I'd like to officially thank JAMES FRANCO

for confirming that I have become desensitized to gross gory stuff onscreen. 127 Hours was the best new film I've seen since The Fighter two weeks ago and I totes watched that arm get chopped off without even having to hide behind a cushion or my fingers or a Carebear. Thank goodness he's the one being touted as the dude to direct the film adaptation of Cormac's Blood Meridian...see here, here and here for the heresay concerning that one (which I HOPE IS TRUE).

I don't want to be too desensitized though. I still wana find bad stuff horrible. But I hope the feeling lasts till I see Blood Meridian (most violent book that anyone who's read it has ever read). Read summary here.

also I joined twitter and spent 90 mins this morning reading about ian somerhalder and eliza dushku and jessica alba. what a non-waste of my time!

Peace out!

coolio numero uno.

Coolios numeros dos, tres & cuatro.

HEROES we need more girl ones.

Well i'm sick as a dog but what really made things better was buying a set of cowgirl coasters this morning with my friend Deb after we had a coffee. Also we talked a lot about Supernatural and the weirdest TV characters we've been attracted to (both of us admitted they were aliens on badly scripted 90sTV shows which will remain nameless). But more importantly I was so sick last night that all I managed for dinner was a block of chocolate and some wine and THE LAST FOUR EPISODES OF HEROES SEASON 2. (This is going to be a really predictable post about why the representation of women really peed me off, btw. You can pretty much read the rest of my argument about this stuff HERE).

the male:female ratio is like so mid-20th century.

I mean seriously! here is how what started off good just went bad. All the chicks are kind of helpless and totally dependent on men to make decisions for them. Maya, for example, who can make everyone drop dead somehow while she's angry, cries all the time and gets really easily deceived by the bad Sylar. He doesn't even have to try, she just falls for his every word! Besides, totally annoying that she's the 'evil one' and she always needs some dude around to calm her down and stop her from killing people. Claire the cheerleader is probably the coolest. But even when she defies her deceitful father, she eventually believes that he was right in all the advice he ever gave her and that if she had only listened to him, everything would be alright - even though he totally lied to and manipulated her.

All Elle wants to do is make her Daddy proud of her, even though he tortured her as a child on the ground it would 'increase her powers' - except rather than enhance her own agency, she has just become his (and his company's) pawn in shady business which even Elle herself doesn't know the extent of! (Though at the end of the season she saved some people's lives, and they were grateful, and I got the impression she was starting to find a new sense of purpose in helping people, rather than just blindly doing what her dad says). I think the WORST scene possibly on TV during the past 5 years was where Noah and Bob (Claire and Elle's respective dads) take each other's daughter hostage and then trade them  with each other in exchange for peace. As if the trading and ownership of daughters was the way men negotiated peacefully. As if they were property to be exchanged! And the girls didnt even question it!!! (And it wasn't even peaceful - Elle got shot, and so did Noah). Not to mention Caitlyn, the lovely Irish girl who gets taken off to the future and left there; the Japanese Princess in the past who just shifts from male hero to male hero and looks pretty and then is left there; Noah's wife who nearly dies from the amount of memory removal he has subjected her to; and Matt's ex-wife who is written off as a lying and unfaithful wife. Moreover, it is the men on the show who remain the most powerful; who run the 'organisation' (and who run the coup to take the organisation down) men make all the big decisions about everyone else (including women); it is men who are always positioned as wanting to save the world or destroy it; it is women who are being   being neglected (Caitlyn and the Princess), seeking help for their problem (Nikki) or being lied to (Claire and Elle) but without any real chance (yet) of standing up for themselves or actually questioning the power dynamics of their world. 

Nicki's split personality kicks butt

Sure, it was pretty cool that Claire's blood is what can save everything. But it is because of that, that she remains an object to be protected and transacted - she becomes a resource. Why don't they take Adam or Peter's blood - those two guys have the same powers of regeneration?? No, those two are too busy doing more important things like destroying or saving the world or saving girls. Much easier to use up the cheerleader. I'm retaining my hopes for Nikki and Monica who are showing some promise. But they're still kind of positioned as emotionally unstable, despite their power. But Nikki is awesome - she is physically strong and beats up everyone, but still loves her son enough to sacrifice a lot for him. In fact Nikki is pretty good. So far she's been the best I think. Monica too, though haven't seen much of what she can do yet.  

As much as I loved the show, I felt pretty nauseated by the end of that season. Just sick of watching women fall back into some sort of dependency role when women and men should be taking on stuff like 'saving the world' (and whatever you might take that to mean metaphorically) TOGETHER. Action TV is still dominated by guys. thought things would've changed since Buffy but no, I guess I'll be watching Kill Bill again tonight to make up for it.

