Film

Tears of a Clone

Debbie Rasmussen — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 18:46:06 -0400

From all the films made every year, the Academy must choose the performance that deserves its Best Actress accolade—and avid watchers of their annual awards might well conclude it has no sensible criteria. Some years, the voting body wants to show its integrity. Other years, it wants to pet its poodles. This year, it wanted to pretend that racism isn’t an industry given, and rolled out an inelegant glut of tardy tributes. And there are, clearly, yet more social and political complexities polluting the field. Perplexed, we watch from the comfort of our homes while agreeable, bobbing revue turns like Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love or Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich are credited with the same talents we recognize in, say, Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry. Refracted through the ponderous shimmying of the Oscars, it is the film industry that dictates to us all what a “talented actor” is; and all too often there’s something vital missing from its skewed definitions. What that something is was demonstrated best, perhaps, by Halle Berry’s overwhelmed acceptance of this year’s Best Actress statuette. Looking at her contorting face, gaping mouth, and swollen eyes wasn’t exactly like looking at Everywoman—since it’s a little difficult to destroy three solid days of laminating and spraying in a single sobfest—but Berry showed more powerful, genuine emotion in her shocked speech than most Hollywood females have done in decades of high-octane, high-drama filmmaking.

It’s a bizarre celluloid convention, the way that emotions such as sorrow, anger, or pain that leave your average female civilian looking like a just-birthed baboon simply shimmer over the airbrushed expanse of a Hollywood star’s face to leave the tiniest damp mark, like a fairy lick. This can perhaps be chalked up in part to the wildly varying levels of acting ability manifest in our movie-star standbys, but I think there’s more to it than that. Maybe it’s worth wondering whether there’s also some weird complicity between the people who make these movies and the people like us who pay to see them. Think of your own face in the mirror after a particularly bad crying jag or a heated, tearful argument. How often do you see Julia Roberts or Cameron Diaz exhibiting that kind of piggy, swollen rawness on film? And is that what we pay for—to see our own emotion cleaned up, sanitized, beautified?

How often do we see women looking as confidently angry, with flecks of spittle flying from their contorted faces, as Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys or John Cusack in High Fidelity? Don’t the ladies aspire to the sweaty, walleyed aggression of Brad Pitt in Fight Club or Edward Norton in American History X? Don’t they long to expand their physical boundaries into the full-on vomiting and dead-eyed fear and exhaustion portrayed by the male cast of Apollo 13? There’s no shortage of leading men out there bellowing, gibbering, and rolling their eyes. But leading women?

When Cate Blanchett’s Lord of the Rings Elf Queen gets angry, her whole head morphs into that of a mystical, shimmering and very cross wraith. When she calms down again, her perfect unruffled features are revealed. Instead of a human face with a big, yelling, angry mouth, we have an ethereal, representational one. This happens frequently in Hollywood, without the need to resort to special effects. Cinema has evolved a balletic and complex collection of signifiers to save faces, a formalized code that mimes deep emotion without ever showing their ravages. Female stars employ a bevy of recognizable acting tics to exhibit emotion: Hysterical crying is indicated by dry, rasping sobs, carefully controlled to eliminate the possibility of gurgling phlegm. The face is hidden, only to be raised as the sobs die down. And then, instead of a ketchup-colored head covered from nose to chin in a thin slick of snot, the sufferer raises a honey-hued, ironed-out visage, unaltered apart from a smudge of eyeliner, like a paint-by-numbers Pierrot. Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner epitomized this perfectly. (And, yes, though it was a romantic comedy, the moment in question was meant to be genuinely moving.) Then there’s the Well and Spill style of tears, wherein the star stares directly into the camera in dizzying close-up. You can see her dredging it all up, straining desperately to relive the terrible time before she had an entourage. Finally, and thankfully, she squeezes out some moisture, locking her jaw as though struggling to produce a small urine sample. A tear trickles down the waterproofed cheek. The eyes sparkle, madly refracting the manufactured emotion.

But if celluloid crying is bad, it is celluloid anger that is, fittingly, the most infuriatingly insufficient. In a normal woman, anger is as debilitating as tears—if not more so, as its physical manifestations can make one look like a congested boil as well as compromise one’s inherent wit and grace. Hollywood has dealt with the ugliness of anger by not only placing carefully reasoned and brilliantly articulated expositions in the mouths of its furious girlies, but by developing a whole style of temper tantrum that justifies the terrible phrase “God, you’re beautiful when you’re angry.” Actually, it should probably be, “Gee, you’re cute when you’re miffed,” because its practitioners never seem to emote beyond a level of irritation more appropriate for a bungled Starbucks order. In this little set piece, whose chief abusers include Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, and Renée Zellweger, the actor begins by letting her mouth drop open and her eyes pop out in incredulous amazement at what’s just been said to her by that sassy clerk/pompous bureaucrat/obnoxious-but-clearly-perfect-for-her man. She punctuates her expression by slamming hands onto hips in a feisty, kooky manner. Then, there’s a cutesy double take, as if she’s at a loss for words, followed by a momentary pause, in which she alternately frowns and pouts; finally, she lets lose a stream of indignant, energetic, but basically quite polite insults.

As her fury grows, the actor’s face miraculously remains the same color as it was pre-tantrum, but she varies her original pose with some of the following movements: the 5-year-old’s foot-stamp (a Ryan romance speciality), the emphatic lean forward (so that the audience might glimpse uplifted half-moons of breast, a movement used to great effect by Roberts in Erin Brockovich), the energetic double-hand slap on a flat surface, the completely steady pointed finger (Ryan in Proof of Life; Roberts in The Mexican) and the incredulous gasp plus hair-toss. These little performances are not only completely unrelated to real life—in which the average gal doesn’t generally choreograph her movements to show off flattering clothing during arguments—but they are also calculated to emphasize how “comical” female anger is.

Though this is acceptable in the romantic comedies that Hollywood churns out like sweet butter (although surely having a little genuine emotion in there would make the stories less facile and the endings less trite), these rote moves require only a little intensification—and perhaps a pained and quizzical frown—to qualify as drama. Underwear helps too, because it’s more dramatic and grown-up to emote half-naked. In Proof of Life, Ryan indicates the torturous battle between anger, frantic worry, trapped desperation, and burgeoning desire by leaning against a fridge in her skivvies, knock-kneed and grizzling gently. Then there’s the scene in Eyes Wide Shut where Nicole Kidman points an “angry” finger at Tom Cruise while rubbing up and down against a radiator in a pair of panties.

Contrast these actresses with Emily Watson; though she has never received an Academy Award (despite being nominated twice, most recently in the same year that Gwyneth Paltrow achieved her Best Actress award for apparently just being ubiquitous), Watson’s film performances have an anguished power that can truly move an audience—and, indeed, disturb one for hours. Her mud-smeared, naked hysteria in Hilary and Jackie reveals the source part of at least some of this power: Watson’s characters often look shockingly ugly. In Breaking the Waves, she doesn’t evince distress at her lovers’ departure with huge, puppy-dog eyes and a trembling bottom lip; rather, she is an elemental force with a face that disintegrates into human mulch and a tearing, mad cry that has no gender.

Watson is, of course, with her tangle-headed, moon-faced sweetness, not at all ugly in actuality. But her most un-Hollywoodlike propensity for messing up her looks in the throes of emotion, unreservedly letting herself go, ensures that she looks like a real person when doing so. And perhaps that’s why her performances don’t slide off you like cheap foundation once you’ve finished watching the film—and can we really say the same about stompy-foot twins Ryan and Roberts and others of their ilk?

Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted, is another actor given the green light to transform herself into a truly scary, dribbling mess of emotion in a recent film, and then rewarded for it with a Supporting Actress Oscar. But there are a few points to consider here. First, Jolie is a one-person lunatic fringe, as much a precious Hollywood exception-that-proves-the-rule as Watson, a wacky little human flag waved when movie people wish to demonstrate that even the most conservative creative industry can tolerate unconventional people. Second, she’s exceptionally good-looking even by movie standards, possessing flamboyant, fleshy features that can withstand emotional engorgement in a way that, say, Paltrow’s fluttery pastel looks would not. Third, Girl, Interrupted was set in the enclave of a girls-only institution; thus, Jolie’s character had not the faintest possibility of getting it on with available males, liberating her character from the emotional/physical constraints of playing the cinematic Love Object. And regardless of how these factors were involved in freeing up Jolie to give the incredible performance she did, it was heartening that the attention to her performance focused on its quality rather than on the ruination of her remarkable looks through real, live acting.

Of course, if you’re a star like Paltrow or Roberts, you should be able to do what you want—and if that happens to include compromising your hundred-watt looks for the emotion demanded by a role, so be it. But by a certain stage in an actresses’s career, her In Style-cover image is like the grossly inflated tit in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, ballooning ahead of her with a life and earning power of its own, squishing all in its path. She is afraid, perhaps, to puncture that kind of appeal. Hence such feeble attempts at uglying down as Paltrow’s and Roberts’s much-discussed fat suits (for Shallow Hal and America’s Sweethearts, respectively), and Renée Zellweger’s “daring” Bridget Jones’s Diary weight gain—all gimmicks that substituted physical transformation for actual acting and did nothing but emphasize the perfection of the stars who temporarily tried them on. Emotion may be the carbohydrate of the industry, but consistency is the key when serving in bulk. Movie stars are simply brands, guaranteed to look and behave in a predictable way: To show Meg Ryan displaying a level of anger or sadness beyond what her audience has come to expect would be a serious devaluation of her brand and a could result in loss of faith, customer loyalty, and revenue. With no plot or point to speak of, a film such as America’s Sweethearts, say, exists only so we, the imperfect masses, can pay money to watch improbable perfection in motion. If these people started looking and behaving more like ourselves, we could sit comfortably gawking at each other in street cafes rather than shell out cash to sit in an itchy theater seat for two hours.

