"Burning Down the House"

June 12, 2019

"Handmaid's Tale" Season 3, Episodes 1-3 (Spoilers)

At the end of “Useful,” the third episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Season Three, June speaks a line that comes from Margaret Atwood’s novel: “Mother, wherever you might be, you wanted a women’s culture. Now there is one. It isn’t what you meant. But, it exists.” In these first three episodes of this season—released all at once by Hulu last week—the theme of gendered power struggles emerges as a central one. Some Gileadean women claim their right to make choices, dare to stage conflict with the men, and form the sort of nascent women’s culture that might please June’s radical feminist mother of the Time Before. The Commanders must reassert their much more powerful authority, while the women speak out—verbally and through other means—to assert theirs, despite the danger exemplified by the bodies of Marthas swinging from above as the Handmaids walk in pairs to the grocery store. The most striking examples of these power struggles are between June and Commander Lawrence and between Serena and Fred Waterford.

The first episode, “Night,” begins where Season 2 left off: June is running down a road in the rain, her sturdy leather boots pounding the concrete as she leaves the car taking Emily and Nicole away from Gilead. Her newfound conviction and sense of power, forged from the self-determining move of making a CHOICE, gather strength as she talks through what she has done—first to God and then to her infant daughter: “I have reasons. There are always reasons. I’m sorry, Baby Girl, Mom has work.” A woman in Gilead choosing her work is most definitely not what the regime has in mind. When she soon comes upon Lawrence, he asks her, “Are you insane?” She tells him that she can’t leave without her older daughter. “You can,” he says. “I won’t.” To push him to take her to the McKenzies’, where Hannah now lives, she reminds him how he has transgressed: “They could put you on the wall. Even a Commander.” “Spunky,” Lawrence observes. And does as she asks. This lays out the first gendered power struggle and what struck me as the big mystery of the beginning of the season: what’s up with Joseph Lawrence, and what motivates him? Why is he helping handmaids escape and taking June to see her stolen daughter? 

June is trying to figure out the same thing. Is he operating out of a sense of guilt and a conscience? But, as the three episodes gather momentum, the possibility of a benevolent motivation behind June’s new Commander’s actions appears to dim. He likes Emily, admires her intelligence, and thinks she might somehow prove useful to the world so lets her get out; he allows the Marthas to stage parts of their operation in his house because “you have to let the rabble rousers blow off a little steam.” Yet, he also berates a Martha for having a stained dress because she’s sopping up wine that he spilled onto the floor, and instructs June to bury the body of the shot Martha with the objectifying order to “clean it up.” He humiliates June at a meeting of Commanders after observing that women can be “fun.” Lawrence, at this point, strikes me not as guilt-ridden or sometimes compassionate, but as thoroughly capricious; he engages in these seemingly disparate actions as a way to assert just how powerful he is and just how powerful he gets to be--simply because he is a man. He does what he does—whether helping someone or harming someone—because he can. Because he is an architect of the society. In Gilead, the rules are made by the Commanders, not for them.  

He makes “logical” and “rational” choices about who dies, who lives, who gets to go where, all based upon his metric of Use. June posits that he is feeling guilty about how his spreadsheets turned out to be actual human beings; she wants him, it seems, to be capable of such a human emotion. But he sets her straight: “How tempting it is to invent a humanity for anyone at all,” he tells her, as they discuss his “binders full of women,” most of whom will get sent to the Colonies to die, but five of whom can be plucked to serve as Marthas. He reveals that their humanity is meaningless to him. His plan to make the planet habitable again for children like June’s daughter and to repopulate it is based on a series of equations, not concern for people, and certainly not concern for women as people. His rubric for who is deserving of being a mother also has to do with his notion of usefulness: Mrs. McKenzie is worthy because she made care packages for orphans, a useful activity; June is not worthy because she had an affair, married a previously married man, and worked an outside job editing “esoteric books” rather than be with her child at all times. None of these things are useful to him, so she loses her daughter to the useful Mrs. McKenzie. Interestingly, unlike most others in power in Gilead, he does not quote the bible to argue against adulterous relationships and for women’s traditional roles. It’s about his own category of “use” and his consultation of Darwin’s Descent of Man.There’s a “scientific,” “rational” reason behind all he does. 

Yet June will have none of it. She refuses, at first, to choose which five women are spared the Colonies, telling him she will not be a party to the regime’s actions. None of them deserve to die, she spits at him. Yet later, she reconsiders. Not because she buys into his project, and not because she is a submissive Handmaid, but because she comes to see that her choice of new Marthas—women who can fit into the Martha resistance network—could actually be useful. There’s a rationality to her choice of an IT specialist, a lawyer, an engineer, a journalist, and a thief. But, it’s a rational choice in the service of a humanitarian project—defeating Gilead. She does this because she cares, and is anything but capricious. This trilogy of episodes ends as it begins—with June and Joseph squaring off in gendered confrontation.

(The big question I now have about Lawrence is one that Aunt Lydia shares—how appalling to have to admit I share something with Aunt Lydia: what is wrong with Mrs. Lawrence? She tells June, “You can let me know if something unseemly is going on with him.” Last season I thought that he seemed to care about his wife, always referring to her as “my love.” Do I remember correctly that she was an academic before Gilead? Now I’m wondering what “unseemly” thing is happening, if he’s slipping her something to keep her in the state she is in. He puts pills on the tray of tea to be carried to her room. Are they a drug she actually needs or something he gives her to keep her weakened?)

Meanwhile, in June’s former household, Serena and Fred engage in their own dramatic power struggle. He is stunned when she comes in after the baby has disappeared and refuses his order to call 9-1-1. He wonders what she has done, and she tells him, “I did what was best for my child” (not “our” child). When June is returned, he sees that the two women were in on this together. At first, they fight: “You killed my baby,” Serena shrieks at June, lunging at her violently. June grabs onto Serena as she vents her own pain: “I have another daughter. You chased us in the woods and ripped her away from me. And she screamed. My baby screamed. I hope it feels like that!” But then she relents and soothes Serena: “She’ll be okay. She’s free.” The two women are a unit at this point, with a shared understanding of what it means to be okay that is diametrically opposed to Fred’s understanding of okay. Later, as Fred talks to Serena, he tries to re-establish the order he sees as proper, with him above his wife and handmaid. But, Serena tells him, “You don’t need to protect me.” “I’m protecting this house,” he replies. God made me master of an incredible woman.” But, Serena wants him to know she will not be mastered. She made the independent choice to send the baby away. “I drove you to desperation,” he almost pleads as he tries to regain his footing. But, Serena is acting on her own now, not as a proper wife.

Her next act casts her in the role of a vengeful god, with shades of the “madwoman in the attic” at Thornfield Hall and Carrie White at her ill-fated prom springing to mind. But while Serena is angry, she is not mad, nor is she out of control of her powers. She very purposely takes the solution meant for cleaning the stub on her hand where her husband had her finger chopped off, pours it on her marital bed/site of Gilead’s most sacred “Ceremony,” and sets a fire. Then she and June leave the house. June asserts the vengeful god interpretation of the fire-setting, citing from 2 Thessalonians 1. She speaks from memory, so doesn’t get it exactly right: “Lord Jesus, be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels. In flaming fire, he shall take his vengeance.” Then she adds her decidedly unbiblical coda, “Burn, motherfucker, burn,” as she stares up at the house (of which Fred is the unfortunate holder) in which she was so horribly oppressed. The actual verses 7 and 8, from the King James Version of the Bible, are: “And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels. In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 

June’s reference to this passage suggest her—and I think Serena’s—take on this act. It is vengeance for the Commander and this society following their perverted version of the biblical teachings, rather than the actual gospel. Serena is daring to pass judgment on her husband and the whole enterprise that she helped to create. She has come to read it differently, she who is not allowed to read and was injured as punishment for doing so. This is her strongest challenge of her husband and assertion of her right to be.

The regime’s interpretation seems to follow in the choice of song that plays after June’s invocation of divine wrath. As we see so many of the Commander’s artifacts of literacy (Scrabble board, books, papers) burn, Bob Geldof sings “Tell me why/I don’t like Mondays...” The song refers to Brenda Ann Spencer’s sociopathic explanation for why she shot up the playground of Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego in 1979, killing two adult school employees and injuring eight children. As Geldof once commented, the Boomtown Rats’ song gets at the senselessness of this crime. And, as June reflects in episode 3, as she gazes on the bodies of the hanged Marthas, they hang for heresy, “not for being part of the resistance, because officially there is no resistance. Not for helping people escape, because officially there is no such thing as escape.” And, officially there can be no such thing as a Commander’s Wife enacting vengeance upon him and calling out his heretical interpretation of Scripture. So, it must just be that she burned her bed, burned her house down for something as arbitrary as not liking Mondays. 

