To escape the heat on Saturday, Hanna and I went to the movies and saw Brave (Disney and Pixar, 2012) which most of you have probably heard much of a muchness about since it was released back in June. There’s been tons of insightful, critical analysis of Brave and what it does and doesn’t do to advance our cultural narratives about girls and women. I’m not going to try and reproduce or summarize the conversation here — but a few of my favorite reviews/reflections come from Amanda Marcotte, Jaclyn Friedman, Heida, and Lili Loofbourow.

What follows are some heat-and-humidity-infused reflections on what moved me about Brave and thoughts about some of the non-Disney cultural narratives the movie may be drawing its inspiration from.

Spoilers below. Also massive rambling.

First and foremost, the most striking thing about Brave – and I’m far from the first person to point this out — is that the story centers on a mother-daughter relationship. Let me say this again: The story centers on a mother-daughter relationship. Just last week, my friend Molly tweeted about how her six-year-old son Noah has just started noticing all of the dead and absent mothers (thanks Freud and Jung!) in children’s literature. When parents aren’t dead, they’re most often either out-of-touch with their children’s lives or actively malicious. Often, for women, there’s a twofer with the dead-mother-evil-stepmother theme.

The lesson in these stories is, so often, that parents and children (and the generations they represent) are inherently in conflict, and that women are naturally rivals with one another — usually for power as represented by male attention/alliances).

In Brave, Merida and her mother are in conflict to begin with: Merida is a rebellious teenager (very much a modern American construct) and Elinor is a mother trying to do what she thinks is best for her daughter and letting her fear muddle her ability to see clearly what is best for her daughter. The narrative tension of Brave revolves around mother and daughter finding their way back to the quality of relationship they have lost, while incorporating into that relationship a greater — more adult — knowledge about themselves and one another.

I think the radical audacity of this storyline finally hit home to me in last act when Merida defends her mother (temporarily turned into a bear) against the clan leaders who believe they’re avenging Elinor’s death. And then when Elinor-as-bear comes to the defense of her daughter who is nearly killed by the real beast, Mordu. It’s a powerful thing to see, on screen, a princess defend her living mother from death rather than speaking in her absent/dead mother’s name. And an equally powerful thing to see a living mother, a fierce mother bear, coming to the defense of her girlchild — not only rescuing her from Mordu, but ultimately listening to Merida’s wish to delay any marriage plot until some nebulous future.

Let’s just say that when Merida says to her father and his soldiers, “I will not let you kill my mother!” I could feel the tears spring into my eyes. How often does a girlchild get a chance to say this in our Western fairytale canon?

This reworking of the mother-daughter relationship speaks not only to our own interpersonal relationships, but also to the broader social narratives of generational tensions. I’m thinking especially here about feminist “waves” and the way we’re so often encouraged to think of feminist activism in generational terms, with overbearing, bitter, jealous mothers pitted against bratty, sexually-potent, ungrateful daughters). Brave points out that division between mothers and daughters — the failure to listen on both sides — obscures the true villain of the piece: adherence to (patriarchal) tradition borne of fear.* I’d argue that such a message is one we truly can’t get enough of in this world obsessed with generational rebellion and rupture. By seeing each generation as a threat to the one that preceded it, we’re hobbling our chances for deep, progressive change.

A few more (briefer) observations.

Merida owes much of her adolescent truth-telling, I suspect, to fictional fore-sisters such as Jane Eyre and Psyche. As Carol Gilligan argues in The Birth of Pleasure and more recently in Joining the Resistance, children — she would argue particularly girl children on the cusp of adolescence — are bellweathers and truth-tellers, pointing out the deceptions we practice on ourselves and one another, and demanding honesty from themselves and those around them. I’d also suggest that Brave‘s narrative lineage owes debts to Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, and to virtually every film produced by Miyazaki. Particularly Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and (Hanna tells me, since I haven’t yet seen it) Nausicaa.

As with Into the Woods, we have themes of parents having to let their children grow up and forge their own path (see: Bernadette Peters’ brilliant witch) while not abandoning them wholesale (see: “You Are Not Alone”). The message in Brave as in Into the Woods is that heroes — regardless of gender — are strongest when working in cooperation with others, and that this message of community isn’t incompatible with forging a new path.