END RANT. I STILL LOVE HEROES BY THE WAY. 

PS If you're familiar with the show - I saw this japanese guy running really fast through the food court at Collins Place in melbourne with a poster tube slung over his back. Just sayin'. Time travel is probably for real.

Fact: Black Swans are native to australia.

Naturally, this meant I had a total freak out after seeing Natalie Portman enact the psychotic episode that is her new film, Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky). If you haven’t seen it, this post contains spoilers – not that that matters, because the story is based on Swan Lake, and even if it wasn’t, would be totally predictable anyway. Basically she’s a neurotic ballerina who has to play the Swan Queen in Swan Lake (both the black and white swan roles) and as the film progresses she becomes more and more entangled in a split personality disorder. She becomes violent and unpredictable, she can’t tell what is real or not and then ends up killing herself onstage in real life (just as the white swan kills herself after realizing her prince accidentally commits himself to the black swan).

Freak out! the black swan takes over. 

The tension of the film essentially lies in uncertainty around whether playing the split role caused her to become unwell, or whether her illess enabled her to perform the role so well. On the one hand, the film suggests she has a bunch of issues already (bulimia, a history of self-harm, crazy/repressed ballet mom who never got to “fulfil her career,” self-esteem issues, perfectionism, etc). On the other hand, the ballet industry seems to provide some impetus for triggering her mental illness: company director encourages the “dark side” of her to come out, by encouraging her to get sexual and trying to seduce her; rivalry with another dancer in the company spurs to fantasise about stabbing the girl to death (it is unclear for while though, whether Portman actually kills the girl or not), rivalry with the ex-prima ballerina who was booted so Portman could take the lead role (Portman then fantasises about this woman stabbing her face off with a nail file, though we don’t really know if it’s a fantasy or not). Etc. In the end, after receiving a standing ovation during the opening performance of Swan Lake, she jumps off the platform enacting the suicide of the ballet character, Odette – but simultaneously stabs herself in the gut and promptly dies. Curtain close. End film. Leave cinema feeling depressed and nauseated.

While Portman did give a stellar performance, and while Aronofsky did an effective job of getting the audience to feel as freaked out and confused as Portman’s character about what is real or not, there are some reasons why I REALLY DID NOT appreciate this film.

1. Gratuitously violent. The film is majourously gruesome with scenes of Portman imagining (or does she actually do it?) ripping her own fingernails out, peeling strips of skin from her arms and scratching the skin from her back. While this is not necessarily bad, it lent the film a horror-element which detracted from the psychological tension which was a lot more effective. The gory bits seemed thrown in to add some shock-factor, but were never really explored. At best they seemed a metaphor for the way that ballet/neuroticism was ripping her to shreds, (which in itself isn’t great as it reduces ballet to an awful metaphor, and fails to acknowledge the complexity around why people begin self-harming in the first place) and at worst, a cheap and nasty way of making a psychological thriller just that extra bit more nightmarish.

2. Based on a bunch of clichés. Portman’s “issues” that I mentioned earlier seem really extreme, and at the same time underdeveloped. Her eating disorder and relationship with her mother are not really investigated and the film seems to presume that the audience will fill this underdevelopment with stereotypes about the ballet industry. Plus – the misogynist ballet director, the sexy ballet-rival and the bitter-ex-prima-ballerina are worn out tropes that we have seen a gazillion times before. Plus, when Portman starts delving into her “dark side”, she does it to the max – goes out gets wasted, takes drugs, sleeps with some dude in the toilets, then has lesbian fantasy about rival-ballerina. I mean, what??!? It’s like they took every deviant act they could imagine and had her do it one night. (Plus, the positioning of her lesbian fantasy with the attractive rival as deviant seemed a) a failure to engage with gay relationships meaningfully and b) a cheap excuse to get attractive actresses naked).

How does such a pretty bird inspire such dread?

3. Glorifies suicide and offers no hope. While the film is clearly a tragedy, it offers NO HOPE. There is no empathy in the portrayal of Portman’s character, no pity for her plight: it basically says, if you’re crazy, there's no way out, you’ll wreck your own life and everyone else’s. Then she gets applauded as she kills herself – as if her real life death makes her great performance worth it. There is no questioning of how to deal with issues, and, due to all the clichés, no real accounting for why she might be the way she is. The film seems to blame ballet for all that goes wrong – but also seems to blame her own circumstances. Even the scenes of the actual dancing are limited, which means the audience don’t really get a sense of why Portman’s character would have invested so much of herself in it. Is it coz she wants fame? Money? Because she loves dancing? We don’t know.