Gilead and the patriarchy are by no means burned down yet. The Commanders still have the power, but as June muses about these men at the end of episode 3, she lets us know that the women are not done: “We watch them, we please them, we know them that well. We know their nightmares. And that’s what we’ll become one day. Nightmares. And we’re coming for you. Just wait.” 

Blessed be the fruit of those nightmares.

"Burst!"--Review of Dietland, by Sarai Walker

December 31, 2018

Sarai Walker’s 2015 novel Dietlandis a rageful, thoughtful, and funny kick-in-the-nuts of the patriarchy, written with much artistry and awareness of feminist theory. (In her afterword, Walker calls out feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky—one of my grad school professors—as an influence.) This book was written before Trump’s presidential campaign and the reveal of his “grab ‘em by the pussy” philosophy, before the Harvey Weinstein scandal exploded and Tarana Burke’s decade-old hashtag was commissioned for wider use, before #Time’sUp, before Christine Blasey Ford’s charges of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh threw us all back again to the Anita Hill testimony against Clarence Thomas, before both Brittney Cooper and Rebecca Traister published their books about the rage of black women (Cooper’s Eloquent Rage) and of a broader, historical group of women (Traister’s Good and Mad), before Women’s Marches and pink hats and feminist women and men taking to the streets and others wakening to feminism. . . . Before all of that, this book came out, and then Marti Noxon adapted it for television—which is what got me to read it. Despite all those ‘befores,’ this is the perfect book for this moment. It follows Alicia “Plum” Kettle as she comes to terms with--and celebrates--who she is, rather than continue to yearn for the acceptance of a fat-shaming, misogynist culture that could never appreciate and love her. Walker also juxtaposes Plum’s story of internal, emotional work and her friends’ cultural projects against the violent anti-rape culture work of the vigilante group Jennifer, raising the question, what is the appropriate response to violent acts against women and a millennia long culture of violent misogyny?

Working as a ghost-writer for a teen beauty magazine, fronting for a skinny, caustic woman who won’t even let the very heavy Plum have space in the office, she receives a mysterious summons to the basement Beauty Closet run by Julia, who—we discover later—is actually working on an expose of the beauty industry, seeking to undermine it. She also is gifted with the book Dietlandby Verena Baptist, daughter of the late diet plan mogul whose Baptist Plan Plum used to be a devotee of. Verena destroys her mother’s empire and ideology and uses her fortune to run a feminist collective of women working to fight the patriarchy in a variety of non-violent ways. Among those Calliope House supports is the former teen TV star, Marlowe, who threw it all in to live her life looking the way she wants to look and wrote a book called Fuckability Theoryafter TV execs fired her for cutting her hair and gaining weight. To remind her of what she was told by a man in her last television meeting, she sports a tattoo that declares, “women don’t want to beyou, men don’t want to fuck you” (137). While going through Verena’s and Marlowe’s “New Baptist Plan” for her, Plum wrestles with whether to give up her planned gastric surgery and life of starving herself and start living on her own terms: “I was hungry for everything, for food and for life. It was odd to think that a pill could take that away, or that I had ever wanted it to” (213).

In contrast to the language and image-based cultural work done by the Baptist-sponsored feminist collective is the vigilante work of Jennifer, the anonymous group that kills rapists and other exploiters of women, and in dramatic fashion attempts to exact both accountability and revenge. To them, the “language” of violence is the only language that these habitually violent misogynists could possibly understand. While I stand actively on the non-violent side of this debate, I can’t deny emotionally pumping an inner fist at some of Jennifer’s actions. And, while I think Walker is also ultimately on the side of non-violence, she also deeply understands those who think differently.  She makes the women behind Jennifer into compelling characters with tragic and completely understandable reasons for their actions. As the female Air Force captain who first flew bombing missions in Afghanistan and then the plane out of which the bodies of murdered rapists were dropped in the U.S. desert said, “This is a different war, not an official one, but who decides which wars are legitimate” (227)? Walker’s depictions of Plum, of Julia, of Soledad, of Leeta dramatically illustrate the ways that women in our culture must always wrestle with multiple identities and negotiate split selves: fat girls, immigrant girls, angry and grieving moms, adolescents unsure of how to be—all can be symbolized by the tension our lead character expresses between herself as Plum and herself as Alicia. 

With this novel, Walker challenges women receptive to feminism to wrestle with our multiple selves, our desires, our fights with the Powers-that-Be and to decide on our best way to “Burst!” in the terms of the iconic Baptist Diet Plan ad. So, read this, think, enjoy, rage, be challenged. On her website, Walker says she’s working on her second novel, which will be “even more bonkers” than Dietland. I look forward to reading it.

In a Lonely Place: a 70-Year Old Noir Novel for the #MeToo Moment

February 4, 2018

“He scraped through the damp sand to the center house, two stories, both pouring broad bands of light into the fog. There was warmth and gaiety within, through the downstairs window he could see young people gathered around a piano, their singing mocking the forces abroad on this cruel night. She was there, protected by happiness and song and the good. He was separated from her only by a sand yard and a dark fence, by a lighted window and by her protectors. He stood there until he was trembling with pity and rage” (170).

Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 novel In a Lonely Place was re-published in 2003 by CUNY’s Feminist Press as part of its Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp series. Though narrated in third person, the perspective comes from within the head of Dix Steele, a lay-about WWII vet with a vicious sense of entitlement--to the material things he thinks he should be able to possess without working and to the women he believes he should possess without their consent. It is his deep sense of being owed something that feeds his need to rape and kill. There is a police investigation of the murders of young women in L.A., with Dix’s good friend from the war in the role of a chief investigator. But, because we only see what Dix sees, know what he knows, and access his thoughts—and he is highly enamored of himself and his ability to avoid being caught—it is hard to tell when exactly the police are on to him. So, this novel does not function like a police procedural, where we see for ourselves what the investigators are doing and thinking. In this case, the gaze onto the cops, and everyone else, is Dix’s, not ours.

While this can be disconcerting and uncomfortable and enraging in turn, there is an art and a purpose to the author’s method. Hughes--as the blurb on the back cover states--“peels the layers off American masculinity and stunningly undoes the conventional noir plot.” (And, I would add to this assessment that it is American white masculinity on which she focuses her laser. Though race never explicitly enters into the novel, it doesn’t have to, for everyone in it is white, and the attitudes that ooze out of Dix’s pores are those of white supremacy as well as male supremacy.) She also revises the femme fatale in significant, important ways, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say more about that except to urge you to read for some very cool kick-assery on the part of a couple of the female characters.

Every so often, some writer or film maker or painter or activist will do this peeling back and revealing as part of her or his work. Sometimes, whole groups in a community or in the country will speak or march or organize or create hashtags for social media as part of this work, to point to what is both obvious and also pushed below the surface. It is happening again, which is what makes the book feel even more relevant now than when CUNY decided to re-publish it.

I read this novel in early 2018, in the midst of #MeToo, in the context of so many women speaking out about sexual harassment and assault, of numerous powerful men losing their positions as a result of the entitlement they clearly feel: entitled to disparage women, to propose sex in exchange for some work-related favor, to masturbate in front of women, to “grab them by the pussy,” to force their hands into girls’ vaginas under the guise of medical treatment. In this context, a pulp novel that “peels layers off American masculinity,” that lays out how misogyny works in a fictional character can mean something different than it meant in 1947. This is not to say that Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK, Donald Trump, Larry Nassar, or any of the other men whose hyper-entitled behaviors toward women in their circles have been central to this moment are the same as a serial killer, but the underlying attitudes that lead Dix Steele to the most extreme misogynist behavior are completely related to those of the contemporary men we have had to focus on this past year. All of them are on a misogyny continuum.

While reading In a Lonely Place, we are privy to Dix’s disparaging thoughts about the woman who cleans his apartment, thoughts predominantly stemming from what he deems to be her unattractiveness. All he needs is the 1-10 ranking scale for women, and he’d sound like Donald Trump at numerous times on the campaign trail. Laurel, the woman Dix declares is beautiful and whom he supposedly loves, is—he tells us, with characteristic sexism--“meant to be displayed” (109). Later, when she disappoints him, he resorts to a deeper, yet still not uncommon, misogyny: “There wasn’t any girl worth getting upset over. They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores. Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore. He’d proved it, he’d proved it over and over again. There wasn’t a decent one among them” (165). Now that Twitter has doubled its character limit, he would fit right in with a certain category of social media troll with that one.  After reading a newspaper account of one of his murder victims, Mildred Atkinson, Dix concludes that “she had led a very stupid life. Grade school, high school—Hollywood High but she was no beauty queen—business college and a job in an insurance office. . . . She played bridge with girlfriends and she once taught a Sunday school class. . . . The only exciting thing that had ever happened to her was to be raped and murdered” (41). No woman’s life, apparently, is worthwhile, unless it has been marked and appropriated by a man.

