For a few dollars more (plus Brittney Griner)

Gentle readers:

There are a few foods that are so perfect as to rank in the “cures all ills” category, and oysters are one of them. Best served with beer and one’s excellent old college friend whose conversation sparkles, along with her fabulous new specs. I am looking into how much more income I will need to eat these every day. Will report back.

Also, thanks to Sociological Images:

In other news: The Hunger Games made $68.3 million on opening day, a new record for a non-sequel, and the fifth highest opening-day box office of all time in the US. Still waiting to hear, obviously, how it does on opening weekend — but this is all good for pushing harder for films with female leads, as I rant about all the time. Stay tuned for my “conversation” with blogger JustMeMike about the film, due to get posted Tuesday (or very late Monday).

And in still other Excellent Ladies news, I hope you’re all following the Brittney Griner news, because I sure am. The Baylor University women’s basketball team — featuring the amazing 6’8″ Griner, who dunks and shoots and blocks alongside her amazing teammates — is rolling ahead in the NCAA tournament with stunning (and what look like easy) wins. They’re now in the Elite Eight and will play Tennessee on Monday night. The fact that I featured a few stories about Griner during her freshman and sophomore seasons means that my blog has had record numbers of hits for the past few weeks. It’s going to be very sad when the tournament’s over and my stats go back down to normal.

In case you’re wondering: yes, all the web searches that lead people to my site still sound like “brittney griner a man?” “brittney griner xxy” or “brittney griner in a dress.” Whatevs — I’ve said my piece about that bullshit.

And finally, I’m off to NYC for an extended research trip and complete immersion into NY film life. Judging by the listings in Time Out, I’m so overwhelmed by possibilities that I’m not sure where to start; the real question becomes, is it actually possible to see more than one film a day? More soon when I get settled into my borrowed apartment, locate a decent bagel and the blackest espresso known to man, and decide which one of the IFC Center’s t-shirts to buy — those t-shirts, that is, which use 1970s metal band imagery to decorate classic directors’ names:

The other side of sex and women in 1960: “Late Autumn”

I find it fascinating and bizarre that one of the most frequently-viewed posts I’ve ever written is from over a year ago on the portrayal of rape in Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women and  Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Don’t get me wrong: I’d still like someone to answer for me the question of why showing a rape onscreen seemed so groundbreaking, so useful as a metaphor for deep cultural shifts at that moment, such that those two 1960 films swept up awards and prizes — I’m just confused why so many readers keep going back to a comparatively gloomy question. Now that I’ve seen Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Autumn (Akibiyori), I can see a bit more how significant those shifts were in 1960 — this time without the gratuitousness of a rape scene. Despite making women the central point of conversation throughout, Late Autumn refuses to feature them as complex characters — and instead looks at them through the eyes of three middle-aged men.

They’re sometimes mistaken for sisters, but Akiko (Yôko Tsukasa, right above) is actually the daughter of the widowed, mid-40s Ayako (Setsuko Hara, left). Both are beautiful, but to the three male friends of Ayako’s long-dead husband, the womanly Ayako is preferable. They all remember flirting with her when she was a beautiful shopgirl way back when, before she married their friend. They marvel at one another that she becomes more beautiful as time passes — and they mutter the old saying that “men with beautiful wives die young” with their teeth gritted, as they don’t see their own wives as nearly so lovely.

Ozu casts a wry perspective on these comical meddlers, but he also uses them to measure the disconnect between generations. For these men, Akiko’s loveliness and her age — she’s 24 — make her an obvious target for their matchmaking energies. They still believe that marriages are made by outsiders, adults who can ascertain which young men have good jobs and families, and which young women are appropriately demure and intelligent and attractive. So when Akiko announces she doesn’t want to get married and refuses to meet with the young man they propose, she spurs a ricocheting set of responses. Ozu doesn’t delve into Akiko’s own motivations — does she want to stay with her mother out of a sense of obligation? or is the younger generation simply uninterested in having its marriages arranged? — but stays focused on the reactions of the older generation, for even Akiko’s mother is perplexed by this decision.

