing more. Now,
thinking back, Miss Trunchbull is pretty obviously a subtextual lesbian
character. She is resolutely unmarried, to the extent that she is offended when
Miss Honey’s rhyme for remembering how to spell “D-I-F-F-I-C-U-L-T-Y” only
features wives – “Why are all these women married?!” This statement also marks
her out as a feminist, rejecting traditional gender roles, but I’ll get back to
that later. Trunchbull is also consistently portrayed as overtly masculine
presenting. She competed in strength based athletics like the shot-put, javelin
and the hammer throw, she’s large and robust – able to pull her broken down car
back to her house by a rope and wrench a padlock and chain from a door with her
bare hands. In the film, when Miss Honey mentions Trunchbull replacing her father’s
portrait with one of herself, Matilda replies “Whoever painted that must have
had a strong stomach, a really strong stomach”. Trunchbull is coded as ugly by
virtue of being “unfeminine” – it’s important to note that this portrait
features her as an athlete, displaying her strength, at her most masculine. She
wears breeches under her coat, dressing mostly in blacks or browns. This
masculinity is emphasised further in the stage musical where the character of
Trunchbull is played by a man. Essentially, Miss Trunchbull embodies many
qualities of the stereotypical “bulldyke” and is of course the villain of the
story. Not only is she unmarried, she doesn’t wish to be and resents the
institution itself. She is assumed to have killed the patriarchal figure of
Miss Honey’s father, who is also, assuming from the difference in surname, her
brother in law. Trunchbull rejects both patriarchy and femininity, bemoaning
the lack of unmarried women in her niece’s rhyme and expressing her disgust at
Amanda Thripp’s pigtails. Remove the violent child abuse from the equation and
Trunchbull could be seen as a radical feminist – ensuring the children in her
school are taught that women don’t need to get married and liberating Amanda
Thripp from her mother’s enforcement of schoolgirl femininity through her
hairstyle. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course Miss Trunchbull is not a villain <i>because </i> of her gender subversion (and supposed
lesbianism – working on the concept that most Hayes Code era queer female
characters were coded as queer by their happily unmarried status) but that
subversion does sit alongside her villainy and often interacts with it. She
uses her hammer throw technique to launch Amanda Thripp over the school fence
and is frequently shown as menacing because of her sheer strength, size and
masculine “ugliness”. What makes Trunchbull a villain, and a despicable one at
that, is her hatred and abuse of children. She runs a school despite this
hatred, seemingly only for the opportunity to torture the children in her care.
She’s overwhelmingly strict, enforcing bizarre rules so she can either make her
pupils miserable or punish them for being happy. Her abuse is physical, making
use of her strength and stature. When her relationship to Miss Honey is
revealed, it is heavily implied that she subjected her to severe physical abuse
as well. There is a shot in the film version at the end of Miss Honey’s
flashback as she tells Matilda the truth about her childhood, where Trunchbull aggressively
grips the child Jenny’s shoulder – the first indication that Miss Honey
suffered physical abuse at the hands of her aunt. This is made explicit later
in the film when, during the final confrontation between Trunchbull and Matilda
in the classroom, she grabs hold of Miss Honey’s arm and growls “I broke your
arm once before Jenny I can do it again”. Miss Honey then reclaims her arm and
retorts “I am not seven years old anymore Aunt Trunchbull”. The revelation that
Trunchbull broke her seven year old niece’s arm, implicitly on purpose, coupled
with the fact that Miss Honey refers to her by her surname instead of Aunt
Agatha, shows the extent to which her abuse of children reached. She clearly
imposed her dogmatic regime of violent punishment over all children in her
care, even her own kin. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Such extreme violent abuse of children is shocking in
itself, but it remains subversive that it is a female character who is the
abuser. To an extent Trunchbull is seen as more evil because of her gender. In
the same way that juries are more likely to give a longer sentence to a female
murderer than a male guilty of the same crime, women are largely expected to be
less aggressive and far less violent than men. When a man hits someone it is
seen as part of his masculinity, he is admonished for losing control – for
letting his nature overcome his nurture. When a woman commits a violent act she
is analysed far more, the implication being that something must be wrong with
her biologically or that her social environment was somehow harmful. Society
believes that violence in women is unnatural which is why we have such a morbid
fascination with female serial killers – and why as a child you’re told to seek
a woman’s help over a man’s if you ever get lost. Crucially in regards to the
character of Trunchbull, women are seen as having a natural affinity for
children. Society expects women to be maternal caregivers at a basic biological
level. It’s why women are expected to have children and stay at home to mother
them, and it’s why any woman who doesn’t want children is dismissed as just not
“feeling the pull yet”. When women commit violence against children society is
shocked three times over. Firstly by the inherent shock of someone hurting a
child, secondly by a woman being violent and finally by a woman who would hurt
a child – a woman supposedly without this “natural” maternal instinct. Child
abusers are universally reviled but female child abusers are seen as far more
fascinating than their male counterparts. There are very few studies looking
into the causes of paedophilia in men yet the media often fixates on the
motivations of female abusers who are often portrayed as either having been
controlled by their male accomplices or as victims of abuse themselves. Society
needs an explanation for how a woman could hurt a child whereas if a man does
it, he’s just evil. It is because of this gendered expectation that Miss
Trunchbull is such a formidable villain. She subverts gender roles completely,
both with her masculine presentation and through her disavowal or lack of
maternal instinct. She is not only a happily unmarried woman without children
of her own; she actively despises children and takes pleasure out of physically
abusing them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Miss Trunchbull is not only terrifying because of her status
as a female child abuser; she is also rendered horrific because of the gender
subversion this enhances. Barbara Creed
wrote this ridiculously fascinating book on female imagery in horror called The
Monstrous Feminine (this book is amazing and you should read it, if not only so
you can join me in spotting vaginas in every movie monster’s face). In it she
talks about how any breakdown of the gender binary can be seen as monstrous as
it threatens the other binaries we take for granted. When gender is subverted,
as with the character of Trunchbull, heteronormative society’s view of reality
is skewed, the boundaries start to disappear and certitudes are rendered meaningless.
