Welcome (back) to Fright Night

In which our Diva gets to revisit an old friend on the big screen

Thirty years ago this summer, I got my dad and then my friend Kathy to drive me to Aurora from the booming metropolis of Bennett, Colorado (population ~1800) for three separate viewings of a movie with the dubious title of Fright Night. Once I got my hot little hands on a VHS copy, I systematically wore it out over the next couple years.

It's the tale of a teenage horror fan who happens on unusual nocturnal activities next door and quickly discovers that his new neighbor is a vampire.  It sounds like the setup for a joke, and there's no shortage of humor. But, as with so many stories that seize my little fangirl heart in their fangy jaws and run away with it ("A vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost share a house," anyone?), there's a whole lot more going on too.

All these years later, I'm gratified to know that I'm not the only one who thinks so, and that it has taken its rightful place as a horror classic. Its cast is in high demand at conventions, two limited-edition Blu-ray pressings have sold out in a snap, a forthcoming documentary blew its Kickstarter goal out of the water, and mere mention of the 2011 remake can elicit the kind of vitriol usually reserved for those who dare meddle with beloved childhood icons. (I'm secure enough in my fan cred to assert that said remake is perfectly serviceable, albeit nothing special.  But that's not a course I recommend undertaking lightly.)

Last night, at an anniversary screening as part of Bruce Campbell's Horror Film Festival at Wizard World, the Chin himself opened the festivities by asking who had seen it in the theatre. I raised my hand and confirmed that I'd done so three times, when I didn't yet have a driver's license and the nearest movie theatre was 25 miles away.

If you've ever seen Campbell in action at a fan event, you're probably not too surprised to hear that this resulted in a solid five-minute interrogation about just what was so special about this particular movie that I went to those lengths. Trying to be concise (yeah, I know, good luck with that!), I first mentioned what really was most important to 15-year-old me: "Teenagers who made more sense to me than the ones in the John Hughes movies." Pressed for further reasons, I mentioned the gorgeous production design, and how there always seem to be more details to notice in both the visuals and the characters. (Just last night I registered for the first time that the pendant worn as part of Peter's "Great Vampire Killer" outfit is a hamsa.) I didn't mention the balance of horror and humor -- so commonplace today that it's hard to remember just how groundbreaking it was in 1985 -- partly because it's so intrinsic to the film that I no longer consciously think about it, but mostly because I was thinking back to why it was so compelling to me then.

Fifteen-year-old me didn't really think much about the uniqueness of the horror/comedy thing, as much as it's gone on to become part of the DNA of so many of my favorites. She just knew she was in love with these characters and this story.

Thankfully the Groovy One finally moved on to quizzing another fan, though heaven knows I could babble for an hour about why I love this movie. About how it was a lightning strike, exactly the movie I didn't know I needed at exactly that moment in time, that might or might not have made the same impression on me if I hadn't been fifteen and smart and bouncy and weird and living in a small town that seemed hopelessly limited and limiting.

When writer/director Tom Holland did his introduction, I didn't even need to ask the one question I'd brought to the Q&A, about why he chose to make this particular story about teenagers. As he explained before the screening, his original brief for Cloak & Dagger was a sort of juvenile update of Rear Window, but the final form of the screenplay didn't go that way. Still, the idea persisted, and he reached the conclusion that the only way for it to make sense for a modern kid to see a murder through the neighbor's window and have nobody believe him or do anything about it would be if the murder he witnessed was supernatural. And the only adult he could turn to would be the horror host he watched on TV... and thus a classic was born.

They said "Be crazier than that!" I'm in the fourth row center, obliging.

Charley, Amy, and "Evil" Ed are ordinary kids living ordinary lives until they're forced to deal with something extraordinarily dangerous. We don't know what the social pecking order of their school looks like, except to infer that Ed has been bullied and that he and Charley have bonded over horror fandom. All three are just a little awkward, drawn not as stereotypical nerds, just regular kids navigating the bumpy transition to adulthood -- heightened emotions, stilted relationship talk, and all.

Amy is bouncy and optimistic and compassionate and enthusiastic and adorkable. She also bears the perpetual Hollywood onus of being "the girl" (and thus damned to represent all girls), and has taken a lot of flak over the years that -- as someone who strongly identified with her, flaws and all -- I sometimes have to remind myself not to take personally. Four years after the remake, I still bristle at dismissals of her as a flimsy damsel-in-distress in the process of praising the more assertive characterization in the update. Now, don't get me wrong -- I love Amy 2.0. Heck, when the promo stills were released, my first comment was a gleeful "Amy gets a gun. I could be on board with this." And the character we eventually saw lived up to those images and to the promise of a Marti Noxon script.

