strange_complex | Entries tagged with sexism

I'm watching huge numbers of films at the moment, mainly with Joel, and indeed going about all over the place doing lots of cool things as well. Which is awesome, but while I'm managing to record the various trips and adventures on FB at least, there is a big queue of films waiting to have anything at all written about them anywhere. This post is an attempt to address something of that backlog.

33. The Monster Squad (1987), dir. Fred Dekker

Watched with Joel in Whitby on my birthday, and not of course to be confused with The Monster Club (1981). While we should in theory have been able to cast it onto the massive TV on the wall of the apartment where we were staying, unfortunately the wifi was so bad that we actually couldn't, and ended up watching it huddled over his phone instead. Ain't technology marvellous, eh? It's about a bunch of kids who love classic monster movies, and have a club which meets in a clubhouse lined with posters from them. But little do they know, monsters are real, and Dracula is busy gathering together / resurrecting his own squad of monstrous chums to try to take over the world via the medium of a powerful amulet. They, of course, have to figure out how to stop Dracula and save the world, with the aid of a diary written by Van Helsing exactly a century earlier and a neighbour who lives in a scary, dilapidated old house, but turns out to be very kind and helpful towards them - and is also incidentally a Jewish former concentration camp inmate.

It's fun, silly, and a nice example of the self-referential humour which flourishes within the horror genre. I think in fact that the kids in the squad probably map fairly directly onto the monsters in theirs - e.g. one of them has a dog, which matches up with the Wolfman; Sean, the ring-leader, wears black and red just like Dracula; his little sister develops a special affinity with Frankenstein's monster which is clearly meant to recall the (doomed) friendship between the monster and the little girl by the lake in the original Universal movie, etc. But I was a bit too tired to really put the full details of that together as we were watching. Meanwhile, as Joel pointed out, it has one of the most bad-ass Draculas ever committed to celluloid, who fights practically every other character in the film, lobs live sticks of dynamite about the place, rips the door off his own hearse with his bare hands, etc etc. All good stuff.

34. Byzantium (2012), dir. Neil Jordan

I've watched and written about this before (LJ / DW), but on my first viewing I had no idea how good it was going to be, so have long wanted to revisit it with the full focus and attention it deserves. Luckily, Joel was amenable to the suggestion. ;-) And it does indeed very much reward a second viewing. There is a great deal in the early scenes which makes fuller sense in the light of what the film later reveals about the characters than it can on a first viewing, such as Clara singing what is clearly a nineteenth-century nursery song to Eleanor in the cab of the lorry as they flee their original location. And so many other clever echoes between the present-day and flash-back scenes, like Eleanor desperately sucking up Frank's blood from a discarded tissue after he has cut himself, followed later by Clara coughing up her own consumptive blood into a similar handkerchief. Having not felt like I did this film justice last time I wrote about it, because it was part of a multi-film catch-up post written long after the fact, I'm annoyingly in much the same position again now. But suffice it to say that I love it, and it remains very comfortably within my top five non-Dracula-based vampire films.

35. Penda's Fen (1974), dir. Alan Clarke

A folk horror classic which I've been wanting to watch for an extremely long time, and therefore put on the birthday present wish-list which I supplied to my family. It's basically about both homosexuality and paganism bubbling up from under attempted suppressions, impossible to eradicate no matter how hard conservative society might try - all of which is obviously immensely appealing. It's surreal, contemplative and very beautifully filmed, and will certainly reward repeated viewings. I also hadn't really taken on board before watching it just how deeply engaged it is with the landscape and history of my native Midlands, what with its setting amongst the Malvern hills (prominent and extremely recognisable in the photography), its interest in the music of Elgar, who was born in Worcester, and of course the appearance of the eponymous Penda, king of Mercia. As for Byzantium, it's one I'll probably want to rewatch now that I know all that, so that I can really appreciate how it all works together.

36. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), dir. Francis Ford Coppola

A re-watch, with a previous write-up here: LJ / DW. My basic opinion that it is tonally uneven, with flashes of what could have been a great film just serving to show up the flaws around them, remains unchanged. I particularly bridle at the stuff around Dracula's wife, which rolls two misogynistic tropes into one. First, her death provides Vlad's whole motivation for turning against the church and becoming a vampire, so is a prime example of fridging, and second the whole reincarnation trope inevitably erodes Mina's agency - although, to be fair, Mina does not just fall straight for Vlad, as usually happens with reincarnated lost lovers, but rejects and resists him at first, and has some general conflict about the whole thing.

But the reason we watched it was following a conversation about some of the Classical references in it, such as moving snakes in one of the brides' head-dresses very clearly referencing Medusa, and it was worth returning to with those eyes on. There's actually quite a lot of Classical statuary and artefacts dotted about the place, and generally used intelligently to add extra dimensions to the story - e.g. a bronze head and vase in a cabinet at the party where Lucy's suitors are introduced, signalling that the hosts are established aristocrats whose ancestors did the Grand Tour, a Marsyas in the cemetery / garden, signalling punishment and torment, and a Lar on Lucy's nightstand signalling domesticity. So, again, an insight into what some people involved in the film were trying to achieve, even if the efforts weren't consistently sustained.

37. Razor Blade Smile (1998), dir. Jake West

I hadn't (that I can remember) heard of this film before, but Joel suggested it because he thought I'd appreciate its '90s Goth vibe, which I did! It's basically about a vampire called Lilith who spends her time partly hanging out in Goth bars and partly operating as an assassin hunting down the members of a mysterious and evil sect. It's extremely low-budget, but it was evidently made with enthusiasm and is definitely a nostalgia-trip as far as '90s fashions and interior decor are concerned. Lilith wears a great deal of PVC, and indeed has something of the vibe of Tanya Cheex from Preaching to the Perverted (which came out the year before) about her, but she still has a terrible pine bed-frame, exactly like that found in every teenager's bedroom and rental property at the time. Oh, and there's a nice little twist ending, where it turns out the whole assassin / sect thing is just a game she plays with her long-term lover to while away the centuries. Excellent fun, but should definitely be watched with alcohol.

I read this because it was published while Stoker was writing Dracula, and both use pagan gods to stand for the abject, evil and Satanic - though Machen's novella focuses almost wholly on that idea, whereas in Stoker's Dracula it's only part of a tapestry of related concepts. The Great God Pan is part of efflorescence of fin-de-siècle stories and artworks about Pan, mainly inspired by an anecdote about his death in Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum 17 and thoughtfully examined in this 1992 book chapter, which I wanted to get to grips with as part of Dracula's context and a possible influence.

Having read it, though, I don't think the influence is particularly strong or direct. Both certainly reflect similar anxieties about what lurks beneath the façade of contemporary civilisation, within us, in the past and / or in the untamed places of nature - but those themes are more or less what all horror stories are about. And both present their stories as a collection of accounts from different viewpoints which only gradually come together - but again, many late 19th century novels did that. What makes them quite different is that Dracula is manifest and present within his eponymous novel, whereas Pan does not manifest directly to any of the point-of-view characters in Machen's. Indeed, he isn't wholly an embodied being at all. Rather, Pan, Satan and Nodens are all treated as attempts to express by metaphor an evil too horrific and inhuman for human minds otherwise to understand; as much something psychological, or the pure concept of evil itself, as anything embodied. As one character puts it, "Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale."

That was all slightly disappointing to me, as I was hoping for something both a bit more embodied and a bit more ambiguous - a Pan simultaneously alluring and terrifying, who might sound sweet music through wooded glades and yet also leap savagely with snorting nose and bloodied fingernails upon the unwary transgressor. Machen's Pan doesn't really span that divide, existing rather on the wholly-terrifying side of the equation. I shall have to browse through the book chapter I've linked above for something more along the lines I was looking for - unless anyone reading can recommend a different fin-de-siècle story or novel which comes closer to ticking those boxes? Do I want G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday or Saki's 'The Music on the Hill' (which sounds good anyway), or what?