Perhaps the outcome of this year’s Oscars are evidence of an upward trend. Of the five nominees, three gave truly emotional performances—Halle Berry’s almost making up for the buttock-clenching moment in Swordfish where her character was strung up from the ceiling and registered her fear and pain with no more than a mild pout. The subtle, heart-rending performances of Berry and nominees Sissy Spacek and Judi Dench served to emphasize the stilted stylisation of the other nominees, for films that seemed to demand facial evocations more suited to Elmer Fudd than to flesh-and-blood humans. Renée Zellweger was apparently worthy of nomination because she porked up a bit and did a funny accent in a cartoonish caper. And Nicole Kidman’s performance in Moulin Rouge was a porcelain collection of feminine cinematic conventions, from the tubercular “coughs” delivered as if she was blowing out the candles on her 12th birthday cake to the wobbling close-ups, a single tear leaving no trace on her rubberized spray-on pancake base. Perhaps, in this whirling, ironic, faux-naîve film, that was the point. But how should we distinguish? It also seems worthwhile to mention that while Russell Crowe revelled in limps, twitches, dribbles, and psychotic episodes, his costar Jennifer Connelly’s single emotional breakdown in A Beautiful Mind took place entirely in the dark. (She received a Best Supporting Actress statuette for her decorous restraint.)

Part of the draw of movies and their stars, of course, is the fact that we obediently desire those beings so carefully packaged to be desirable—even when they’re packaged with gender assumptions galore. Just as the studio execs assume that females always want to be rescued by the likes of Nicolas Cage and Russell Crowe, perhaps they also think that their average male audience member has had quite enough of his real-life partner’s real-life tears and anger. Perhaps they worry that, however lovely they are, if Julia or Sandra or Cameron seems too irascible and emotional, too “hysterical” up there on the screen, she’ll drive the boys away.

Yet the truth is that much of the abovementioned mulch is aimed at us undiscerning women, a part of the paradoxical conspiracy that includes women’s magazines, hair-color commercials, and Ally McBeal. We have a collective, masochistic urge to submit to these saccharine entertainments, with their syrupy smiles and cooing, joshing advice disguising the shrieking, brass-clawed commercial raptors forever pushing us towards some mummified idea of perfection. The rigid control we are supposed to have over our own lives extends beyond physical appearance to emotions themselves and, in the struggle to be lovely, we are urged to be as mean and sparing with tears and anger as we are with our food.

Hollywood, despite the way it eagerly seizes on every inoffensively hip global trend, is still alarmingly conservative. Its images of women remain mostly proscriptive, not reflective; and for some of us, this is beginning to curdle. Otherwise excellent films like Vanilla Sky and A Beautiful Mind are spoiled by their vapid, unthinking depictions of women. Once you start to notice them, the examples are all over the place, becoming more discordant every time. Perhaps in the end, we’ll simply refuse to pay any more to see these morbid annoyances; and finally witness raw, complex, real emotions reflected in the faces of Hollywood females as they watch what happens to their paychecks.

After graduating from Oxford University with a degree in English Literature, Laura Smith spent a few years in Eastern Europe, editing a cultural magazine and website in Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest. She is now living and writing in France, for climatic and culinary reasons.

Student Counsel

Kyla — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 03:00:00 -0400

Everything’s bigger in Texas, or so the saying goes, and that may be truest in the realm of sex-education controversy. Texas, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, has also been at the forefront of abstinence-only education in public schools since 1995, when then-governor George W. Bush signed the curriculum into law. Since then, Texas public-school students’ questions about birth control, abortion, or unfamiliar burning sensations are answered by teachers with a policy-approved soundbite: “Abstinence is the only way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.” They learn that condoms don’t work, that premarital sex means you’re damaged goods, and, occasionally, that hiv can be transmitted through kissing. Since taking presidential office, Bush has pushed for more abstinence-only programs, requesting more than $200 million for them in 2004. (Only a few states, including Texas and North Carolina, require abstinence-only education, but many others offer generous grants to schools that teach abstinence and host virginity-pledge drives.)

Whether the programs are good or bad for youth depends on your own, ahem, moral values, but there’s no question that they’re controversial, even in Texas. The new documentary The Education of Shelby Knox follows its title character, a with-it, curly-haired teenager from Lubbock, as she realizes the limits of her abstinence-only schooling and decides to do something about it. Her subsequent involvement with the Lubbock Youth Commission, a group determined to bring comprehensive sex education into the city’s schools, tests her relationship with her Republican, Baptist family, the school board, and her peers. Filmmakers Rose Rosenblatt and Marion Lipschultz follow the high-school sophomore as she becomes a true activist, certain in her beliefs and unafraid of calling out for truth. Bitch spoke with Rose, Marion, and Shelby Knox herself shortly after the documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Rose and Marion, how did the film come to be? How did you find Shelby?

Rose: We weren’t looking for Shelby. We knew we wanted to cover sex education. [The subject] was a motif in our last film, Live Free or Die, which was about an ob-gyn in Bedford, New Hampshire, who did abortions. He was fighting a Catholic and secular hospital merger, and he was also fighting to be allowed to stay on as a volunteer sex-ed teacher at his kids’ high school. We got into the sex-ed [struggle] that way, and understood that it was a very big issue on the national scene, becoming bigger as the federal government [got] more and more into the business of funding.

[Funding for abstinence-only sex ed] was slipped into the welfare-reform act, under Clinton, and it’s now big business. We knew it was a good story—we’d done a lot of things having to do with reproductive rights, so this was right up our alley. It took us a solid year to find a specific story that we were happy with.

Marion: We’ve done about five films, and this was the hardest research we’ve ever done. What made it so difficult was that it was a controversial issue [that involved] kids and high schools. We went to 20 locations across the country, researching stories and networking hard. We tried to talk to people who were [attempting] to get abstinence-only education into the schools, and in some cases we were shut out. One teacher in California [invited] us to come to her class, and then when the principal found out about it he said, “Absolutely not.”

I wrote a story about abstinence education recently, and I had teachers say, “I can’t talk to you.”

Marion: We were shut out of a lot of places. We finally got a call from Lubbock, Texas, [telling us] that there was a group leader named Cowboy Fred Ortiz who was with a bunch of kids fighting for better sex ed [in schools], and down we went.

Shelby: I was actually interested in the sex-ed issue before they came along, and my parents were supportive of that, because they realized how little information everybody had—and how dangerous that was. What most parents don’t realize is that they got more sex education when they were in high school than kids do now.

Once you found Shelby, how did you develop the narrative?

Rose: One of the reasons we were able to do this efficiently is that Shelby got it very quickly—and by “it,” I mean how to make a film. She understood that her story was a vehicle for the issues. So she was able to help if she knew something important was coming up, something that would be good to have in the film. She also understood that you needed a kind of drama.

There are some scenes that are really hard to watch, like Shelby’s one-on-one talk with Ed Ainsworth [a surfer-style preacher nicknamed “Sex Ed,” who spreads the gospel of abstinence to the kids of Lubbock]. Did Rose and Marion propose that, or did you, Shelby?

Shelby: It was a collaborative idea. I wanted to talk to him, I wanted to somehow get into his psyche. But I also wanted them to be there filming it.

Rose: We recognized that he would be a critical character, and we knew how tough it would be to get him to really be involved. He knew the Lubbock Youth Commission, and thought they were totally wrongheaded. But he also had a bit of the filmmaker in him—as everybody does—and he said, “I go to these parking lots where kids hang out. You can come with me and see what I do.” What he does is called “witnessing.”

Shelby: He’s a natural performer. He dresses like a teen, dyes his hair. And he definitely wanted his side of the story to be told.

Marion: We appreciate that Ed was willing to be involved, because one of the things in Lubbock, as in a lot of places, is that it’s really hard to go up against a bunch of kids. Imagine being a town elder and disagreeing with kids. You run the risk of not looking very good. A lot of people, when you ask about this issue, not just in Lubbock, will avoid the media and freeze you out.

Rose: For example, we convinced the head of the local family-values coalition to talk to the youth from the commission on camera, and I think he understood that that was a good thing to do. But he wasn’t expecting Shelby to stand up to him when he started lecturing her. When she said, “No one tells me how to be a good Christian!” he was really floored. He shut the door totally after that. But audiences start cheering and applauding at that moment.

Shelby: What isn’t in the film is that he asked me if his face was on my dartboard. And I said yes.

Speaking of supporting characters, when did you start seeing that Corey [Nichols, a student on the Youth Commission and young Republican who clashes with Shelby in the film] was going to be a major element of the story?

Rose: When Corey [beat out Shelby] in the election for mayor of the youth commission, we knew we were going to have to deal with him. We were sure that Shelby would win—because we wanted it so badly, and also because she was perfect for it. So Corey appeared, and he won, and then we were like, “What are we going to do now?” Because we had wanted to cover the commission’s campaign to get comprehensive sex education in the schools, and we sensed we were not going to get access politically the way we were with Shelby. We had no idea how we would use Corey’s victory in the film, or that the adversarial thing [between them] would be a whole other layer.

Marion: At first, we didn’t think we had a film.

Rose: We were despairing. This story doesn’t tell itself—we had to wrestle the story out of an enormous amount of footage. When we went [to Lubbock], this was a story about a group of teenagers fighting the town. [We weren’t] looking at the story of a Republican family and the transformation of their daughter. We didn’t know how much Shelby was going to transform. That’s the magic. And it was other people who said, when we showed them the footage of the Knox family, “Have you got more of that?”

The family scenes seem like they would be hard to film.

Marion: [Shelby’s] mother and father began to understand what we wanted. People get it after a while and they want to give it to you. They’d talk about emotions with us, and then we’d have them talk about it on camera.