Aronofsky is the master of gore and shock-factor, and though I never want to watch Requiem For a Dream again and wish I could erase most of it from my mind, at least that film demonstrated the consequences of a drug-lifestyle, how consumerism and capitalism destroy lives beyond repair, and the rampant sexism still occurring in a so-called post-feminist world. Black Swan, however, is problematic because it sets itself up to be a ballet film, but one that dishonours the ballet tradtion by filling it with a bunch of clichés; it sets itself up to be a psychological thriller, but  detracts from its tension with its schlock-horror-ness; it sets itself up to be a portrayal of mental illness, but portrays such illness unsympathetically with no real accounting for its cause or consequence. Apparently though, everyone else in the world loves it and it's raking in billions of box office dollars by the day. 

In any case, just to drag feminism into the mix, at least Portman has noted that it was unusual for a man to direct a film centering on female psychology, and that having more female Hollywood directors is something the industry we should aspire to. Read interview here.

what the world gave back

So my last post WORKED. ie, the world heard my cries and responded by getting all my friends and family to send totally awesome amazing stuff in the post. Check out the following, which arrived during the VERY WEEK after I sent the universe a youtube clip of Buffy whinging. I recommend trying it at home!

Batman singlet.

boutique dark knight.

massive james dean.

Even massiver JA.

ROBOT necklace. JaydusBoBaydus has one the same but in reverse colours. Aww.

A surprise gift from a friend! the second in lewis' scifi trilogy. ahhsome.

Uma, Wayne, Mariah and Cormac. Does life get better. All in a package from my Dad.

Some gifts which arrived a bit earlier for xmas, but were so awesome I needed to put them up!

beautiful melbourne notebook - Another suprise gift from a gf in Oz. BEST!

Mum saw this and "thought of me." Do I have the best mum or what!

Dexter Bobble from my Bro.

Not to mention all the letters, emails, skype calls and love that the rest of my family and friends have sent. Feeling lots of Aussie love in Edinburgh right now - HEARTS RIGHT BACK AT YOU!!!

GIVE ME SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT

So because watching so much TV lately has totally sucked the will to live from my brain and also made me feel totes crap about myself (THAT’S RIGHT, the difference between Jtul and a Stanford student is that they don’t binge out on supermarket  apple crumbles and watch whole seasons of bad CWB tv shows in one sitting) I am taking a month off watching ANYTHING. Admittedly I forgot this the last few nights and made my way through 2 eps of the BBC Pride and Prej. But who can feel guilty about breaking a TV ban when Darcy is there to glare and saunter around looking arrogant and amaaazing!

The supernaturalz are hitched.

Moral is I’ve been trying to procrastinate all day by blogging but have NOTHING TO SAY. Which is lame coz I’ve been reading my butt off in lieu of TV binging so I should have something literary to say about all that but I can’t because all my literature magic got used up today writing bad paragraphs about the narcissism of American culture in 1980s Knoxville.

The. Best. So hardcore in leather jckt! 

So whatevs – I could default and write about the Supernatural boys but I think that’s bad for a number of reasons including a) its not good to obsess over famous married people but more importantly b) as if they truly compare to Rupert Giles from BTVS. (That’s right folks, MR FLIPPIN GILES, the baddest librarian of all time who also turned out to be an unlikely father figure, a likely magic rehab sponsor, a gay rights advocate and evil-fighting fiend. It’s interesting to note his development over the 7 seasons of the Buff, from Englishy-stuttery guy in S1, to turtle-necked-slightly-cooler-has-gf-and-plays-acoustic phase, through to over all cool-magicky-returned-prodigal-father type deal at the end of s6. Didn’t we all get goosebumps when that happened?)

What I look like now. Almost.

And tell you what now my regrowth has been showing for way more than a year I’m looking more and more like Amber Benson aka Tara from Buffy every day. Which isn’t such a bad thing considering her amazing duet with Giles in Once More With Feeling, listen to it here, couldn’t find the clip! Most days I think Tara should’ve gone straight and had babies with Giles. But of course that would muck up a buttload of plotline up so I never wrote in about it. (BESIDES Amber is an AUTHOR NOW so we're bascially twins.)

Also, If anybody cares I’m on day 2 of this caffeine-free meat-free alcohol-free fast and my head feels like Giles just took it with a library book AND a cross bow so yeah, less coherent today than usual. So on top of being tv-less I also have the withdrawal symptoms from helaware AND have nothing but a carrot to eat (literally: my organic fruit and veg box didn’t get delivered though I have been going stir crazy waiting at HOME ALL DAY.)