Anyway, although it wasn't quite the novel I was expecting or perhaps really wanted, I still got good value out of reading this one. The way it draws on Classical motifs, and especially the landscape and gods of Roman Britain, to construct its image of evil reminded me of the realisation I had made while watching the BBC TV version of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit that it is in part a response to the discovery of the London Mithraeum (LJ / DW). I guess this novel, and other material like it, also forms part of the literary backdrop which made Kneale's story possible.

It does some interesting things with story structure. The chapters from different points of view I've already mentioned, but the final chapter is literally called 'The Fragments', and includes texts with deliberate lacunae in them to bring the story to a dim, half-understood conclusion which the reader is left to patch together. This is essential to the way Machen has dealt with Pan throughout, the whole point being that no human mind can witness him / it without going insane. And it plays around nicely with the relationship between city and country. Pan is unleashed in the remote Welsh / Romano-British countryside, but his worst effects are felt in the heart of London. So Machen uses rural metaphors to describe the encroachment of the rural (primitive) into the city (civilised). One dimly-lit London street looks "as dark and gloomy as a forest in winter", while in another "the wind blew as blithely as upon the meadows and the scented gorse".

The critical reception section of the Wikipedia page is right to draw attention to its outright misogyny, though (third para). The force which Pan represents is brought into the world in the person of a woman, Helen Vaughan, whose main modus operandi is to lure men to her and then drive them to kill themselves. Even worse, she is born in the first place by the actions of a doctor who performs a brain operation on her mother, Mary, and who justifies his actions to a demurring friend on the grounds that "I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit." Mary, by the way, is only seventeen, and in addition to seeming to think he has the right to perform experimental brain surgery on her, the doctor has also evidently brought her up to call him 'dear' and solicit kisses from him in what read to me as a very power-abusing relationship. The operation destroys Mary's mind, while her body survives only long enough to give birth to the child, Helen, (always the true purpose of women in misogynistic novels) and while the doctor does come to regret his actions by the end of the story, it's not at all clear that he would have done if it hadn't been for the consequences which followed. Both Helen and Mary also exist only from the two-dimensional perspective of the male characters - Helen never speaks, but just goes round being evil and ruining men; Mary speaks a few lines before the doctor's operation, but only to submit meekly to his will. Still, Wikipedia also tells me that there is a feminist response to the novel called Helen's Story by Rosanne Rabinowitz which tells the whole story from Helen's point of view - and that could be truly awesome.

If you'd like to read The Great God Pan yourself, the whole thing is on Project Gutenberg, and I can confirm that their free Kindle-formatted version works very nicely.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/645999.html

Life is genuinely a bit quieter for me at the moment than it has been for a while, and (touch wood) should stay that way until the end of August, so I'm taking the opportunity to try to get back on top of things a bit. I've been tidying and cleaning my house so far today, and now turn my attention to my unblogged film list - not that I am really likely to make great inroads into it today, given that I am probably going out to see another film this evening.

ladylugosi1313 will appreciate just how far I am going back to review this one, although luckily I did take some notes on it at the time, so I have at least something of a starting point.

Anyway, this is a classic and very famous Powell and Pressburger film which centres around the lives and loves of a ballet company engaged in putting on an adaptation of 'The Red Shoes' by Hans Christian Anderson. The story tells of a young girl who yearns for a pair of beautiful red shoes, but when she acquires them through the manipulative machinations of the evil shoemaker, she finds that they compel her to dance on and on until she dies. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the film, we are treated to an amazing sequence, probably some 15-20 minutes long, which is just the company performing the ballet. The relevant cast members were all actual professional dancers, so it is essentially a filmed version of an actual ballet performance, but enhanced also by the potential of what film allows them to do. This ranges from the relatively simple and obvious business of close-ups and camera tracking, which a static audience in a real theatre can't benefit from, to special effects such as the girl seeing a vision of herself already dancing in the shoes when she peers in to the shop window to wonder over them, and then her dancing through fantastical landscapes using an early version of what's now green-screen when she is first experiencing the joy of having acquired them.