However. You don't get to say "only hung sweetly by Charley's side" about the girl who steps up save him before he ever needs to save her. (Well, it's a free country; you can say whatever you want. But I'll take umbrage.) When, according to all evidence available to her, he's having some kind of mental breakdown and is determined to do something that will get him locked up for the rest of his life.

Ed turns to her and says "What are we going to do?" It's Amy who immediately comes up with the tactic of asking Peter Vincent for help, thus buying time in which Charley promises not to take action and marshaling the resources of the only adult he's currently prepared to listen to. If they had been living in the world they thought they were, if Dandridge had not in fact been a vampire, then Charley's sanity and future would have been saved entirely on Amy's initiative.

I babbled something to that effect at Amanda Bearse during a Q&A at a convention a couple years back. It wasn't the most coherent thing in the world, but she seemed pleased, and I hope she's rightfully proud of the character she created, particularly having now raised a daughter herself.

On a related note, another aspect of that article linked above that irritates me: "until she was turned vampire by Jerry and became the typically sexed-up evil female. Evil because she is sexual, as has been the case in vampire narratives since Carmilla and Dracula. Contrastingly, in the remake Amy has far more sexual agency–and is not demonized for it."

Here's my problem with that line of reasoning: The original Amy had an agency that was immensely important for 15-year-old me to see, the agency to make her own choices and have them respected.

Charley, with his "we've been going together almost a year" outburst, very nearly disqualifies himself as a hero before even starting to become one, then saves it by apologizing in the next breath without prompting. He was clearly parroting the script he's been force-fed by popular culture about what he's supposed to want and how he's supposed to get it, and he's instantly ashamed, probably without fully understanding why he even said it. He admits to being scared too -- a cardinal no-no in the teen-movie guy code! -- and the ensuing earnest discussion of what level of physical intimacy they're ready for is funny without being played for laughs at their expense. They have all these feelings -- and yes, they both have them -- but not the experience to deal with them in any way that isn't all kinds of awkward. So they talk about it awkwardly, and healthily, and with the understanding that it's important to talk about what they are and aren't ready to do. In the teen-movie landscape of 1985, this was nothing short of a revelation.

So it's all fine until Dandridge comes along and uses Amy's sexuality against her, manipulates feelings she has explicitly stated she is not ready to act on, with the aim of overwriting her identity and turning her into someone else entirely. Not even the long-dead woman in the portrait, but merely his image of her. She's not "evil because she is sexual." She's dangerous because Dandridge is using her as an extension of himself.

At the end of the movie, when she's free of that influence, we're nominally back where we started, with Charley and Amy making out -- fully clothed -- in his room. But it's comfortable in a way that it wasn't at the beginning. They've survived shared trauma and come out stronger, but they're not adults, and they're refreshingly not in any hurry to be. They've decided what they're ready to do, and there's no tension about whether that should change. It will come in its own time, and we're left with the sense that they'll decide it together.

So... that's Amy. One character. That's not even getting into Charley and Ed and brilliant creepy-charming-predator Dandridge and the treasure that is Roddy McDowall as Peter Vincent. A blog post only has so much space.

Anyone still wondering why I love this movie so much? :-)

#DearMe

In which our Diva sends a message in an imaginary digital bottle to her teen self

Dear Me,

You are a Smart Kid, and a Pollyanna, and a nerd, and a skinny girl, and getting taller seemingly by the minute, and watching people flip out about this sex thing with no small degree of bafflement.

This is for you.

Love,
Val



In celebration of International Women's Day, take part in YouTube’s global #DearMe initiative to inspire and empower young girls everywhere. We all know that growing up is tough. But if you could go back in time, what wisdom would you share with your teenage self? It all starts with two words. Dear Me. 

**Share your advice by making your own #DearMe GIF at http://youtubedearme.com **

Remember the ladies

In which our Diva impersonates the Founding Mother of smarts and sass

A couple weeks ago, a friend alerted me to Drunk History's "Stumble Into History" contest, which called for videos of fans posing as historical figures to react to their portrayal on the show. It sounded like fun (and getting flown out to warm, sunny LA to do a walk-on in Season 3 sounds particularly good right about now!), but I've had other priorities, so it wasn't until this past weekend that I did anything about it.