Rose: Once, Shelby was talking to us about how her parents wanted her to quit the commission. We knew we wanted that scene. So we came down and said, “We know Shelby often goes back and forth with you about you wanting her to quit. Can you talk about it?”

Shelby, what did your parents think of the movie?

Shelby: They loved it. My parents were at Sundance. My father compiled this massive book of every article I ever appeared in, and he recently made a t-shirt with “The Education of Shelby Knox” on the front.

Rose: He knew more about Sundance than I did.

He also calls Shelby a “feminazi.”

Shelby: Yes, he does. But my father doesn’t understand feminism really, in that he still sees it the same way a lot of women my age see it. He says, “You’re beautiful, how can you be a feminist?” He sees feminism as something for lesbians and ugly women. He doesn’t understand that it’s changed and morphed so much, and it’s not just for women who want to be men. I feel like feminists in your generation [meaning Rose and Marion] were trying to be more macho.

Rose and Marion: Nooo!

Or so the media wants you to think!

Rose: We never were trying to be men! We’re thinking of doing a book with Shelby, intergenerational conversations on feminism.

Check out http://www.incite-pictures.com for information on The Education of Shelby Knox. Rebecca Onion (http://www.rebeccaonion.com) is moving to Austin, Texas, this fall, and Shelby Knox has promised to show her around.

Five Conversations About One Thing - Jim McKay

Kyla — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Amy Richards met Jim McKay as he was getting ready to release his first film, Girls Town, in 1995. McKay was kind (and political) enough to offer his film to the Third Wave Foundation, which Richards cofounded, for a benefit screening. Though Third Wave has had dozens of events since then, none has come close to matching its success, in terms of sheer dollars raised in one sitting (over $20,000), the number of new donors and allies attracted to the organization’s work, and the unparalleled visibility that comes when you combine social justice and Hollywood.

Since their introduction a decade ago, Richards—coauthor, with Jennifer Baumgardner, of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future and the recently released Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism—has seen McKay every few months, walking the streets of New York City with his family, at events like the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, or, more deliberately, through their mutual interest in and commitment to social-justice work; McKay and his wife and business partner, Hannah Weyer, produced a film for Scenarios USA, a youth-produced media organization that Richards works closely with. When Bitch approached Richards about contributing to our masculinity issue, she could think of no better subject than McKay.

Amy Richards: How do you describe yourself, and how did you get involved in filmmaking?

Jim McKay: I’m a filmmaker, writer, director, husband, and father, in no specific order. I’m in my 40s—it’s hard to remember [that] sometimes. I got into film basically by watching films; I wasn’t one of those kids who was shooting Super 8 at the age of 8. Music was the art form that enticed me first, not film. In college, I started realizing that there were interesting stories out there. I spent a good four years watching films, then gradually entered that world. I didn’t go to school for film—I studied secondary education—but I did get tons of help from people around me.

Two of your films—Girls Town and Our Song—have been described as emotional and political coming-of-age stories with girls as their subjects. Was there a reason you focused on girls rather than boys?

When I got out of school, I was becoming a political being. I became interested in every “ism” that wasn’t my experience in order to understand the world in a fuller way. I studied feminism, but not in a formal way, and through that I saw the need for the stories of real women. When I started making films, I was trying to fill that specific void.

It’s been a challenge to tell girls’ stories, but it seems like a greater challenge for me to confront the story of a boy. In a strange way, I’ve always felt less comfortable exploring masculinity.

When you’re a political person, it seems natural to tell the less powerful person’s story. It seems silly to tell the rich person’s story or the white person’s story, though those are instructive too.

Exactly. People often say, “Why aren’t there conservative voices in documentary films?” The reason that conservatives don’t make documentaries is because they make the mainstream films. If the mainstream was liberal, conservative voices would be in the art houses.

Also, focusing on girls explicitly doesn’t necessarily exclude boys. In what way does your work directly or indirectly take on masculinity?

Actually, the film that I just finished, Angel, focuses on a young man, and my third film, Everyday People, has many male subjects. Angel is about a kid and his social worker, a 38-year-old woman, and they are both at turning points in their lives. The film deals with issues of family, fatherhood, and motherhood.

How did you come to do Angel?

I often take a minor character in one film and explore their story further in another. Girls Town fed into all of the other movies I have done. When you immerse yourself so deeply in something, there is bound to be one part that you didn’t get to tell, or it leads you to a parallel or emerging story. After Girls Town and Our Song, I wanted to rise to the occasion of telling a male story. Everyday People focuses on two young females and one young male, and my venturing into that character gave me the background to develop Angel.

In both Girls Town and Our Song, the protagonists are young women with a conspicuous absence of fathers or father figures. What shaped that decision for you? You must have a more personal relationship to this subject now that you’re a father, though you weren’t when you made those films.

I’m certainly dealing with family and fatherhood now that I’m a father, but I don’t think I would have done the films any differently. One of the moms in Girls Town is not present either, and I actually completely don’t deal with moms at all. With Our Song, I was confronting an unfortunate reality, which is the absent father. When you do work that comes from a certain social background, it’s a challenge to make things honest but not exploitative. I had to push myself—and actually Hannah pushed me, she said, “It’s okay to make [the father] a fuck-up.”

The subject of fathers is very personal to me, since I don’t know my father—my mother left him two months before I was born and I have never met him. It’s not fair that we tend to have different expectations of our mothers than we do of our fathers.

The norm is different now. My mom was a teacher before she had kids; she took a lot of time off, and then she went back to teaching. She was living in a time when there was little questioning of being a full-time mom. What I notice today is that parents have another life beyond parenting, and that makes parenting [more] challenging. I wish I had a blank slate and could just create these roles. For mothers, it’s especially problematic because so many more moms have full work lives before they have kids. When they spend more time with their kids, they are very aware of what they are missing.

Having spent so much time with the girls in your films, developing their characters and hearing their stories, has it been helpful in shaping your thoughts on how you want to raise your children?

My daughter is 3 and a half years old, and my son is four months. I feel no security at all about what I’m doing. I turned out okay and I can only worry so much about whether or not they are going to be in a good school or are going to be picked on. That’s life. You have to keep reminding yourself that it’s the lack of perfection that makes them into full human beings.

I am constantly trying to check myself. A Barbie found its way into my daughter’s hands, [and] it tripped me out for a couple of days. She was obsessing, “Daddy, look at her hair.” I made snide remarks and told her that I didn’t want to play Barbie, I wanted to play something else. After about four days, I delved into a very adult discussion about how Barbie is not like a real person. Then I realized that my daughter doesn’t need this, and she certainly doesn’t want it. It is horrifying what is out there that’s defining the culture. [But] that’s the world, and I have to trust that my kids will learn how to think.

I spend a lot of time on college campuses, and I’m shocked by how often students just want to know what “the” answer is. They ask me: “Is this a sexist ad?” Or, “What’s feminist about Mean Girls?” They’ve forgotten how to analyze the world for themselves; they expect the answer to be obvious.

Media and critical thinking are the most important classes. If you take today at face value, without interpretation, what are you getting?

Jim McKay’s new movie Angel will premiere in the U.S. in late 2005. Amy Richards’s latest book, Grassroots, is out now.

Jail Bait

Kyla — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 02:00:00 -0500

It is not my pleasure to remind anyone of the 2001 teen flick Sugar & Spice. Teetering between the black humor of Heathers and the girly glitz of Clueless, it achieves the success of neither, and I bring it up now only because of a single scene.

The movie follows a group of cheerleaders who decide to rob a bank in order to finance their captain’s unexpected pregnancy. But when watching old crime flicks for how-tos on grand larceny proves insufficient, the cheerleaders visit a state prison for some face-to-face advice from one girl’s incarcerated mother.

In the prison’s waiting room, a hefty, lip-smacking inmate maneuvers her mop between the legs of pretty, pregnant Diane and leers at the unsuspecting group: “Them some sweet skirts y’got there.” The scene is played for maximum laughs: Naive cheerleaders find themselves in a den of sex-hungry criminals—but the criminals are women, so it’s funny! You know, instead of scary! A short time later, the girls visit with other inmates for tips on pulling off the heist, and encounter a further litany of stereotypes—dry-haired, chain-smoking women who make veiled references to turning tricks and killing men. As slapstick as the film is intended to be, the scene is noteworthy simply because, as one of the few images of incarcerated women in mainstream media, it bears an unusually heavy burden. Unlike other frequently caricatured images in film—like, say, cheerleaders—movie audiences can’t always weigh the portrayal of a female inmate with a real-life counterpart for accuracy.

Prisons keep these real women separate and invisible from the public. Meanwhile, news organizations are much more likely to sensationalize individual crimes than to examine the truth behind the 182,000 women incarcerated in the U.S. So stereotypes go unchallenged by serious news analysis, and the public image of women in prison is at the mercy of pop culture dreck like Sugar & Spice, whose mocking portrayals settle in as the basis for dangerous assumptions. It doesn’t sound like a big deal—after all, it’s just a stupid movie, right?—but misleading pop culture images have dire consequences for real-life incarcerated women. These cheap images aren’t going to inspire anyone to take action to confront the laws, policies, and people who make life hell for women serving time.

Doll houses and birdcages

The lineage of women-in-prison movies is a seedy one, with a B-movie record marked by girls-gone-bad storylines that extends at least as far back as the 1950s. Titillating titles like Caged (1950), Girls in Prison (1956), Caged Heat (1974) and its 1994 update, Caged Heat II: Stripped of Freedom, and Amazon Jail (1982) cater to viewers’ voyeuristic impulses. These tales of vulnerable young things navigating a harsh prison are largely vehicles for money shot–style images that are the films’ raison d’être: a roomful of women being hosed down by their sadistic warden as punishment (1971’s The Big Doll House), say, or a young reform-school inmate gang-raped with a plunger by her roommates (1974’s Born Innocent). Such exploitation films are no longer being produced in great numbers, but the women-in-prison fan base is large and active, as illustrated by the many websites devoted to chronicling the genre, often highlighting particularly sexual or violent scenes.