In her thoughtful Afterword to this Feminist Press reissue, University of Cincinnati professor Lisa Maria Hogeland begins with what she calls “the most difficult question of all: What feminist claims can be made for a novel that is narrated from the perspective of a serial rapist and killer of women?” (225). That question is required when a feminist press reissues a book, she says, and offers a number of answers to the question, including: Hughes doesn’t blame women—a mother, for instance--for Dix’s pathology like so many other works do; she does not in any way blame the victims and their behavior; and through her narration, Hughes takes us inside Dix’s misogyny in order to critique it. This leads to a suggestion by Hughes that “since sexual psychopathy or serial murder can be motivated by so little, there may be little difference between the serial killer (or the rapist, as feminists have long argued) and any other man. The novel is insistent that Dix is—or appears to be—‘normal’” (231). Hogeland then raises the question, “What, then, is the relationship between misogyny in its extreme forms and misogyny in its everyday forms” (231)? It’s all, as I said above, on a continuum.

Her question in 2003 takes me right back to my reading fifteen years later. The misogyny was not new in the 1940s; feminist discussions of it were not new then or in 2003; and, now in 2018, they are renewed. As more men who are just “normal” men—producers, comedians, politicians, doctors, restaurant and mall patrons, all those who led to the everyday, non-famous #MeToo moments of millions of us, fathers, husbands—are pointed at as displaying misogyny, this story, which reveals a misogyny that is both extreme and that which is quotidian, is more interesting than ever.  

Book Review: The Women in the Castle, by Jessica Shattuck

October 24, 2017

What happens when women’s stories of war are privileged over those of men? In Women in the Castle, Jessica Shattuck explores the lives of three very different German women during and after World War II: a resister, an at-first true believer and low-level collaborator, and a poor woman who marries up only to have her desired life violently interrupted. While the men were off fighting a war--or fighting those in their country who waged the war--the women stayed home to fight their own battles against hunger, against threats to their children, against the soul-crushing rapists of invading armies, against those who would deny the atrocities their own government and military were inflicting on millions of others, and against their own senses of guilt and shame. Shattuck delves more deeply and thoughtfully into the moral ambiguities of ordinary people living in Nazi Germany than in any other novel I’ve read. (The Book Thief is my other favorite that does this with success.) In the process, she asks us to consider important questions of what it means to be morally right, of what it means to be guilty, and of the role of compassion for imperfect friends in the midst of deciding these questions.

Marianne is a strong, intellectual woman, fortified by logical arguments and the knowledge that she is right about the evil of Hitler and the Nazis. Her husband and childhood friend are part of the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, and she is their helper. She also promises the men that if the plot fails, and they are killed, that she will look after their wives and children. After the war is over, but while the Russians and the Americans are still occupying the country, she manages to find two of the widows and their children. They all come to live in her family’s largely-ravaged castle and need to figure out how to survive, carry on, and live with the after-effects of rapes, executed spouses, and the growing revelations of all their country had done and they and those around them had not done.

The novel also pushes readers to consider the forces that stop people from speaking out and resisting early on, when something might still be done to halt a complete descent into authoritarianism, into genocide. I’m not one for glib comparisons of bad contemporary leaders to Hitler, but that doesn’t mean that politicians with authoritarian personalities and aspirations don’t need to be called out for their assaults on democratic institutions like the ballot, the press, and demonstrations. Looking back through this well-researched fiction to a horrific time, Shattuck shows us numerous people who were yearning for something: community, a return to a better time, a leader to set things right, and so were blinded at first, then willfully ignoring what was there, then often too fearful to act. And, then it was too late. In her depiction of those Germans who thought the posters, news reels, and stories of concentration camps were Allied propaganda, I could see those today who cry “fake news” whenever they come across a story not conforming to what they need to hear about their leader, their political faction. As one character reflects on what she will have to pay for during the rest of her life: “not only her inaction, but her self-deception, for narrating away evil while staring it in the face” (337).

The story of these women is a powerful and challenging one, offering a different perspective on Nazi Germany and the effects it had on everyday people. The women have much to teach us.

Daphne Du Maurier's Women Who Can't Speak for Themselves: My Cousin Rachel and Rebecca

August 2, 2017

*Spoilers

I ventured to the theater to see Roger Michell’s “My Cousin Rachel,” which looked intriguing enough, and it was—at least enough to get me to the library for the 1951 novel. My public library has, apparently, had the book since about the time it was published. This is the old, rather yellowed copy I read. Du Maurier published this more than a decade after Rebecca, the only other of her books that I have read. Both are gothic, suspense stories centered on titular female characters who don’t speak for themselves; both raise important questions about the characters and morality of those women: Was Rebecca the beautiful, charming, and much-loved woman that some characters portray her as, a victim of her husband, OR was she a cruel, nasty, and completely self-centered manipulator of her husband and everyone else? Was Rachel a natural widow, sad upon her husband’s death, a spend-thrift, but otherwise good person, OR was she a calculating poisoner, out for the Ashley fortune by any means necessary? According to Liz Hoggard, writing in The Independent in 2006, with regard to Rebecca, although the book was billed as a romance, “du Maurier insisted she wanted to write about the balance of power of marriage, and not about love.” Rachel digs into similar power issues between men and women in relationship. Both books deal with romantic and sexual obsession; both are narrated by characters so intimately involved in the stories, who experience such emotion for the titular women that we have to question their reliability and their interpretation of events; and both raise questions about the “appropriate” way for women to behave in patriarchal male/female relationships. What sort of female behavior is rewarded, and what sort is punished?

One thing these Du Maurier novels can do for readers is raise questions in our minds about female characters who don’t get to speak for themselves. When Philip Ashley’s voice is the only one to which we are granted access, Rachel is constructed for us by him. We do get to hear what other characters say about her, but not directly. Philip reports those comments, and we can wonder how selective and objective his memory is, or more accurately, we can wonder in which ways his memory is selective and subjective; it is the nature of memory to be so. He also tells us about Ambrose’s letters, but even he questions whether the letters are accurate representations or the product of his cousin’s diseased brain.

Philip never dons a cloak of objectivity. He is frank with readers about his bias against Rachel prior to meeting her and purportedly honest about his feelings as his obsession grows. He lets us know from the beginning that he, too, cannot answer the question with which readers are left at the end: “Was Rachel innocent or guilty” (9)? But, by framing it as a question of guilt or innocence, our narrator shapes the frame through which we will view the story. Rather than ask if she was victim or perpetrator, kind or cruel, faithful or faithless, strong or weak—all aspects of her character that someone might wonder about, given what Philip does relate to us—he frames this in criminal terms, as if she is on trial. Like Tom Jenkyn, who killed his wife and was hanged outside at Four Turnings, his corpse left out as an example for the child Philip and younger Ambrose, Rachel is constructed as the potential criminal from the beginning: was she innocent or guilty of poisoning both Ambrose and Philip? Philip doesn’t know. We don’t know. But what we do know at the end—presuming Philip is describing his actions accurately—is that Philip sent Rachel to what would likely be her death and just sat beside her as she died.

He does end with a focus on hanging men at Four Turnings, just as he began: “They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more, though” (288). So, we are to think about a man who twenty years before had hanged for killing a woman, while this man would not. Yet because of the framing of the story at the beginning, we are brought to that final page with the question of Rachel’s innocence or guilt foremost. We cannot know for sure. But, regardless of her innocence or guilt as a poisoner, she paid for her “crime” against Philip: not giving herself to him after the one night. He will not pay for anything with his life.

Victorian novels often ended with the “virtuous” woman “rewarded” with marriage, and the “sinful” woman—usually meaning unchaste—being punished with death. In this novel, Rachel is unchaste and punished with death. Yet du Maurier creates the novel, with its first-person narrator who is unsure of the truth and perhaps a bit free with it, so that we cannot really know if she is deserving of punishment or not. Our narrator, the man who constructs our window into the world of the novel, is more than fine with Rachel being unchaste, if only she would then have married him and agreed to sex with no one else but him for the rest of their lives. Marriage wouldn’t be a reward for past chastity, but a means of managing her future chastity. Her death isn’t a punishment for sex with a man not her husband; it is a punishment for not wanting to continue having sex with that man. Interestingly, the rewarding/punishing force here is not a supposedly impersonal fate, or a metaphor for the divine; it is the imperfect first-person narrator who knows that the forces of justice no longer “hang men at Four Turnings” for killing a woman. This is most definitely, like Rebecca, a reflection on power relations between men and women. Du Maurier gets us to wonder—with Philip—how much power Rachel really has over her husbands and Philip. Is it the ultimate power of life and death?