At which point, I pulled it together in less than a day, with resources I had around the house, and uploaded my entry a comfortable three hours before deadline. I'm pretty pleased with myself for that. :-)

I spent a fair amount of time waffling among the awesome ladies on the list -- Mary Dyer? Dolley Madison? Nellie Bly? -- but ultimately Abigail Adams and her legendary letter-writing were always going to prevail. (I am rather sad nobody represented for Nellie, the original intrepid girl reporter.)

So, interspersing some of Mrs. Adams' famous words with a few of my own invention, I took pretend quill pen in hand and threw my mob cap in the ring.

You can check out the results here and (if you feel so inclined and if you have a Facebook account, on which the voting mechanism unfortunately depends) vote for me once a day until next Monday, March 2. Comments and sharing are also most definitely welcome, and thank you!!

The Mom Zone revisited

In which our Diva spotlights a certain category of supporting character

A couple years ago, I hit a threshold in my acting career - the one where you start playing moms, and really never stop until you start playing grandmas. Since I don't have kids in real life -- and, due to the vagaries of genetics, was still frequently being asked where I went to school up until very shortly before that (and have been carded more than once since!) -- it felt weird. Really weird.

I've since gotten over that initial weirdness in the process of playing Busy Single Mom, Updated Fairy Tale Mom, Wholesome Civil-War-Era Mom, and Slightly Nervous Suburban Mom. Sure, it's great to be the lead once in a while, and women -- particularly mature women -- need to be more often, and in more varied ways. There should be more than this set of supporting roles out there for my type and age bracket. But that's a much larger discussion than I'm tackling today, and it doesn't change the fact that these roles, for all their limits, can be much more varied and meaty than we sometimes think.

Which is how I came to tweet last week, only semi-jokingly, that as long as I'm spending so much of my acting time in the Mom Zone, I want to be the Hollywood Midwest answer to Lena Headey.  Seriously, though, the last few years have seen this lady take on three, count 'em, three high-profile characters who function in their respective narratives primarily as mothers -- but you sure as heck can't say she's in a rut.

First, of course, she stepped into Linda Hamilton's iconic shoes as the ultimate "mama grizzly," Sarah Connor, on the TV spinoff Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Sarah started out (as seen in the original 1984 movie) an ordinary working-class girl, not long out of high school, who waited tables and went out dancing with her not-long-out-of-high-school friends, until one night Kyle Reese dropped out of the sky... er, future and informed her that her yet-unconceived son would be the only hope for the survival of the human race. Caught between trying to give John a childhood and preparing him for the brutal realities he would face as an adult, she made everything up as she went along, trusted nobody, got really really psychologically damaged, ended up more dangerous than most of the machines, and never ever, not once, failed to be riveting to watch.

Then of course, there's Game of Thrones' Cersei Lannister, defined primarily as mother -- particularly after Joffrey takes the throne and promptly derails any plans Cersei might have had of doing any actual reigning as Queen Regent -- but also as wife, sister, illicit incestuous lover, and most of all as bitter, viciously resentful product of a pseudo-medieval fantasy society's strictly enforced gender norms. She hates the role that's been thrust upon her but plays it to perfection and to whatever advantage she can gain, coping with an apparently endless royal wine cellar and a nasty pastime of mocking her intended daughter-in-law for believing and sincerely doing her best to embody the ideals of highborn feminity they've both been raised on. She is, by and large, an awful person who does awful things, and the show would be much poorer without Headey's sly, snarky performance.

Currently on multiplex screens (for the moment, anyway; the box office hasn't exactly been all they hoped for) -- and setting off this whole thought process -- we have Jocelyn Fray in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, who belongs to a subset of mom-dom that I'd quite like to take a crack at: the Unexpectedly Awesome YA Mom.

YA (for those who don't hang around the same people and blogs I do) stands for "young adult," and refers to a segment of the literary market primarily intended for teens. It's on my radar primarily as an arena where female authors are thriving and young female readers are finding a welcome breadth of young female characters driving their own stories. (Even more breadth would be great, of course, and it would also be nice if, say, publishers didn't go around slapping whitewashed cover images on the few books that do star PoC protagonists, but that's another topic getting important discussion elsewhere, and not my topic today.)

It's also on the public's radar, to the extent that it's a well Hollywood has been drawing from quite a bit the last few years, ever since Twilight caught them off-guard as a juggernaut franchise and finally brought to their attention the fact that teenage girls and young women have *gasp* actual, legal-tender money they quite like to spend on movie tickets. (The merits, or lack thereof, of said franchise are also beyond the scope of this particular post, and quite frankly I'd be happy to never see another comment about them as long as I live. Just so we're clear.)