More recent versions of the women-in-prison movie have tended toward a different kind of fantasy. For instance, much of the 2002 film Chicago is set in a women’s prison and, unlike its sleazy predecessors, it doesn’t make sexuality the lure of its story. But notwithstanding the real-life murderer Roxie Hart, who inspired the original stage script, the conniving vixens that headline Chicago aren’t meant to exemplify actual inmates. As a musical, it’s clearly set apart from reality. The same idea applies to Brokedown Palace (1999), in which a pair of naive American girls are tossed into a Thai prison. Though the film is based loosely on the true experiences of Americans incarcerated abroad, it’s still an overblown, slightly absurd Hollywood take on such a scenario. Both movies are clearly fantastical, and the audience is expected to suspend disbelief and enjoy a good story.

More serious takes include Stranger Inside (2001), an HBO movie that makes female-female relationships the central part of the storyline, rather than a laughable or seedy side plot. The movie develops characters into something beyond stereotypes, urging audiences to relate to imprisoned women. Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye did her homework before making this movie, even workshopping the script with inmates in Minneapolis and San Diego (see “Cheryl Dunye,” no. 16).

Dunye’s respect for the voices of real women is admirable, and exactly what the genre needs in order to counter the false images that have long been its foundation. Nonetheless, Stranger Inside still has problems. Despite the movie’s efforts to humanize its characters, it’s not able to fully move beyond the predictable types, offering us characters like reforming gang girl Shadow, tough-as-nails Mama Cass, and pregnant Tanya.

Joanne Archibald, a formerly incarcerated woman who now works as advocacy director at Chicago Legal Aid to Incarcerated Mothers (CLAIM), spoke with Dunye during the making of Stranger Inside and, while she liked Dunye’s attitude toward her subject, felt that, in the end, the movie suffered from too many distortions. In particular, Archibald criticized the use of violence in the script. “[The characters] were stabbing and beating [each other] all the time,” Archibald says. “People have the idea that women in prison are mostly murderers, or at least very violent people, and this movie underlined that.” She adds, “I felt like the dialogue was realistic, and workshopping [the script] helped that, but the level of violence was not normal for a women’s prison. I don’t know if it was the group of people [Dunye] talked with, or what. My personal feeling was that it was an HBO thing.” (Given HBO’s “realistic” prison soap Oz—which, in its six-season run, averaged at least one inmate death per episode—this conclusion isn’t far-fetched.)

This overemphasis on violence is all too common. According to prison-reform organization the Sentencing Project, women are much more likely to be incarcerated for drug or property crimes (57 percent) than for violent crimes (31 percent). But popular culture persists in imagining female inmates as a bloodthirsty bunch.

This cultural predisposition toward emphasizing the relatively small percentage of women serving time for violent crimes is the one notable failing of the otherwise excellent 2003 PBS documentary, What I Want My Words to Do to You: Voices from Inside a Women’s Maximum-Security Prison. The film spotlights playwright Eve Ensler’s creative-writing workshop at New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and showcases the work of 15 workshop participants, with its narrative structured around various descriptive exercises, such as “Describe the facts of your crime.” The film is most moving when documenting the group discussions that follow each woman’s sharing of her story. These moments are intercut with footage of actors—among them Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei—discussing the women’s writing in low-key rehearsals. The film’s climax comes when the actors read the women’s writing onstage before an audience of prison inmates.

Like Dunye, Ensler (and the filmmakers she worked with, Madeleine Gavin, Judith Katz, and Gary Sunshine) has a sincere compassion for incarcerated women. Ensler personally selected the women for her workshop; according to the website, she sought “a cross-section of women who I thought would benefit from a group…. They had seeking spirits, they wanted to reckon with their deeds. And they were visionary women, women who had a sense of the future.” The film gives context to its subjects’ crimes, something that is often missing from sensationalized news reports. And most important—despite the professional readings—the women largely speak for themselves. We see them laugh together, support each other, and articulate the injustices they’ve known. The women in Ensler’s workshop are people PBS audiences can find common ground with—an important point considering our culture easily labels its prison population with words like “predator” and “monster,” encouraging us to dehumanize them. Furthermore, PBS developed an excellent website for the film that offers resources for further education on prison issues.

Unfortunately, nearly all of the “visionary women” featured in the film had been convicted of murder. Though this is at least partly due to the fact that in a maximum-security institution like Bedford Hills, inmates are more likely to have been convicted of violent crimes, included in Ensler’s efforts to depict the women in all their humanity is a tacit affirmation of the too-common assumption that most incarcerated women are violent.

Invisible women

There’s a small number of films that are neither seedy, fantastic, nor especially serious depictions of women in prison: Freeway, Fun, Last Dance, White Oleander, and the ’70s tv drama Within These Walls are several of note. There are also other cultural efforts to bring the stories of incarcerated women to the general public, such as the Medea Project, a theater company founded in 1989 that uses dramatic performance to give female inmates an outlet for their stories and experiences (see “Broad Way,” no. 17).

But despite these steps in the right direction, outside of exploitation films men still dominate the pop culture imagination of prisons. Prison stories—whether they’re told in a movie, a tv show, or a magazine article—usually feature men. If asked to imagine a prison, most of us will flash to the gloomy stone we remember from The Shawshank Redemption, or the foggy decrepitude of Escape from Alcatraz. If asked to picture a prisoner, we might think of Sean Penn’s wiry, chain-smoking death-row inmate in Dead Man Walking. These are the heavyweights of the prison genre, and they have loads of company. How the public imagines prisons is in large part owed to these films, as well as Papillon, Murder in the First, Face/Off, The Green Mile, and even Stir Crazy.

Since America’s incarceration boom began more than two decades ago, there has been a steady flow of male prison stories, but not a corresponding rise in female prison stories. This is true despite the fact that, since 1980, the number of women in prison has increased at nearly double the rate for men, and despite the increasing attention paid to abuses within women’s correctional facilities.

This relative invisibility is even more dangerous than inaccurate popular culture images. While the problems with women-in-prison movies have serious consequences for the public imagination, there is no excuse for them to bear the weight they do. News organizations need to do their part in telling the truth about incarcerated women.

Despite the two million people behind bars in this country—not to mention the families and the 600,000 prison employees directly affected by the system—prisons and prisoners receive relatively little news attention. Politicians typically only reference prisons when advocating get-tough-on-crime legislation, and even then the news media rarely delve into the ramifications of the proposed policies. For instance, the sevenfold increase in the number of incarcerated women in the past two decades is clearly connected to policies such as California’s three-strikes law, which is the harshest and most widely used law in the country (it carries a mandatory life sentence for anyone convicted of three felonies, ranging from homicide to drug possession to mail theft). But even when news organizations do attempt to cover prisoners’ issues, the story is often deeply sensationalized.

Racist stereotypes and assumptions about incarcerated women also come into play in media coverage: CLAIM’s Archibald has found, for instance, that it’s much more common for a dark-skinned woman to have an unseemly mug shot accompany news coverage of her crime; white women, by contrast, tend to either have more flattering photos or no photos at all. Coverage also generally lacks complexity. Santha McTaggart, who was formerly incarcerated at Western Wayne Correctional Facility in Plymouth, Michigan, has a laundry list of other issues the news never seems to get to—for example, the complexity of sexual relationships between inmates and corrections officers. While abuse is certainly prevalent, she says, the issue is more complicated; for example, sometimes women pursue such relationships in order to gain a more powerful place in the “society of captives” (a term coined by Gresham Sykes in his influential book of the same name).

Fortunately, there are measures at work to improve media coverage. Organizations like CLAIM facilitate voluntary workshops for arrested women that train them to work with the media that covers their case. Participants are videotaped, and the class discusses how the woman presented herself and her case. The point is for women convicted of crimes to deal with the media more affirmatively: not to lie, but not to feel forced to answer invasive questions either—and to give a full and accurate picture of her situation to help news audiences identify with her.

Martha Stewart’s recent incarceration in a minimum-security West Virginia prison has made prison life a trendy subject in the news-and-culture sphere, though to say it’s elevated the discourse would be inaccurate—Stewart’s prison sentence has yielded many more tiresome jokes about cell decorating and eucalyptus-scented shower trysts than it has serious discussions of social justice and prison reform. “The public is not getting the message about women in prison,” says Luveichie Anderson, who is incarcerated at Western Wayne. “If they were getting the message then the system wouldn’t be the way [it is]. Some laws could be changed, but no one cares.”

The lack of cultural language about women in prison translates into a de facto acceptance of the state of women’s prison experiences today. But without public awareness of prison conditions and prisoners’ issues, injustices can easily go unchecked, especially since inmates, who are in a severely constrained environment, have few opportunities to protect themselves.

When the public is misled about incarcerated women, it becomes easy for them to vote for standard “tough on crime” policies, like California’s three-strikes law and New York’s Rockefeller drug laws, that do little more than crowd prisons with nonviolent offenders, male and female alike. The public is responsible for electing the officials who determine state budgets and corrections policies—and therefore we are indirectly responsible for deciding whether or not incarcerated women have the right to jobs that pay more than small change, to maintain their parental rights, and to job training and education.

If female prisoners were represented more accurately in the media, the public would surely be more inclined to pressure politicians to pay attention to a population that is all too easy to ignore. A complacent public that isn’t spurred to ask questions—of politicians or of one another—is also more likely to tacitly accept the fundamental philosophy that prisons are the best means of punishment. In a country with the dubious honor of incarcerating 25 percent of the entire world’s prison population (according to William Alexander, founder of the Prison Creative Arts Project and an English professor at the University of Michigan), it’s easy to forget that incarceration was considered a revolutionary concept when the first two prisons opened in the United States in the 1820s.