In a world where Miss Trunchbull exists, anything could happen. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Positioned in direct opposition to Miss Trunchbull is her
niece and Matilda’s teacher Miss Honey. Miss Honey is everything Miss
Trunchbull is not – a point explicitly made in her introduction via the
narrator in the film. She is warm and kind; she loves children and is
physically frail. The original illustrations in the book by Quentin Blake
further emphasise this physical difference in stature. Trunchbull is tall, fat
and muscular whereas Honey is thin and elegant. As with many of Dahl’s
characters, their names also codify their personalities – Trunchbull seemingly
a portmanteau of “truncheon” and “bull”, implying corporal punishment and
mindless anger simultaneously and of course Honey meaning sweet and, perhaps
crucially, natural. You don’t have to look hard to see the striking differences
between Trunchbull and Honey as gendered. Whereas Trunchbull is coded as
masculine through her strength, clothing, physicality and personality, Miss
Honey is ever feminine; clothed in floral dresses, her hair worn long and
loose. Miss Honey wears glasses, a cinematic trope used to let audiences know
she is intelligent right from the off. Her power lies in her intellect and her
compassion which contrasts with Trunchbull’s disregard for intelligence and use
of physical power. The message of the story of Matilda is essentially that
smarts win out over strength. The precociously intelligent Matilda and the
equally clever Miss Honey use their wits to outsmart Trunchbull and end her
tyranny. More specifically though, Miss Honey nurtures Matilda, helping her to
develop her intellect and powers and therefore facilitating her victory. Miss
Honey’s strength comes from her maternal instinct and her love of children.
This contrasts directly with Miss Trunchbull’s attitude. Trunchbull is
demonised because of her disavowal of maternity; Miss Honey is glorified
because she embraces it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This could be seemingly a simple reinforcement of
traditional gender roles; Miss Honey as the heroic mother figure embracing her
femininity against Miss Trunchbull the gender subverting masculine villain. However,
I think the reality is far more complex. Again, if we look back to Hayes Code
era representations (when Hollywood had to conform to certain “morality” codes,
preventing the inclusion of openly queer characters in film) many female
characters were subtextually coded as queer by being shown as happily
unmarried. These characters were usually secondary to the main female
protagonist who would be engaged in a romantic storyline with the film’s lead
male. Of course not all unmarried female characters are lesbians, but it is
interesting to look at the figure of Miss Honey as a possible queer character
especially considering her opposition to Miss Trunchbull. Miss Honey lives
alone in a tiny cottage, she is resolutely a “Miss”, having no love interest or
romantic storyline and the only male figure in her life is her dead father
Magnus. She is not only single, but she never mentions wanting a man in her
life either. She isn’t a Bridget Jones kind of figure, always longing for a heterosexual
relationship; rather she seems content without a partner, happily independent
and paying her own way. If we take Miss Honey as a queer female character her
positioning as a stark contrast to the perhaps more obviously, stereotypically lesbian
Miss Trunchbull takes on an extra layer of complexity. The narrative is no
longer simply glorifying heterosexuality and demonising homosexuality. Miss
Trunchbull’s lesbianism is in effect nullified. She’s no longer evil because
she is queer; she’s evil because she is butch. In Matilda, homosexuality is
acceptable but gender queerness is not. Rejection of femininity makes you evil;
embracing it makes you a heroine. This concept is reinforced by the representation
of Matilda’s mother who is also shown to be non-maternal, being far more
concerned with money and television than her daughter’s wellbeing. Mrs Wormwood’s
selfishness makes her a bad mother – when a woman has children she is expected
to always put them first, in the eyes of society she stops being a woman, an
individual, and becomes only a mother, there solely to take care of her
children. Mrs Wormwood’s disinterest in her daughter (coupled with her “white
trash” appearance in the film) renders her unfeminine and therefore villainous.