Around this, the story of the ballet company echoes the narrative of feeling compelled to dance with tragic consequences in a real-world setting. The lead role in the ballet is played by Vicky Page, who is just emerging into the ballet world as a new rising star, and feels a strong vocational compulsion within herself to make her way in the profession and be the best dancer she can be. This is externally personified by Boris Lermontov, the ballet company's director, who takes her as his protégé and demands of her to devote her entire life to dancing. But meanwhile she also falls in love with the company's composer, Julian Custer, and runs off to marry him - only to discover and admit to a jealous Boris some months later that his career as a composer has taken over, and she has barely danced since their marriage. It is tragic and terrible and very emotively played, but it does essentially boil down to a very gendered story about how a woman can't have both love and career success. Even worse, because Vicky's own internal conflict about this is externally personified into the two men, it is largely framed as a conflict between them within which she has no real agency. Vicky's response is thus to run in tears from the theatre, horribly compelled by the red shoes she is wearing, and jump from a terrace into the path of an oncoming train. That is, two men fight over a woman until she breaks.

It was a visually very beautiful film, beyond the ballet scenes I've already mentioned. The colour was over-saturated, but with a taupe tint - probably largely because that was what they could achieve using still quite early colour technology, but it looked amazing anyway, with the red shoes themselves incredibly rich. Some of the cinematography also reminded me of Fellini's films - especially shots of people looking smallish and isolated in large, splendid rooms which accentuated their fragility. Some of the dialogue struck me the same way, too. Fellini's characters often make very simple, even banal, statements which acquire a lot of their meaning from context, and these characters quite often did the same. Fellini was in his late 20s and just getting started in the film industry at this time, so maybe he saw it and picked up some ideas?

Anyway, very beautiful and effective overall, as long as you can look around the inherently rather misogynistic central conceit.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/641777.html

So, the Doctor Who Christmas special, then. I am usually an absolute sucker for these, frequently believing them to be far better on the day of viewing than I later realise is really justified. But sadly this one failed to wow me even on Christmas day itself.

swisstone has already covered most of the plot-holes and lazy clichés, thus saving me the trouble, and I agree with his basic thesis - that Steven Moffat is not really giving Doctor Who the attention it needs or deserves. So I will stick to noting a few things which particularly struck me as I watched.

The two stand-out aggravations for me were mystical motherhood and negotiable death. On the mystical motherhood side, I couldn't shake off an icky feeling throughout the story that someone had pointed out to Moffat some of the sexist tropes which have cropped up in his previous stories, so he decided to Do Something About It and redress the balance - but completely failed because he assumed that femininity is essentially equivalent to motherhood, and can only understand motherhood anyway by treating it as strange and mystical and quasi-supernatural. I thought while I was watching that I recognised this as a common trope by male writers who are trying to portray women positively, but still fundamentally viewing them from a patriarchal and reductive point of view. However, having typed a seemingly endless string of searches involving words like "trope" "women" "feminine" "motherhood" "mysterious" "mystical" and "magical" into Google, I still can't seem to track down a basic description of it or a list of other examples, even on TV Tropes. Surely I'm not making this one up, am I? More likely I'm just using the wrong search terms. Anyway, it's annoying.

As for the negotiable death, Moffat has done this so often now that it is intensely predictable, and I groaned with resignation at the inevitability of what was to come as soon as Madge started seeing visions of her husband's 'death' in the time vortex. That's annoying in itself, because it makes Moffat's stories less able to surprise or enthral, but I find this particular device repellent even if it is only used once. It undermines our ability to engage meaningfully with in-story deaths, so that any emotions which they provoke have to be regarded as temporary or provisional until we can be sure whether or not the death is 'real' - often much later in the story. And it toys with the viewer, dangling a hard-hitting narrative with a very powerful emotive force, but then just waving it all aside without working through its consequences properly. I would respect Moffat very much if he had dealt with parental death properly in the Doctor Who Christmas special, and equally much if he had chosen not to include it at all. But what he actually did smacks of wanting to have it both ways - maximum emotional impact and a fairytale happy ending - without being prepared to do the creative work necessary to make the two consistent with one another. In other words, it is lazy writing again - not to mention insulting to people who have had to deal with the utter non-negotiability of death in the real world.