In a world that’s becoming increasingly economically dependent on the prison-industrial system, alternatives to the current state of prisons are rarely imagined; in a twisted way, many people’s livelihoods depend on putting other people behind bars. But through active pressure, we have the power to change this. Organizations like CLAIM, the Prison Creative Arts Project (full disclosure: I used to work for the group), the Sentencing Project, Amnesty International, and the Justice Policy Institute are working to push the truth of incarcerated women through the white noise of sensationalized crime and into the public’s mind. As media consumers, we can support these efforts with more letters to the editor protesting traditional media approaches to women-in-prison and crime stories—and lauding those rare examples of sensitive, nuanced coverage. We can pressure media outlets to be aware of the particular issues surrounding incarcerated women, including motherhood and domestic violence. And most of all, we need to listen to the concerns of incarcerated women—because they need us. As Santha McTaggart puts it, what inmates want is “some people to relay what we are saying. We need someone to listen and to take us seriously.”

Anna Clark writes from her favorite corner of Michigan.

Suburban Blight

Kyla — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 03:00:00 -0400

A film studies professor once told me that everything you need to know about a movie is revealed in the first five minutes. This is particularly true of The Stepford Wives.  

In the opening scene of Bryan Forbes’s 1975 original, Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) takes a long, scrutinizing look at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her reaction is one of mild surprise, then subtle resignation, as if she’s thinking, That’s me?…Oh, well. She appears wistful and introspective as she walks around the silent Manhattan apartment that has been emptied for her family’s move to the suburbs. Compare this to the start of Frank Oz’s 2004 version: Joanna (Nicole Kidman), a powerhouse network executive, struts like a supermodel up to a podium, delivers a self-congratulatory speech, and previews the coming season’s reality shows to a huge industry crowd. The mood is loud, flashy, and in-your-face. The difference between the two scenes is night and day, and therein, as my professor foretold, is everything we need to know.  

In the early ’70s, people actually used the term “women’s lib” freely and earnestly. These days, we’re told there’s no need for it—we’ve been liberated, right?—and the phrase seems as quaint as a belted maxipad. Times have changed, and to watch the Stepford Wives remake is to be repeatedly hit over the head with this fact. From good-natured pokes at rampant antidepressant use, omni-corporations, overindulged children, and obsession with physical appearance, we’re made painfully aware that this movie wants to be now, hot, and self-aware. 

In both films, Joanna moves to the town of Stepford reluctantly, at her husband’s behest. And in getting to know the new community, she senses that something’s not right with its cheerful, perfect citizens—particularly the women, most of whom are obsessed with cleaning, shopping, and pleasing their men. Joanna and her sidekick, Bobbie, begin to suspect that the shadowy Stepford Men’s Association—into which Joanna’s husband is promptly inducted—is behind the alien perfection of the town’s women. 

Stepford’s horrible secret has changed slightly between 1975 and 2004: In the original, the men of Stepford are killing off their imperfect wives and replacing them with sunny, pliable automatons. In the remake, they’re digitally lobotomizing their spouses into sunny, pliable automatons. And in the remake, Joanna learns (through an internet search, natch) that all the perky, apron-sporting wives were once successful execs, just like her. The suggestion is that they all got a little too successful, so their husbands were compelled to take them down about a thousand pegs. Off to Stepford they went—to live life, as Joanna’s cigar-smoking husband, Walter (Matthew Broderick), says, “the way it was meant to be.” (These men presumably supported their wives on the way up, so why they changed their tune is never made clear.) 

The biggest difference between the original and the remake is that the latter is a comedy (written by veteran filmic funnyman Paul Rudnick) and the former a thriller. The original played on the still-present fears of what feminism means for both women and men; the remake almost demands that we don’t think too deeply about its significance. The thing is, feminism—unlike other “trends” of the ’60s and ’70s—never disappeared only to return as camp, like, say, the fondue pot did. The fear of women’s economic and social power also never went away, and the remake’s attempt to distance itself from something that’s neither vintage nor remote raises the question of what, exactly, we were meant to find relevant about it. A quick tour of Stepford, then and now, may provide a few answers.  

Kathleen Collins is a frequent contributor to Bitch.

The Queen's Gambit

Colin Sagan — Sun, 01 Jun 2003 03:00:00 -0400

Few would debate the fact that before the civil rights and women’s liberation movements percolated into mass culture, representations of black/white relationships in popular media, particularly Hollywood, were thoroughly unbalanced. Viewed in retrospect, seemingly amicable duos like Uncle Tom and Eva, Scarlett O’Hara and Mammy, and Shirley Temple and Bill Bojangles make us cringe with the obviousness of the black character’s one-way caregiving role. The minstrelization of African-Americans—alternately portrayed as countrified nurturers or urban entertainers—reveals the extent of their oppression in Hollywood. But a look at contemporary film exposes the perhaps more troubling fact that little has changed, and nowhere does this become clearer than in narratives that take on the societal ramifications of interracial romance.

While Hollywood has always flirted with the frisson of miscegenation (1930’s Motion Picture Production Code explicitly forbade it, a ban not officially lifted until the mid-1950s), it wasn’t until the ’60s and ’70s that films seriously tackling the complexities of interracial relationships took their first tentative steps forward: The Sidney Poitier dramas A Patch of Blue (1965) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) are the most famous examples.

And then came 1975’s Mandingo. Shocking audiences with its lurid, if somewhat cynical, portrayal of the star-crossed love affair between a white man, Hammond, and his black slave, Ellen, Mandingo stands as the quintessential racy race film. The film’s flamboyance sometimes verges on camp: Hammond is cursed with a gimpy leg, an obvious symbol for impotence that sets him in even starker contrast to his hypervirile slave Mede. Mede stands in for Hammond’s displaced masculinity, not only becoming a top fighter in plantation wrestling matches but also sleeping with Hammond’s wife, Blanche. Campiness notwithstanding, though, Mandingo sought to challenge our entrenched conceptions of race and power by presenting consensual—and romantic—sex between master and slave.

Hollywood has revisited the Mandingo taboo over the past decade or so, and has also sought far more thoughtful and normalized representations of interracial relationships, from the edgy drama of 1992’s Zebrahead to the Afterschool Special–style schlock of Save the Last Dance and the self-referential punch lines of Cruel Intentions. (In the last, an irate matron screeches to her daughter’s black cello teacher, “I got you off the streets!,” to which he replies with bewilderment that he lives on Park Avenue.) Yet Hollywood still can’t seem to slake its thirst for the broadest of characterizations when it comes to interracial pairings, and this year’s Queen Latifah/Steve Martin hit Bringing Down the House provides ample
evidence that a film’s racial awareness has nothing to do with its racial sensitivity.

The plot goes something like this: Framed for a bank robbery, brassy Charlene (Latifah) meets a recently—and unhappily—divorced tax attorney, Peter (Martin), in an Internet chat room. Letting him believe she’s a lawyer, too, Charlene sets up a rendezvous at his home. Her real goal is to clear the bogus charges, but because Charlene is presented from the start as a sponger who needles and harasses Peter into helping her, the film doesn’t let us believe wholeheartedly in her innocence.

Then again, that may not be the point. As the two haracters get to know one another, Peter begins to look at Charlene as a potential companion. After all, he stands to gain a lot from the relationship: Charlene belongs to a tradition of with-it black characters who gamely provide spiritual counsel to floundering white souls. She poses as the family’s nanny, ostensibly so that Peter won’t horrify and alienate his wealthiest client, racist heiress Mrs. Arness, with the implication that he and Charlene are friends, much less potential lovers. Their relationship is symbiotic, but unbalanced. He takes her into his home and agrees to work on her case, while she nurtures his kids and advises him on how to win back his ex-wife, Kate (Jean Smart).

By having Charlene irreverently parody the archetypal mammy, Bringing Down the House presents itself as a spoof of racism and racist films. But the film fails as a satire because it’s plenty racist on its own. As Charlene settles into the mammy role, BDTH simply becomes an example of the kind of film it’s supposed to be skewering.

It appears that the bigwigs at Disney were aware of the script’s racist potential, or at least eager to hedge their bets. And it’s easy to imagine that studio execs were attempting to inoculate themselves against inevitable criticism when they enlisted Queen Latifah as executive producer. As she told the Boston Globe in March 2003, “The studio felt the script needed not just a black voice, but because it was so racy and edgy, it also needed someone who could develop a different take on the characters.” Until recently, Latifah was best known as an mc who once topped charts with lyrics like “I’m not your personal whore/ That’s not what I’m here for.” She also established herself in proud-black-woman roles like Kadijah James in Fox’s gal-pal sitcom Living Single and Cleo on 1996’s heist drama Set It Off. Had Charlene been played by an unknown actor, far fewer of us would have given the film’s premise enough of the benefit of the doubt to make it to the theater.

Which is not to say that Latifah’s behind-the-scenes role is a mere marketing ploy. But to assume that simply having her in an executive position makes Bringing Down the House not racist would be naive. The timing of the movie’s release is noteworthy: After effectively crossing over to mainstream Hollywood with a race-blind role in the Oscar-
winning Chicago, Latifah in Bringing Down the House charges straight back to the mammy genre of the past. In playing a character who burdens herself with shoring up a white man’s sexual insecurity, teaching his son to read and his daughter to be careful whom she runs with, and cooking soul food for a wealthy bigot who responds with crass racial slurs, the erstwhile mc seems to have forgotten her hip history. In his Chicago Sun-Times column on March 7, Roger Ebert suggested that Latifah perhaps wanted to make a point: “Rich White Lawyer Had Better Learn to Accept This Bitch on Her Own Terms Instead of Merely Caving In to Her Sex Appeal” [sic]. The other logical explanation—aside from BDTH’s blockbuster potential—is that the film’s “We’re spoofing racism, not reproducing it!” posturing really does have us all duped, Queen Latifah included.

