On Pixels, Race and Gender in Hollywood

It has been with a depressing familiarity that Hollywood has got itself in a mess this Oscar season about the lack of racial diversity in its nominees. Not only is this the second year without any non-white nominees for the key awards, it smacks of the same attitudes present since Hattie McDaniel accepted her Oscar in a Whites Only hotel for a film that painted slavery as not that bad and a nice backdrop to the problems of wealthy white people. Meanwhile the argument about equal pay for women goes on, spearheaded by Jennifer Lawrence, and the startling lack of  female directors is still to be noted (it’s worth listening to this excellent interview with Lexi Alexender on the topic) while male directors with a history of failures keep getting work.

All this came together in my mind while watching the execrable Pixels directed by journeyman Chris Columbus who has had some success (most notably with the first two, most boring, Harry Potters, Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire) and some sizable flops (the $100 million Bicentennial Man being the most offensive). That Columbus gets a budget of $88 million for this dross when directors like Kathryn Bigelow and Mary Harron have barely made any films in the past 10 years shows how much the gender problem lingers throughout the Hollywood system. God knows how much Adam Sandler got for his lazy performance, but I’ve no doubt he probably made double the money that Michelle Monaghan received. Worse still this film puts a capable actress through the indignity of playing an horrific male-fantasy of rebound MILF; the sort of woman who goes for men who basically harass her when she’s in a fragile emotional state. Watch as Sandler, playing a TV repair guy, literally says “Wow” as she enters and then proceeds to explain that he’s shocked that any man would leave her because she’s so hot! Instead of, like a real person, phoning his boss and getting him sacked, she tolerates this eventually deciding that the schlub has potential. The rest of the film is lazy as hell, and continues to demean women throughout, seeing them exclusively as the reward for male effort – including one character having a threesome arranged for him by the President because he helped save the world. In a kids movie. It’s also an incredibly white film, with non-white characters limited to support (in fact the only two significant non-whites, both male, need to be rescued by our white heroes in the film’s tepid denouement). The only engaging character in the film is Q*bert, an animated sidekick – and even he is transformed into a sexy-hot-female-warrior so one hero can live his weird cyber-sex fantasies. Did I mention it’s, y’know, for kids?

Generally considered as a flop Pixels managed to drag in $244 million globally, meaning it probably covered it’s costs. But it stands as an excellent expression of all that’s wrong with Hollywood – a story conceived around a cool idea, but one that no-one thought through; misogyny from the get go (the cast has two characters called Cyber Chick #1, and Cyber Chick #2); lack of diversity; and a horrible view of its audience.

Yes the Oscars are an affront. Yes the pay-gap is wrong. But the problem will not be solved by a few awards, or a few pay rises. Until it hits the execs who put this tripe together, who treat their audience as a bunch of idiots with the emotional intelligence of zero, nothing changes. Please stop spending your money on this stuff – seek out the work of female directors, make an effort to watch films made by, and for, diverse people. Otherwise there’s another 100 years of this.

Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984)

Warning: Spoilers!

Having scandalized a nation with the excellent Dressed to Kill (1980)  De Palma planned to go one better with his next Body Double, this time re-mixing Vertigo and Rear Window and then adding some madness that’s all his own. It’s more polished than its predecessor, but lacks the visceral shocks, although much is made up by the gleeful deconstruction of male spectatorship in a film in which a crime is solved because the protagonist (Craig Wasson as a loser B-Movie actor) surfs porn channels at night. The twist is so ludicrous it trumps all other elements in this thriller that once again throws the audience a dirty look and suggest that watching films might just be a bit perverted.

Wasson is Jake Scully an actor fired from a terrible vampire film because he suffers from claustrophobia. He goes home and finds his wife in bed with another man (worse than that, he makes her “Glow”). A new friend (Gregg Henry) offers him a place to stay, in what must be the most 1980s location ever, the Ultramodern Chemosphere complete with rotating bed and a telescope that spies on the hot woman dancing opposite. Mix in a mysterious Native American TV engineer and a murder plot soon hatches in which, in the least subtly phallic way imaginable, a woman is killed by a very large drill. Haunted by this woman Jake cracks up, watches porn and spies Melanie Griffith (as porn-star Holly Body) who has some familiar dance moves. Jake, being a bit mad, decides the best way to follow up his observation is to star in a porn-film opposite Holly, a scene which includes Frankie Goes to Hollywood singing their subtle anthem Relax (and I mean the actual band turns up, not just the song).