Being girls, of course, the things they like can't possibly be actually worth anything (for a nice summary of that particular cultural meme and the problems with it, see this interview with YA author Sarah Rees Brennan), but their money? Ah, that can move mountains of calcified industry conventions. Or at least budge them a little.

But the thing I've been noticing as these movies based on YA (and middle-grades; let's not overlook the number of cars hooked to the Hogwarts Express here) books come out, even more than the fact that a lot of them have girl protagonists, is that said protagonists' moms are often some seriously awesome characters in their own right.

Now, mostly I'm familiar with the fantasy ones, because that's the genre I'll always gravitate to by default, regardless of the age bracket of its intended audience. So I don't know how much it holds for YA novels in other genres. But YA fantasy novels are often some variation on the "destined hero" narrative, with a protagonist who discovers some fantastic heritage kept hidden throughout her/his childhood. With that structure in place, Mom almost has to be involved in said heritage somehow, as a keeper of knowledge if nothing else. And she's often a lot else. (See also: Virginia Doyle, mother of Gemma, protagonist of A Great and Terrible Beauty and its two sequels, a property I would dearly love to see adapted to film even though nobody is going to let me play Virginia. Which I would love.)

Which brings us back to Jocelyn. Who was apparently even less prepared than Sarah Connor to raise a kid with A Destiny, since it's pretty clear that she had no opportunity to learn how to raise a kid at all. The secret society of Shadowhunters and their solemn duty to hunt demons with their special innate badass abilities seems great and all, until the younger (and more prominent) characters start telling you what it's like to actually grow up in that world. Which Jocelyn did, and there's a world of interesting in whether it was a good idea to keep that fact (and by extension a lot of other facts) from her daughter Clary, the central character. Like Sarah, she made up this whole parenting thing as she went along, and she got a lot of it right and a lot of it wrong, but at the end of the day she and Clary love each other ferociously even while they're arguing, and it's a beautiful thing to see. (Also, she's hell with a cast-iron skillet. That fight sequence is worth the price of admission all on its own.)

Mom's role is unquestionably a supporting one, but this week-plus later, I still find myself thinking a lot about it, even though the movie overall is kind of a hot mess, albeit one assembled from a lot of interesting bits.

I'm not sure what the point of all this musing is, except that I'd love to see more of this kind of story, and this kind of character, in the indie milieu. There's plenty of room for it, given that, for example, the YA properties picked up for big-budget adaptations are uniformly led by pretty white straight girls. It would be great to see Hollywood fix that, and I'm all for continuing to talk about how to get them to do so. While that inevitiably arduous process continues, though, I'm looking for the indie community to step up first and show them how it's done.

So how about it, indie filmmakers? When I look at the Chicago/Midwest casting breakdowns on Actors Access tomorrow, what kind of moms will I see? Stay tuned...

Upon reflection

In which our Diva has been missing the obvious

If you've been around this blog a while, you might remember me mentioning that the whole Lizzie Siddal thing started for me with her self-portrait. It's been a solid twenty years now, but I still vividly recall flipping through Jan Marsh's Pre-Raphaelite Women in the bookstore at Okemos Mall (a relatively convenient bus ride from my Michigan State dorm) and stopping short at this image with a near-physical shock of something very like recognition.

Over the years, I've pondered where that reaction came from. It's not that I actually think she looked that much like me (though it's also not hard to figure out how a pale, skinny, redheaded dreamer promptly developed an enduring fascination for her). It's the expression that reached out and grabbed me, eloquent of concentration and minute examination.

Lizzie painted herself... painting herself. Studying, perhaps even criticizing. Descriptions of the portrait -- just nine inches in diameter, and Lizzie's first and most successful known work in oil -- usually contrast its directness with the downcast gazes and romantic glamor of Rossetti's many portraits of her. It's part of the reason my work-in-progress finally acquired the title Unvarnished.

The easy conclusion to draw is that Rossetti (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the other artists she sat for) projected a particular image onto her, and there's a lot to be said for that conclusion (hey, look, it's another Beatrice, and another, and Gabriel, honey, this is becoming an issue), but it doesn't necessarily follow that she painted The Truth in counterpoint to his romantic embellishment.

In fact, as occurred to me in a headsmacking moment the other day, it wasn't physically possible for her to do so. Which I knew, of course, but I hadn't quite thought through the implications this way before.

