Global warming autumns are now so common that I no longer find it odd to be wearing a tank top and shorts on a September afternoon (whether it is appropriate for a 29-year-old to don such an outfit is another question entirely). Apparently, television and film are mirroring this climate trend because we are still mired in the late-summer pop cultural doldrums despite having already celebrated Labor Day. Now is, therefore, the perfect time to delve into those books, films, and lesser known television shows that can sustain us until Mad Men returns and the Oscar season officially begins. Continue reading “Weekly Girl Crushes: When You Can’t Watch Mad Men…”
Am I the only one who began to hum the oh-so-catchy Parks and Recreations ditty when Bruce Wayne…well…fell into a pit? Because he stayed in that pit for a long time. Would this pit—an obvious allusion to the earlier childhood pit and his current depressive abyss—transform Batman (I’m sorry, “The Batman”) from a super strong masculine fighter into a fresh brand of cerebral hero? Now, I realize Batman has never had super powers and has always relied on his toys, but his powerful male body has also always been his primary tool. But I sensed a change. Hobbling around his mansion in a bathrobe and getting physically bested by—horrors!—a skinny woman, this Bruce Wayne hinted that Nolan was, for once, creating stakes in a superhero film by suggesting that continually bruising and battering a man’s body could have an effect not just on his morose soul but also on his knees.
Next, he loses all his money. This manufactured plot point is even less believable than the whole sun-setting issue. Bane is holding the stock exchange hostage during the day (i.e., before 4 pm), yet he is then chased (maybe thirty minutes later) in total darkness. Holy daylight saving time, Batman! More to the point, you can’t trade away your entire company by pushing one button; Nolan seriously needs to hire a consultant who has read The Wall Street Journal at least once. If one is willing to dismiss reality (this is a comic book film after all), then you are left to ponder the more interesting question of whether this aging, physically damaged, and semi-impoverished (if you don’t count that mansion and BatJet) Batman could defeat the forces of chaos as a broken man. But then he fell in the pit. Continue reading ““When I Fell in the Pit””
Mike Lane (Channing Tatum), the titular figure in Steven Soderbergh’sMagic Mike, is perhaps the nicest man I have ever encountered on screen outside of a Hallmark Christmas film. Although I initially found it easier to believe that a half-lizard man was stalking Manhattan’s sewers than that someone with Tatum’s looks could be so kind, I quickly realized that Soderbergh was using this hyper-sweetness against Mike. It’s the initial warning that he’s not your father’s hero. When Mike first saunters across the frame, he is nude. I point this out not simply as an excuse to include this gif but because it’s significant that Mike first exists as mere body. This body underscores his physical masculinity (he does in fact have a Y chromosome—a very, very nice one), but the film calls into question the cultural signification of this flesh. He may be male, but does this make him a man?
Since Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949 and drag queens burst onto the pop cultural scene in the 1990s, people have acknowledged that femininity is something you do, not something you are. As Judith Butler taught generations of gender studies majors, femininity is an act that must be continuously performed in order to have meaning. Masculinity, on the other hand, has mostly remained the default position. Men are assumed to be masculine—unless they act in an obviously feminine manner—and women who are not performing their proper feminine roles are immediately derided as masculine. Masculinity itself is, therefore, taken for granted, the natural gender at odds with feminine artificiality. With the help of a few rip-away pants and leopard thongs, Magic Mike attacks masculinity’s unassailable position by revealing that it is no less a performance than femininity. Indeed, in Magic Mike, masculinity is entirely a performance—one centered on money. Continue reading “Men at Work”
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”
