In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Movies

Not liking The Help that much

(I know Jill posted on the movie. I read the book and I have thoughts, which I was finally able to edit today.)

I haven’t seen the movie The Help, but I did read the book. I wasn’t impressed.

First, I am sick to the teeth of feel-good, revisionist fiction. I am really fed up with the Nice White Lady trope. And I am stunned that people read shit like this and think it shows any sort of political awareness by the author.

The main character Skeeter is a big old rebel because she want to a four-year-university! Without seeking an MRS degree! So there! HA! (And yes, I know that was kind of a big deal back then, trust me, but she had that option. The Black women she “helps” never did.)

The actual plot—that Skeeter writes a book about Black maids and what they see and hear at work—is also teeth gnashingly infuriating. Not that such a book is written—hell, no (though really, a White woman speaking for Black women is gross. It just is). It’s that the Black women in the story are passive, they are so fearful they need to be coaxed by the Nice White Lady. Apparently, there was no civil rights movement afoot in the South. Oh, they recognize MLK and his work, there is mention of actions in seemingly distant places, but the Black women and men of this town don’t seem to be involved. They are passive, they are helpless, they do nothing, and are so very grateful to the Nice White Lady once she shows them the One True Way.

It’s frustrating because in these narratives—written by privileged Whites—Black people are always passive. Things are done to them or for them, but they are never the agents of their own liberation. (And sorry, but no, telling the Nice White Lady about your shitty boss isn’t being an agent of your own liberation—not when Black women were actually organizing against Jim Crow, segregation, lynchings and violence, and the intimidation of Black voters.)

Jo Ann Robinson had been organizing against segregation and for the bus boycotts for years. And she did this not on her own, but as part of the Women’s Political Council. They were the first group to call for a bus boycott in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

And she is not the only one.

Ella Baker. Fannie Lou Hamer. Septima Poinsette Clark. Vivian Malone Jones. Dorothy Height. They worked their asses off, they took punches (Fannie Lou Hamer was damn near beaten to death), they dodged bullets, some lost their homes and livelihoods, they endured harassment and threats, and they were out there facing the brutality of White people who did not want to share the power.

And the thing is, these women are not outliers. They are not unusual. Women were active in the struggle—even the nice Black maid who was always so sweet to you growing up, who was always so quiet and polite to your parents, was likely working her ass off on her off hours, knocking on doors, preparing for meetings (or cleaning up after them), strategizing about what to do next, giving aid to other activists who needed it. Even small actions could be perilous, but know this: a lot of people were taking them. This movement was not built on the actions of a few leaders or some Nice White People. They weren’t waiting for the Nice White Lady to come and free them, they were doing that themselves thankyouverymuch.

And it’s why it infuriates me when Whites, or wealthy people, or men, or whoever, want to barge in and lay down the law and tell a community What They Need or What is Best for You.

This could have been a good, meaty book if Skeeter had done this thinking she was great and smacked right up against civil rights organizing in her own town. It could have been a much more compelling story if it showed that the Nice White Lady realized she wasn’t that nice or good for doing this and showed some actual growth on her part (as opposed to the bohemian makeover and move to New York because she’s a spunky independent girl). It could have been much better if the maids were shown more accurately, as actually active in their own lives, as agents of their own freedom, with no need for a Nice White Lady to show them how to do it.

But it was not that book. It was a book that exocitized the Black women (they speak in dialect in the book and their accents are literally spelled out—the dialogue of the White southerners—who ALSO SPEAK IN A DIALECT BY THE WAY—is not given the same treatment). They are pure, Bible-reading demure Madonnas or they are short-tempered “sassy” and mouthy (dear God can we kill that particular word, please? I hate the word sassy. It is right up there with spunky as a patronizing “compliment”), but they are ultimately there to serve as tools for a story about the fake growth of the White main character.

This is just a gross combination of theft and denial—stealing someone’s history and denying it even existed.

Strength in cupcakes

“Women are girly. Again,” she says. And apparently, that sucks.

Writing for the Huffington Post, Peg Aloi bemoans the death of the “tough gal,” as evidenced by blogs about cupcakes, gardening, Hello Kitty, and knitting. Women write about cuddly kitties. BUST is sponsoring a craft fair, holy shit! Feminism has not only come to an end but is actually regressing, and it’s all because of heirloom fucking tomatoes. Thanks, ladies.

It would appear that the world, as seen through Ms. Aloi’s TV, has become squishy, pink, and birthday cake-scented. (Oh, my God, how cool would a birthday cake world be, at least for a few hours?) The view from my window looks nothing like delicious baked goods, though, so I thought I’d share some of that view with Ms. Aloi.