Like any self-portrait prior to the ascendance of photography (and, I expect, a good many even today), it's not a portrait of Lizzie as anyone else saw her. It's a portrait of her reflection. Which is not the same thing at all. But it's the reflection that spoke to me on that glossy page all those years ago. Sure, I could stare at Ophelia or Beata Beatrix all day, but that modest little circle still pins me like nothing else. I wonder if she ever held the portrait up to a mirror (as simulated here through the magic of Photoshop)? Did it shed any light on the connection between her "unvarnished" self and what others saw?

This train of thought brings to mind this blog post I read a year and a half ago, in which Cleolinda (who writes the sidesplittingly funny "Movies in Fifteen Minutes" recaps as well as the best good-natured skewering of Twilight you will ever encounter) states, quite clearly and cogently, what should be obvious but isn't necessarily, about what we see in the mirror vs. what everyone else sees.

And that's just in the purely physical sense, before you get into the mindgames we play with ourselves. And oh, do we play them. My own relationship with the mirror remains largely that of a dancer -- it's a tool for finding faults, but also for fixing them, and most of all for practicing and adjusting what I show to the world. I get along much better with my reflection than with most photos of me (which is probably why Cleo's post stuck with me), but still... Well, there's a reason that searching, critical look in Lizzie's eyes is so very, very familiar.

It's funny that, as Kirsty Stonell Walker pointed out in a post a few months back over at The Kissed Mouth, there's a metric truckload of Victorian art assuming women's relationship with the mirror to be all about vanity. But I'm inclined to think that then, as now, it was a whole lot more complicated than "Oh, look at how pretty I am!"  I can't help but imagine that within each painting where the viewer sees a glamorous nymph admiring herself, the nymph herself sees something a bit more stark looking back at her.

Jane Eyre painted Blanche Ingram as imagined perfection, on ivory with her finest pigments, before ever meeting her in person -- and depicted herself on plain paper with every flaw laid bare. All those dudes painting the girls in love with their mirrors should have checked with Miss Bronte or Miss Siddal for the real score.



(And on that note, back to my reflection of Lizzie, coming soon to a stage near you. Just as soon as it has a whole script. I'm getting there. This thought process is distilling its way in as we speak...)

Bunnies and buzzwords

In which our Diva is officially tired of the word "empowerment"

In the wake of The Playboy Club's moment in the spotlight at the annual Television Critics Association press tour, debate is bouncing around the internet about just what the show means. Personally, I think what it means is really damn complicated, and that's exactly what I like about it. Is what I'm about to say colored by the fact that the show is being produced in Chicago and employing some of my friends and colleagues? Probably. But that's not the only reason I want it to be good and do well.

Some people, notably Melissa Silverstein over at the indispensible Women and Hollywood, have zeroed in on the comments by cast members asserting that the position of their characters is proto-feminist and "progressive."  There's more skepticism about this than I think the the comments actually warrant, though Silverstein is right that Amber Heard's attempt to explain her position didn't quite say what I think she intended it to. From my vantage point, sandwiched between Heard's generation and Gloria Steinem's, I can see both perspectives, and where and how they're missing each other. I've never hesitated to call myself a feminist, but it's not hard to see why many younger women do, and it's not quite the reason I've often seen put forth by their elders. Not so much that they think it entails various other political baggage, but that they have been repeatedly told that it does.

If I'm honest, I have to say I have more sympathy for those young women's position, because I've listened to those who paved the way before me, and heard how often what they have to say sounds an awful lot like "We didn't fight for your right to make your own choices just to have you make the WRONG choices!" How it sounds like going any way but theirs makes you an ungrateful wretch who's setting The Entire Cause Of Women back by decades. Think that sounds melodramatic? Check out the three, count 'em, three indignant comments on the W&H post by judybrowni, who apparently considers childish namecalling to be the appropriate response here. There is no quicker way to send my estimation of you into the toilet than to call any other woman a "bimbo" -- hey, how about throwing in "whore" or "witch" while you're at it? -- and tossing in "know-nothing" and "anorexic" (people still think that's okay? seriously?) into the bargain, along with rampant ageism and repeated implications that acting  isn't "real work" (And what possesses people from various walks of life to tell people from other walks of life that what they do for a living is invalid? It never, ever fails to sound petty and foolish.), pretty much seals the deal.