It doesn’t take much to see why Ayako is so bewitching for those men. As played by Hara (an actor so beloved in Japan for her portrayals of dutiful daughters and admirable women that she’s called The Eternal Virgin), she embodies elegance, beauty, and acquiescence to men. She never offers a contrary opinion or a disruptive comment, but smiles as she’s doing in the image above — with consummate sweetness and willingness to bury every one of her own desires behind her eagerness to please others. The director never criticizes her, never implies that her obedience to the rules of male dominance and female submissiveness might be exaggerated or a strain on her, but one cannot help noticing the difference between mother and daughter. Whereas Ayako acquiesces, Akiko goes her own way. She refuses to meet the man proposed by the adults as a marriage prospect — but then when her own friends tell her how much they like him, she agrees to go on a date with him.

For a brief moment, then, you think perhaps the bullheaded matchmakers’ desires will actually match up with Akiko’s and make everyone happy — except it’s not good enough for the three men. They decide bullheadedly to force Akiko into marriage by getting her mother to remarry. They agree that the lucky husband shall be the one widower amongst them. Like good bumblers, they fail to inform Ayako herself of this news until a comical series of misunderstandings has complicated the plot.

Let’s not overlook Ozu’s gift with setting and gesture. There’s a heaviness to the older generation’s movements — the men are constantly eating and drinking, while Ayako dresses in the kimonos of the past. All of them get filmed in interiors that emphasize the heaviness of frames and muted, autumnal colors, and sterile offices. Ayako is almost always filmed kneeling on the tatami, with Ozu’s camera quintessentially at mat level. Yet throughout the film we get glimpses of the youth’s alternate world — the young women’s glamorous modern dresses, their retreats to rooftops, their hiking in natural areas. The young haven’t yet broken from their elders’ grip, but they’re getting closer.

It’s really only the young we see face the camera directly in a challenging gaze: as below, as Akiko tries to battle it out with one of her matchmakers over her life; and later in the film, when her best friend tells Ayako exactly what to do to help her daughter’s situation:

Ozu plays all of this for its comic elements; Late Autumn is ultimately a subtle comedy of manners — but he maintains a terrific gravity throughout the film, in part because he never clarifies the women’s true feelings. In other words, he knows just as much as Bergman and De Sica that 1960s marked a generational shift and that sex and gender matters were at the heart of those changes, but he traces that shift in the most complicated way by avoiding the extremes of filmmaking: showing rapes onscreen.

A review for the Guardian put it most nicely of all: “When the women drop their smiles at the movie’s climax, that simple facial change is as startling as a gunshot.” We’re left with a melancholic sense of regret and inevitability. It’s a beautiful, exquisite film. Once again, can someone (a grad student perhaps?) write a thoroughgoing account with the title, 1960: The Year Our Films Broke — to explain the explosion of film alongside cultural change?

1960s wacko misogyny: “Something Wild” (1961)

To start off, let’s not mistake this for the 1986 Jonathan Demme film with the great soundtrack.

Indeed, I’m at a loss after watching Jack Garfein’s Something Wild. Let me recount a few plot points to show why. Lovely teenaged girl Mary Ann (Carroll Baker) is raped on her way home one night from her college classes in New York. She doesn’t tell anyone. After trying to return to normal for a few days, she simply leaves her notebooks on a park bench one day, rents a cheap apartment in a low-rent Lower East Side neighborhood, and tries working in a five-and-dime store, while her distraught parents try to find her. But her inner turmoil roils and she finds herself incapable of being touched by anyone, so eventually she ends up at the Manhattan Bridge prepared to jump off.