Before we begin: Ms. Aloi, most of the examples of “tough gals” you provide hit somewhere around the mid- to late-’80s. Blogs, in the form we enjoy today, didn’t really come into popularity until the late ’90s. Women in the Age of Ripley still were knitting and baking cupcakes–they just weren’t blogging about it, because, y’know, no blogs.

Moving on:

Those “tough gal” examples cover a fairly vast range: leather-wearing rock rebels like Joan Jett and Courtney Love*; supernatural kickers of ass like Xena, Buffy, and Ellen Ripley**; iron-spirited fighters for right like Norma Rae and Erin Brockovich. You identify them as “strong, sexy, and take no crap.”

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Step into my film school! The importance of casting in breaking open movie stereotypes

Did any of you catch Matt Zoller Seitz’s pieces on underrated actors and actresses? Given that the purpose of “top ten” lists is to make people argue about who should really be on the list and obviously there are great people not on the list who are underrated, I’m going to say that any list that makes the argument that Wendell Pierce should be in everything is a list I can be happy about. I was especially pleased to see a nice variety of ages among the actresses.

The brilliant Wenhwa Ts’ao taught me to cast actors (with a little help from Judith Weston), and she taught me to look at every actor who came into the room to audition and ask myself “What will kind of character will this actor create in my story?” vs. “Does this actor fit the idea of the character I had in my head?” First, because as a low-budget filmmaker, you have to be flexible and sometimes rewrite your story to take advantage of the talents and resources you have around you. Second, for creative reasons, the actor you want is the one who makes you re-imagine your film. He or she makes your film possible in a way that it wasn’t before, just by existing and walking into the room.

I wanted my first-year film students to understand what happens to a story when actual human beings inhabit your characters, and the way they can inspire storytelling. And I wanted to teach them how to look at headshots and what you might be able to tell from a headshot. So for the past few years I’ve done a small experiment with them.

It works like this: I bring in my giant file of head shots, which include actors of all races, sizes, shapes, ages, and experience levels. Each student picks a head shot from the stack and gets a few minutes to sit with the person’s face and then make up a little story about them. I wanted to know:

  • What kind of story or genre do you think of when you see this person?

  • What character are they playing in the story?

  • Is there a specific role or type that comes to mind?

  • What is their job?
  • Maybe describe an environment, or period, or style of dress that you associate with the person.

    • The students then show off their actor’s photo and pitch their stories to the class and then we talk about the results. I’ve run this experiment a few times, and the students are very excited and creative with stories/genres and have a lot of fun with it. “I picture him in a Western. He’s the lone cowboy who rides through town and gets caught up in the trouble that’s going on there.”

    However, some troubling shit always occurs.

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    On “The Help”

    Photo from The Help of two white women walking and a black woman walking behind them

    Haven’t read/seen it, won’t read/see it* and was generally squicked out by the whole premise of the book to begin with — let’s tell a story that is kinda-sorta about race but more about how these nice black ladies helped white women Find Their Voice, from the perspective of white women of course — but this statement from the Association of Black Women Historians is worth a read. This piece in the Times is also on point:

    The fail-safe response for Hollywood has been to depict racial prejudice in cartoon caricature, a technique that has made the Southern redneck a cinematic bad guy on par with Nazis, Arab terrorists and zombies. By denying the casual, commonplace quality of racial prejudice, and peering into the saddest values of the greatest generation, Hollywood perpetuates an ahistorical vision of how democracy and white supremacy comfortably co-existed.

    To protect viewers, sometimes at profound damage to the historical record, white heroes are featured and sometimes concocted for these movies, giving blacks a supporting role in their own struggle for liberation. Films of this stripe are legion, though the most irritating example remains “Mississippi Burning,” in which two F.B.I. agents are at the center of an investigation into the murder of civil rights activists. It was a bitter pill for movement veterans to swallow since the agents’ boss, J. Edgar Hoover, was as vicious an opponent as any Southern Dixiecrat. Though not as egregious, both Rob Reiner’s “Ghosts of Mississippi” and the adaptation of John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill” fit this formula.

    The other Hollywood fallback strategy when dealing with the movement (or race-themed film set in any period) is to employ “the Magic Negro,” a character whose function is to serve as a mirror so that the white lead can see himself more clearly, sometimes at the expense of the black character’s life. Sidney Poitier’s selfless convict in “The Defiant Ones” was probably the definitive Magic Negro role, though the formula has survived decades, from Will Smith’s God-like caddy in “The Legend of Bagger Vance” up to Jennifer Hudson’s helpful secretary in “Sex and the City” — just a few incarnations of this timeless saint.

    I’m not sure what to do with the fact that the Home Shopping Network is featuring a collection inspired by The Help. The nostalgia for ugly times is also what bugged me about plantation weddings — sure, the American south is every beautiful and there’s no reason to demonize every aspect of it, but the marketing of products inspired by the movie (and events on plantations) works not just because those things are aesthetically pleasing but because there’s a romantic attachment to the Antebellum South. And, well, you can’t divorce that white person nostalgia from slavery and segregation. So marketing KitchenAid mixers and gumball-sized faux-pearl necklaces as being “inspired” by a movie about segregation and racialized domestic work strikes me as… clueless, to be generous.

    And of course The Help is also “inspiring fried chicken cravings far and wide.”

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    *I’m not boycotting the book, I just don’t think it looks very good. Apparently it’s sold 3 million copies, mostly to women, but I don’t actually know anyone who’s read it (Facebook “friends” who I don’t really know don’t count). I suspect that’s more of a Lit Nerd / Snob thing than a “we’re too progressive to read this” thing, but either way, none of the folks I regularly discuss books with have purchased or even mentioned it (and the random people I know who have recommended it are not people whose book recommendations I take particularly seriously). So it’s not on my list, and I’ve placed it in a mental Da Vinci Code category (i.e., “things I will read if I am on a plane and they are free and there is nothing else to do and I can’t sleep). But if you all are looking for a good read, go buy Just Kids

    Why Roger Ebert is the best

    He is hilarious, and also such a stealth feminist:

    “No Strings Attached” poses the question: Is it possible to regularly have sex with someone and not run a risk of falling in love? The answer is yes. Now that we have that settled, consider the case of Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher), who first met when they were 6 and now meet when they’re maybe 26. Busy people. He’s a low-rent TV producer and she’s a medical student. She doesn’t have time for romance, and he’s dating the sexy Vanessa (played by the well-named Ophelia Lovibond).

    …

    All of this is fun while it lasts. Then the wheels of Hollywood morality begin to grind. There was a time when the very premise of this film would have been banned, but times change, and now characters can do pretty much anything as long as they don’t get away with it. Although “No Strings Attached” might have been more fun if Adam and Emma had investigated the long-term possibilities of casual sex, it is required that the specter of Romantic Love raise its ominous head. Are they … becoming too fond? Emma suggests they try sleeping with others so, you know, they won’t get too hung up on each other. If you’ve ever seen a romantic comedy you know how that works. Experience shows that not sleeping with others is the foolproof way of not getting too hung up, etc.

    This is a strange film. Its premise is so much more transgressive than its execution. It’s as if the 1970s never happened, let alone subsequent decades. Emma and Adam aren’t modern characters. They’re sitcom characters allowed to go all the way like grown-ups.

    You should read the whole thing. And if you’re bored and looking for more Ebert reviews, I would recommend this old-ish one, where he eviscerates Nicholas Sparks. It’s the best take-down I’ve seen since Bruni reviewed Cipriani.

    Last-minute Monday Fluff: Mysterious As The Dark Side Of The Moon

    In which I talk about my really like disproportional, somewhat inexplicable, and frankly kind of embarrassing love of Disney films! …again. Y’all, I swear, I think about things other than this! Like all the fucking time! Like, I HAVE semi-substantialish posts in the works, I do! Buuuut none of them are going to get done tonight sadly, and man, wasn’t my last post ever a total bummer (which: I really, really appreciate the comments on that post, which I do not have time to respond substantively to right now which I feel terrible about, but – thanks to all who have done so for sharing)? Plus, Monday start with “M,” and so does music, which this is, and so does Mulan, which this also is, and so do both make and man, which are also relevant words to tonight’s babbling session post!

    So: Mulan! I ♥ this movie, pretty weirdly intensely, especially since I can’t even really claim childhood nostalgia for it since I was like ten when it came out, which is kind of beyond the pop-culture-imprinting stage. THE BAD THINGS that exist in like seriously every Disney movie, like I thought Great Mouse Detective was maybe the exception because it’s about mice, in England? But then I watched some clips from it a while back (seriously people, I need a new hobby) and Basil’s first appearance is in this totally racist disguise and you’re like, “…ah. WELL then.”