She is positioned with Miss Trunchbull as a woman who rejects expected aspects
of her femininity and is therefore shown as an antagonist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">An analysis such as this suggests that Matilda is inherently
problematic in its representation of gender and those who reject constructed
gender binaries. However the ending of the story is unmistakeably queer.
Matilda leaves her heteronormative family unit with a biological mother, father
and brother, to be adopted by a single, possibly queer woman who she is
completely unrelated to. This is the happy ending. Matilda is inarguably better
off with Miss Honey, a single adoptive mother who understands her far more than
her own biological parents. This seems especially significant now, what with
the main argument spouted by opponents of equal marriage being something along
the lines of a child needing a mother and a father to be well adjusted. Of
course this argument is total bullshit – it relies on the idea that marriage is
solely for raising children, ignoring all childless married couples, besides if
the GOP were so concerned about every child having a mother and a father they
would ban single parenthood, embrace contraceptive pills and abortion rights and
steal children away from widows. Everyone knows how preposterous this argument
is now, everyone knows it’s just a smoke screen, just spin – “we don’t hate gay
people we just want to protect the children”. But considering the time at which
Matilda was written and the time when the film was released this conclusion was
somewhat revolutionary. Dahl was saying that children aren’t always better off
with their own parents, sometimes the heteronormative family unit doesn’t work,
straight parents can be bad parents and children can be happier without them.
The image of Matilda joyously roller-skating around the living room of Miss
Honey’s reclaimed family home flies in the face of the traditional family unit.
This single, potentially queer woman is a better parent for Matilda than her
own biological, decidedly heterosexual mother and father. Here emotional kinship is better than shared
biology, blood is not thicker than water, nurture wins out over nature. And
that’s huge, that changes things. Especially when the classic fairytale villain
is the stepmother – the imposter, the woman who isn’t related to the hero and
so cannot connect with them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Perhaps it was somewhat of a trade-off. Dahl had
his decidedly queer ending but he had to reinforce gender stereotypes
elsewhere. Matilda could live happily ever after with an adoptive single parent
who she has far more in common with than the people who conceived and birthed
her, but Miss Trunchbull had to be a gender bending villain. The heteronormative
family unit could be breached, its homogeny denied, but gender roles still had
to be prized. A woman can live without a man but she can’t be a man. A single independent woman can be a hero but
only if she’s a mother figure. You can blur the gender lines but only if you
demonise it. In order to offer an alternative to the heterosexual happy ending,
Miss Trunchbull must be sacrificed for her unsanctioned masculinity.</span></span>TheSecondScreenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12098001235296444906noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5066553040921297855.post-71662182583298125702013-07-02T08:31:00.002-07:002013-07-02T08:31:45.578-07:00Introductions...<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hi, my name is Jasmin. How are you? When I was trying to
come up with a name for this blog – something punny and clever whilst still
encapsulating my basic premise, harder than you’d think – I considered
including my name in the title. I like my name, it’s fine. My mother claims to
have picked it from the Isley Brothers’ song Summer Breeze which is a useful bit
of small talk, even if it’s not entirely true. And although I never once have
been able to find the correct spelling (without the usual “e” on the end) on
any personalised tat from gift shops, and people will inexplicably pronounce it
Yasmin even though it clearly begins with a “J”, I am perfectly happy to be a
Jasmin. However, as an avid watcher of American TV – something which will
largely be the focus of this blog as it is, largely, the focus of most of my
life – I have come to realise something about the name “Jasmin” across the
pond. Characters named “Jasmin” seem to have a reputation. They are rarely
protagonists and mostly appear as either strippers or personality-less party
girls who sleep with the main character’s boyfriend (Parenthood being a rare
exception). There's no judgement here, I respect each of these fictional characters' rights to use their bodies in whatever way they choose. However as an introverted soon to be 21 year old lesbian from Lincolnshire
who will never sleep with any of your boyfriends, I felt like using “Jasmin” in my
title could be misleading to international readers. Or those who base their
views of the world on television, like me, anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I thought I’d better introduce myself, seen as otherwise I’d
have to think of an actual topic to start with and that seems even more
difficult than coming up with a name. As previously mentioned, my name is
Jasmin, I live in Lincolnshire with my parents (I know, so cool) and have
recently finished university. I made the somewhat baffling decision to study in
my home city of Lincoln, a place which struggles to live up to the noun “city”
seen as it’s essentially one really long street with a steep hill at the end,
literally called Steep Hill. Lincoln is a city because we have a cathedral,
which is about the only notable thing about Lincoln. It’s a very interesting
building, however, having lived in Lincoln for almost 21 years and visited the
cathedral on trips pretty much every school year, it somewhat loses its charm
after a while. There’s only so much interest a massive church can hold to an
atheist who’s seen the thing hundreds of times. Lincoln is the proud owner of
four Costas, three sex shops, a grand total of fifteen tattoo parlours and a
canal boat that doubles as a pole dancing club. For a city that somehow feels
the need to have four Costas on its one long street, we only have one cinema.