Yet, when it comes down to it at the end, she is just another woman killed by a jealous, suspicious, and possessive man. Like Max de Winter killed Rebecca, like Tom Jenkyn killed his wife. She is never allowed—like Rebecca—to speak her story. And that’s what makes these books gothic horror, more than romance. Du Maurier draws for us pictures of two women who cannot speak for themselves—and then meet tragic ends. Their names are central to the stories, but their voices are silent. And, she draws for us a third woman, the second Mrs. de Winter, who narrates Rebecca, but has no name. In traditional Victorian novel structure, she is the virtuous one rewarded with marriage. But, rewarded for what? Is she virtuous, or merely naïve enough to serve Max’s purposes? At what cost does her marriage come? When her husband tells her that he killed his first wife, she is only relieved that he didn’t love Rebecca. After Max wins her allegiance, their marriage without the first wife haunting them truly begins. What virtuous basis for marriage is this? Again, du Maurier offers what can seem on the surface to be a romance, but instead can be read as critique of how patriarchal men can get away with murder and demand unreasonable and immoral things in return for their love. This is powerful feminist story-telling.

Octavia Butler's Kindred: Review and Discussion

July 29, 2017

Kindred, by Octavia Butler (1979)

(Some plot details discussed here)

This thoughtful and disturbing novel is almost forty years old now, but like the recently-published Lovecraft Country, which I also read and reviewed this summer, it pushes readers into a different time period and place in order to reflect on fraught relationships between American blacks and whites. Butler introduces us to main characters Dana and Kevin in a pain-filled hospital room in 1976, where they discuss the inexplicable “accident” that severed Dana’s arm. For the rest of the novel, she carefully narrates her story, in which she—a 26-year-old aspiring novelist, an African-American married to the Caucasian Kevin, who is a published writer—is suddenly transported to an antebellum Maryland plantation, to save a young white boy, Rufus Weylin, son of a slave-holding plantation owner and Dana’s ancestor, from drowning. The boy is accident-prone and destructive, so needs Dana’s saving powers numerous additional times as he is growing up. Each time, Dana is stuck in the past longer, but when she gets back home, not much time has passed.

On one of those trips, Kevin was holding on to her when she got summoned and ended up in 1800s Maryland, too. Dana learns first-hand the horrors, humiliations, and accommodations of slavery, while her husband—positioned of course differently as a white man—endures his own ordeals and uses his more enlightened attitude and love for his African-American wife to negotiate the slave-holding south in a way that is dangerous for him, too. Butler draws us in to feel the pain, the frustration, the rage, and the powerlessness of the slaves, while making us think about inter-racial relationships, the affront of one human being thinking he can own and completely control others—while also loving them, in his way—and the question of just how much and how people can get used to some kinds of mistreatment. By the end, we see how the legacy of the past can be psychologically deforming, represented by the literal deformation of Dana’s body when her arm is torn off.

Through the character of Rufus, who Dana realizes does love his free black neighbor, Alice, in his way, Butler shows us how love and basic human relationships were perverted by slavery, by the belief and mindset that one can own other people. When Alice chooses to marry Isaac, a slave whom she loves, Rufus rapes her and is beaten by Isaac, who seeks to protect his wife. Dana is summoned and negotiates the newly-married couple’s escape, but they are apprehended, Isaac is tortured and sold farther south, and Rufus buys the brutally beaten Alice to be his sex slave, all the while asserting his love for her. He does treat her gently while she recovers, but cannot understand why she hates him. He wishes she would freely love him, but since she does not, his belief that white men are owed sex by any woman they desire overrules his version of love—or is so intertwined with it that his ability to love is severely compromised and increasingly lost to him, so that his need and perceived right to dominate and control threaten to undo him.

Butler’s exploration of how a sexual/marital relationship between a black woman and white man could be is through Dana’s and Kevin’s 1976 marriage. Their relationship is based on their shared passion for writing, their willingness to sacrifice much for their craft, and their identification as rebels against the lives of respectable and dependable work at mundane jobs that their families urged upon them. While they can have—in 1970s California—a very different inter-racial relationship that was possible in the antebellum South of the Weylins and their slaves, it is not without its costs. Both of them face severe disapproval from their families for the marriage. And, while Dana never reports Kevin exhibiting personal racism, he does have some sexist attitudes, wanting her—for example—to type his manuscripts and resenting her refusal to do so. And, Dana worries about systemic racism when Kevin travels back in time and place. She tells us: “A place like this would endanger him in a way I didn’t want to talk to him about. If he was stranded here for years, some part of this place would rub off on him. No large part, I knew. But if he survived here, it would be because he managed to tolerate the life here. He wouldn’t have to take part in it, but he would have to keep quiet about it. . . . The place, the time would either kill him outright or mark him somehow. I didn’t like either possibility” (77). We are all shaped by our physical, political, and attitudinal environments; ideologies shape and embed themselves. We can be aware of them, critically reflect on them, consciously work to uproot and confront and change them, but nonetheless, they are part of who we are. Systemic racism infects us all, and obviously does so differently for white and black Americans.

The ways that black people internalize racism and can accommodate themselves to a hostile and cruel environment like that created by slavery is also a focus of the novel. After observing a group of enslaved children on the Weylin plantation playing slave auction, Dana says to Kevin, “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery” (101). A number of the slaves she encounters do resist in a variety of ways, some attempting to escape. After her own attempt to flee the Weylins failed, and she was badly beaten by Rufus’ father, Dana wonders about her own resolution to run again: “why was I so frightened now—frightened sick at the thought that sooner or later, I would have to run again? I moaned and tried not to think about it. The pain of my body was enough for me to contend with. . . . I tried to get away from my thoughts, but they still came. See how easily slaves are made? they said” (177). Later she wonders, after one of the slaves verbally attacks her and she just walks away: “Was I getting so used to being submissive” (220)? She recognizes that slaves do the back-breaking work the overseer demands of them not because they want to, but “They do it to keep the skin on their backs and breath in their bodies” (237). She comes to understand how complicated—and perverse—the institution of slavery and the system of racism are.

After Dana’s act of self-defense that leaves her an amputee, she and Kevin, in 1976, return to the Weylin’s area of Maryland, the place of her slave-holding and slave ancestors, to try to come to terms with the past that had intruded so violently into their present. While science fiction’s device of time travel cannot happen literally to us readers, the time travel afforded by books like Kindred is open to us, with its many invitations to reflection on history, race, and how they construct and impact our present. In our volatile time of American hostility against people of color and immigrants, we all should reflect on what it takes to internalize and become too accommodating of toxic situations we might think we cannot control. Resistance—as Dana discovered—might forever mark one, but is most definitely possible. And necessary.

Book Review: When the Moon Is Low, by Nadia Sashimi

April 25, 2017

A beautifully-told story of Fereiba, an intelligent girl and young woman growing up in pre-Taliban Afghanistan. Her poetry-loving spirit is trapped in the confines of her step-mother's traditional demands on and expectations for her, but the men in her life: her often passive father who manages to rouse himself to insist on her right to start school as a young teen, her wise grandfather, and later her husband, encourage her to pursue her studies and work. The rise of the Taliban puts an end to her intellectual and working life, and the longer second part of the book is a refugee story, alternating between Fereiba's first-person narration and the third-person story of her teenaged son, Saleem. Aspirations for a safe place to call home, live as a family, and nurture their spirits and identities drive these characters, but the novel is neither sentimental nor predictable. What I've read in the news leads me to think the nomadic, always running from and to something, refugee experience as Hashimi narrates it is realistic. We are allowed into the mind and heart of a doubting, fearful, and courageous mother and into the journey of a boy from whom way too much is demanded. I loved this book and what it revealed to me and wish more American politicians would let stories like this inform their stances on refugees.

"Beatriz at Dinner": Parable for Our Time?

Film Review
October 14, 2017

I’m an admirer of Selma Hayek’s acting and of the beautiful Pacific coastline that co-stars in this film. The philosophy that script writer Mike White and director Miguel Arteta convey through their lead, Beatriz—the calm and spiritual, yet lonely and angry healer, companion to and lover of non-human animals—is one I feel an affinity with: death is a part of life that we need to accept, as it includes all of us in its ocean-like tides. While we should strive—like Beatriz—to accept it, with sadness, when it comes naturally, we also—like Beatriz—should push back against unnatural death: the blatant murder of both human and non-human animals and the deaths that come through abuses of power and reckless disregard, visited by many in power, like real estate magnate Doug Strutt (John Lithgow). Belching smokestacks, poor people thrown off their land, large exotic jungle animals killed by safari-goers like Strutt, who declares his takedown of a rhinoceros is not “murder”; “it’s like this dance of man and beast…” he boasts, in an attempt to make his sport into a meaningful, religious exercise of becoming one with nature. Beatriz, in a very different way, is shown to be at one with nature, through the repeated images of her slowly, steadily paddling a canoe on a river. Whether these are her memories, a metaphor for her belief in the spiritual blending of humans with the planet’s very arteries, or some sort of foreshadowing, they serve to mark her as wholly different from Strutt.