Other than that, I also felt that we hadn't had enough time to get to know the family and their wartime lives before they came to their Uncle Digby's house, so that it was difficult to get any real sense of how fantastic the house might seem to them in comparison to everyday normality, or how badly they needed such a wondrous experience. Here, in fact, it would have helped if the children had known by the time they arrived that their father was dead, so that we could have seen them briefly being able to forget their pain and loss as they got caught up in the magic of what the Doctor had in store for them. As it was, all the Doctor's efforts seemed rather embarrassingly over-blown from their point of view. And although this in itself could have been been used to move the emotional trajectory of the story forward by tipping the children off to the fact that something more fundamental was wrong within their family, it wasn't.

Meanwhile, I'm sufficiently steeped in the work of Ray Harryhausen at the moment to notice how similar the design of the Tree King and Queen was to that of the wooden figurehead who comes alive and starts attacking people in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and to be very little surprised to come across yet another example of the extent of his influence:

But as for Doctor Who, I don't really have anything else to say about this story.

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I couldn't post this last night, because I just could not get onto LJ at any point after Doctor Who ended. So what follows was actually written in Yahoo! Notepad yesterday evening, and lightly edited this morning in order to get the tenses right.

Gosh, well. I think I can only possibly start writing about this ( with the end first )

So ( where the hell does this go now? )

Anyway, as for the rest of the story, yes, it did ( play out much like Three's encounters with our reptilian cousins )

( The Doctor and Ambrose )

( Nasreen Chaudhry )

So, Chris Chibnall may not be the most highly-regarded of Doctor Who writers, and it may well be that without the shock ending (which must surely have been largely Steven Moffat's work), this would have ended up as another largely predictable and forgettable story. But, as it was, it worked for me. Looking forward to yet more historical action next week.

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( First Doctor: Galaxy Four )

( First Doctor: Mission to the Unknown )

Two stories in a row which display a distinctly sexist world-view, then. And you might well say - "But Penny, these stories were made in 1965. What did you expect?" Except that two seasons' worth of stories featuring strong, independent women (especially Barbara, but not just her) talking to each other, doing amazing things as though it were completely normal, and enjoying the total respect and trust of the men around them have shown me that Doctor Who is capable of a great deal better than this. I don't want to lose that - but here we are, with Verity Lambert still not even properly out of the door yet, and things already seem to be crashing and burning horribly.

So, to cheer myself up after all that, I went right back to the Good Old Days. You know, before the BBC Ruined Our Show by, like, broadcasting it on TV, and shit. Jeez, talk about selling out...

( First Doctor: An Unearthly Child (untelevised first attempt) )

So, yes, that is better, and I'm ready to continue forwards now - not least because the next story is The Myth-Makers. But I proceed with caution and lowered expectations from here on in.

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Because its vice-chancellor thinks it is OK to publish an article like this one (scroll down to the 'LUST' section) about sexual relationships between (female) students and (male) staff at Universities, which includes such choice phrases as these:

"Equally, the universities are where the male scholars and the female acolytes are."

So, no female scholars, then? All the women at University are there purely to enable men, and possibly drink admiringly from the founts of male knowledge?

"The fault lies with the females"

Like everything, of course!

And, worst of all in my view:

"Normal girls - more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos - will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers"

I think I would like to go and vomit now. What a wanker!

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Read online at the BBC Classic Doctor Who website.

Science Fiction fans often express concern about why it is that more women don't seem to be interested in the genre. I know they do, because there was a panel to that effect at Mecon 11 in the summer.

Unfortunately, this book is a prime example of the reason why. Apart from Romana and a tea-lady who makes a brief cameo appearance in chapter 2 before being blown to smithereens, all of the female characters in the book are crazed dominant-yet-also-subservient femdroids who turn out to be modelled on the inner workings of K-9. In fact, the total lack of any plausible female characters for the entire duration of the novel even gets the writer into plotting problems towards the end of the book. Realising that the Metralubitans at the centre of the story are in the position of needing to rebuild their society from a small pool of people after surviving a catastrophe, the Doctor has to turn to their President and ask, "Premier, there are females down in your dome, aren't there? Real ones, I mean?"