It becomes even more obvious that BDTH is resurrecting old race stereotypes when compared to another Steve Martin comedy with a similar plot, 1992’s Housesitter. Here, Martin plays the same stuffy-but-benevolent white guy whose ex-fiancé is frumpy and cold—not quite a harridan, but not a keeper, either—and Goldie Hawn plays Gwyn, a low-class vagabond with a heart of gold. Gwyn’s role, in contrast to that of Charlene, is not to help the man get his ex back but to make him realize that he deserves better. Though both films depend on the chemistry between the pairs, Martin and Hawn end up together, whereas Martin and Latifah do not. Though Bringing Down the House is initially set up as a romance between Charlene and Peter, it becomes clear as the movie progresses that love would blossom only if Charlene were white. To save face, the movie sets up another, more comical, white guy, Howie (Eugene Levy), as Charlene’s potential love interest. This pairing is one of the more ludicrous elements of the film, as Howie tries to win Charlene over with lines like “You got me straight trippin’‚ boo.” Charlene seems mildly flattered and thoroughly amused by these overtures, and though the closing scene finds them snuggling happily, she and Howie suffer an obvious dearth of chemistry.

That said, the film’s pivotal—though highly sublimated—love scene occurs between Charlene and Peter at a swank nightclub. As a live band cranks the place up with Kelly Price’s “Ain’t Nobody,” Charlene, in a low-cut black dress, goads Peter onto the dance floor to coach him in the art of freaking. As he gets into the spirit of the hip gyrating and ass shimmying, the camera pans up to the restaurant balcony, where, conveniently enough, Kate sits with her sister Ashley. Observing Peter and Charlene, Kate clucks, “He’d never dance with me like that!” The upstairs/downstairs symbolism in this scene is used consistently throughout the film. Where Charlene personifies the aggressive, freaky music that signifies sexuality in BDTH, Kate looks tastefully bland by comparison, sporting all the accoutrements of modern gentility—cell phone, car, neutral clothing. She’s as colorless as Charlene is, well, colored.

But for all the electricity between Charlene and Peter, she is more a barometer for his sexual fantasy than a true love interest. This becomes evident in the next scene, in which their ambivalent dance-floor romance is rendered into a burlesque sex act back at Peter’s. Charlene puts on a Barry White record and continues to coach Peter in seducing Kate; she encourages Peter to grab her breasts as though they belonged to his ex-wife. He goes on to stuff his crotch with two prickly tennis balls, and they tumble onto the couch together in giggles. Naturally, Peter’s dowdy next-door neighbor Mrs. Klein walks into the room to discover the two of them play-humping and gasps, “Mandingo!” in predictable knee-jerk fashion.

This kind of blatant self-referencing is the film’s way of getting itself off the hook—trying to make clear that, though it may promote old stereotypes, it does so with a self-conscious gaze. Having an ostensibly racist character pass judgment on Peter and Charlene seems to exonerate them for capitulating to the retrograde roles of master and Jezebel. This winking backward glance to an inarguably racist representation of interracial romance seeks to assure us that Bringing Down the House is, after all, just a spoof.

In fact, Mandingo references are a kind of modus operandi for Bringing Down the House. Ashley, the film’s bratty belle, is set up as a modern-day Blanche. Seeing Charlene at a country club, for example, Ashley snottily asks her for a martini, as though a black woman would be there only in the capacity of waitress. And we’re inclined to cheer Charlene on when she later follows Ashley into the club bathroom, muttering, “I’m gonna kick the bulimia out of you, bitch.” The resulting kickboxing match vaguely recalls the scene in Mandingo when Blanche calls Ellen into her bedroom and beats her with a switch. BDTH’s fight is far more fair, but the characters’ cartoonish kung-fu moves drain the scene of seriousness. In the end, when Ashley is bruised, knocked out, and swinging from a hook on the wall, we’re left cheering for Charlene, as though her physical victory over Ashley constituted a kind of ritual sacrifice of the racist Blanche archetype.

But what BDTH fails to acknowledge is that the scene in Mandingo isn’t a mere catfight. Rather, it suggests that the white woman is targeting the black woman because she can’t see that they’re both victims within a larger system of power. In fact, Blanche isn’t supposed to be an archetypal villain at all. (By the end of the film, when her husband poisons her for giving birth to a biracial love child, she’s transformed into a sympathetic character.) By trying to mirror, and then resolve, Blanche and Ellen’s complex rivalry in a single over-the-top showdown, BDTH misses the point completely.

Granted, Bringing Down the House uses hyperbole in a way that suggests it couldn’t possibly be taking itself seriously. With the possible exception of Peter and Charlene, all the movie’s characters are firmly two-dimensional, and those intentionally coded as racist are over-the-top caricatures: Mrs. Klein is an anachronism culled from some pristine ’50s suburb; Ashley is an abominable drama queen who milks geriatrics for their money; and Mrs. Arness is a frumpy, plantation-reared matron who, while dining at Peter’s house, cluelessly (if earnestly) sings a mock “spiritual” featuring the lyric “Massa gon’ sell us tomorrow.” The film keeps us rooting for Peter and Charlene by setting them against these stark, cartoonish villains, as though by demonizing the allegorical racists, the film itself is also denouncing racism. These scenes function to give Bringing Down the House a political pass, encouraging viewers to substitute their own politics for the actual politics of the film.

As always, though, Hollywood doth protest too much. As a spoof, Bringing Down the House fails to convince, as the moments of marked irreverence don’t carry throughout. To a great extent, the film regurgitates old allegories in order to simplify larger issues of race and power. Charlene provides ideological justification for the idea that black folks are there to help white folks get in touch with their authentic selves, whether it’s in the realm of sexuality, spirituality, or—in Peter’s case—just being a funky guy and a good father.

While it’s worth arguing that Queen Latifah’s role in producing the film marks a pivotal achievement for black women, it also shows that having a woman of color involved in the process won’t necessarily change the underlying assumptions of the eventual product, nor the way it will be interpreted. With Bringing Down the House, she reveals the ideological contours of black women’s oppression in Hollywood. The lesson may be that success comes fastest when you join the forces that make those who don’t fit Hollywood’s restricted romantic-heroine mold feel shitty—but we’d rather be taught something we don’t already know.

Rachel Swan is an intern at Bitch.

The Women's Academy

Kyla — Sat, 01 Mar 2003 00:00:00 -0500

There are some contests in which women are truly at a disadvantage when competing with men. Football. Presidential nominations. Snow-writing. But acting is not one of them. Streep vs. Nicholson, Dame Judi vs. Sir Ian, Maggie Gyllenhaal vs. Jake Gyllenhaal - the Vegas odds would be close ones indeed if these actors were pitted against each other for top honors.

They're not, of course. Movie awards have always segregated the genders, without ever explaining what emoting has to do with X and Y chromosomes. And no one's done it longer or with more cachet than the Academy Awards. The separate categories for Actor and Actress are unfair, but practical: What with the dearth of strong roles written for women in Hollywood (not surprising, given the high percentage of male screenwriters and directors), if the sexes were expected to duke it out in the acting categories, the imbalance in the numbers alone would ensure that women never got face time with the little golden man. (And since a parade of peacock gowns is always more interesting than yet another black tux, we'd also be missing out on what Joan Rivers and InStyle consider the real competition of the night.)

Between Salma Hayek's efforts to bring Frida Kahlo to the screen, Chicago's nominated trifecta of Zellweger, Zeta-Jones, and Latifah, and the leading-lady powerhouse that is The Hours, 2002 was a year when writers finally offered up a diverse assortment of juicy roles for the ladies. Here, in honor of the 75th annual Academy Awards, which will be broadcast on March 23, we'd like to offer what the Academy can't: more opportunities for women to win. And, unlike Best Actress in a Leading Role and Best Actress in a Supporting Role, these are truly gender specific.

Best Actress in a Male-Fantasy Role
Emily Watson, Punch-Drunk Love
Leonor Watling, Talk to Her
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Femme Fatale
Liv Tyler, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Natalie Portman, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Best Actress in a Romantic Lead Opposite a Man Old Enough to Be Her Father
Hilary Swank, Insomnia
Wanda De Jesus, Blood Work
Debra Messing, Hollywood Ending
Tea Leoni, Hollywood Ending
Do Thi Hai Yen, The Quiet American

Best Acting by a Former Romantic Lead Now Playing Someone's Mother
Daryl Hannah, A Walk to Remember
Geena Davis, Stuart Little 2
Kim Cattrall, Crossroads
Lesley Ann Warren, Secretary
Kim Basinger, 8 Mile

Best Actress in a Role Requiring a Nude Scene That's Integral to the Part
Salma Hayek, Frida
Maggie Gyllenhaal, Secretary
Emily Mortimer, Lovely & Amazing
Kathy Bates, About Schmidt
Thandie Newton, The Truth About Charlie

Best Actress Who will Likely Be Replaced in the Sequel By a New Babe
Rosario Dawson, Men in Black II
Fann Wong, Shanghai Nights
Beyonce Knowles, Austin Powers in Goldmember
Halle Barry, Die Another Day
Asia Argento, XXX

Lifetime Achievement Award for Surviving Hollywood with Her Dignity More or Less Intact
Susan Sarandon, Goldie Hawn, Catherine Deneuve, Sissy Spacek, Sally Field, Diane Keaton

Melissa Morrison is a Phoenix-based writer who tapes the Oscars so she can fast-forward through the boring categories.