But I digress. I do think Heard's statement, as quoted in the post, was ill-chosen, and the whole spin of "it's all about empowerment" (although, has anyone from NBC actually used that overworked word, or is it coming from the press? h/t to Mizzelle for confirmation, via this NPR article, that yes, it seems to have started with executive producer Chad Hodge) is ill-advised. And Silverstein is right that the spin is what it's about at this stage of the game, but I'm a bit baffled as to why she -- who writes compellingly about the industry every day, and knows how the spin works and how little it often has to do with the actual product -- seems to be letting it color her impression of the show so much. I doubly scratched my head at this:

Me thinks this young woman better have a damn good show or she should just shut the fuck up and admit she’s on a show that’s about women wearing bunny costumes trying to get by in the world where it was really difficult for single women to get jobs that would pay a decent wage.  You see if they framed it that way, I could potentially be interested.

I... really don't understand how that's not what's being said. I honestly don't. That's exactly the impression I get from the interview videos on NBC's website, and at the Twitter stream from the press conference, and NBC's own description of the show as "a sophisticated series about the transitional times of the early 1960s and the complex lives of a group of working-class women."

One of the places I've seen that last quote is in this article over at Fangirltastic, in which regular contributor Theron expresses skepticism that the show will ultimately prove to be anything more than a standard-issue prime-time soap. She also touches on the much-publicized call to boycott by the Parents Television Council. And while I'm skeptical of the PTC's "Playboy = pornography = unalloyed evil" position, it has raised in advance issues that are relevant, and which seem like they will actually be part of the show. I've seen several comments in various places pointing out the tendency of many people to conflate Bunnies (hostesses/servers in the Playboy Clubs) with Playmates (nude models in the magazine). With this important distinction in mind, I was struck in the trailer by Brenda (Naturi Naughton) bluntly and proudly declaring her ambition to be "the first chocolate centerfold."  There are multiple thorny issues wrapped up in that one line -- the divide between Bunny and Playmate and what it means when one woman sees the first as a stepping stone to the second; our culture's unsettled relationship with a woman who chooses to trade on her sexuality as a commodity; the fetishization of race. (The last is particularly interesting in light of the way Naughton has embraced the "chocolate Bunny" label in her own press statements.)



"You're either the living, breathing fantasy that is the Playboy Bunny," admonishes senior Bunny Carol-Lynne (Laura Benanti), "or you're not." Hugh Hefner tweeted earlier this evening, "Was being a Playboy Club Bunny in the 1960s empowering or exploitation? Why not ask the original Bunnies themselves? They'll tell you."

I don't have one to ask, but it seems to me the only honest answer is "both." That's certainly what I'm looking forward to in the show, based on the glimpses NBC has given us. And if that seems nostalgic or irrelevant, take a look at this photo from NBC's mock Playboy Club at the recent San Diego Comic Con, of a Bunny flanked by two Tilted Kilt servers. Time warp, anyone?

So, bottom line: We're looking at a show about a very messy and complicated time and place for women. At least, I hope that's what they'll let it be. Because the messy and the complicated haven't entirely left us, and that's the story I'm interested in seeing.

Romancing the stars

In which our Diva's DVD collection is growing again

Earlier this week I finally saw Agora, an extraordinary film that I didn't have the opportunity to catch during its brief visit to US cinema screens. I'd wanted to ever since I read about it at Women & Hollywood, both because I will happily watch Rachel Weisz do pretty much anything and because Alejandro Amenabar previously directed The Others, which is for my money the best haunted-house film ever made.

Agora, of course, is a completely different kind of movie, but no less beautiful, meticulous, or thought-provoking. It's one of those movies that make me thankful I don't have the mental wiring that makes people get huffy about storytellers taking dramatic license with history, because it's highly unlikely (though, as their astronomy consultant points out in the behind-the-scenes material on the DVD, not wholly implausible) that Hypatia of Alexandria actually hit on all the principles featured in the film. (I'm not even touching the anachronistic charge of "witchcraft," which made even me wince a bit, even while putting me in mind of my beloved Dangerous Beauty.) But oh, how magical to watch her grapple with those ideas, beginning with the soul-shattering leap of faith represented by the heliocentric model of the heavens -- coming to grips point-blank with the realization that we are not at the center of the cosmos -- and leading inexorably to letting go of the "purity" of the circle and placing Earth's orbit on an ellipse. Even more fascinating, she reaches the solution we know is correct (and know must be coming; if there's a conic section on the mantelpiece in Act 3, you know it'll be fired in Act 5! *g*) through the prism of the knowledge of her time, and therefore deduces a rather different model for "why" than that which Johannes Kepler bequeathed to us 1200 years later.