    …that was supposed to be an introduction, let’s try this again. THE BAD THINGS: racism, pretty much. There’s a lot of humor that has a kind of undercurrent of “lolz Asian people are funny,” and also I admit I am not really well-versed enough in almost-ancient (? what is the cut-off for ancient, exactly? I was thinking BC but that’s super Western-centric of me, isn’t it, which is even wronger than usual in this case) Chinese culture to detail the particulars of this but it being Disney, I am just going to go ahead and assume they get it horridly, wildly, egregiously wrong. Also, the Huns are like, literally inhuman-looking, which, what is up with THAT? So, as per always: this is just as if not more important, and I care about it at least equally in a very different way, than the thing I am going to talk about super-enthusiastically below!

    Now that that is clear, may I present to you: what is pretty commonly agreed upon by every person I’ve ever asked, at least, as the greatest Disney song ever (it also cracks the top five of the list of most people my age I know of Best Songs To Sing Along Drunkenly Too, right up there with Don’t Stop Believin’):

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    Not a Fish, Not Yet A Human

    So one time, Chloe at Feministing posted about Disney’s The Little Mermaid, calling it “a feminist’s worst nightmare,” because it’s literally the story of a woman who gives up her voice to get a man, which: sort of true, but also no, because in a universe where you can VERY EASILY read the moral of Beauty and the Beast as being “if you love your abusive boyfriend enough, he will change for you,” The Little Mermaid is second-worst, at best.

    Then Feministe’s own Sady posted about this at her now-defunct Tumblr, but her contribution to the conversation is still up at mine; the two points she made most salient to this post were 1) Ariel’s giving up her voice is clearly framed by the movie as a bad thing, as her voice is her most desirable characteristic, the thing Eric fell in love with to begin with, the thing Ursula the sea witch uses to lure him away, and the thing she needs to regain before they can finally be together; and 2) that Ariel always wanted to go to the shore and Eric was more than anything a catalyst for that transition. A catalyst in the shape of a dude, yes, but a thing Sady and I, apparently, along with people I have met and possibly other people, also, have in common is that sometimes things just happen like that. Are dude-catalysts overrepresented in our stories, reinforcing the notion that for a girl, a dude is the bestest catalyst of them all? Yes. But it is, in fact, a story that sometimes plays out that way in the real world.

    Possibly it mostly plays out in the world of the very young, which led me to the babbling over there that eventually in my head became what will hopefully be less babbling-y over here (…off to a GREAT START, I am), which is that in my reading, The Little Mermaid is fundamentally a story of childhood and adolescence.

    Now: I am not interested, here, in trying to reclaim The Little Mermaid as a feminist classic, because I… am never interested, really, in trying to stamp something definitively with Feminist or Not Feminist. There are fucked-up things going on in every Disney movie ever, and The Little Mermaid is no exception. There is (as Chloe points to) the good-sweet-young-pretty-girl vs. evil-vicious-old-ugly-woman dichotomy, played out pretty blatantly, which I can recognize as fucked up even if I also delight in Ursula’s gleefully malicious machinations and that marvelous cackle. There’s Sebastian the helper crab’s accent, which to most people I’ve met reads most closely to Jamaican and is at the least pretty clearly supposed to be Of The Exotic Hot Lands Of The Caribbean, which is… gross, and kiiiinda racist. There’s the fact that Eric, who frankly has the personality of a Ken doll, saves Ariel from her distress at the end in a disappointingly mundane way (he rams a ship into Ursula. really? REALLY? She’s become this like giant ball of evil magic fury and all it takes is a little poke with some wood? …oh, I get it now). All of these things are worth discussion; I have discussed them myself in various situations in the past!

    But right now, I want to focus on The Little Mermaid as a – still poignant to me – story of the painful liminal zone between childhood an adulthood.

    Ariel is, to my knowledge, the only Disney heroine for whom we are ever given an explicit age; as she tells her father, defiantly, in one of the most accurate representations of teenager-parent quarreling I have ever seen, “I’m sixteen years old, I’m not a child!” He responds with the classically parental, “Don’t you take that tone of voice with me,” followed by “As long as you live under my ocean, you obey my rules.” which, FULL DISCLOSURE: that line is, by a wiiiide margin, the most frequently quoted line in my house as I was growing up, which QUITE POSSIBLY colors my own relationship to the movie, because: my teenage self was shut down many a time with it. Like, minimum once a month.

    My response to hearing it from my mother was, usually, pretty much along the lines of Ariel’s: pout angrily and storm off in a huff to my cool undersea cave room to cry on my rock bed and complain to my charming animal companions friends about how unfair everything was, and also how “I just don’t see things the way [s]he does.” Then she sings one of the best things ever written about being a young girl:

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    Muslim Women on Sex and the City 2

    In light of yesterday’s discussion of SatC, I thought I’d direct your attention to Muslimah Media Watch’s discussion of the film.