She’s rescued by a seemingly nice auto-repair man, Mike (Ralph Meeker), who takes Mary Ann home to his spare basement apartment, feeds her, and gives her a cot to rest on. When he returns home falling-down drunk late at night he tries to touch her, so she kicks him in the eye — but can’t escape the apartment because he’s placed the keys in his pocket. Turns out this is no accident: he intends to keep her there, captive. This seems to go on for weeks, during which she huddles on the cot and refuses to eat. Eventually he asks to marry her, though the line between marriage and sex is overly blurry.

She finally manages to escape from that bleak basement. She joyfully walks through Central Park, eats an apple from a corner produce man, breathes the air. What does she do next? Why, RETURN TO HER CAGE. Creepy captor Mike joyfully welcomes her back. The film ends with her mother visiting the basement apartment and begging her daughter to leave him (he now wears an eye patch, presumably due to permanent eye damage after she kicked him), to which Mary Ann responds, “He’s my husband.”

“Something Wild?” Oh, how I would have preferred that original Manic Pixie Dream Girl from 1986, Melanie Griffith, who drives that awesome car and teaches Jeff Daniels how to enjoy life.

Why did I watch this 1961 movie? Because Kim Morgan’s excellent blog, Sunset Gun, told me it’s a masterpiece. She makes several important points that seem pretty plausible:

1. The film broke boundaries by showing a rape and portraying its emotional aftermath for the protagonist.
2. Its expressionistic and gritty cinematography was far ahead of its time.
3. The film’s difficult and ambivalent ending captures the ineffable results of trauma.

A young Edith Stapleton as the crass next-door neighbor

Let me stress that Morgan’s piece is deeply persuasive, in part due to her lovely prose. “It feels like trauma, it feels Jungian, dreamy, hyper real (with such wonderful location shooting). [The director, Garfein] seems to understand, visually, the horror and fairy tale nature of a victim floating above pain. Mary Ann wants to rid herself of anguish, she wants to float, and yet, she’s stuck in a basement,” she writes. I can agree with this — at least on an intellectual level.

Problem is, that’s not the response I had while watching it. Morgan says, “The ending creates a false kind of happiness (intentional, I think) that sits in your soul with such sadness and complication that the movie will not leave you – after all these years, it’s never left me.” A much less sympathetic Feminéma finished the movie and spluttered, “What the hell?”

Above all, Morgan stresses the fact that Baker’s version of Mary Ann is an deeply affecting character — and although I too was moved by those dark scenes of her wrestling alone with the rape’s aftermath, the movie utterly lost me with the captive-in-the-basement storyline and the crazy ending. In the end, the film seemed less sensitive to the woman’s experience that a nightmarish cautionary tale with no clear upshot beyond don’t get raped — you’ll never recover. (Not that one usually has a choice about being raped.)

Even if I grant that Garfein’s film is more sympathetic to Mary Ann than other films about rape victims from that era, my assessment of two other 1960 films — Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women and Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring, plus Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) and perhaps even Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 1961) — leads me to wonder whether, if we consider these films as a group, their directors served up rape stories less to evoke sympathy from the viewer than to proclaim themselves to be provocateurs on a hitherto taboo subject. Or, perhaps especially in the case of the European directors, to use rape almost on the level of metaphor. At any rate, it seems rape was the topic for international film in the early 60s, and I’m not sure it did women a whole lot of good, at least not immediately.

Kim Morgan’s appreciation for Something Wild makes me wonder: am I simply a 21st-century feminist so locked in the political world of my own time that I lack the historical sensitivity to appreciate an early and even pathbreaking attempt to address the issue of rape? She points out, for example, that Garfein was a Holocaust survivor who well understood “entrapment and subjugation,” and that it remains rare to find films about rape that don’t just display sympathy for the woman but “deal with it as a kind of submersion into a subterranean world of dirty rooms and dreams.” 