On paper nothing should work about this film. The protagonist is unlikable, the plot hinges on ludicrous behavior and coincidences and the finale involves a dog misidentifying his owner, but the whole is done with such (heavily 1980s) style and verve that it works, dashing though its running time at breakneck speed. It also makes some neat observations about the male audience, and the differences between being a Peeping Tom and watching porn. Just as in Dressed to Kill women are not represented well, there are only two really, but the men are far worse: a bunch of selfish, obsessive voyeurs. And De Palma’s willingness to throw in every thriller trick makes it hypnotic watching.

Male Anxiety and The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995)

Warning: Spoilers! 

The Usual Suspects is an excellent film, correctly celebrated for its non-linear structure and unreliable narrator. But it’s also a fascinating look at male anxiety in the way the characters are consistently calling into question each others’ sexuality and masculinity. As the Suspects themselves jockey to out-man each other Verbal Kint/Keyser Soze looks on showing the virtue of thought and ambiguity amid the cock-fights. It’s an anxiety that seems increasingly pervasive in male-culture, finding angry expression in communities such as Red Pill or in humorous social comment in #masculinitysofragile?.  It’s with great prescience that Chris McQuarrie’s script for The Usual Suspects explores this.

Throughout the film the threat of loss of masculinity is ever present, with the possibility of passivity (especially in the sense of sexual penetration) seen as the greatest fear. Not so much death for McManus, Hockney, Fenster and Keaton but buggery as the ultimate humiliation. Their strength is seen in terms of this, their unwillingness to “bend over for anybody” in Kint’s terms. They tease and threaten each other with penetration (Fenster to Hockney “Hey lover boy, you wanna piece?”, McManus to Hockney “You wanna dance with a man for a change?”) When Keaton is arrested he’s told he’s not a business man, “From now on, you’re in the gettin’-fucked-by-us business.” Bending over, being fucked is the greatest threat. Is it any wonder these men grip their guns so tightly throughout the film? This constant reassurance of their masculinity, the acceptable cinematic phallus helps define, and protect them

Except that it doesn’t. They are all undone by the most passive one of them all. One who talks rather than acts, who hurts and plans. Is it any coincidence that Verbal states that “I’ll probably shit blood tonight” having been punched by Keaton, revealing his own penetrability (unsurprisingly anal). Agent Kujan tries to dominate him mentally and physically, but its his own status as a “cripple” and a “gimp” (which means both disabled and a sexual submissive) that give him an advantage. It’s beyond these men, and their physical anxiety, to understand that they can be controlled by talk, not physicality, that passivity can be controlling.

Fundamentally this is the fear of the feminine (passive, talking, penetrated) that has taken root in our culture since the Victorian era – it’s created a binary opposition where attitudes and qualities accrue on either side and slippage isn’t possible. It’s beyond anyone in the film to see that Verbal Kint could move across boundaries, have qualities from either groups. It’s a division especially riven into US culture from the Western in which masculinity is held superior for its silence, action and ruggedness, with women connected to the home and hearth but also the emasculating forces of civilization.

Oddly it reminds of the classical split between Rome and Greece, and the USA is often compared to Rome. The Greeks had Odysseus praised for his wiles and planning, his cunning and speech. For the Romans he became Ulysses a treacherous man, whose deceit was an un-Roman quality. It may not be un-linked that the Greeks were more interested in sex between men. We don’t know whether Alexander the Great was a top, but it’s clear in the Illiad that Achilles was a bottom.

Classical diversions aside The Usual Suspects suggests the current growing anxiety in some men about their gender – that any quality that aligns them with women/homosexuality is to be driven away. Ironically, this leads to their downfall. Turns out their masculinity is fragile, rather like a Kobayashi mug.

The November Man, Motivation and Women In Refridgerators

The November Man is overall a silly film, a later entry into the Liam Neeson/Taken inspired Geri-Action series. This time Pierce Brosnan dusts off his suits and gets to play a retired spy dragged out of retirement, etc. Nothing special, but a reasonably well put together film (despite Brosnan’s rather alarming action-gurn). What is of note, and what really got my back up, was the insistence, in such a throw-away film, to depict a rape against the main female character (played by Olga Kurylenko, another Bond alumnus who plays a very similar character in Quantum of Solace). I don’t actually mind the fact that her character is raped – it makes sense – but what got to me was the insistence on seeing it – in POV. Not much  mind, but enough. And it got me thinking. Why isn’t it enough for us to know she was raped? Why then later does this character have to suffer a flash back that leaves her useless and unable to avenge herself (you know – so the guys can do the killing)? Why does her whole character have to be defined this way?