For all of its strong points, however, this film lacks the subtlety that would make it more artful and thoughtful and thought-provoking. In our polarized time, viewers will likely either agree with the immigrant Beatriz or with the businessman Strutt. Its explicit plot is too black and white, and in that falls short as a drama in the realist strain, which is how it looks on the surface. The rich people at the dinner are largely just caricatures of sad, soul-less people, lacking the self-awareness to recognize that their lives contain nothing without the expensive things with which they surround and feed themselves. Beatriz’s massage client, Kathy (Connie Britten), who asks her to stay for dinner when her car breaks down, is drawn a bit more fully. Beatriz helped care for Kathy and her husband Grant’s teen-aged daughter when the daughter had cancer. She now makes the long drive to give Kathy massages in her gated mansion. Kathy is appreciative of all Beatriz did for her daughter and tries at first to form a bridge between her wealthy husband and guests and Beatriz, but is clearly pained by these two parts of her life together in the same space. Ultimately, she must side with the source of all her wealth. The script doesn’t give the characters the room needed to fully explore all of these tensions.

But, all of that is pertinent if we watch this as something that would really happen. If we watch this film, however, as a parable, it makes a different kind of sense. Until the end, there are only small signs to suggest this way of reading “Beatriz at Dinner”: the recurring canoeing footage most prominent of them. It isn’t until close to the end, when Beatriz is banished to an upstairs bedroom for an outburst against Strutt, that more clues slip in: the rich white folks lighting their sky lanterns to float above the ocean, Beatriz’s repeated, unsuccessful attempts to reach a friend in Mexico by phone, two alternative scenes of ritualized violence that play out one right after the other, and the finale. Without giving the ending away, I’ll say that the parable’s moral gets driven home with these images of the rich, powerful, and exploitative having each other as they send their fire up into the California sky (the same California that as I write this is burning from out-of-control wildfires.) Reminiscent of Daisy and Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, “they were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

It is people like Beatriz--who cares for people sick from the pollution chugging out of the smokestacks, protects animals who are objects of sport for others—and Kathy and Grant’s Mexican maid who often do the cleaning up. And, yet they are not portrayed as a group, as those who support each other. Toward the end of the evening, the maid sees Beatriz and asks her how the dinner was; Beatriz just smiles and says that what was anything but nice and fine went well. While those who “belong” at the dinner have the unity of each other’s company as they watch their beautiful, yet potentially dangerous, creations float above them, Beatriz only has her cell phone, through which she desperately tries to reach someone she can relate to. But that someone is never there; she has the memory or the metaphor of a solitary boat ride in those images; she views photos of Kathy’s and Grant’s daughter, smiling as she remembers her time with the girl, but she is off at college. Which side would she be on were she there?

Ultimately, my take-away message from Arteta and White’s work is that it’s lonely being a social justice warrior and that those with the money and the power are going to prevail. I felt a gloomy sadness after it was over. Is that sadness supposed to accompany a recognition of how our society is pretty hopeless? Or is it supposed to inspire a move to bring those who would fight, who would speak truth to power-- as Beatriz does to Strout—together? Or is it a drama that wants to do more than the film makers could manage? I’m still not sure.  

"Wind River;" Exploring Masculinity: Violence and Grief

Film Review
September 18, 2017

“Wind River”--Taylor Sheridan’s recently released film--is a terribly sad and beautifully-rendered reflection on masculinity, violence, and grief. Set in the harsh winter landscape of Wyoming, in the harsher physical and social context of an Indian reservation, the film dissects and then re-constructs the Wild West/Cowboys v. Indians mythos, critiquing its macho, violent masculinity and suggesting possibilities for rewriting old, devastating relationships.

At the beginning of the movie, we see Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a U.S. Fish and Wildlife ranger, dressed in white to blend in with the harsh snowy landscape, shoot and kill several wolves as they prey on a herd of sheep.  He later describes his job as a hunter of predators. In the process of rounding up the dead animals, he notices something else lying on the distant frozen ground. He discovers the body of a barefoot, young, Native American woman—Natalie--daughter of friends and friend to his daughter.  He offers to help the woefully understaffed tribal police and lone FBI agent sent by the feds (Elizabeth Olsen) track down Natalie’s rapist and murderer.

Cory is a modern-day cowboy, riding across the wide Western expanse of land on a snow mobile instead of a horse, but still managing animals, sporting a cowboy hat, and more at ease reading and listening to the land for signs of what happened than talking to other people. He’s a representative of the United States government, yet instead of being at odds with the Indians on the reservation, he seems more linked to them than to his fellow white people and government agents. His ex-wife--with whom he has a tense relationship--her father, whom Cory clearly respects, and their son are all Indians. Before too long, we see that the strongest bond is between Cory and Martin (Gil Birmingham), Natalie’s grieving father. He and Cory share the horrific experience of having lost teenage daughters to violence on the reservation. What Sheridan is most interested in showing his audience is this grief of fathers.

 It’s not that the mothers don’t grieve. The two very brief glimpses into Natalie’s mother’s world are heartbreaking: in one, she sits alone in her room, moaning in heartbreak, as she cuts herself; in the other, she is deeply sleeping on the bed that is strewn with scrap books and photos of her lost daughter. Cory’s ex-wife, too, clearly mourns her child. The girl’s picture is prominent on the fireplace; she won’t even go to the reservation anymore and doesn’t like their son doing so, even to visit his grandparents. But, this is not the mothers’ story. Neither is developed as a character, nor on screen much. This story is Cory’s. And Martin’s. Two grieving fathers who don’t shy away from the emotions in which the deaths of their daughters engulf them.

When we first see Martin, he is being questioned by Jane, the young FBI agent dispatched from Las Vegas, ill-prepared for the elements and the experience of the reservation. She feels strong empathy for Natalie, the dead raped woman, but is completely unequipped for talking with the Indians she encounters. Martin seems almost unaffected as he responds to her questions and tells her off for her assumptions. This sort of misunderstanding happens, he charges, whenever “one of you people” (whites, U.S. government-types) comes around. But, then there is a knock on the door, and he opens it to reveal Cory, another white U.S. official, and leans into him for a long hug. The two men stand outside the house, where Cory has no platitudes to offer his friend. The pain doesn’t get better he says, three years after his own young daughter died, and he recounts the story of a grief workshop he attended. It didn’t really help, but the counselor did tell him one thing he found useful, and he wants to share the advice with Martin: he has to “lean into” the pain. Feel it, rather than seek to avoid it. This is no macho, “man up” speech from one tough frontier man to another. It is also no condescending, paternalistic cowboy to an Indian talk. These two men are equals. Cory may always have seen Martin as his friend and equal, as a father of his daughter’s friend. But if they hadn’t seen themselves completely that way before, their similar losses are the great equalizer. And, they each possess a gentle masculinity that allows them to feel, to cry, and to rely on another.

This gentleness, this willingness to face and immerse themselves in emotion is at complete odds with the violent and more conventional forms of masculinity on display throughout the rest of the film. The story is, after all, set on an Indian reservation—the castaway, residue of land of a macho, violent nation, intent on pushing away and marginalizing the country’s original inhabitants in as oppressive a way as possible. The reservation nurtures hopeless, angry young men like Martin’s son, who turn to drugs and violent gang activity in futile and misguided attempts to shore up a corner of the culture’s dominant image of masculinity for themselves. It also attracts brawling, entitled, violent men, representing colonizing energy industries. Set all of this against the brutal backdrop of a violent natural environment, and Cory’s and Martin’s united efforts to be a different kind of man are remarkable.

A critique of the film that I have seen is that it is one in a long line of films set on American Indian land, focused mainly on American Indians’ lives, that yet relies on white leading actors to play the saviors. This is partially valid. We do need to see stories with Native leading characters. Their stories deserve a broad audience, and Americans who aren’t Native would benefit from experiencing them. There are many wonderful actors, including Birmingham and others in this film, to take on such roles. But, this is one film in which the white characters are not saviors. Their very inability to fulfill that role, to even help, is part of what frustrates and pains them. As Martin’s son points out to Cory, he couldn’t even save his own daughter. Neither could he save Natalie, or the reservation’s drug addicts, or Martin, or his marriage after the death of a child rent it. And, he seems resigned to the fact that he can’t save his own heart. The best he can muster right now is to do his job; spend time with his son; try for a measure of justice in an unjust world; and “lean into the pain” with his friend. He is no white knight riding in on a shining steed--or snow mobile. The problems the film shows us are the result of a too-long history of people of Cory’s race, of the government for which he works, interacting with those people who were in North America first, and their descendants. There are no easy fixes to these problems. But these two men—Cory and Martin—from vastly different backgrounds and different sides of the classic Cowboy v. Indian divide are going to lean in to their grief together. They truly are different sorts of men from so many of the others around them.