As in Miyazaki’s films, the protagonist(s) Merida and Elinor must learn values such as respect for others, harmony with the community, and a balance between the qualities identified as “masculine” and “feminine” in our culture. Merida is fierce and physically fearless, yet needs to learn the art of political persuasion and empathy for others. There is a subtler morality at play in Brave that shares closer kinship with Eastern folk traditions (in my admittedly limited experience) than it does with the fairy tales Disney usually draws on for inspiration.

And, of course, there’s the brilliant freedom of watching a film about a teenage girl that is decidedly not a marriage plot. Merida’s age is indeterminate, though her body is that of a young woman gone through puberty. She isn’t anti-sex, or anti-marriage even — she’s simply not ready to make the choice. As others before me have pointed out, to have a teenage girl in a mainstream film whose sexuality is indeterminate — meaning she could swing straight, gay, bi, fluid, or something else entirely. We don’t know. And, for once, it’s immaterial to the plot.

This is the exact opposite of pretty much every princess movie — and even most YA novels! — out there on the market, because romance is a driving force in stories about adolescents. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, but when coupled with heteronormative plots it means that girls look at the narratives about young adulthood and they see that they’re expected to be boy-crazy, or at least boy-interested. They could be boy-interested in the most kick-ass, gender-bending guy on the planet — but boys it almost always is expected to be. And if not boys, then girls (or girls and boys), and it’s always, always, always meant to be an all-consuming preoccupation.

Teenagers are expected, in our culture, to be preoccupied — for better or worse — with sex and relationships. And as a teenager who wasn’t personally driven to explore these things (except in a fictional, future-looking sort of way), I often felt really out of step with stories that depicted my concerns in that way. Merida’s maybe someday but certainly not now attitude toward romantic relationships, coupled with her deep, passionate involvement in her familial relationships, show how teenage girls (and, I’d argue, teenagers more generally) are more complex persons than our media so often portrays them to be.

My one frustration with Brave (and then I promise to stop rambling!) was the one-dimensional portrayal of the male characters, particularly Fergus (Elinor’s husband, Merida’s father). It’s understandable in a 90-minute film that some characters get short-shrift, but the buffoonish character of Fergus, coupled with Elinor’s  level-headed political thinking and parental role can all too easily be read according to the “smart woman married to a boorish man” trope of situation comedy fame (Simpsons and Family Guy anyone?). While the teenage boys put forward to compete for Merida’s hand eventually speak up for their own independent choice of spouse** they are also caricatures clearly meant to communicate “brawn but no brains,” “brash, vain hottie,” and “sensitive weakling.” Since Merida’s protests regarding marriage are valid regardless of the merit of her suitors, it seems like a poor choice to recapitulate harmful stereotypes about men in a film that is otherwise quite smart about women and gender.

I suspect that this shortcoming has less to do with Brave in particular than it has to do with the fact that our culture has still not answered the questions of masculinity posed by feminist thinkers and activists. We haven’t figured out how to tell a story about fully-dimensional, human women, that also includes fully-dimensional human men. In order to tell a story in which a mother and daughter are the central relationship, Elinor’s husband, her (much younger) sons, and Merida’s would-be suitors, cannot be taken seriously — must provide, in fact, the comic relief to an otherwise revolutionary plot. Which leaves open the question, of course, what place fathers, sons, and male lovers might have in this brave new world which Merida and her mother are building for the clans?

Some anti-feminists would argue there isn’t a place for men in the world Elinor and Merida seek to build. I’d argue it will be up to the men — and women alongside them — to discover and create that place for themselves.

*As an aside, the historian and feminist in me would really love to know the details of Elinor’s back-story. She and her husband seem to have a loving relationship, yet she clearly sees marriage to some extent as a political alliance. I yearned for a glimpse inside her head, so that we could understand some of the reasons for her fear, and the reasons for the decisions she made — both in pushing Merida toward a betrothal of political expedience, and then later in choosing to support her daughter’s desire to forge her own path.

**And seen through slash goggles, Hanna and I agree that in the final scene it’s clear at least two of them have found each other as potential mates!

Cross-posted from the feminist librarian.

plus did I mention the steampunk visuals?

On Monday, Hanna, Minerva, and I went to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. It was, like, the first movie we’d seen in the theater in over a year, since most of the shows we’re tempted to see on the big screen these days come out in 3D and hello, migraine! So anyway, the movie theater itself was an experience. As was the wild, glorious, playing-fast-and-loose-with-history, as gay as a handbag full of rainbows, romp that was the film itself. I mean, really. Mr. Downey, Jr. and Mr. Law couldn’t have made the thing more flirty if they’d tried. So really, a good time was had by all.