SO THAT’S RIGHT: GIVE ME SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT WORLD. My head hurts but on the plus side my brother sent me a Dexter bobble head all the way from Australia so sometime the universe just sends it all back to you Oprah Style. (you know I don’t really believe that Oprah crap btw. But I do love how she asks every single interviewee if they’d made peace with God, including JK Rowling and Cormac McCarthy). Cereally, who can focus on their lit thesis when they could be writing about totally awesome supporting roles such as Rupert Giles from Buffy and can’t even have a cup of coffee? Now watch the clip and think of me!!! Apart from the whole dying and coming back to life thing of course!

BYEZ. 

PS. I really am a happy person :) I just wanted to write about Buffy but without coffee iz hard :(

      

how does peter pan grow up into uma thurman?

OK I’m writing this real quick coz I need to finish my PhD application TODAY however I just spent all morning trying to unlock a new racing cup on Mario Kart and now I feel dizzy from overdoing it on Rainbow Road. In any case hopefully writing a brief post will help bridge the intellectual gap between understanding Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism and avoiding being blown up by Bowser.

Jack hurts Peter by becoming Hook's "son"

I watched Hook for like the millionth time last night and of course it was amazing, who can get over Rufio’s midriff shirt and the cuteness of Maggie. But while the film has snappy dialogue, detailed sets, and hilarity (Robin Williams + Dustin Hoffman = deadly combo) it was full of BOYS. (Which of course makes sense, since Peter Pan is a boy, the Lost Boys are, well, boys, and Hook and Smee are men). The original female characters from Peter Pan (Wendy, Tigerlily) have been somewhat phased out/removed, in favour of Peter’s wife Moira and his daughter Maggie. But while Moira and Maggie play reasonably significant roles in the story, they are the morally stable and consistent ones: it is Moira who remains loyal to her family while Peter gets distracted by his working life, and Maggie who remains faithful to her family while Jack gets distracted by the attentions of Hook, who convinces Jack that Peter never really loved him.  Both father and son experience a crisis of ‘belonging’: once Peter realises that his “happy thought” truly is his son, he is able to fly and rescue his kids; once Jack understand he is his father’s happy thought, he apologises for betraying his father and allows himself to be saved. (At this stage, Maggie is of course already waiting to be saved and welcomes her renewed father back with open arms, just as Moira is waiting for her family to return from Neverland and welcomes her renewed husband with open arms). Marriage and family life become peaceful and whole again and father and son realise that the most important thing is loving and supporting each other.

The film is also about Captain Hook discerning his purpose (his purpose is to perpetually fight with Pan) as well as the lost boys, who are able to find a leader/father-figure in Pan again. I think the film does an effective and moving job of working through the issues associated with working through such crises, such as the need for humility and the importance of loving people in a way which puts them ahead of your own interests.

Watching Hook though, with its overwhelming amount of boys- hundreds of pirates, a large group of boy orphans, a man-hero with a conflicted son – made me ask the question: how many action/adventure films did I get to watch as a kid which featured girls? And I don’t mean just contained a token chick, but which actually portrayed the girl as the centre of the action. The films I loved as a kid were things like Hook, The Sandlot Kids, The Mighty Ducks, BMX Bandits, Aladdin, The Neverending Story, The Princess Bride, etc. Some of these contain strong female characters, such as the Connie and Tammy, the girl hockey players in the Mighty Ducks series. But other than that, not much. Others agree with me in the crisis of the female action hero - check out this Pajiba article for an argument that sounds a lot like mine, but provides an awesome and detailed list of the Best Female Action Heros! (lets just say that the fact the author puts Ripley from Alien and Sarah Connor from Terminator at the top of the list makes the author a LEGEND in my books).

I still wana be her when I grow up.

As a kid I didn’t really think about it that much, but as an adult (and potentially a parent one day) I would want my children, whether sons or daughters, to be exposed to films that portray male and female alike as able to participate in an action adventure. Not all little girls can faithfully sit there and await their parents to rescue them. Not all little girls should grow up to sit around at home waiting for their husband to “fix” everything (indeed: some little girls will not even get married, for a whole host of reasons). If girls can grow up to be as cool as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, they should know it from a young age and not have to wait till they’re old enough to see an R-rated film! (Meaning kids films could include broader narrative/gendered possibilities – lets not show all 3-year olds Kill Bill).

To be honest I think that at the moment, cinema is doing a reasonable job of it. Hermione in Harry Potter is great, and in those books gender has no bearing on how or whether you participate in the fight of good against evil. You also get Lindsay Lohan in the Herbie films, Alice in Wonderland (this is an oldie but a goodie) and films like Hotel for Dogs and The Spiderwick Chronicles where again, gender is not a type of set role. Even though movies like Pirates of the Caribbean and How to Train Your Dragon contain cool female pirates/dragon-fighters respectively, these girls are one out of at least 10 men: I wonder if we will ever get to a point where an action film could contain all women and not be read as a type of feminist statement, but rather just enjoyed as another possibility. I hope we get there in my lifetime.