If the preceding paragraph has made your eyes glaze over, don't let it stop you from watching the movie, because it's not really about the science. It's about Hypatia's passion for the science. Which, if you look at the posters and most of what was written about it when it came out, is fairly obvious.

Then a funny thing happened, and it seems to have happened in the U.S. distribution phase. First, there's the redesigned-for-American-market DVD cover. Then the synopsis on IMDb, and the one on the DVD envelope from I got from Netflix, tells us that it's about a slave named Davus who, among other things, falls in love with his mistress. The Netflix synopsis doesn't even name her.

Now, I'm the first to agree that Davus' journey in the film is as rich and complex as Hypatia's, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye out in the future for more from Max Minghella, whose performance absolutely makes it a compelling journey to follow. I'd certainly go as far as to call him a second lead. But Davus is not the center of the film. He's one of several men in Hypatia's orbit, none of whom is her lover (albeit not for lack of trying), which is even more baffling to the Hollywood mindset. She is explicitly described by several of the creative team in the documentary material as the sun at the center of the film's cosmos, and I can't imagine watching the film through and not coming away with that impression.

The other thing I find a bit depressing (albeit unsurprising) is the amount of commentary I've seen that interprets the film as anti-Christian. The comment thread on on the trailer on YouTube has voices both agreeing with and offended by the perceived condemnation. But there is no such condemnation. There is a great deal said about how bringing religion into the political mix makes it that much easier for human beings to rationalize their own abuse of power.

Have there always been so many people who don't know the difference between the two? Certainly in the fifth-century Alexandria of this film, that would appear to be the case. And that's the larger tragedy, above and beyond the death of one brilliant and committed woman.

We mind because it matters

In which our Diva is thoroughly disgusted, but also hopeful

Earlier this week, I tweeted: Andrew Wakefield made a fortune by lying, without regard for harm to others. Last I checked, the word for that was "sociopath." That's pretty much all I have to say on the topic. It will be years before we'll be able to calculate the damage done by the falsified study linking vaccines to autism, if indeed it ever stops posing health risks and lining the pockets of a whole legion of quacks preying on desperate parents.

Also in the last few days, there's a lesser-known (and let's pray he stays that way) sociopath by the name of Kenneth Tong tweeting an endless stream of hardcore pro-ana propaganda and touting an alleged "size zero pill" that will make everything all better. Never heard of him? Neither had I. Apparently he was on Big Brother for about seventeen seconds before getting booted for threatening a housemate. This post on the blog "A Very Public Sociologist" sums up quite well which rock this individual crawled out from under, what makes him tick, and why paying any attention to him plays into his greedy little hands.

That last is why I hesitate to mention him at all, but I've come to the conclusion that it's important for a variety of reasons. I still refuse to link directly to anything of his, and have in fact set him to "blocked" on both Twitter and Facebook. Not that he would notice or care, but my hope is that a wave of users doing so will be noticed by the services in question, which are unfortunately unlikely to ban him regardless of at least one e-petition calling for it. (Not linking to that either, not because I don't agree with the sentiment, but because they don't work. Spend your energy elsewhere.) Unfortunately, I have no doubt that they regard him as nothing more than "controversial," and will continue to allow him a forum for what is nothing more nor less than hate speech. (If you don't understand why that phrase applies, spend an hour or two at Kate Harding's "Shapely Prose" archive. I used to add "and try not to say anything too ignorant while you're there," but then I stopped because it was fun to watch her take such comments apart. Unfortunately, she appears to have gotten burnt out on that -- and I don't blame her a bit -- but the archive remains a valuable resource.)

When references to him first popped up in my Twitter timeline a few days ago, my first thought was that it was some misfired attempt at "ironic" hipster misogyny, following the current trend in (so-called) humor of spouting things so outrageously, offensively bigoted that surely no one could take them seriously, so we must know the speaker is joking! That's apparently how you're supposed to tell that it's funny, and if you don't laugh, well, you must be the humor-deficient one. (Hint: No.)

I've since come to the conclusion that, while he might end up claiming retroactively to be up to something like that (see also: "It was a social experiment!"), there's nothing remotely so clever going on. Just some guy who may or may not understand, but certainly doesn't care, that he's doing very real harm just to get attention. And make no mistake, there is harm. Every single thing he's saying amplifies the tape already playing in the background for any woman who lives in our society, and which tyrannizes the lives of those living with eating disorders.