Now The November Man is throw away, I doubt we’ll care about it in 5 minutes. But we will care about the preponderance of women being raped in film, and the consistent use of rape as the way to torture, threaten, and emotionally scare women. Once again women’s sexual “virtue” becomes a dominant aspect of their character. How they react, how they’re scarred, how they recover becomes part of the continuing moral grading of women based on sexual morality (and how men have to come in and deal with it). The woman is inevitably passed from one man (bad) to another (good) – although both are violent and murder others. But hey I guess that’s just how men express love, and hate, and maybe hunger. By shooting people.

Does any of this matter and what does it have to do with refrigerators?  Women in Refrigerators is a website set up in 1999 to catalogue the various atrocities that happen to female characters in comics, started after a Green Lantern found his dead girlfriend in the aforesaid white good. And it’s an extensive list in which women are transformed from people to motivating factors, and of course the worse their death/rape/mutilation the greater the cathartic violence the hero gets to enact. This at a time when Hollywood is becoming more and more male-centered (check out this Variety report).  Maybe we need a Hollywood Women in Refrigerators? I think, however, that it would be so extensive so as to break the internet.

As long as we keep seeing women in terms of sexual virtue, in which their whole lives are defined by a sexual trauma that can only be redeemed by a “good” man we’re going to keep having wider social issues concerning real relations between men and women. As men we need to start objecting when women are reduced to this. And we need to start recognizing how it also de-humanizes us – in which we are reduced to vengeance machines carrying massive anxiety about sex and sexuality. Frankly it’s not very grown up.

In 1974 Laura Mulvey published her ideas on the male gaze, suggesting that Classical Hollywood reduces women to passive objects simultaneously desired and hated by a ‘male’ camera. Although Mulvey’s ideas are not perfect, and are deeply rooted in Oedipal silliness, her idea got traction because she was on to something  important that overall women are being used for plot motivation, from which male characters act out the male audience’s anxieties. Indeed, these days, women barely feature in Hollywood films (only 30% of speaking characters). Lots has been said about the harm this does to women. And quite right. But we should also consider the harm it does to men, in limiting our ideas about women. They become problems, not people. And if that’s all we see it becomes real. Picking on one representation is neither here nor there and The November Man doesn’t matter. But women, and men, do.

Nurse (Doug Aarniokoski, 2013)

This is a fun little B horror, enjoying the culturally ingrained fetishisms that surround the healthcare profession and stirring in its own happy brand of weird. The film follows Abby (Paz de la Huerta) who narrates the film in a Kill Bill style as she persues her quest to punish men that she judges are letting down their wives and families. Her murderous honey-trap develops however when she mentors new nurse Danni (Katrina Bowden), and develops a dangerous obsession.

A proper exploitation film full of nudity and violence Nurse is good fun if you don’t think too hard about it. Well shot and at times quite inventive it builds its elements of body horror steadily until a Hospital becomes covered in blood. Abby is a nice addition to the slasher villain roll-call, which really has too few women on it. I couldn’t quite decide if Paz de la Huerta’s performance was eccentric or just plain bad, but it was always entertaining and the film builds to a fun if decidedly OTT finale. Katrina Bowden does a good line in not-so-defenseless damsel and Judd Nelson (of the 1980s!) provides good support, with Kathleen Turner in a quick cameo (that voice is still to die for). Could do without the CGI blood – whatever happened to condoms filled with corn-syrup? – but for an hour and a half of cheap thrills you can’t go too wrong with this.

The Jaws Symposium – De Montfort University, 17 June 2015

Academic conferences can be a bit of a mixed bag. There’s the focus (does it have one), the speakers and, perhaps most importantly, the coffee. Well DMU, and in particular IQ Hunter, excelled themselves with the Jaws Symposium. By focusing on one film it ensured that the papers were relevant and that each panel made sense in itself, as well as for the wider day. It’s difficult, and unfair, to pick out specific speakers but I will mention that both key notes (Murray Pomerance and Nigel Morris) were very good and that a whole host of new ideas were thrown about – including some excellent myth busting about the film. Yes it’s important – but not always for the reasons we’re told in the text books. The highlight of the day was undoubtedly the Skype chat with Carl Gottlieb who gave some great background on the film and laid to rest a few more lingering myths, chiefly the idea that John Milius wrote the Indianapolis speech (he didn’t  – it was a combination of Gottlieb, Howard Sackler and Quint himself, Robert Shaw). He also, graciously, answered my query about whether being on the opposite sea-board to Hollywood allowed the film-makers an extra freedom (and the ability to get away with all the problems the production is famous for) – the simple answer was yes.