Pixie Lit xmas special!

Let’s face it: every Christmas you end up at a friend’s house drinking wine and sniffing pine needles and someone says ‘Hey! Lets watch a MOVIE!” and every year every December I do the rounds of offending nearly everyone I know by admitting that Love Actually is ACTUALLY my least favourite film. Ever. Since this has happened thrice this December already, I thought I would put together my personal list of the goods and bads that xmas film and tv have yielded over the years, and why they suck or rock.

BEST

Home Alone 1 & 2 - Everyone agrees. It’s got humour, it’s got bad guys, it’s got an ingenious kid that makes all kids watching think that they to could potentially foil two robbers in their tracks by beating them over the head with paint cans, etc. Plus – Harry’s scream when Kevin puts his brother’s tarantula on Harry’s face is potentially the best and funniest scream in the cinematic history.

A Muppet Christmas Carol - yes, I cry every time Tiny Tim speaks. Yes, the though of Kermit and Miss Piggy making babies is scary. But what could be better than Charles Dickens as a Muppet musical? It’s so cute and hilarious! Even the vegetables are scared of Scrooge!

Cute as pie!

To Grandmother’s House We Go - a lesser known and more controversial contender, this is the only Olsen Twins film I’ve ever seen. But I watched it every year as a kid, and I think it’s quite important because it means my Olsen twin memories are happy and fun and full of reindeers and fairy floss (as opposed to scandal, eating disorders, bad fashion sense, bad films, etc. Though Jared Padalecki starred in one of their later movies…awesome.)

Best. Kiss. Ever.

The Office Christmas Specials – portrays my favourite onscreen romance of ALL TIME (yes, I love it even more than Buffy and Angel, more than Simba and Nala, more than Leia and Han, more than me and a young Marlon Brando, which granted never happened ‘onscreen’): that of Dawn and Tim finally getting together. I cry every time I think of her opening her paint set in the car (in fact I’m welling up just thinking about it...)

A Mom For Christmas – Any tele-movie about a mannequin coming to life played by Olivia Newton John and being supermom and accidentally burning a house down deserves to be here no questions asked.

Santa Claus - And though I haven’t actually seen it, this looks incredible. A 1950s Mexican film about Santa fighting demons from space! Read summary here!

WORST

Dear Best Friend: you're booted if you try this.

Love Actually - apart from Alan Rickman who is great in anything (but best as Snape) and Colin Firth (also great in anything, but the GREATEST as Darcy) this films sends a terrible message! In fact Alan and Colin give terrible messages too even though I love them! What, love is anything you make it? Love is all around, in the affairs, and the sleeping around, and even though Colin Firth is amazing as if his part of the storyline would EVER happen! Talk about giving people unrealistic expectations! And Kiera Knightly’s husband’s best friend telling her he loves her AFTER she’s married? Inappropriate!  My best friend BETTER NOT PULL THE SAME STUNT or they won’t have a best friend anymore! GAHHH! And as if the little boy at the end would actually make through the airport in time to meet that girl! And as if a girl like that would ever kiss a guy like him! I’m sorry but it’s true! Laura Linney is the only person in the film who characterises love as being self-sacrificial when she gives up hooking up with the dude she likes in order to look after her brother, but even then the audience is left feeling like she got jibbed. Whatever happened to love being about the other person? About caring for someone in spite of yourself? For taking joy in serving another person? DIDN’T HAPPEN IN THIS FILM! PLUS EVERYONE IS SO FREAKING ANNOYING except Emma Thompson she’s quite good although she gets TOTALLY SCREWED OVER by her husband. LAME. Here endeth the rant.

Miracle on 34th Street - I could go on and on about this one as well but let me keep it brief: the conclusion of the film is basically that we should believe in Santa (and not just believe in him, but have it ruled in court that he exists) because “What’s worse? A lie that brings a smile? Or a truth that sheds a tear?” That’s right kids. It best to LIE to KEEP PEOPLE HAPPY. Don’t go near the TRUTH in case it UPSETS SOMEONE!!!

Home Alone 3 - Um…Macauley Culkin was in rehab (and was like 18 years old) at this stage, and since the largest fan demographic of the first two films were also like 18 years old (some too in rehab) at this stage I’m not quite sure who this sequel was trying to reach.

The so-called hierarchy of attractivness. A bad xmas msg!

The Holiday - Admitting I don’t love this film earns me more death stares than Love Actually. It’s not coz I don’t like the storyline (though of course it’s totally unrealistic. I have also already complained about Jude Law’s bad fake tan) it’s because what’s with ‘the hot’ couple and the ‘not’ couple? As if meeting the man of your dreams also equals meeting someone equally as attractive as you. Personally, I find Kate Winslet and Jack Black way more attractive than Jude and Cam-Cam, but please! It’s shameless!