I’m telling you about my home city because I want you to understand what I
suspect is one of the main reasons why I spend so much of my time indoors,
engrossed in the fictional lives of TV characters. It’s simply because there’s
nothing to do here. Lincoln is small and it is boring. It’s very pretty and
tourists love it but living here is dull. So until I manage to somehow detach
myself from my home town and start living the life I’d like to lead, I will
instead use television to escape my mundane suburban existence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I studied Film and Television and English (a course title
with an irritating number of “ands” in it) at the University of Lincoln. I have
just finished my course and will graduate with First Class Honours in
September. So of course I am starting a blog because that is what unemployed
graduates do. I have been blogging for a few years over on Tumblr at
<a href="http://butmyopinionisright.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">butmyopinionisright.tumblr.com </a>and will continue to do so whilst writing here.
My tumblr however will mainly consist of links to this blog interspersed with reblogs
of gifs of lesbian TV characters and Parks and Rec. I love television. I love
movies too, and books. Essentially any type of media which allows me to immerse
myself in fiction is pretty high on my priorities. Having spent three years
studying all three of these things I decided – pretty much in my first year
actually – that I wanted media to be the
basis of my professional life as well as spending my free time at the cinema
and holed up in my room watching Netflix. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The dream - or as I intend to now
refer to it so as to make it seem more realistic, the ambition – is to be a
showrunner, to make television in the US, preferably in New York. There are
many reasons why I want to make television, reasons which I will most likely go
into in later posts, but one of the main reasons is also why I wanted to start
this blog. Television is the most powerful tool of social change we have in
modern Western society, I would argue even more powerful than the internet
(think about it, when have your grandparents last been on Reddit?). Almost
every home in the UK of the US has a television, people watch TV all the time,
even if they just have it on in the background. It’s one of the most useful
methods to proliferate a message or a point of view, which is why the industry
is funded so much by advertising. Television has been at the forefront of most
of the significant changes in public opinion in the past few decades. Ellen
coming out in The Puppy Episode, Willow and Tara kissing in The Body, frank
discussion of female sexual pleasure on Sex and the City, The Cosby Show – all
of these things and so many more helped change public opinion far more than any
grassroots feminism/gay rights/anti-racism campaigns could hope for. These were
stories piped into every home in the US (and the UK) with a television set
regardless of race, sexuality or gender. They made the unfamiliar seem less
scary – lesbians were no longer “those people” they were Ellen Degeneres, they
were Willow and Tara – and they changed how audiences thought and behaved in
their real lives away from the TV. Television is important. Television is an
art form. Television deserves, and needs to be criticised in the same way
people would talk about films or literature. I want to make television because
I want to change the world and I think that’s the best way I could do it. I
want to make television because I think a lot of shows are problematic and I
want my shows to be better, both in quality and in representation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And that’s why the focus of this blog will be mostly TV. I
will be including films pretty regularly also, and books occasionally, but I
will mainly be writing about television past, present and future. I want to
assess television critically as well as discussing its entertainment value. As
for this blog’s title – The Second Screen – yes, it’s a somewhat pretentious
nod to Simone DeBeauvoir’s feminist masterpiece, whilst also taking note of
television’s somewhat marginalised status amongst academic criticism. The focus
of the long form critical posts I write on here will be mostly feminist and
queer readings of television and pop culture. I hope they’ll be entertaining
and most of all I hope they’ll be accessible. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m going to warn you right now - as you have probably
noticed due to the length of this first post – I am not a concise person. When
I write, I write a lot. I am verbose and I rarely edit. I expect that most of
the things I write on here will be long, some may be rambling. I hope that they’ll
also be interesting enough for you to carry on reading. For this reason (and
also because of my intense fear of failure) I’m starting off by only committing
myself to one post every week. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So yeah, that’s about it. The Second Screen – long,
occasionally rambling, hopefully entertaining posts about television, films and
pop culture from a queer feminist perspective. Tell your friends. Please don’t
be mean in the comments. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
TheSecondScreenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12098001235296444906noreply@blogger.com2