A Galaxy of Our Own

Colin Sagan — Sat, 01 Dec 2001 02:00:00 -0500

In the ’90s, the black man suddenly invaded the blockbuster science-fiction and fantasy film. African-American males found expanded roles for themselves in a genre that had previously been blindingly white. We finally have a celluloid landscape in which Will Smith and Wesley Snipes get to represent heroic manhood for the masses, but hip and powerful black women have been overlooked by the Hollywood machine so far. Admittedly, the situation is far from perfect even for black men, who are still often secondary in importance in the futuristic and fantasy worlds of popular film. Keanu Reeves, not Laurence Fishburne, gets to play messiah in The Matrix (1999), that slick flick about a world where humanity must fight against machines that control our minds, bodies, and the entire fabric of reality. And in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), in whose faraway world evidence of any people of color on any planet is sorely lacking, Samuel L. Jackson has fewer lines than you can count on one hand. But at least black men no longer have to sacrifice themselves to save the white planet, a phenomenon epitomized in Terminator 2 (1991)—if anyone even remembers that there was a black man in the movie—and satirized in Mars Attacks! (1996). Nor must they always play sidekick to Bruce Willis or some other white guy.

After the economic success of 1996’s Independence Day, for instance, Will Smith became Hollywood’s golden boy of the turn-of-the-millennium science-fiction and fantasy film genre, boasting multiple heroic leading roles in succession. So if Hollywood can now groove on black male youth culture in its depictions of the future or of superheroes—however trivialized blackness may be by Will Smith in Independence Day, by Will Smith in Men in Black (1997), and by Will Smith in Wild, Wild West (1999)—why do black women usually get stuck being the mystic mammy or the mocha chocolata ya-ya? If we review the types of roles black women rate in contemporary science-fiction and fantasy film, we find that writers rely almost exclusively on limiting and demeaning stereotypes. Regardless of the fact that sf and fantasy have the potential to enable escape from the trappings of the past and present, racist stereotypes of black women hold strong in the Hollywood—and hence the American—imagination. We feminist and antiracist viewers might expect that the legacy of Gone with the Wind and Amos ’n’ Andy would finally have given way to depictions of capable, intelligent, and brave black women in the filmic future; but, for the most part, we would be wrong. Forthwith, a guide to the hypersexualized victims, second-fiddle girlfriends, tough babes, old wise women, and rare uncategorizable exceptions.

The (over)sexualized victim is the young, thin, light-skinned black woman who is inevitably onscreen to display her sexual appeal. She finds herself exploited and even brutalized by male characters, black and white. Her roles may range from passive girlfriend to superheroine, but her primary purpose is to titillate viewers with images of black women’s victimization.

Consider, for example, Dr. Karen Jenson (N’Bushe Wright) in 1998’s Blade. Karen is the girlfriend of the title character, played by Wesley Snipes, and, superficially, she seems to break with stereotypes; she is an educated, articulate scientist. Yet the film values her more for her own blood than for her knowledge of hematology. Blade, a half-vampire/half-human antihero, must save the world from vampires; at the film’s climax, he finds himself weakened and in need of blood to continue his battle. Karen sacrifices herself to Blade’s vampiric/heroic need in a scene that makes this reduction of an intelligent, capable black woman into a passive, sexualized victim painfully plain. He crouches over her, his body pulsing as she allows him to drain her blood. As he drinks, however, the hunger overpowers him; a weak, limp Karen can only whimper at him to stop before he kills her. Stop he does, but it’s difficult not to read the scene as a metaphoric rape perpetrated by the filmmaker to satiate viewers’ racist and sexist appetites for images of dangerous black masculinity and exploited black femininity. It seems we should cheer Blade on for his willpower in stopping just short of his beloved’s murder.

A similarly preyed-upon victim appears in the earlier, and more lighthearted, comedy/horror film Vampire in Brooklyn (1995). Here the vampire is no antihero, just a villain. And the character in question, Rita (Angela Bassett), is not entirely passive; by making her a police officer, the film gives Rita some power and identity beyond vampiric victim. Nonetheless, we learn early on from her superior, a white female detective, that Rita’s three months as a cop have not been highly successful and her job is at risk. Furthermore, despite some signs of competence, Rita is most memorable for her displays of visible fear and typical shrill horror-movie screams. In particular, the scene in which the vampire Maximillian (Eddie Murphy) enthralls Rita is rich with imagery of typical sexist victimization. In her tight, revealing dress, high heels, makeup, and upswept ’do (one of a variety of wigs Bassett wears throughout the film), Rita gives in to her hunger and lust and lets Max take her.

Downright misogynistic by comparison with this clichéd seduction, however, is the way the film dispatches Rita’s roommate, Nikki (Simbi Khali). Nikki is a minor character without an identity apart from a desperate need to have sex with any man handy. In her few minutes of screen time, the young, light-skinned, and curvaceous Nikki first throws herself at Bassett’s partner and prospective boyfriend; then, when he rejects her, she invites the first man she meets in the street up to her apartment for coffee or “some other refreshment.” The man is Maximillian, and he has not even attempted to ensnare her before she offers herself to him. Thus, she gets what she “deserves”: We listen at the keyhole as he has sex with and then murders her.

Another variety of hypersexualized victim appears in X-Men (2000). Storm (Halle Berry)—the only woman of color in the film (and one of two in the long-running Marvel comic)—is a superheroine who can summon wind, rain, and lightning at will. However, she boasts far greater power in theory than she actually displays onscreen. She is rendered the most highly sexualized of the X-Men, sporting overly tight and revealing white t-shirts that expose ample cleavage. With her sexy garb and flowing white hair, she is far more sexually objectified than the other heroic women (both white), the highly professional Dr. Jean Gray and the shy teen Rogue. Even more fully sexualized is the villain Mystique, whose costume is limited to small decorative blue patches on her blue skin. However, only Storm is rendered a victim within the narrative.

Early on, Storm is confronted by Sabretooth, an enormous, leonine brute portrayed by a white male professional wrestler. He hoists her in the air by her throat, puts his face menacingly close to hers, then softly growls his desire to hear her scream. Storm holds her own and does not scream (should we be thankful for small favors?), but no other heroic character in the film faces this kind of sexualized disempowerment. Later, Sabretooth again captures Storm and reminds her that she “owes” him a scream. Though the other X-Men are trapped and bound, only Storm is the object of a villain’s violent desire.

What if a black woman escapes this kind of victimization? The odds are she will not similarly escape hypersexualization, as exemplified by Jasmine Dubrow (Vivica A. Fox), the girlfriend of Steven Hiller (Will Smith) in the apocalypse-aversion blockbuster Independence Day. Jasmine proves herself capable and brave when she defends the (white) president’s wife and child and brings them and herself to safety (a scene that brings this character into the realm of the mammy stereotype, discussed below). Yet once Jasmine achieves this remarkable feat, she fades into the background to let other (male) characters save the world. Moreover, in keeping with the tradition of sexual exploitation of Hollywood’s young black women, Jasmine appears most often as the passive object of Steven’s desire; and, perhaps more tellingly, she works as a stripper.

If she sacrifices her sex appeal, today’s black woman in sf and fantasy film may also have to relinquish any claims to empowerment—or a central role. Though Pam Grier may remain best known to contemporary viewers for her role in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) or as the aggressive heroine of blaxploitation flick Foxy Brown (1974), she also portrayed Louise Williams, wife of failure-turned-hero Byron in Mars Attacks! Louise is capable and independent—at least, she stands her ground and raises her children without a man until he fulfills her expectations of a true partner. However, Louise has only a minor role, and she most definitely does not get to be a hero. Instead, she gets to wait for one to come home.

There are a few black female characters who have managed to escape both sexual victimization and minor girlfriend or wife marginalization. They are still young, thin, light-skinned, and conventionally beautiful, but they also get to take on some heroic toughness. The best example is probably Angela Bassett as Lornette “Mace” Mason of Strange Days (1995), the cyberpunk tale of Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), a loser who deals in illegal mind recordings, tapes of firsthand experiences—from sex to robbery to murder—that buyers jack into for a vicarious thrill. Mace, a limo driver, is Lenny’s friend; she is tough, intelligent, and brave. She repeatedly displays heroic behavior, risking her life to protect others and to champion justice (her goal is to expose the police killing of a black rapper/leader and take down two murdering racist cops by bringing a recording of the crime to the police commissioner). She is the only character in the film with a conscience and actively political goals. And she is pointedly not oversexualized; the film leaves prostitution to its white female characters.

Unfortunately, Strange Days devotes ample time to Mace’s pining after Lenny, an entirely undeserving, inept, and whiny white man. Lenny loves an equally unworthy and whiny young white former prostitute/current rock star, preferring to watch his recordings of their past sexual encounters than to see the love of the “good woman,” Mace, right in front of him. It’s painful to watch Mace save his life over and over for no reason other than a vague suggestion that, long ago when he was a cop, he was kind to her and her son when her (black) husband was arrested. When the two kiss as the film closes, there’s no question that this white man does not deserve her—but that she needs him just the same. Nothing in the film supports its conclusion apart from forced conventions of action and romance. We never see Lenny give anything back to Mace: He doesn’t risk his life for her as she does for him, he has no goals apart from greed, and he does not even display appropriate gratitude—let alone affection—until the final scene.

With Lenny as the weak victim and Mace the strong protector, there is a clear gender reversal going on. However, the relationship between the hard-working black limo driver and her weak, needy passenger/“friend” also has a Driving Miss Daisy feel to it. Her caretaking and selflessness, plus her ability to know what is best for others even when they do not, harks back to another role black women have historically played in American cinema: the mammy.

