Hillary Clinton

We often hear people refer to entertainment as threat-less, as in "It's just a movie," or "It's only a story." The bullets shot in blockbuster action movies are blanks, falls from buildings are all staged, and White House-destroying explosions are created only with pixels. Fantasy, not reality. On the other side of fictional narrative is its credibility—stories are supposed to "suspend disbelief" so that audiences can journey along with the tale presented. When it comes to portraying real people, many directors and writers will give interviews in which they insist the historical characters were researched down to the last eye blink and pinky movement. But for a writer, director, and actor to carve out the personality in question, they make a series of choices: which scenes in this person's life to present? Which known statements to recreate? Which relationships to highlight and which to leave absent from the screen? Even if the people in question were consulted for a particular retelling—which is not usually the case—there must remain a gap between the whole of their lives and the film version. In this case then, these films may say something about the era in which they were produced, as well as our cultural need for a particular representation.

• If you're bummed out at Oscar nominating five white guys for Best Director yet again, check out Cannonball's list of five women that should have been nominated instead.
• Break out your see-through visors and cigars and support this Kickstarter campaign for feminist playing cards.
• From inter-office email: "We're probably all sick of Doucho Schwyzer, but this Global Comment piece is pretty good."
• Check Colorlines' wonderful obituary for Etta James.
• We all know Pariah's pretty darn good, but did you know the twenty-year history of black lesbian filmmaking?
• Today in Rick Santorum: pregnancies from rapes are God's will. Cue the sound of a thousand long, drawn-out sighs.
• Here's what Charlize Theron was missing when she silenced Viola Davis at the Oscar roundtable last week.
• Here's something: Ice-T predicts Hillary Clinton will be president in 2016.

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The most boring exhibit I ever saw in any of the Washington, DC Smithsonian museums was, without a doubt, the gowns of the First Ladies. Oh, how I could not have cared less. But my mother preened over them like she'd just found some rare bird egg sitting under her window. Helen Taft? Grace Coolidge? Elizabeth Monroe? I didn't care about their dresses, and I certainly didn't know who they were as women. On top of that, weren't First Ladies just... housewives in a really nice house?

The leaders of the [women's suffrage] movement trembled on seeing a tall, gaunt black woman in a gray dress and white turban, surmounted with an uncouth sunbonnet, march deliberately into the church, walk with the air of a queen up the aisle, and take her seat upon the pulpit steps. A buzz of disapprobation was heard all over the house, and there fell on the listening ear, 'An abolition affair!" "Woman's rights and niggers!""I told you so!" "Go it, darkey!" . . Again and again, timorous and trembling ones came to me and said, with earnestness, "Don't let her speak, Mrs. Gage, it will ruin us. Every newspaper in the land will have our cause mixed up with abolition and niggers, and we shall be utterly denounced." My only answer was, "We shall see when the time comes."
--First-wave feminist Frances Gage, reflecting on the occasion of Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech