A Dyke A Broad #12 The Movie Edition
With reviews, notes on women in film. A disgruntled Christmas report. Plus a Kentubano New Year's.
Hello from Paris!
You need a dyke fix? My interview with Tristan Taormino on lesbians and the Avengers for her Sex Out Loud podcast is now available for listening!
It was definitely more fun than my Christmas Eve when the upstairs neighbor and her pops spent the day chipping away at the plaster on the wall above our bedroom, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang until it reverberated inside the whole apartment. They paused long enough to let us eat our homemade bûche in peace, but then put Bulgarian music on full blast for a couple hours, before switching to Christmas standards at bedtime, so I got to greet Christmas listening non-consensually to every version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Fucking Snowman by every washed-up pop singer that ever graced the face of the fucking earth.
I spent the night wondering how lethal a sharpened candy cane could be. Or if I should just whittle a spear out of a nice yew branch. For them. For me. Did it matter? Somebody had to die. They finally turned it off around 4 a.m.
Girls, Girls, Aliens, Girls, Girls
By and large, though, the long weekend wasn’t too bad. We spent most of it watching alien and space movies. Which fits as well as anything with virgin births, and other supra-natural events of the season, including the last minute conclusion of the Brexit talks.
First up was Arrival (2016), then Annihilation (2018). After that Gravity (2013), and as a palate cleanser, because the others were starting to give me strange dreams, the action movie Salt (2010) with an exceptional Angelina Jolie. I recommend them all. Though Gravity got on my nerves.
Spoiler alerts!
Many many spoilers.
Though most of them you could guess if you’ve ever watched a film in your life.
They all feature women, and only Gravity dips into stereotypes so hard it hurts. In the others, the women are remarkably just… themselves, fully engaged with the task at hand.
In the extraordinary film Arrival, actress Amy Adams is a linguist called in when a dozen of egglike spaceships land on earth, and the Americans need a de-coder for theirs. The mood is meditative rather than “action-packed”, though there’s still suspense. One of the things I liked is how we are allowed to see her confidence in her own skills and smarts, the satisfaction and joy she feels exercising her intelligence, even taking calculated physical risks when the men won’t. Which means she’s the one, in the end, who saves all their butts. (Of course).
Annihilation is moody and contemplative, too, even if there’s also a save-the-world aspect. And women are important here, as well. The whole crew which is sent into the mysterious, possibly alien, “shimmer” is composed of them, women of all ethnicities, with a dyke for good measure, who isn’t just there to butch the group up, but actually gets to hit on the newcomer played by Natalie Portman. Why not give it a try when they are all about to die on a suicide mission?
The sex of the group is dismissed in one passing line. ”An all-women crew?” Then the matter is dropped. Which allows them to get on with it, and be what they are, nerdy scientists. Or handy with a gun. Or wild with fear and paranoia. Or jaded and ready for death. Surviving mutated crocodiles and bears, each other, and a careless alien force changing everything.
I’m mischaracterizing them with my one-liners. Handy with a gun. Nerdy scientist. Though they are. But also more. I thought about it and decided it was mostly because they are allowed to think. Which means they are allowed to be still. (True of Arrival’s Amy Adams as well). And in that stillness, surrounded by the possibility of violence, you can see the tiny movements of inward intelligence on their faces. When almost always, women (and men, too, really, in their masculinity) never stop playing to the camera.
Even Angelina Jolie, in Salt, rejects caricature, which is tough because she has the most actiony role as a fugitive CIA agent, stuck in a succession of chase scenes, gun battles, hand-to-hand combat. She still refuses to look fierce, or satisfied, but is vulnerable. And human. Concentrated and intent, sometimes almost afraid. Her thinness is not a turn-on. She looks almost frail hanging onto the side of the truck. She runs and runs and runs and you can see her getting tired—unlike her role as the cartoonish Laura Croft Tomb Raider in which the smug video game heroine never gets tired. And she spends a lot of time acting with her tits. That was the Lara Croft gig, though. Bringing a video game heroine to life.
This isn’t to say we aren’t reminded they are women. Nurturers. Reproducers. Three of the main characters are, or were, or will be mothers. Mothers of daughters, no less. Most have romantic relationships with men. It would be too much to ask to let them just be single. But in these movies, motherhood gives them a kind of fullness, generosity, capability of human connection, without making them weak.
After Arrival and Annihilation, Gravity really annoyed me. In a nutshell, Sandra Bullock’s Dr. Stone is up in space to perform a hardware upgrade on a space probe. Things go horribly wrong, with people dying right and left. Her best chance to survive is a sort of escape pod, but then we learn that in training she kept crashing it. Apparently she’s competent enough to go into space, and do high-tech repairs, but too dumb to drive a shuttle. Ooopsie. Suddenly the whole set-up, with the amazing sound, and sublime special effects that was meant to be a meditation on loss and survival just turned into an elaborate lady driver gag.
Even worse, she was only saved because a dead guy appeared to her in a hallucination offering the key engineering tip for how to hack the damaged pod. Arghhhh!
On How the Patriarchy Poisons Our Brains
I’d say I could do better, but I’m having my doubts. I started work last month on a novel. And female characters are practically writing themselves. This is not a good thing. Because they insist on pursing their lips and being judgy. Or weeping dramatically. Screaming that horror movie scream. And delivering hackneyed lines that embody every gendered stereotype in every book I’ve ever read, or TV show I’ve ever seen.
Yeah, they keep mugging for the camera, and sooner or later there’ll be a showdown. It’s them or me.
I will try to dispose of them when we celebrate New Year’s the Kentucky-Cuban way.
New Year’s, The Kentubano Way
It starts on New Year’s Eve.
What you do if you’re Cuban, or hitched to one, is give your symbolic house a good symbolic scrub, and on the stroke of midnight, toss the bucket of “dirty” water out of your window embodying all the crap of the 365 days before, so you can start fresh.
At the same time, at midnight, you’re supposed to eat one grape for every strike of the clock. But I’ve never figured out how you’re supposed to toss the water and stuff your face with the grapes at the exact same time without choking to death. EMTs stand by.
New Year’s Day, the tradition in Southern states like my own Kentucky is to cook up a big pot of black-eyed peas (for luck), and a pot of greens (for money). Though this year I think I’ll turn the black-eyed peas into falafel, and make a slaw out of the greens.
We can use all the luck and all the money we can get.
In other news…
Fast food is nothing new. Archeologists unearthed a particularly well-preserved snack bar in Pompeii. On the menu, fried chicken, but not biscuits.
And…
Men who kill, or want to kill, women finally get some attention when they kill a bunch of men. Like in France last week when a POS, Frédérik Limol, killed three cops that were trying to save his girlfriend who’d climbed up on the roof to escape him. After killing the cops, the man succeeded in setting the house on fire, but not killing his partner, before he killed himself.
Unsurprising, the man’s ex-wife had filed several complaints against him for harassment including death threats, to the general indifference of the judiciary, who never pursued any charges. Now, she’s under police protection because a tiny group of neo-Nazis is celebrating Limol’s actions and accusing his ex-wife of wanting to destroy him.
And… to cheer things up a bit...
Let’s hear it for prodigies.
That’s it for this week. And this year. Here’s hoping 2021 brings salud, amor, dinero (health, love, money) to us all, and at least a little joy.
Almost optimistically yours,