With one exception: Where the fuck were the women?

See, there were three … let’s call them “female characters with potential” … in the film: Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), Mary Morstan Watson (Kelly Reilly), and a Roma woman, Simza Heron (Noomi Rapace). Regardless of what you think of the casting decisions made, I think we can all agree that all three of these characters are well-positioned to play substantive parts in the action as it unfolds. Even if your OTP is Holmes/Watson — and let’s face it, the film leaves you with little by way of alternatives! — Mary, particularly as played by Kelly Reilly, has enough grit to hold her own, whether you fancy a threesome or just a wife whose sexual interest lies elsewhere. Irene Adler, as a character, has more than enough scope to go toe-to-toe with Holmes, whether with him or against him. And the one original character, Simza, is gutsy and on her game whether it’s in the sewers below the Paris opera house or bedecked with rubies at a peace summit in Switzerland.

Mild spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

What all three of us noticed, though, was the fact that the script writers seemed to feel that the plot could only handle one woman with actual lines at a time. Irene Adler, to our collective disappointment, is dispatched within minutes — “reduced to a plot point,” another friend of ours put it sadly after seeing the show over the winter holiday. Sherlock oh-so-sadly delivers John to his wedding, hands him off to Mary, and then promptly retrieves him again en route to their planned honeymoon. Mary’s allowed to get in one or two self-possessed, kick-ass moments before Holmes jettisons her from the train (and the plot), and the reunited couple dash off in pursuit of Moriarty. At which point, Simza is allowed to enter into the narrative, where she stays for much of the film as the native guide for our heroes.

So it’s not that I protest that the central relationship in the story is two men ’cause we knew that going in, and anything else would have strained credulity. I don’t demand hetero romance, or even equal representation in the cast list … some stories are going to entail more men than women and vice versa. What’s striking is that the script writers clearly realized their female characters had better have gumption … but there was only so much ladygumption the script could sustain at once, apparently. It’s cool to have Strong Female Characters^TM … as long as you only have one at a time? Or as long as they’re split between the good and evil forces? Or in competition over our Manly Hero/es?

This, in turn, got us thinking about the exceptions to this rule in action/adventure and genre feature films. For example, Alice and Claire in Resident Evil: Extinction (2007).

Carlos totally sees where this relationship is going

Some other films we came up with included Silent Hill (basically an all-female cast), X-Men: First Class (Moira and Raven), the first Alien (Ripley and Lambert), and Sunshine (Cassie and Corazon).

This is where you + trivia night come in, Harpies, ’cause I want a list of films that don’t assume action/adventure stories can handle but a single substantive female role at a time. For simplicity’s sake, I’m calling for feature films only, not television series, since that gets into a whole tangle of rotating cast members etc.

Cast your vote and make your case in comments below!

A Town Like Alice

It’s June (can you believe it?) and that means summer is here. Well, not technically until the 21st but I come from a family of people whose lives were bound by the academic calendar, so as soon as school is out summer has definitely arrived. Also, the heat index in Boston yesterday took us up nearly to 100 degrees fahrenheit. Which means it’s time to think about movies to throw on the old Netflix queue. Or borrow from your local library, or rent from the local video store. Remember those?

There are two schools of thought when choosing summer films. One is that you pick movies that take place in the summer, or in hot places. The other is that you rent films that are about freezing your ass off in an attempt to cool yourself down (particularly if, like us, you don’t have air conditioning! … distraction can be a really awesome thing). The other school of thought is watch movies for which the weather gives you a 3D experience as it were. Movies in which everyone is sweltering (metaphorically or actually). Last summer, Hanna and I put together a joint post with a long list of just these movies.

Two of my personal favorites from this list are A Town Like Alice (1981), about a young Englishwoman and an Australian soldier who meet in Malaya during the Second World War and Jewel in the Crown (1984) the epic miniseries about the waning days of the British Raj in India. In my late teens and early twenties, watching Jewel in the Crown was almost an annual ritual, to be completed with meals of curry and iced glasses of gin and tonic.

What movies do y’all return to summer after summer to help beat (or co-opt) the heat?