We heard about Jaws’ place in cinema history, the epiphenomena surrounding the film, links to childhood and sexuality, ideas on the masochistic process of cinema and much more. Also lunch was good. And it’s always great to hear Peter Kramer’s laugh. See you in another 40.

Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006)

This is a wonderful, fun, grown up film about sex, desire and what is (or isn’t) considered normal. On its release it gained some notoriety for the explicit sexual acts on display – but this is not hardcore pornography (no matter what Chris Tookey of the Daily Mail thinks).  Rather it’s a sweet exploration of one woman’s sexual frustration, and an acknowledgement that trust, openness, and self-knowledge are required for sexual fulfillment. Sure it may be idealized to an extent (mostly avoiding questions of STDs, etc) but it presents itself in an overtly playful manner (opening and closing with a cardboard model of New York). At times it’s very funny. When Hollywood struggles to represent anything vaguely grown-up about sex (and sometimes alarmingly placing sexual desire and objectification onto younger women – check out this Honest Trailer for Transformers 4) and women in their 30s are too old for men in their 50s (even when the woman is the wonderful Maggie Gyllenhaal)  any film that challenges this is welcome. They’re especially welcome when they are this much fun.

I wouldn’t suggest you watch it with your mother though. Or if you’re homophobic, transphobic, ageist, rascist or thinking that the gay marriage vote in Ireland is the worst thing to happen in the last 100 years.

Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980)

Spoilers!

I’ve never really got Brian De Palma. Of all the movie brats (Spielberg, Coppola, etc) he’s the one I’ve engaged with least, and he’s probably the least respectable in critical circles. Post The Untouchables  (1987) he became more mainstream, hitting blockbuster heights with Mission: Impossible (1996) but has tailed off since, with his most recent films gaining less attention and smaller releases. Maybe mainstream success was the end of him because Dressed to Kill is far more interesting than his blockbusters, reveling in sleaze and controversy, but also showing how good De Palma can be.

When released in 1980 Dressed to Kill was widely condemned by feminists and gay rights groups for its depiction of violence and transsexualism. All the women are subjected to serious violence and terror. Sexual difference was linked to violence. However 24 years distance and the film takes on a very different light, one in which men are repeatedly exposed and condemned. If anything this film shows us how women’s desire is continuously repressed and negated by society.

The opening of the film would be unheard of today, a long lingering set of shots on Angie Dickinson (49 at the time) in the shower fantasizing. It’s a moment that simultaneously acknowledges female desire, and suggests that women over 40 can be attractive and have a sex drive. In the cinema culture of today, where actresses are getting younger and disposed of by age 40, this seems unfathomable. It is alas all a dream for Angie, and the film cuts abruptly to the “wham, bam, thank-you ma’am” sexual practice of her husband. Angie fakes it, but her discontent is obvious to us. She visits her shrink, Michael Caine, and confesses her need to be desired. What follows is a wonderful, dreamlike, sequence in an art gallery where Angie pursues a man, and is pursued by him. The camera drifts along the corridor tracking her excitement and fear, as she follows him, and is followed. An amazing scene happens, again one that I can’t imagine would occur in today’s Hollywood, in which the man goes down on Angie in the back of a cab. The whole sequence, from gallery to cab, focuses on her pleasure and desire, and shows sex as something other than a penetrative act.

She awakes, happy. It can’t last of course. She discovers the man has VD and as she flies a woman brutally murders her in an elevator, with a cut-throat razor no-less. Here the film switches to Nancy Allen, a “Park-Avenue Whore”, who witnesses the murder (and whose John scarpers at the first sight of blood). As Nancy becomes a target, Michael Caine starts getting threatening answer-phone messages from a trans-gender patient and the plot deepens.