Die Hard 2 – even though Die Hard is one of my favourite films and not strictly about Christmas, it does take place on Christmas Eve and is responsible for my fear of flying. Coz, what if some looney mucks up the instruments and my pilot misjudges the distance to landing and Bruce Willis isn’t there to light a cigarette and blow the looney up. 

Lets finish up with the greatest xmas special ever - Star Wars Happy Life Day. Keep an eye out for the baby wookie!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Azzled and Padazzled

I know I recently wrote about character Dean Winchester from Supernatural but seriously the man (and his brother Sam) deserve a post all to themselves. Really they deserve a whole blog EACH – ten blogs each – nay, the whole internet­ – but I have neither time nor skills to implement this.

Jared and Jensen

The two fictional fighters of fantastical crime (otherwise known as Jensen “Robobabe” Ackles and Jared “Too Chiseled To Be True” Padalecki) are actually the sole selling point of the show. It’s almost embarrassing at times, with the occasional (and superfluous) topless shot, manly rescuing and action, and the mandatory 5-minute bromance scene at the end of each episode where the boys share some emotional issue with each other, pat each other on the back, crack open a beer and then drive away in their (gorgeous) Impala. Sometimes I get the impression that the producers tripped over some screenplay that was on the floor (because it had fallen out of the trash) but saw the cost-benefit ratio in hiring ridiculously good-looking actors to attract a large female audience, and saving money by not having to hire a writer.

And really, apart from the boys’ appearance, I’m not sure how the CW Network gets away with such a show - even though I also was totally sucked in (and DVDs are really cheaps in the UK, got a whole season for less that 10 quid! whoo!). The premise of the show is two brothers fight all sorts of evil, ostensibly to protect the world. But really, the evil-fighting bit is just a backdrop to a hopelessly male-centric narrative, about men in all sorts of personal crises resolving their issues with and through other men. This in itself is not a bad thing, by the way. But rather than focusing on solving mysteries or using their wit to get out of tricky situations (like MacGyver) Supernatural is about two pretty Hollywood boys pretending to be hardcore (they drive an old impala, listen to Metallica and Black Sabbath, and drink beer all the time) having some sort of brotherly argument about family, self-esteem or their future together as a family, and then resolving it at the end in aforementioned bromance moment (and these moments are totally endearing and mostly very well acted). They have male role-models only: at first, their father, who they spend the first season searching for, and later Bobby, another hunter of evil who helps them along the way. (And even later, Castiel, an angel). For 5 seasons that’s pretty much what you get.

Sam and Dean have a man-to-man in the graveyard

While this male-centricity is sometimes interesting and develops (sort of) over the seasons, the women are not portrayed so favorably. Female characters are pretty much absent – unless they are evil (like the demon Ruby) being rescued (like a girl in nearly every episode) or being kissed/slept with (like a girl in nearly every other episode). It’s quite difficult to articulate female roles in this show without positioning them as passive – ie girls were rescued; girls were killed; girls were kissed. It’s troubling that women have so little agency in this world. Even Ruby, the demon, is not really a girl – the demon just possesses girls’ bodies, so the female body becomes a shell to be inhabited and used by some evil external force. Seriously: didn’t we get over these kinds of narratives in like the 19^th century??!?

Despite all this – here’s the stumper: the viewers are mostly teen and adult females (though, to be fair, the stats show lots of guys watch it too). Of course, this is because the good-lookingness of Dean and Sam is so great it outweighs any desire to analyse the gendered power structure presented by the destabilised sons, absent fathers, substitute male role-models and passive women in the show. Furthermore, their brotherly love is so exclusive that it almost repudiates female voyeurs even as it draws them in, making girl viewers believe that if they were the one to meet Dean and Sam, they really could win the heart of a Winchester.

So in a way…Supernatural provides something quite special for women which isn’t seen very often. They to feel an attachment to the brothers (you really do feel you know them like sooooo intimately after all the bromance moments) they get to experience foreclosed desire – and the unattainability of the boys, due to their brotherly exclusiveness, makes the desire all the sweeter (or something like that). Plus the eye candy, I guess. Anyway, it’s a show for women, much like the trashy 18^th and 19^th century gothic novels which were primarily read by women and contained an abundance of male characters, sexy demons, evil woman, etc. And while I may disagree with the objectifying aspects (of men AND women) of the show, I can't devalue the fact that at least it works for women in a way some other shows don't.