Film Review: "Wonder Woman"

July 12, 2017

“Wonder Woman” (2017)

Directed by Patty Jenkins; Starring Gal Gadot and Chris Pine

SPOILERS

I’m just going to start out saying that I LOVED this movie! I did. It was exciting, fun, thoughtful, laugh-out-loud funny, and not something I get to see every day—or every time I go to the movies—or basically, hardly ever. Was it perfect? Of course not. Why should it have been? As the Daily Show’s Michelle Wolf exasperatedly said--after her montage of dramatic headlines that all had behind them the assumption that this movie should win the culture wars for feminism once and for all: “You know when we’ll feel women are equal at the box office? When we get to make a bad superhero movie and then immediately make another bad one.” As men have so often done. Well, despite the expected conservative whines and some feminists’ critiques about the movie not having enough female characters once Diana left Themiscyra, or enough of a sisterhood focus (I do agree that more Etta Candy as an integral part of the Ares-hunting team would have rocked and made the movie better), or enough of a focus on the original fight for women’s equality, “Wonder Woman” set box-office records and won positive reviews from both professional critics and movie-goers. And, I argue, it was strongly feminist in ways that many critics don’t look for.

Psychologist Dr. William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman in 1941, a press release explained, “to set up a standard among children and young people of strong, free, courageous womanhood; and to combat the idea that women are inferior to men.” “The only hope for civilization,” it argued, “is the greater freedom, development and equality of women” (quoted by Jill Lepore in her New Yorker article on the film).1 In the 75 years since then, Wonder Woman has gone through numerous iterations of her stories; real-life women’s history has been full of change, evolution of status, and back-tracking; and there are still so few Hollywood movies centered on a female protagonist and directed by a woman (zero when it comes to superhero flicks, until Patty Jenkins made this one), that when one does emerge, it is heavily fraught with the weight of too many factions’ expectations. Lepore is disappointed that the plot of the movie didn’t focus on the kinds of fights for equality that many real-world feminists (including Marston and the women in his life who helped him devise Wonder Women) were engaged in during the 1910s: fighting for suffrage and establishing birth control clinics.

Yet, in this film, Diana Prince is not just opposed to, but horrified by, the Great War and wants to make it end. There were many real-world feminists who were felt the same way. But, more even than that, the movie takes on one of the projects of many feminists in our time period in which it was made: recognizing that much of the continued inequality between men and women emerges from our over-reliance on gender binaries (everything can fall neatly into the category of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’) and then working to deconstruct those binaries. Real people, their skills, strengths, weaknesses, and dreams don’t align so neatly into just one category. And, gender binaries are related to other either-or categorizations. In its blurring of such boundaries—as well as in its depiction of this super-heroine—“Wonder Woman” demonstrates its feminism.

Traditional thinking about gender is related to thinking about war: “real men” are warriors, while women are supporters on the sidelines, not directly involved. Yet, there is nothing inherent in femaleness that means passivity, silence and inactivity in a man’s world. There is also nothing inherent in maleness that means they have to be violent, aggressive, war-like and mean. Steve Trevor is not; even Samir, Charlie, and the Chief change their attitudes. Charlie rebukes Diana when she is solicitous of him after his nightmare; he’s angry that his vulnerability and what today we would term PTSD have been revealed. The Chief says, “He sees ghosts.” But, after the victory in Veld, Charlie sings in the tavern. The next day when he suggests he wouldn’t be useful to the group as they go after those readying the gas, Diana says with a sweet smile, “But, Charlie, who would sing for us?” A man’s value can be in shooting or in singing.

Diana at first believes that if she can only find and kill Ares, his influence over men’s hearts will be eradicated, and they will get back to being good people who will no longer want to destroy each other. Yet, she gradually comes to understand that human beings are complicated; they embody both good desires and qualities AND bad, warring impulses at the same time. As Steve Trevor tells her, “We’re all to blame.” Setting up an Ares-less world structure will not eradicate war any more than setting up a world structure with laws and government agencies pushing equality between the sexes will eradicate sexism. The movie dramatizes how the typical boundaries between “good guys” and “bad guys” is blurry, just as it demonstrates how the boundaries between feminine and masculine aren’t neatly drawn.

The set-up of, and challenge to, these categories starts early on. During the beautifully set and choreographed scenes on Themiscyra, we hear some of the background mythology (movie version) and learn that it is Ares’ lust for war and his ability to influence so many human men to share it that causes the downfall of the gods’ world. This is very different from the cause for the Fall laid out in the book of Genesis, which blames Woman and her desire for knowledge that the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would impart. The alternative Fall mythology places women and men differently. Because Ares couldn’t stand his father’s creation, he sowed jealousy and suspicion among humans to get them to turn on each other and wage war. So, they went from being good people—men—to warring, but the gods created the Amazons to bring them back to love and reason. At this point, it is a simple gender reversal: indicting all men and their war-loving natures instead of women and their desire for knowledge and independence. It can seem refreshing to feminist viewers that it’s not woman—Eve--bringing down man and requiring divine punishment because of it, but men causing and precipitating the Fall, needing women saviors. The women even get sent to Paradise for their protection and training. Diana comes to see, though, that things are more complicated. Over the course of the film, her experiences lead her to reassess her thinking, and we are given the material to do so as well. Despite the way the British get their women to dress so that they could not be fighters, despite women’s banishment from parliamentary rooms in which decisions are made, women can be warriors: for evil purposes like Doctor Poison, and for good, defensive purposes like Diana saving the village near the Western Front.

The funny scene in which Etta and Steve take Diana clothes shopping so that she might better fit in shows her criteria for an appropriate outfit: not how she looks, but how well she can kick, spin, and move in it. The gender standards of early 20th century England are being challenged. Women don’t need to dress in such starkly different (feminine) ways than men (masculine). Focusing a critique on clothing—though humorous in the scene—might seem to be trite, except the focus is on functionality. Edwardian dress is designed to keep women only doing “feminine” tasks. It is a means of communicating role; as such, it is worthy of a feminist critique such as the movie provides.

Yet, blurring boundaries between the traditional gender categories is not just about critiquing traditional femininity or making female characters “masculine.” The movie’s Diana exhibits much compassion and a desire to take care of others in need—attitudes typically classified as “feminine.” When in the trenches on the Western Front, she is—like Steve Trevor—appalled at the suffering, and wants to stop to help everyone: a woman who describes to her what happens in the village, soldiers in pain. Steve and the misfit team are mission-driven and want to keep going. “You can’t save everyone, Diana,” Steve says as he urges her on. Yet, she asserts—in perhaps a typically “masculine” way--her intention to stop to help. As she dons her Wonder Woman uniform, she leads the way across the battlefield, stopping bullets so that her team and others can make it across to save the village: she is exhibiting a blend of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits: she is a woman leading men, with men following her into battle; she is a woman fighting and prevailing, and none of them are conforming to traditional gender categories.

In one of my favorite images, Wonder Woman stands atop the village church, in the gaping hole left by its spire being blown away. Steve Trevor and the rest of the ragtag mercenaries worked together to help our hero leap from a severed car door they hold to the bell tower where a sniper was poised. If the church represents both the religions that set the governing myths that so many live by—whether the ancient Greek pantheon’s stories about Ares being responsible for men’s warlike natures or the bible’s story about a woman’s desire for knowledge leading to a human fall—and the resulting dualisms of gender and human nature, then Diana’s act of destroying it while saving the residents (a typically-masculine military act borne out of a more feminine desire to save and nurture everyone) represents transcending these boundaries.

Yet, Diana still has more lessons to learn. Like us more ordinary beings, learning isn’t on a nice linear trajectory. When she kills the German officer whom she thought was Ares and the war didn’t stop, she was ready to give up. Steve tells her, though, that it’s not just one bad guy. “It’s them.” It’s all of us, actually. “We’re all to blame.” This coming together of dark and light in one being is hard for her to wrap her head around at first. But, then she encounters the real Ares, also a fundamentalist. He still—after ages—believes that humans are all bad: selfish, hateful, etc. She tells him, “You’re right about them. They are everything you say. And so much more.” It becomes, at the end, a struggle between fundamentalist/simplistic ideology, which can lead to generalizations about large groups of people, and a belief in complexity and understanding deeply who people are.

At the end, she reflects, while reading Bruce Wayne’s email about the photo, that the light and the dark are in everyone. As masculine and feminine are in everyone. “I used to want to save the world,” but now she knows that things are not that simple. Inside every human there is darkness and light. One hero can’t save them from that, but love can change things. We all have choices to make about what we can do to make a difference. Though none of us can save the world, we all can act to try, do what we can to love and save someone. Despite what some feel the film lacks in wider female representation, this gender and other dualism boundary-blurring makes this a strongly feminist film. And damn fun super heroism.