The filmmakers do not add commentary to the film; they let the activity in- and outside the two buildings speak for itself. The abortion clinic is owned by a middle-aged couple. They peek out their windows to see protesters with signs and tiny plastic baby figurines, calling out to the women heading towards their door. Candace, the woman, treats her patients with kindness and compassion. Their faces are obscured as they explain that they already have three kids to care for, they didn’t want to get pregnant again, or they don’t feel like they have the power to demand that their partners use protection. One says she considers herself a murderer, and Candace tells her not to go through with the procedure if she doesn’t want to.

Every day, the husband drives to a separate location to pick up the clinic doctor. When they return, the doctor’s face is concealed by a sheet inside the passenger side window. The protesters holler at the car and often stand in the driveway as the it pulls in and out. At the end of the day, the husband drives the doctor back to the second location and the doctor drives himself home. One protester makes it his mission to learn the doctor’s identity and find out where the pick up and drop off takes place. He reclines in his car, staking out the local WalMart parking lot until his suspicions are confirmed. Filming took place in the same year as Dr. George Tiller’s murder. The fear is palpable.

Across the street, the literature misinforms patients that abortion causes breast cancer and that 95 percent of women who abort regret their decisions. Anne, the woman who heads up the operation, does whatever it takes to convince women and girls to continue their unplanned pregnancies. She tells one woman with an abusive partner, “For all you know, the baby changes him.” I wanted to cry. Some patients fall for the manipulation. Another laughs bitterly after Anne buys her lunch to butter her up.

I went to the screening with my boyfriend, who was more shocked by what he saw than I was. I read about it every day. The filmmakers took questions after the movie, and I was pleasantly surprised by the pro-choice vibe in the theater. An old man asked how the woman from the CPC could get away with lying to pregnant patients about the ineffectiveness of condoms. People were clearly disturbed by what they’d seen.

The experience affected the filmmakers, as well. Grady remarked that the struggle between the pro-choice and anti-choice camps “has nothing to do with babies. It’s about control, it’s about the power of women and women’s roles, what the purpose of the female gender is, the absolute core of the identity of a woman. It’s so profound and so deep.”
12th & Delaware is an expertly crafted documentary that looks at abortion in a sensitive way. I hope it has as much of an impact as the pair’s earlier films, and I would absolutely recommend seeing it if you have the opportunity.

Dr. Temple Grandin

I am super excited about the upcoming HBO biopic Temple Grandin, based on the life of lecturer, best-selling author, autism advocate and professor of animal science at Colorado State University, Dr. Temple Grandin.

Grandin, who is among the most famous individuals with autism in the world, was diagnosed with autism as a child in 1950. She overcame many personal and educational challenges before becoming an inventor and earning a Ph.D. in animal science. As an adult, she is an advocate for people on the autism spectrum, speaks regularly at autism conferences and offers advice to parents with autistic children. Grandin has also devoted much of her career to improving the treatment of livestock animals.

At age 18 she invented a device called a Hug Machine – a deep pressure device designed to calm hypersensitive persons. It is typically used to treat individuals with autism spectrum disorders. She came up with the idea after noting the way cattle were vaccinated while confined in a squeeze chute on her aunt’s ranch. After pressure was administered to the animals, they calmed down, and Grandin correctly predicted that such a device might settle her own hypersensitivity.

Grandin relates easily to animals and has to work hard to interact socially with other people. She says:

I’m a visual thinker, not a language-based thinker. My brain is like Google Images. If someone says the word factory, most people think of a vague place. I think in detail of every factory I ever saw, like the John Deere plant in Moline. Animals are sensory thinkers, thinking in pictures, smells, sounds. They don’t think in terms of language. I don’t either.

Grandin harnessed her “disorder” to better understand animal behavior, and became one of the top designers of livestock facilities in the nation. She advises the livestock industry in animal behavior and has created improvements to animal handling systems in meat plants.

[T]he things that scare a prey/species animal like cattle are a whole lot of little visual details that people just don’t tend to notice. And one of the big problems they used to have is the people just wanted to get out there and yell and scream and push and shove and you know more and more prods. Rather than remove the things that the cattle were afraid of.

A few years ago, American Public Media accompanied Grandin on slaughterhouse inspections she performed for McDonald’s. The resulting story is fascinating, describing the influence Grandin has had on the meat industry and providing a glimpse into her everyday life.

I so strongly admire Dr. Grandin’s philosophy, her talents and her career. I bet she has to deal with some nasty sexism in her field, too. Temple Grandin is based upon Grandin’s memoirs, Emergence and Thinking in Pictures. It airs on HBO on Saturday, February 6.