This all kind of freaks me out a bit - not because of its gender representation in the show but because I like it in spite of its gender representation.  Furthermore, I liked a show that in some ways objectifies men; and as someone always ranting about how bad it is to objectify women, this troubles me of course! So much so that I'm having a little break in the middle of season 4 till I get over it all and the desire to find out what happens outweighs my moral obligation to the advocacy of gender equality. You know what I'm sayin'?? (So NO SPOILERS PLEASE I will watch it again someday! I hear the show becomes more self-reflexive and aware of it's hilarity in the later seasons...)

re-filming cowboys

I nearly had a heart attack after opening my blog this morning and thinking I hadn't written about violence for like a whole post (but of course I had: the picture of Renee Zellweger holding a gun alerted me to this.) I think it was that I hadn't written about actual full-on crime violence, cowboys or Buffy for like a whole post.

BUT thankfully over the weekend I watched Once Upon A Time in the West, a 1968 film directed by the king of spaghetti westerns, Sergio Leone. Like most of his films, I spent the first hour trying to work out which cowboy was which (there were three main ones, each with their lackeys, and they all look kind of the same and sound the same and shoot people, and some of them were pretending to be other ones. So it's this whole confusing thing).

But it was such a joy to watch, for three main reasons:

1. The cinematography. waahhh there just aren't words. It was beautiful: not just because of the amazing desert landscape, but also the facial-close ups (kind of making the face a landscape to written onto as well). For example:

The cowboys always fill the screen, even if, like the second screenshot above, the desert actually takes up more space. Sergio Leone is known as one of the first directors to make 'films-about-films' and Once Upon a Time in the West is a type of meta-western, simultaneously an homage to, and reworking of, the American western TV shows that were very popular in the early 60s. That every shot seems overwhelmed by men - and men who almost all die - perhaps signifies the impossibility of American TV cowboy ideology (the glorification of the frontier, expansion, violence, etc) actually surviving (or perhaps that Leone thought it should be 'killed off').

2. The story line. SO COMPLEX! I mean seriously, it was almost unnecessarily full of red herrings. But this was the great thing about it - it was not predictable at all and defied the Western fomulae that had, till this point, been assumed. For example, the three cowboys in the opening scene (shown in the bottom right screenshot above) are actually actors that have previously been cast as successfully violent cowboys in early American Westerns. They all get shot within the first five minutes and you realise: this film is about breaking down the stereotype. These men that who have committed violence in the name of America will be brought down. Ironically, it is another lone, American cowboy who shoots them. Here we see the cowboy at once vilified and exonerated (but I haven't thought about this enough to provide an interpretation yet).
          Leone provides a plethora of characters (the three cowboys - Harmonica, Frank and Cheyenne, a robber-baron, a young beautiful widow, and some other side characters) to mix and intermingle so many typical western storylines that it's hard to know what the film was actually about, or to articulate its plot. But I think this was intentional. Leone seems to have brought all these familiar storylines together in a way that is quite difficult to interpret, so that any reigning, America-focused narrative becomes not only impossible to read, but in fact absent.

Cardinale as Jill McBain

3. Claudia Cardinale (the actress who played the young gorgeous widow, Jill McBain). What a ROBOBABE! She is considered the first so-called "complex" female character in a Western: she arrives in town, a young wife, to find her husband and his children shot by Frank, who wants the McBain land. All three cowboys visit her a various times to try and find what was so valuable about the property (which, as it turns out, was the fact it had water on it and was right by the railway). She relates to these cowboys without fear, claiming to not even fear rape, because even if all the men had their way with her, she wouldn't be dead. Later, when Frank does try to rape her, she sleeps with him willingly so as not to be killed. She is then revealed to be a prostitute from New Orleans who fell in love with the land-owner McBain and decided to move to his ranch. The fact she is a prostitute explains her lack of fear about putting forth her body in order to survive, but complicates her role as lady-of-the-house. She is a whore who is respected by the cowboys simply because she is beautiful, and sexually beautiful. The fact she is prostitute means she is not the type of untouchable, Southern Belle that Nicole Kidman was in Cold Mountain, but an accessible woman whose beauty and body is available to men.
          Cheyenne, at the end of the film, says to her: "You know what? If I was you, I'd go down there and give those boys a drink. Can't imagine how happy it makes a man to see a woman like you. Just to look at her. And if one of them should pat your behind, just make believe it's nothing. They earned it." I mean, excuse me? I know, I know, it was '68 and '70 feminism hadn't quite made headways but STILL! "They earned it?" Who writes that? And the thing is, Jill does walk contentedly out into the midst of the workmen, bringing them water, like some sort of eternal female figure, a whore providing life-giving nourishment. Jill's character may have been complex but her objectification is portrayed as natural, and in fact, somehow good and life-giving. Gross. But, I guess women in Westerns had to start somewhere, right?