In sf and fantasy film, the mammy, a.k.a. the old wise woman, offers exception to the inverse Hollywood relationship between sexuality and empowerment. However, she is far from truly powerful. This troubling figure returns from Hollywood’s racist past with a vengeance in the character of The Matrix’s Oracle (Gloria Foster). In a small inner-city apartment, Foster’s unnamed character sits in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and dispensing wisdom, while a younger black “daughter” cares for (psychically gifted) children in the living room. It is the Oracle who spurs Neo (Keanu Reeves) on to discover his true fate. Even more than Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy in Gone with the Wind, the Oracle lives for others. She caretakes and advises from within a world she knows to be unreal, enacting the fantasy of the stern but loving black grandmother. Her stereotypical and one-dimensional role as mystical source emerges plainly as she serves Neo a feel-good cookie after offering an ambiguous prediction for his future.

Despite these bleak examples, there is some hope. Escaping from her sexual-victim role in Vampire in Brooklyn and her relatively more empowered yet problematic role in Strange Days, Angela Bassett comes to the rescue of black women in sf and fantasy film in the otherwise forgettable Supernova (2000). In this futuristic adventure tale of a medical team that encounters an alien doomsday device in deep space, Bassett’s Dr. Kaela Evers is skilled and highly competent as a doctor and scientist. It is she who solves the mystery of the alien device through careful and speedy research. She is neither hypersexualized nor desexualized, as evidenced by her relationship with the ship’s reticent captain, Nick Vansant (James Spader), which develops on her terms and somewhat slowly for mainstream film. Moreover, she is entirely respected by her diverse crewmates (as well as Vansant) and touted as one of the crew’s toughest members. We see her use her mind and weaponry with equal skill. It is a pleasure to say this character cannot be easily pigeonholed.

Science-fiction and fantasy film as a genre is likely to continue limiting black women’s roles to familiar racist and sexist figures. (It is a Hollywood system still dominated by patriarchal white supremacy, after all.) Yet as black men have done—and white women before them—black women will surely gain power at the sf/fantasy box office if politically aware audiences watch carefully and demand more and better representations. For now, those of us still willing to watch what the machine puts out will have to keep our eyes peeled for the exceptions while we continue our feminist and antiracist critique.

Elyce Rae Helford is an associate professor of English and director of women’s studies at Middle Tennessee State University. She is editor of Fantasy Girls: Gender and the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television (Rowman and Littlefield); coeditor of Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek (Westview); and author of articles and book chapters on Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tank Girl, The Stepford Wives, and the fiction of Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy, Ursula Le Guin, and other sf authors. She is currently writing a book on representations of women’s anger in contemporary U.S. media culture.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape

Debbie Rasmussen — Tue, 01 May 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Reviewers have likened it to a dot-com Pretty Woman, but The Center of the World, the latest film from director Wayne Wang (Smoke, Blue in the Face, The Joy Luck Club), is a far more complex rumination on the intersections of sex, love, and commerce. Set in southern California, the story follows Florence (Kissed's Molly Parker), a rock 'n'roll drummer who earns a living offering up lap dances in a strip club, and Richard (Boys Don't Cry villain Peter Sarsgaard), the lonely, freshly minted computer millionaire who pays Florence $10,000 to spend a weekend with him in Las Vegas. The script boasts a number of different writers (including authors Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt and underground filmmaker/performer Miranda July), and Wang encouraged his leads to collaborate with him on creating an intimate, searching portrayal of two people struggling with the limits of their self-created lives. Journalist Laurel Rosen was a research consultant on the film, finding real-life strippers and dot-com millionaires who were willing to help the actors in developing believable characters, and got a chance to talk with Parker about her role in the film.

How did you train for this role?

I worked with a dancer in Los Angeles at Cheetahs; she taught me some of the moves. I wanted to learn the dance stuff, but I also wanted to check out what her reality is. We talked a lot and she danced for me. It was in the afternoon and the club was empty. The whole place just had that feeling — you know, when you go into a bar in the daytime, it smells horrible, and it seems so much nastier than at night. There was sunlight streaming in the doors, and it was really dark inside and carpeted. She was really great, incredibly open. Right away she took me into the dressing room, and was like, "This is where we get changed and we all hang out back here together," and she just ripped her clothes off. She was so not self-conscious about that, or like, "Check me out, I'm gorgeous."

Any particular moves you do in the movie that you learned from her?

Some of the lap dancing. [You] never actually see Florence stripping in the movie. She sat me down and gave me a lap dance and told me what she was doing when she was doing it. It's all about the tease. It's about making the customer like they're different from all the other guys who come into the club. [They] buy from the strip club the fantasy that you might be the one that they leave with. And that fantasy is totally perpetuated by the dancers. And this dancer is getting paid to teach me to do this stuff, so I too am one of those people who's buying something from her. Everyone's engaged in the transaction — there's an understanding that there's business, but once the business is done everyone engages in the fantasy.

What are the physical demands of a job like erotic dancing?

You have to be incredibly physically strong to be able to do any of that stuff on the pole. You know how they lift themselves up on the pole and twirl down and do all those things? I couldn't even begin to do that. Your back needs to be so strong. These women spend hours at the gym every day. There's a lot of preparation that goes into doing what they do. They're really physically fit, they have their hair done and pedicures and manicures and waxing, tanning, all kinds of stuff.

In addition to the dancer in LA that you worked with, you also met with other sex workers — a dominatrix, a few [other] strippers. Looking back on the research that went into performing this role, what did you learn from the people you met?

The research gave me a whole lot of information, and then gave me the security to say: There are thousands of women who do this, and they're all different, and they're all doing it for different reasons. Both as an actor and as a woman, I'm not interested in playing the character in the movie as any kind of a cliché. I didn't want to hook into the really obvious thing that we all assume about strippers and sex workers — that they've all been abused, that they're victims. I really wasn't interested in doing that, although that is the reality for a lot of women. But mostly — and this often happens to me [when I'm] doing research for films — it gave me enough information to be able to stand back and go: I can play this any way I see fit. Because at the end of the day, the character I play should be a complex person who has all kinds of reasons for doing what she does.

Is there anything that you hoped to learn from the dancers but didn't? Or hoped to find out in your research process but didn't?

I found that many of the women I met talked about their work as being empowering, and something they enjoyed. But I felt like it was a bit of a thing they were saying to me, or that they had been telling themselves. No matter what you're doing in your life you have to justify it to yourself — that it's important, that it has value. Especially when it's something that's judged so harshly from society's standpoint. These women feel the need to defend their choices. Especially in view of me and a filmmaker and a journalist coming and sitting down and asking them questions about who they are and what they're doing, and what happened to them, and how do they do it, and [other] intimate questions.

So I felt that I [got this line] immediately from the women, like "I do this because I want to do this, nobody's making me do it. I feel really empowered by doing it, it makes me feel good about myself, I'm in control." And then later, as the conversation [went] on, I would start to not really believe them as much. The first girl I met just looked so vulnerable and sad. And she talked about how she was a good wife, basically — she would go home and fuck her boyfriend and make dinner for him and all that. She said that she was going to go on one of those Ricki Lake-type shows and ask her mother for forgiveness. That just gave me the chills. I think it's a complicated reality. But I found all of these women incredibly open and really generous. And smart.

Do you feel the movie accurately portrayed the complexity of that world, or of that character?

In the film, you never really see my character. You see her briefly in her own world — putting up fliers, playing the drums — but mostly you see her with this guy, who she's trying very hard not to give any of her real self to. Which was the choice I made, and the choice Wayne made in what he chose to use in the film. When Florence comes into the hotel room to dance for Richard, she changes the lights, she puts on the music, she tries to create the situation. She walks in thinking she'll be able to control this whole situation and it's going to go the way she wants it to. And then it doesn't, because it's just her and this man in this room for three days. He's not an ogre. He's charming and sweet and young and good looking. And it complicates the whole situation for her, and her defenses start to fall apart.

Was the fact-based process that went into developing this character different than ways you've entered into other roles?

One of the things I really loved about doing this movie was the process of rehearsal and learning. I loved that Wayne thought it was important to make sure we were at least attempting to represent Florence — and in a bigger sense, all women who are sex workers — in a way that's realistic and truthful. Often we would come up against something that we didn't know or understand, and he would get on the phone and ask somebody about it, or we would go somewhere and talk to people. I loved his openness and his willingness.

Bad directors will tell you they absolutely know how to do it, and how it has to happen; there's this insecurity that leads them to feeling like they have to control everything. But Wayne was so wonderful. He really let us create our own characters from information that he helped compile.

Any specific times when Wayne really let you take the reins or collaborate with him to change the script in the interest of greater reality?

Absolutely every day. We were constantly in dialogue about how to make the [film] as real as possible. Every morning, he and Peter and I would sit down and go through what we had planned to shoot that day and go, "What's working? What's not working? Considering what we shot yesterday, how does that change what's going to happen today? Does anyone even understand what we're doing in this scene? Let's change that and talk to people." That was the process of making the whole film. It was the most fun I've ever had because it felt like such a collaboration between the three of us. Peter and I were given the responsibility to create those characters. It was like, "Here, actor, here's the information that we can give you. You come up with the character, combined with what was written by Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt." And the scenes, based on a fairly loose structure of the story they had, evolved out of there. It really was so exciting. Not because of the subject matter so much but because of the way [we worked].

How do you think the film fits into the entertainment trend of blurring the lines between fact and fiction?

The film was shot on digital video, and [what] informed Wayne's decision to make the movie on video [is that] he could do it really quickly and have a lot of control. At this point, our response to watching video is that we know it from home movies, we know it from porno, and we know it from the news. All three of those things are very intimate representations of reality. We're used to watching them and thinking that this is something real that's happening, or it's something titillating. So in watching this film, there's something about the way it looks that makes you feel immediately voyeuristic.

Look for The Center of the World in an arty-type theater near you.

Laurel Rosen is a freelance writer and researcher in San Francisco. She has written for Salon, Bust, and Mother Jones, and is the author of San Francisco's 49-Mile Scenic Drive: The Guidebook, published by Sasquatch Books.