    If any non-Arab, non-Muslim readers are itching to say (or repeat), “Well, I don’t think it’s racist, and my opinion is valid, too, and also you’re just looking for stuff to complain about!” just please, please remember that these women may have a wee bit more expertise on the subject than you do. Do you enjoy it when a member of a privileged group lectures you on what is and isn’t offensive to your group? No, it’s frustrating and insulting! Stay civil, all.

    Defending Sex and the City (sort of, not really).

    I haven’t seen the latest Sex and the City movie, and I don’t plan to because I’m sure it will be terrible. It also sounds a little bit racist! And, like the rest of the franchise, shallow and kind of silly.

    However, Choire makes some good points here:

    It used to be that we loved rich people; then recently we came to find them distasteful, or at least wasteful. And now America burns with a weird, left- and right-wing resentment. It’s been a long time since our country has been angry enough to come close to redistributing the wealth.

    It is true, in my experience, that a surprising number of rich people are actually fairly terrible (and spoiled and short-sighted and ugly on the inside). But the four rich women of Sex and the City are of a different ilk. They love clothing, each other, homosexuals, intercourse, and their feelings, in that order. Have we forgotten that these are fantastic qualities? Apparently so, because that is what is now being used to trash them.

    Also:

    Even more important, the movie provides a first-wave feminism flashback the likes of which we haven’t seen anywhere. Charlotte and Miranda, getting drunk, and telling the socially unutterable truth about how they sometimes hate their children? Hello, it’s a much-needed refresher course straight from 1971.

    I asked Andy Cohen—Bravo executive/host and Friend of Sarah Jessica Parker, and defender of Sarah Jessica Parker—what he thinks about all the spite. “Given the amount of actually stupid/ridiculous movies that come out every year, I was amazed by the degree of vitriol leveled at a good one (of very few) that celebrates women,” he wrote to me through Facebook.

    It is pretty amazing. But then, some topics—fashion and morals and rights and responsibilities and sex with strangers on the beach, that great American pastime—still make people pretty uncomfortable.

    A lot of the criticism of Sex and the City is valid, but some of it — or at least the criticism that appears in mainstream media sources — is also mean-spirited and sexist. And a lot of it is silly — like the criticisms of the clothes. Of course the clothes are ridiculous and over the top. It’s Sex and the City! Remember the giant flower? And the tutu? I’ll admit that I enjoyed the show well enough, and I even think it was groundbreaking insofar as it featured women on TV talking about sex honestly, with female experiences centered. The characters also prioritized their female friendships and, while most of their conversations were about sex and men, they all had individual identities and perspectives. They were funny. They were raunchy. Sure, they were a little shallow with the adoration of clothes and shoes, but so am I, to a point. Was it a feminist TV show? No. Did it have its moments? Yes.

    I’m not surprised to see the movie being raked across the coals, though. And I’m not exactly heartbroken over it. Sex and the City had its moment; it was groundbreaking ten years ago, when explicit sex talk from women didn’t have much of a place on television, and it was fun and indulgent in a thriving economy and in a culture that embraced excess. Those things have changed, though, and SATC has not changed with them.

    Choire’s right that a lot of the vitriol targeted at SATC is sexist and ageist, and that the film is receiving disproportionate criticism in part because the story is centered around older women; in American culture, we like the women in our movies to be young and pretty, at least if they’re talking about having sex. Women with wrinkles and handbags full of condoms are just unseemly. The film also challenges our ideas about marriage and motherhood — and those challenges are rarely met with enthusiasm in a culture that lionizes both, without actually taking steps to support the individuals who make up (or wish to make up) those institutions. And while I’m also critical of the emphasis on consumption in the show and in the movies, SATC seems to draw disproportionate criticism for celebrating wealth and stuff. You don’t hear the James Bond or Oceans-whatever-number-we’re-on-now movies being taken to task because the lead characters are obsessed with money and toys.

    But some of the better criticism centers on the fact that SATC is only concerned with the rights and experiences of a certain class of women. Muslim women? Oppressed, but, of course, silent. American women, by contrast, have everything going for them and are fully “free.” When Muslim women do take any sort of action, it centers around… shoes. And rescuing our heroines, of course. The movie is “good for women” insofar as it features some women, but that doesn’t stop it from being racist and sexist.

    My Louboutins for a decent popular movie about lady-stuff.