Dear Gareth Roberts: here is a clue. If you want your readers (and especially your female ones) to find Metralubitan society plausible enough for them to either a) believe in its ability to regenerate itself or b) care, write both sexes into that society in the first place. Don't just suddenly assert that they are there when the plot demands it. Gah.

The world moves on, though. Since writing this, Roberts has proved himself capable of better things, especially in regards to his Sarah Jane Adventures scripts. So my annoyance is more directed at the fact that this is such a common failing in SF contexts in general than it is against him personally. But it is disappointing, and lets the book down considerably.

Which is a pity, because on the whole this is a pretty decent story. The ending gets a bit contrived and hand-wavey, and winds up with Roberts writing himself into corner which nothing but a literal Big Red Button can get him out of. But the essential set-up of a war between two rival parties who actually rather like one another socially, the basic conceit than most human(oid)s are sufficiently vain that they can easily be manipulated into non-sensical and immoral behaviour via a bit of flattery, and the comic touches (especially the parody of Marxist revolutionaries) were all well worth reading. Plus the Four!love was most satisfying, and came complete with a nicely-realised Romana II and a charmingly unhinged K-9 into the bargain.

In short, then, basically good fun, but with a Russell T. Davies-style ending and an apparent failure to register the existence of half the human(oid) population. If you love Four, you should definitely read it.

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( Third Doctor: Spearhead from Space )

In summary: a good story, but heading in a direction I'm not wildly keen about.

( Third Doctor: Inferno )

Overall, then: a very refreshing break-out from the usual constraints of this era. May not be perfect, but its strengths definitely outweigh its weaknesses.

And that? That would be me bang up to date with my write-ups. A good feeling, I can tell you. :-)

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Well, I haven't posted a Doctor Who write-up here since August, it would seem. What with Belfast, and then Vienna, and then term starting, I haven't had much time for anything but memes and cut 'n' paste lately. Which isn't to say that the last month or so hasn't been enormous fun. Just not conducive to writing about cult TV.

Now, however, I have a whole weekend to myself and nothing in particular to do - for the first time in about six weeks. So it's time to start catching up!

( Fifth Doctor: Earthshock )

All in all, good stuff - and I look forward to seeing more of the stories which precede and follow this one.

( Second Doctor: The Invasion )

Overall verdict - a real classic with some brilliant moments. Just a pity about the feminist failure surrounding Isobel's venture into the sewers.

What's more, with those two stories written up, I do believe I can allow myself to actually start watching Doctor Who again now, rather than getting by on old episodes of Poirot and Sex and the City in an attempt to stop my write-up backlog growing even larger than it already was. Hooray!

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I've just received an email from a female student, addressing me as 'Miss X' - not at all an uncommon occurrence. I like to think I'm not the kind of person who would feel the need to go round with a stick up my ass about people getting my title wrong like this - except that the rest of her email goes on to demonstrate perfectly why, nevertheless, I do. Within three sentences, she has gone on to mention (in the context of possible dissertation supervisors for next year) two of my male colleagues - and both of them are referred to, entirely correctly, as 'Dr. Y' and 'Dr. Z'.

Just for the record, it's not that she hasn't had every opportunity of noticing that I am a Doctor, too. She took one of my modules last year, so would have seen it on the module documentation. Meanwhile, this year she is studying in Italy, and as such has received numerous emails from me in my capacity as Study Abroad coordinator, all of which included my full name and title in the signature file. Also, one of the male colleagues she mentions is of a very similar age to me - so this should rule out the possibility that she is assuming I am too young to have become a Doctor yet. All that's left is an apparent unconscious assumption that female academics are not equivalent in status to their male colleagues.

It's not the first time I've seen this, or the first time I've seen it coming from someone who is female themselves. I recognise that a lot of people don't really understand what academic titles mean, or how you earn them. But even if you don't know the fine details, I think it's generally clear enough that 'Doctor' is an honorific, earned title. Seeing female academics regularly stripped of it by underlying assumptions about their intellectual status, while their male colleagues are not, is just one more sign of how unbalanced gender relations continue to be.