It may be a mixed blessing (due to the aforementioned giving him attention), but it's still cheering to see the virtually unanimous disgust in response. From high-profile figures like Rihanna and Simon Cowell, from less famous but still influential people like Being Human star Sinead Keenan and Doctor Who composer Murray Gold, and from pithy private citizens like this and this and many more. Like British educator Philip Edmundson, who's gone beyond the single-tweet statement to begin building a counter-campaign of sorts, including a link to this eloquent and heartbreaking blog post about just what it is Tong's comments are enabling.

Twitter is full of call-to-arms hashtags (enumerated and retweeted by the Kardashian sisters): #stunningnotstarving, #nosizezero, #curvesaresexy, #curvesarebeautiful. While I support the sincerity of those using all of them, I'm personally only using #stunningnotstarving, as I find the others problematic for a couple of reasons: #nosizezero denies the existence of the minority (however few) who are very small but healthy, and the last two are more positive but still imply a bit of exclusion. A woman of any size and shape can be stunning and not starving, so that's one I can take to heart.

What's sad and infuriating is that it took absolutely no effort for Kenneth Tong to seize his pathetic little bastion of power, because the structures are already in place. Every word he's tweeting is part of the basic formula women get from every direction every day they live in our culture:

What you weigh is how you look.
How you look is whether you're wanted.
Whether you're wanted is what you're worth.


So we can ignore Tong and his blatant "if you're not thin you fail at life" (by a definition of success at life that seems to consist entirely of whether you sleep with celebrities) all we want, but the message will still be there, and in more insidious forms. I'm not immune. Neither are women of my acquaintance who, even while expressing their disgust with Tong's comments, had the courage to admit he affected their food choices that day.

Which brings me to the good news: Long before this creature crawled out from under his rock, the opposition was in place. And it's gaining momentum. In the BodyHeart Campaign, which also came to my attention via Twitter, thanks to Dollhouse star Miracle Laurie. In the Viola Project, bringing out the power of young women through the power of Shakespeare's words. In the increasing public awareness of the extent to which fashion images are retouched and manipulated, which is just beginning to build into a backlash. In the documentary Superskinny Me, in which two British journalists discover firsthand the destructive consequences of the "race to size double zero" even under close medical supervision. And now in the stream of tweets calling Kenneth Tong out on his douchebaggerie, and the fact that they vastly outnumber the heartbreaking ones -- every single one accompanied by an avatar depicting a perfectly attractive young woman -- asking him where to get his magical miracle pill. (My money's on some of those being sockpuppet accounts designed to feed into the publicity machine, which is that much more disgusting, but might also mean that many fewer victims falling for his flimflam.) Edit: Thanks to long-time friend Mandy, who brought my attention to this amazing community of Harry Potter fans, who focus on a different real-life "horcrux" (the word for a type of curse in the HP universe) each month, and who happen to be discussing body image this month. Serendipity!

This issue is nothing new. It's not the first time I've blogged about it, and it won't be the last. It'll be back the next time the camel's back breaks, and I trust you'll bear with me.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a nice healthy dinner to cook. All that misogynist claptrap is making me hungry.

Song for Today: I know I've named Saving Jane's "One Girl Revolution" before, but I can't think of anything more appropriate or inspiring. Raise your hand!

P.S.: If I ever say to you, individually, that you're beautiful, you're gorgeous, you're anything wonderful I happen to feel like calling you? I'm not blowing smoke. I'm not just trying to make you feel better, or making empty noises to puff up your self-esteem. I'm saying it because I believe it is true, pure and simple. Contradict me if you absolutely must, but know that your energy would be better spent trying to teach a pig to sing. :-)

Cannes do

In which our Diva has a signal to boost

Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood has been tracking developments in the lineup at this year's Cannes Film Festival, at which not a single film directed by a woman is in competition for the Palme d'Or. (If this doesn't immediately strike you as a problem, W&H is a great place to start reading up on why it is.)

She's by no means alone, and now British-based filmdirecting4women is organizing a petition to point out to the festival powers-that-be that this is a pretty appalling state of affairs.

As people who care about and are interested in films we must protest the lack of female directors in competition for the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Women make up over half of cinema audiences and we demand a fairer representation of female directors in the main competition.


We are raising our voices in protest in hopes that in the future this will never happen again.

We are watching. We will not be silent.

Please take a moment to check out their website and the cool T-shirts they're selling, and if you feel so inclined help spread the word on your blog/Twitter/etc. I know it's "just movies," but it's also part of the larger conversation about the value of women's work. And that conversation isn't going to be over any time soon. I hope you'll join in.