I’m introducing a new feature called NERD ALERT!, highlighting gender-related books, films, and performers that lean more toward the artsy end of the cultural spectrum but will not cause drowsiness or the urge to throw books, DVDs, or performance artists against a wall. (This is what I do when I attempt to read Ezra Pound—nap and then commit violence against paperbacks.) I’ll list five items each week that you should investigate if only to look smarter than everyone else you know. I would say “look cooler,” but who am I kidding? Continue reading “Weekly Girl Crushes”
Critics rank Brave as lesser Pixar: better than the Cars films (and frankly what isn’t?) but far below the profound and witty masterpieces of the past few years. I agree. The film’s visual universe is a banal emerald isle worthy of DreamWorks or Enya. The signature song sounds like an American Idol finale number. And the plotting moves too quickly with few of the quiet moments of visual and narrative brilliance that define Pixar’s best work. Nevertheless, the film’s strongest thread—Merida’s complicated, even violent, relationship with her mother—must be celebrated as a deconstruction of the traditional mother-daughter narrative popularized in fairy tales.
Mothers are usually long dead before a fairy tale begins. In their place, we find vain, brutal stepmothers and witches who sometimes try to eat you. There is a simple reason for this. Fairy tales were written by men in decidedly patriarchal societies who imagined women to be in perpetual competition for men. Once a woman bowed out of this competition, she became a crone. Fairy tales, and later Freud, consequently conceived of mothers as continuously warring with their daughters for male attention—especially the father’s. Because of the incest taboo, fairy tales couldn’t portray biological mothers and daughters at war for paternal affection, so unrelated stepmothers were introduced as proxies. Consequently, you always find older women tormenting younger women out of jealousy before the younger women kill their pseudo-mother figures. And then someone gets married. Lovely story.
I’ve never connected with this view of femininity because it paints women of all ages as petty victims. It’s also inaccurate. Women form intense bonds with other women that have nothing to do with men. Shocking, I know. Despite what male authors have been telling us for hundreds of years, we actually kind of like each other. Brave is an intelligent deconstruction of the typical fairy tale not because of the absence of romance but because of the preeminence of a female bond—the knotty, multifaceted bond between a teenage girl and her mother. Continue reading “Mommie Dearest”
When adapting an immensely popular book, a filmmaker must always be wary of evoking the wrath of fans if the film diverts—even slightly—from the page. Although the third Harry Potter film is by far the most successful, Alfonso Curón was still criticized for adding gothic elements and cutting superfluous Quidditch scenes. Gary Ross was clearly conscious of this fact when creating the entertaining but slavishly faithful Hunger Games.
Initially, I thought The Hunger Games could be easily adapted to the screen because it is a well-paced narrative. After watching the film, my initial reaction matched that of most other critics: the atmosphere of the reaping was pitch perfect, the cornucopia was horrifying without fetishizing the violence, the slow pacing of the film’s first half and the quick pacing of the second was jarring, and the shaky cam was annoying precisely 99.9% of the time. What was most striking, however, was how the film’s tone and characters differed from the book even though the film was basically a page-by-page adaptation.
I was immediately reminded that this first book takes place almost entirely in Katniss’s head. Entire relationships are formed and played out through her thoughts, and we see her character develop less through her actions—save in a few key scenes (e.g., the reaping, Rue’s death)—and more through her psychological battles and internal reactions to her circumstances. The classic response to this dilemma is, “Well, it’s impossible to film interior monologues unless you include intrusive voiceovers violating every show-don’t-tell law ever written.” I disagree. Yes, you cannot film exactly what is going on inside a character’s head through language, so you should instead use the tools unique to cinema to express the same meaning. Continue reading “All Up Inside Katniss’s Head”