There are so many other great things about the film - the soundtrack, for one. Also it's clear Tarantino has watched this film about a gazillion times, the music, the cowboys, the stand-offs, the deliberate dialogue have pretty much just been inserted into the Kill Bills. But everyone should watch Once Upon a Time in the West. It will make everyone want to move to California and everyone want to marry a cowboy (even if you're a man. Trust me they're amazing).

Cold Mountain: not as cold as edinburgh.

Ok so normally I can’t stand Jude Law (ESPECIALLY in The Holiday, I mean WHAT is the with the fake tan? You live in England, and it’s SNOWING. And you’re cast as Kate Winslet’s BROTHER. In what way is a tan convincing?) But I did kind of warm to him in Cold Mountain, I think it was the fact he barely spoke a word, and played very convincingly the social awkwardness that comes with professing your love to someone before you know them properly, then being re-united with them years later after a war and wondering how to act and treat them. Which, basically, is the story of Ada (Nicole Kidman) and Inman (Jude Law) in Cold Mountain.

Renee as Ruby

What I liked even more than Jude Law was the relationship between Ada and the girl who comes to help her manage her farm once her father’s died and Inman has gone to war. The girl is Ruby, played by Renee Zellweger, a young girl abandoned by her father who knows everything there is to know about growing crops, building fences, baking pies, and finding her way around the nearby mountains. When Ruby first arrives, she finds Ada dying of starvation due to her inability to do anything (including grow food), inability to make money (she’s a ‘lady,’ she doesn't work!) and her pride, which means she is too ashamed to continue relying on other’s charity. As Ada cries when Ruby first arrives,

I can talk about farming in Latin. I can read French. I can lace up a corset, God knows. I can name the principal rivers in Europe, just don't ask me to name one stream in this county! I can embroider but I can't darn! I can arrange cut flowers but I can't grow them!

But within a few short months, Ruby has transformed Ada from profoundly useless Southern Belle to hardy, herb-growing, fence-building, pie-baking, not-starving lady-now-mountain-girl. Ada can repay her neighbours’ charity by cooking them food. She can protect her and Ruby’s friends, (deserters from the army) with a shotgun that she has learnt to shoot. In losing her role as lady, Ada gains the ability to survive as a woman dependent only on herself and other women.

What is most interesting about this transformation is that Ada arrives in Cold Mountain as the  traditional, beautiful Southern Belle – but one physically trapped by this position, not just by her corset, but by her lack of skills which force her into poverty once she is away from the money and society of men. It is only in shunning her role as lady that Ada is able to regain pride in herself, can participate in social transaction without shame (by baking food for her neighbours as payment) and gains a friend. This does come at some cost, though – for while her father’s death, a symbolic death of the patriarch, creates the space for Ruby to enter the father’s house and transform his daughter, Ada still experiences grief at this loss. She must also sell her beloved piano – the one thing of her old life that she loves and is good at – to have enough money to survive one particularly cold winter.

The doomed couple.

The other main cost is her loss of Inman. She does remain dependent on his memory and the possibility he will return, to get through difficult times. Initially, I felt uncomfortable about this because I felt it undermined the feminine independence she develops with Ruby. However, when Inman does finally return, years down the track, it’s actually not too clichéd. They don’t run to each other and make out. She nearly shoots him, then realizes who it is, and then they have an awkward conversation about how strange it is too see each other. (Then of course they get over it, hook up overnight in a mountain shack, and then he gets shot the following day protecting them from the City Guard. And of course she got pregnant from the one night they spent together and it’s the whole romantically tragic thing. But anyway).

While this ending was a bit predictable and attempted to pull every heartstring the audience had (admittedly, I cried LOTS) it does point to something quite profound: Inman’s return without death was actually an impossibility. This type of transformed, independent woman cannot exist with the providing husband on her arm. Ruby, on the other hand, who grew up with survival skills and who effectively taught herself  independence, can get married (and does). Ada’s narrative seems suggest that there is something about the act of shedding an old feminine role, or the act of removing a stereotype cast upon you, which inevitably involves loss, and probably some sort of masculine loss. It is this loss which catalyses Ada's transformation. Hence, Inman needs to die for Ada to remain who she has become, while Ruby can marry and have children because she has not has to “shed” anything: she is a type of independent woman who can choose a man without needing to revert to dependence on him.

Or something like that, anyway. Maybe I’ve been WAAAAY too sucked in by Hollywood, but as you know, I always am! Because it’s FREAKING COLD in Edinburgh right, and much nicer to stay inside watching and fantasizing about Hollywood that go outside in the rain. (But I still love Edinburgh. Don’t get me wrong).