Review: "Raw," a Film by Julia Ducournau

March 26, 2017

Writer/director Julia Ducournau’s "Raw" is certainly the most disturbing and distasteful film I've seen in a very long time. And, the most brutally honest and thought-provoking. It's both a horror and a coming-of-age story; if "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" is a feminist parable on the hell of high school (we'll plop the school right on the Hellmouth), this is a feminist parable on the hell of a prestigious college's rush week, on steroids. The cannibalism can be challenging to watch (I had to turn my head in a number of places), but it’s strangely worth sitting through. Ducournau told interviewer Lara Berger that "With 'Raw,' I set myself the challenge of shifting the audience’s moral standards throughout the film. I wanted the audience to feel empathy for a character that is becoming a monster in their eyes. It sounds twisted, but I believe that the building of a moral identity comes with the acknowledgement of tendencies that we qualify as monstrous or evil. I often ask myself, for example, 'What’s the difference between me and someone who kills?' I wanted to disturb the audience in that way. I found inspiration in the myth of Abel and Cain." 

She and the young actor Garance Marillier, who plays Justine, do succeed in creating empathy where we might think there could be none. But, the really important point in this statement by the filmmaker, and the crucial thing she succeeds at with “Raw,” is pushing the audience not just to acknowledge the philosophic point that the world is not constructed of an endless series of either/or dualisms, but to viscerally experience it. The point of the extreme and unrelenting corporal images is to force those of us watching—and refusing to faint (like some reportedly did at the Toronto Film Festival) or walk out—to grapple with these blurred boundaries: what is the difference between me (a vegetarian) and someone who kills people to eat their flesh (besides, hopefully, the killing people to eat their flesh part)? The film succeeds at dramatizing the blurred boundaries between a number of classic dualisms our society holds on to—particularly regarding food, conformity, and gender. And, fittingly, the boundaries between them are quite fuzzy as well. What we might expect from a film when we are accustomed to typical boundaries between what is accepted to be food and what is not; between conforming to familial and social norms and rebelling against them; and between “masculine” and “feminine” are all turned on their ears.

From the beginning, Ducournau establishes typical horror film scenarios: a young woman causing a car crash by walking into the street and getting hit, parents dropping their daughter off at veterinary college where her sister (already a student there) is supposed to meet her, but is a no-show; the parents don’t wait. Something is going to happen to this young woman. And, it does. But, not what we might be conditioned to think. 

Before too long, Justine moves from being victim of the sadistic “Elders” of the school, enforcing conformity to their cruel—and at the same time ridiculous—hazing rituals, to being the aggressor. As Joss Whedon created Buffy to defy genre conventions that the cute, blonde, teen-aged girl will be done in by the monster or serial killer, Ducournau created Justine to make a feminist statement: young, idealistic women in college may have to put up with a lot of sexist and other kinds of crap, but they don’t have to be devoured and subdued by it. They can become the devourers, the subduers. They can claim and act on their power. And when the mode of claiming is extreme, and we want to recoil from it, Ducournau forces us to confront the question of why this is so shocking, why this cannibalistic behavior is taboo. Isn’t it, after all, just a logical extension of actions that so many in society find acceptable? Aren’t those rigid categories actually just on a continuum we choose not to see?

The veterinary students whom we might expect to have chosen their career goal out of tender, compassionate emotions toward the animals they are learning to care for, instead are dismissive and cruel. At Justine’s first meal with her new classmates, she is derided for her stand on animal rights. Young male students engage in banter about “fucking” monkeys and other non-human animals. They wish to treat these beings as they do human women—through their dismissal, through sex, and through making them the brunt of nasty jokes. So, when Justine turns it around and treats other humans the way most others only treat non-human animals: as food—why is that so different? They force her to eat meat, so she takes it even further and eats MEAT (human meat). Just a point further along the continuum, no?

She is raised a vegetarian and comes to college intending to hold fast to that ideal. Yet, one of her earliest experiences there, after learning her fellow students really don’t care about animals—non-human or human—is to be forced to eat a piece of rabbit kidney. When she calls on her sister, Alexia—also raised vegetarian—for help, she learns that her sister has rejected their family’s diet in order to fit in. The “Elders” tell the “Rookies” at the beginning of the initiation week that since they are likely only there because their parents want them to be, they will now be shown how to break away from those family dictates. They will learn to be non-conformists. This, of course, is bunk, since what the upperclassmen want is for the new students to now conform to THEIR norms. Justine is not to have ideas on animal rights different from theirs; she is not to have ethics regarding food different from theirs. She is to conform to the gender norms they set, dressing as they see appropriate for female students (wearing a cocktail dress to class; she has to borrow one from her sister), pushed into sex with a male student at a party (one of them doused in blue paint, one in yellow, they are shoved out of the party room and told not to re-enter until they are both green. She takes a bite out of him). 

The “colors” are bleeding now across the boundary between the themes of conformity and gender, and sensibly so, since gender is one of the constructed aspects of human experience that we are most strongly expected to conform to—and among the norms we are most strongly punished for transgressing. Perhaps at one point in time, this veterinary school was all male, but it’s been co-ed for years; both of Justine and Alexia’s parents were students there when young. Yet, the gendering of veterinarians is still masculine, and the females among the “Elders” are made to conform to it. As they march into the arena early in the film, both male and female upperclassmen are chanting slogans about vets marching while waving their penises high. They are the masculine, sexualized conquerors, using their genitalia as tools of conquest, like so many conquerors before them have. The forced submission of the underclassmen is referred to in sexualized language as well (though I don’t remember the specifics). The “Rookies” are feminized as they go through the initiation; next year, if they survive, they will be the real men, regardless of whether they are male or female. At one point this is illustrated by Alexia and Justine, sitting on a roof drinking and talking. Alexia needs to pee and instructs her younger, rookie sister how to do so like a man: drop your pants, thrust your pelvis forward, and lean back so the stream goes away from you, over the edge of the roof. Justine doesn’t want to, but agrees to try. She fails at being the masculinized upper-classman, wetting her clothes and falling. She can’t conform to what her sister and fellow students want; yet, she also refuses to conform to traditional feminine norms .

When Alexia pushes Justine into her first Brazilian bikini wax, she fights back, terming the ripping pain she feels “torture.” “Beauty is pain,” Alexia tells her. Women all over succumb to this form of pain to rip away part of their bodies, modifying them in the name of beauty. Isn’t the decidedly unfeminine act of taking a bite out of people’s flesh just further along the continuum of such torture and forcefully ripping away a part of the body?

Justine is not the only character who can’t conform to the gender norms of the school and the society. Her roommate, Adrien, a gay man, lives in the blurred boundary between strict gender poles, too. At first, Justine is upset to meet him, as she’d asked for a female student to live with. “They gave you a fag,” Adrien tells her. “It’s the same thing to them.” They become friends, a refuge for each other, but also pull and push each other into places they don’t really want to go. I’m not going to offer spoilers, but the ending, both literally and symbolically, presents a strong message on gender conformity (or lack of it) at multiple levels. For all of the film’s barbarity, this and other messages are highly affirming of our personhood. As Ducournau articulates one of them to Lara Berger: 

"I think I want people to feel important and meaningful. In French, the title of my movie is ‘Grave.’ Among many other reasons, I called it that because I realized that, when they confide in someone, people — friends, family, colleagues, me — tend to wrap up their story by saying, ‘Mais c’est pas grave,’ meaning, ‘But it doesn’t matter.’ They say this in order to alleviate the weight of their words. But it does matter. The humanity in each one of us matters, however flawed and sometimes inhuman. I want people to feel responsible for their humanity in the end, because freedom comes at the price of responsibility, I think. Boy, what a bummer!"

As I left the theater, I, too felt that the film was such a “bummer.” But, the wonder of this work is that, with discussion and reflection, this seemingly barbaric film is supremely full of affirmations for humanity. If we’re willing to take that look at ourselves and at society’s assumptions.

On Political Correctness and a Female Doctor

July 20, 2017

Sheesh! You’d think a woman had actually succeeded at becoming President of the United States or something. But apparently this is an even worse infraction against a corner of the glass ceiling, for this has inter-galactic repercussions. The BBC announced this week that Jody Whittaker—an actor with one more X chromosome than any of the previous dozen actors similarly anointed by the powers-that-be of “Doctor Who”—will play the thirteenth incarnation of the Doctor.

And the internet lost it.

Many like me expressed our excitement, while others melted down on any platform available. And, the melters weren’t only males. The biggest charge is that this is just a PC stunt by those liberals running and ruining television. Liberals at the BBC? Horrors! Some tried to argue the impossibility for such a thing, others imagined silly analogies, but they all boiled down to gender essentialism.

Crying “political correctness” is the laziest way to avoid making an argument. It’s an empty phrase that anyone can project any complaint onto. Groups from all political perspectives have ideas that are deemed “correct” and those that are deemed “incorrect” for members of that group to hold. For current-day conservatives, being anti-abortion, anti-birth control, and anti-tax are all “politically correct” positions to hold. But, when people use the phrase, it’s typically conservatives referring to ideas of liberals and progressives that they don’t like: women and minorities should be well-represented in government, workplaces, entertainment, for one idea. Those of us who have been hoping for a Doctor to re-generate into a female have never said that any woman in the role would do. Whovians always want—and almost always get—stellar actors to play the Doctor. And, it looks like we have this time, too. Those loathing this choice, however, seem to think that ANY male actor would be better than ANY female actor. Rather than reasonably argue for why that might be true, they cry “PC!”

