The Second Awakening

It occurred to me this week, and not for the first time, that my therapist might raise an eyebrow toward my reading habits. Shortly after I began transition in earnest, she started suggesting women’s lit to me, as a way of starting the process of socialization. The first book she recommended was The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, which I had already read and enjoyed, though maybe not as much as she would have liked. She smiled approvingly and further recommended a book by Kris Radish, who I had not read. So a couple of days later, I picked up The Elegant Gathering of White Snows at the public library and started reading it right there. My public library has some mighty comfy reading chairs, so this was no hardship, really. I chose not to check it out. After about twenty pages, I decided that it just wasn’t for me. This happened again with the next writer she recommended, and eventually I realized that she and I were not going to see eye to eye on literary matters. I started heading her off at the pass by having a book with me every time I showed up at her office, usually something daunting and intellectual like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. It’s not that I don’t like women’s literature, or books by and about women, however you want to define it. Heavens, no. I mean, I named one of my dogs after Flannery O’Connor and my favorite writer of horror fiction is not H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen King, but Shirley Jackson. What seems to butt against my therapist’s suggestions is the fact that I do have fairly well-developed literary appetites, and some of those appetites are decidedly un-feminine.
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I’m a bit late to the party when it comes to The Kids Are All Right (2010), Lisa Cholodenko’s comedy of manners about a lesbian couple whose children seek out their sperm donor. It’s a droll movie that shades into painful drama with deceptive ease. It’s good. Very good. You should see it if you haven’t already. It’s a film that begs the question of why doesn’t Annette Bening have an Academy Award yet? All well and good. But it does raise some questions.

From my perspective, there are two elephants in the room in regards to this movie. First: For a decidedly queer movie from a queer filmmaker, there are surprisingly few queer people in front of the camera. As in none. Second: The plot twist that drives the second half of the movie, in which Julianne Moore’s character, Jules, has an affair with Paul, Mark Ruffalo’s character, is a cliché, and an obnoxious one at that. The movie actually does deal with both of these issues, but it’s debatable whether it deals with them successfully.

Taking them one at a time:

While I don’t demand that gay characters be played by gay actors, its galling to see an entirely straight cast playing gay characters in an era when Newsweek magazine is decrying the “fact” that gay actors can’t play straight characters (and why doesn’t this impediment flow the other way? Hmm?). The timing of the movie is unfortunate in this, and it’s compounded by the fact that Cholodenko is herself a lesbian and would presumably have no blinders on when it came to straightwashing the movie. It’s obvious that she’s aware of the problem because she comments on it directly in the text of the movie: When quizzed by their son about why they prefer gay male porn, Jules explains that in lesbian porn, the actresses are all played by straight women. “It’s so inauthentic,” she adds. This is probably the funniest line in the movie, given the casting, but it’s also kind of a bitter pill. On the other hand, the actors Cholodenko does have are so good that it suggests that there were no better choices available.

The second issue is more vexing, given the underlying patriarchal meme that all a lesbian needs to turn straight is a good fucking from the right man. Fortunately, this is demolished by the movie–Jules repudiates the idea that she is somehow straight and she repudiates Paul in the end, too–but should it have been raised in the first place? I don’t know. In the context of the movie, it does rise organically from this particular story and these particular characters. Jules is demonstrably having a mid-life crisis even before Paul shows up, and such people often do stupid things. This is compounded by the fact that some lesbian women actually DO occasionally have sex with men, even once they’re in touch with being lesbian, and this is NOT indicative of some latent heterosexuality (or even bisexuality), so the movie could claim some level of verisimilitude if it wanted. I just wonder if it couldn’t have explored Jules’s crisis in some other way. It might not have, given the film’s plot for Paul: he wants a family and he wants Jules and Nic’s family. This comes to a head when Nic rages at him that it’s HER family and he can bloody well go out and get his own. It’s a terrific moment, and it wouldn’t be possible without Jules’s dalliance with him.

In any event, it’s a lot to think about. Fortunately, the movie grounds all of this in a very closely observed depiction of Nic and Jules’s marriage, the details of which suggest that the movie as it actually plays probably could NOT have been made by a straight filmmaker. The way Jules and Nic behave with each other betrays too much knowledge of lesbian culture, from the therapy-speak they sometimes use to the details of their sex life together. The second funniest moment in the film comes when Nic pulls a big comforter over herself while Jules is goinq down on her: “I’m cold,” she says. “I’m suffocating!” Jules replies. Oh, and there’s the vague disappointment visible when they realize that their children are totally hetero. Mostly, though, it’s a celebration of marriage, and a timely one at that. It suggests that Jules and Nic’s marriage is exactly like anyone else’s marriage, which is to say that it’s like no one else’s marriage at all. Because no two marriages are alike.

“Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril’s parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.” –Carl Sagan, Cosmos

One of the things I’ve come to love about Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is the sheer effrontery of the way it re-writes the end of World War II. All movies about history are fiction, Tarantino seems to be (truthfully) saying, so let’s wallow in that freedom. Anyone who watches movies for history lessons deserves what they get. Or to quote another film by another filmmaker, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The Myth of Hypatia–and Carl Sagan relates a myth, not historical fact–is a kind of Rorschach test. Are you a bibliophile? Then this is a horror story. Are you a feminist? Then this is a portrait of the patriarchy at one of its lowest moments. Are you a scientist? Then this is a parable about academic freedom. Are you an atheist? Then this is your worst fears about religion made flesh. What you take from this is in large part what you bring to it. The atheist in me has a few problems with this, because one of the core questions an atheist needs to ask herself is this one: do you care that what you believe is true? As it turns out, this particular atheist does care, so The Myth of Hypatia is a bit of a disappointment to me. No matter how much I may want this story to arm me against the religious and the superstitious, it’s bullshit and I can’t in good conscience use bullshit as ammunition against bullshit.

This disappointment does not extend to Alejandro Amenabar’s recounting of the myth in Agora (2009), however. Because, you know, it’s a movie, and just like Tarantino, Amenabar is rewriting history for his own ends (though he rewrites considerably less than Sagan even as he adds romantic subplots). I don’t have to care if a movie is true. I only care if it’s good theater. Continue reading →

“Ain’t you got no men to do this?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t,”

Movies don’t usually have an overt thesis statement, but this exchange from Debra Granik’s stark indie hit, Winter’s Bone, serves pretty well.  It’s a familiar kind of movie–it’s a hard-boiled detective film–with unfamiliar trappings. We don’t get the mean streets of the city at night. The movie is set in the Ozarks. And we don’t get the cynical, hard-drinking private eye, either. Rather, we get a seventeen-year-old girl who is just trying to keep her family together. We do, however, get most of the plot points of film-noir detective film, but given the other elements of the film, it all seems fresh and new. Certainly, the power dynamics are different when you have a poor teenage girl rather than a hardened detective, but she perseveres with the same stubbornness and moral rectitude of a Philip Marlowe or a Lew Archer.

This film is also a portrait of the wreckage left by late capitalism, envisioned by the film as a stark winter of discontent, possibly as a new dark age where established institutions like law and education have completely failed and where the feral world of drug trafficking has taken their place. Granik and her cinematographer, Michael McDonough, capture all of this in a cold, desaturated style that casts its setting as vaguely post-apocalyptic. This is the world that men have wrought, the film suggests, and the men are absentee landlords, either literally as in the case of our heroine’s missing father, or figuratively as weak, venal characters. Women are left to clean it all up, and frankly, it’s a shit job.

Ree Dolly, played by the a-MAY-zing Jennifer Lawrence, is this film’s version of the private eye, and a more unlikely candidate for the job is hard to imagine. At least Marlow and Archer had contacts and the resources of their clients. Ree has only her own determination. This doesn’t stop the film from throwing her into those brutal situations in which hard-boiled detectives sometimes find themselves. It doesn’t stop the goons in the employ of the film’s bad guys from kicking the shit out of her. In the traditional hard-boiled story, these kinds of scenes are designed to show how tough the detective is, and to knock the detective so far down that it seems that there’s no way back up. It serves the same function here, but the inequality between the opponents throws it into even starker contrast. Ree’s major antagonist is Merab, played with stony resolve by Dale Dickey. In a lot of ways, she’s Ree’s doppelganger, in so far as she’s stubborn and not above getting her hands dirty. She, too, is cleaning up the messes left by her men folk.  It seems oxymoronic to claim Merab as a feminist villain (meaning that she’s not a villain because she’s a feminist, by the way), but here she is. Both characters function as everywomen, as two sides of the same coin.

The auteurist in me looks at this movie and compares it to Granik’s first film, the similarly titled Down to the Bone, in which Vera Farmiga plays a rural housewife and mother struggling with drug addiction. Like that film, Winter’s Bone is bracingly unglamourous. Like that film, it links poverty with drug addiction as inextricably linked. Like that film, it’s about a woman trying to keep her family from getting sucked into the downdraft. Both films find the kind of stark beauty in poverty that one finds in depression era photography. Auteurs in the purest sense tend to make the same movie over and over again. It appears that Granik is doing exactly that, but she’s discovered, like many directors before her, that she can smuggle her thematic concerns to a wider audience by framing things in terms of genre. That’s the main difference between her two films. She links Winter’s Bone to the plot and visual style of a film noir thriller, while she was content to just turn her camera on the characters in Down to the Bone and let them play things out without genre archetypes. Good as Down to the Bone might be (and it IS very good), I think Winter’s Bone is probably stronger for it.  It lets the story set the hook, then it reels the audience in for the rest.

Winter’s Bone should still be in theaters. Down to the Bone is on DVD and is currently available for instant streaming from Netflix.

–Dr. Morbius