I can see where the critics came from in 1980, decrying the fact that the sex in the film is linked to violence and violation, and that in a world where the trans-community was struggling with it’s representation the inclusion of a possible trans-killer was not helpful. But today the film reads more as a critique of men, with both women used and attacked repeatedly. In a patriarchal world what other punishment for daring to embrace one’s sexual desire could there be for a women other than disease and death? The heroine, Nancy Allen, is blackmailed by the sleazy cop (a young Denis Franz) into doing her own detective work. While pursued by the killer she’s repeatedly hustled, and leered at by men, a status as object only re-enforced by her job (although the film shows how she uses information from customers to gain investment info). The only male figure in the film to emerge sympathetically is Angie’s son, a tech-obsessed geek depicted in a pre-adolescent phase. The film seems to say that the only man worth anything is the one who hasn’t yet woken up to sex. What is a male-to-female trans-sexual but the ultimate male possession of woman, body and soul?

Stylistically the film contains some wonderful shots and techniques, really building on De Palma’s reputation as a Hitchcock style film-maker. The use of mirrors is especially well done, and a sequence on a train platform, and then in the train, masterfully ratchets up the tension. Some of the acting is a bit rough around the edges but overall it’s top entertainment and an example of the type of film Hollywood rarely makes these days; a modestly budgeted thriller aimed at adults.

Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

Women present a problem to action movies. Fundamentally the action film is based on men, and on the domination of patriarchal concepts – an Alpha male beats the crap out of other, lesser, men and asserts his dominance. With his dominance comes the dominance of his values. A classic example of this is Die Hard in which John McClaine kills the effete Euro-villains, demonstrates his superiority over various yuppie types and gets his wife back (she realising that he is more important than her career). The very nature of an action heroine subverts this and this presents further issues. How strong can the woman be? Can she both be strong and retain a feminine allure (which is important, so it goes, for the audience to identify with)? If she has a man what can he be like (as the very notion of a male partner destabilises her power – in short if she’s getting screwed she’s not in charge)?

Few films have dealt with this successfully. Aliens and Terminator 2 are often held aloft as good examples, but it’s interesting to note that the motivation for Ripley and Connor is maternal. Are women only allowed to be violent if they’re saving their kids? In the ridiculous Tomb Raider films Lara Croft suggests a female action hero but she can’t escape traditional male/female roles either – in the first film she’d doing it all for Daddy. In neither film does she get the Guy, denied the reward of the Hero. Why? Because it destabilises gender roles. Strong women are a threat, in which case they must be denied happiness, otherwise the upset the norms of gender.

All of this occurred while watching Haywire which stars Gina Carano, a mixed martial arts fighter and former American Gladiator. The dynamics of her character, Mallory, are interesting. She fights only men and the men employ a variety of dirty tricks against her. Carano, who is an impressive fighter, uses her whole body and the environment to fight back. One fight, in a hotel room, almost becomes a parodic sex scene as Carano wraps her thighs around Michael Fassbinder’s head.  Anyway it all comes down to betrayal – a variety of powerful men (played by an impressive cast: Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor) have used Carano and she takes them to task. Bill Paxton pops up as her father. Interestingly there is no mother in this film – indeed Carano is the only woman in a film full of dubious men.

Despite some impressive fights the overall effect it rather boring and low key. Soderbergh throws in his usual stylistic flourishes and non-linear elements but the film would benefit from more bombast and less waffle.

The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar, 2011)

If Hitchcock was still making films I’m sure he would have made fascinating use of CCTV and surveillance technology. This thought occurred to me while watching Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In which has Hitchcockian undertones, with particular echoes of Rear Window and Vertigo. Antonio Banderas, re-united with Almodovar after many years, plays a skilled surgeon, an expert in skin grafts and cosmetic procedures, who’s haunted by the death of his wife in a fire some years ago. In his house, which doubles as a clinic, he keeps a patient on whom he’s testing a new synthetic skin. Who this patient is, and why they’re there, drives the plot into unexpected territory.

Beautifully shot in several sparse interiors a tale of obsession unfolds. Banderas is better here than in any of his American films, revealing a sinister side to the surgeon. Elena Anaya as his patient is also excellent – her eyes are almost always on the edge of tears, hinting at the shocking truth that has led her to be a prisoner/patient in Banderas’ home.

Engaging with ideas of revenge, sexuality, and identity The Skin I Live In unfolds in a surprising manner, Almodovar employing a non-linear structure, with multiple flashbacks, to gradually fill in the plot gaps. Caught somewhere between thriller and horror, it’s a film that slowly creeps up on you and gets under your own skin.