I’ve only seen Whittaker in “Broadchurch,” but she does a wonderful job there. As the mother of a murdered child, she has displayed a range of emotions, much restraint under pressure, and a big heart. These are all qualities any Doctor possesses. If she can do it as a grief-stricken mother in a small, coastal English town, she can do it as a roaming Time Lord. A PC publicity stunt, as many called it, would be something like hosting a contest to pick one random female and granting the role to her. Casting an experienced, strong actor is no such thing.

 “He’s a Time LORD, not a Time LADY” is something I read more than once. That one can be dispensed with quickly: Time Lord is a race, not a gender. Romana was a female Time Lord; River Song has Time Lord DNA and has re-generated; the Master re-generated into Missy. The Corsair had both male and female incarnations. And, in fact, according to the BBC’s Doctor Who website, in 1986, Sydney Newman—a producer, who worked on the show at the beginning, in the early 1960s—wrote that “At a later stage, Doctor Who should be metamorphosed into a woman.” That was 1986! So, maybe it’s not that liberal political correctness is ruining everything now by throwing a woman into the mix. Maybe it’s that anti-feminist “political correctness” kept it from happening much sooner.

“What’s next? A man playing Miss Marple? Mrs. Holmes?” “Can Wonder Woman be a man next time?” (What is it, anyway, with some men’s resentment of the “Wonder Woman” movie? Like we don’t live in a world in which exist dozens of super hero movies centered on male heroes. Like this summer hasn’t seen the release of yet ANOTHER Spider Man film….). But, okay, I’ll respond: Miss Marple was written by Agatha Christie as a female human, not as a science fiction alien who can change bodies and personalities. But Dr. Watson was written by Conan Doyle as a stodgy middle-aged Englishman and now is a stylish, youngish, Asian-American woman on “Elementary.” I love how Rob Doherty has shaken up the Holmes canon, so, sure, any one of the Jodie Whittaker nay-sayers who has a great rationale and script for a Mr. Marple, go for it!

Wonder Woman is a bit harder since the word “woman” is in her title, and there are thousands of years of mythic history of Amazons being explicitly female. William Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator, brought her to life to give children a positive female role-model. So, there are good reasons for not switching to Wonder Man. (And, the fact that I feel ridiculous writing this paragraph just highlights how ridiculous these questions are.) *Note: after I posted this, a reader informed me that Marvel created a Wonderman in the 1960s. So, that answers that point by Whittaker nay-sayers. I plan to check some of those comics out. 

I get that for those who have a strong sense of gender essentialism when it comes to the Doctor, this is a hard moment. I thought Matt Smith was way too young to be the Doctor and was quite dubious, but ended up loving him. I didn’t care for a couple of the Doctors from the Classic era and, with one of them, just stopped watching for awhile. Those who can never accept Jodie Whittaker can do the same. It’s a well-loved show for Whovians, but it is still, a TV show. And, it’s not like there aren’t seasons upon seasons of male Doctors to stream and lose oneself in.

Remember, though, that this is a fictional world. And, fictional worlds are meant to expand our minds and our ideas of what is possible. So, welcome Thirteen! I can’t wait to jump in the TARDIS with you and see where you take us.

The Madwomen in Gilead: On Being a Wife in Hulu's Dystopia

July 23, 2018

The Handmaid’s Tale’s Gilead is a dark world that professes to exalt, honor, and protect women as wives and bearers of children. The regime does pay lip service to the sanctified positions of Wife and Mother, but in actuality rips many women from their spouses and children, forcing them into sexual, housekeeping, and toxic waste clean-up servitude for those in power. Three of the Wives, in particular, offer an instructive look into this role in Margaret Atwood’s imagined theocracy and help make the point about what actually is insane.

In their classic 1979 work of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar interpret 19thcentury female writers’ novels. Taking their title from Jane Eyre, the authors posit that these female novelists basically had the dichotomous tropes of angel and monster to draw from when creating their heroines. A woman could either be an angel: submissive, pure, “feminine” by the standards of the time and culture, or a monster: rebellious, “unfeminine,” badly behaving, according to the prevailing standards. Gilbert and Gubar argue that writers like Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen struggled with anxiety over the authority they were claiming. They needed both to adhere to and subvert the angel/monster construction and did so, in part, through creating doppelgangers--pairs of female characters, one of which was angel, the other of which could enact the “monstrous.” Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason are one pair that function this way, as Gilbert and Gubar see it. Margaret Atwood and the TV show writers also employ this angel/monster construction, but are perhaps more successful than women writers over 100 years ago at blurring those boundaries.

Late in Season Two of The Handmaid’s Tale, we are introduced to Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) and his wife, Eleanor (Julie Dretzin), a former art professor “who wanted the world to be beautiful,” but unfortunately had married a man with the power to make it exceedingly ugly and cruel. She is angry, tries to speak against the cruelty, is classified by her husband as “not well,” and is confined by him to her room. At first it seems that he does this in the classic move of labeling a truth-telling woman as insane in order to lock her away. I watched her in her first episode and thought “madwoman in the attic.” As we learn more about Commander Lawrence, though, we see that he might be sincere when he calls her “my love,” and perhaps shuts her up for her safety. Either way, her voice is silenced, and she is a “madwoman in the attic” type character, there to point out what is wrong with the other wives on the show and cry attention to the evils of this theocratic society. She might be seen as “insane” to the regime, but her perspective is the sanest among the wives we have met.

The wife who is most responsible for creating what it means to be an “angel” of a Gilead wife-- and hence also what it means to be the “monster”--is Serena Waterford. Serena is an author of Gilead’s structure and rules, a professional writer and speaker in the time before, who—we learn—believes that it was worth it to sacrifice all of that so she could become a mother by legally stealing another’s baby. She represents what a Gilead wife should be, everything that Eleanor Lawrence would fight against. At least for quite a while, she strives to be. She mouths pious platitudes and quotes from the King James Version of the bible. But, she keeps veering into “monstrosity.” Clearly missing her former life, she takes over writing government orders while her husband is recovering from a gunshot wound, disobeys his orders and brings a female doctor to the hospital to examine the Putnams’/Janine’s baby, and—in the season finale—decides she was wrong about that little rule that females like her daughter shouldn’t read, so stages a revolt at the Commanders’ power meeting. She is punished for her hubris by having part of her hand cut off, similar to how Charlotte Bronte’s Rochester was “punished” for his arrogance by losing his hand in the fire. While in the script, her punishment comes from those in power to bring her down for the bold sin of reading while female, we could also view the punishment as coming from the story’s creators for placing herself above all other women and writing them in to absolute submissiveness. Once Mr. Rochester is brought low, some literary critics maintain, he could be an equal to Jane, paving the way to their egalitarian marriage. To me and some other readers, this plot twist at the end of Jane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte’s critique of the inequalities of Victorian marriage. Perhaps we can interpret Serena’s loss of an appendage as authorial punishment for, and commentary on, her selling out of other women. Once she suffered the hacking off of her finger, she is in a sense brought down, and engages in an act of solidarity with Offred and the Marthas, those women lower than her on Gilead’s hierarchy. She moves closer to the “mad” from the beginning wife, Eleanor, making blurry the lines between angel and monster.

Finally, Eleanor Lawrence’s true doppelganger might be Nick’s young wife. Eden is the true believer in Gilead; brought up in the system, she strives to be an “angel,” yet she also believes in romantic and marital love. Perhaps she was old enough in the pre-Gilead age to have watched Disney movies and read fairy tales that promise salvation and love from a handsome prince. She expects this from her arranged marriage and wants her “script” to be realized, but her move to a different home reveals to her that the rest of Gilead does not follow along. She works to figure out what Gilead and what a biblical god mean, but her means of understanding: reading and annotating her bible are forbidden. The more she strives to be a good Gileadean wife, the more she veers from the country’s prescribed role, until—like her doppelganger--she goes “mad,” according to the views of the power structure, crossing the angel/monster divide. Fred terms her a “slut,” but she has actually adopted the “heresy” of love. As they drown her for being a heretic (drowning was one typical punishment for the heresy of witchcraft), she recites the famous 1 Corinthians passage on love that is read at many Christian weddings. Notably, she doesn’t use the King James Version translation as Serena always does when quoting the bible. KJV uses the English word “charity,” instead of “love.” She dies a martyr to the love professed in a different part of the bible than Gileadean authorities have ever called upon. Her tragic mistake was in believing that Gilead’s view and hers were the same. So, at the end of her life, she also becomes one of the “mad women of Gilead.”

By maiming one “angel” and killing another, but leaving the “monstrous” madwoman in her attic, the show makes its points about Gileadean “femininity,” the role of Wife, and leaves room for a more interesting path for wives and other women in Season 3.