To be honest, I’d love to be able to cop to the charge of present-mindedness, and to embrace Morgan’s reading. I trust her argument most for the film’s first half, in which we watch Mary Ann wrestle with her demons and refuse to tell anyone about her experience. But I felt increasingly pushed away from her during the second half of the film. For me at least, Morgan’s position holds less water during that “entrapment and subjugation” part of the film in which Mary Ann and Mike face off as captive and captor, a hour of screen time that concludes — crazily — with something resembling love between them.

To buy Morgan’s argument, I believe,one would have to see the rape as real and her captivity as an almost metaphorical extension of her suffering. In fact, during the film’s second half not only did I feel less sympathy and more confusion, but the cinematography makes a major shift toward a kind of theatricality that conveys an odd artificiality. Locked in that basement, we watch Mary Ann as if she’s on a stage and we’re an audience being tested. The film asks members of its audience stretches beyond their comfort zones, but it doesn’t feel — to me at least — as if we’re doing this for the benefit of Mary Ann or other rape victims, but instead for some other aesthetic purpose (or even for the glory of the director).

I think, instead, Something Wild and the other four films I’ve mentioned display an almost prurient fixation with tracing the destruction of female innocence. Most of these films rely on an expressly innocent (and usually blonde) victim, often contrasted with other (cheap) women, like Edith Stapleton here. As a result, I return to the speculation I offered in last year’s post about Two Women and Virgin Spring: I believe this was film’s way of dealing with the sexual revolution — to offer histrionic cautionary tales rather than explore rape per se from the perspective of victims.

To say this film is less objectionable than the others of its era is, in the end, not to give it many accolades at all. I stick with my earlier position: rape should not be depicted onscreen, as it leads to (at best) such a deeply conflicted portrayal as Something Wild and (at worst) an awkwardly titillating depiction of female pain and debasement.

Sex, rape, and film in 1960

I’ve been trying to write about Vittorio De Sica’s “Two Women” for months now, a film that garnered Sophia Loren the Academy Award for Best Actress.  But the subject of rape in connection with women’s sexuality is a tough one, and I kept putting it off — until tonight, after watching Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring,” which won both the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film.  Here’s my question:  Why were people watching so many movies about rape in 1960, and finding them so award-worthy?

In both cases, the rapes are graphic even today — the films show the women struggling, bloodied, traumatized, their clothes torn.  In “Two Women,” Sophia Loren and her 13-year-old daughter, each pinned under a fierce group of ravaging soldiers in a bombed-out church, gaze frantically at each other before they lose consciousness.  In “Virgin Spring,” three shepherds trap the golden-haired, unsuspecting Karin and rape her; when they’re done, they kill her with a club and steal her clothes.  What the hell?

Of course “Two Women” is an antiwar film — it revisits the true story of mass rapes by French Moroccan troops in Central Italy near the end of World War II — but do we really need to see a vicious rape to get an antiwar message?  Rather, the film is partly about the neat contrast of the two women’s sexuality:  it portrays Loren at her most luscious and earthy, wiping sweat from her brow and fanning her magnificent chest as admiring men look on, so different than her religiously devout, pubescent child with big eyes and a clear conscience.  Loren’s character has used sex and her beauty before when necessary, but she has always done so to remain in charge of her future.  De Sica might be telling us that in war everyone suffers atrocities; but by offering us the contrast of their different sexual histories, he makes those histories somehow relevant.

Karin may be the ill-fated virgin in “Virgin Spring,” but she’s no innocent.  As the spoiled daughter of a prosperous farmer, she heads out through the woods with her slatternly, cranky, pregnant-out-of-wedlock foster sister, Ingeri, to deliver candles to the far-off church (they must be delivered by a virgin to please the Virgin Mary, they believe).  Decked out in her most beautiful clothes, she sings songs of spring and renewal, and the countryside blossoms around them.  But as they travel, Karin reveals herself to have a vicious streak:  she smugly informs Ingeri that she’ll never be pregnant outside of marriage, but only when she is “mistress of my house with honor.”

Ingeri:  “We’ll see about your honor when a man takes your waist or strokes your neck.”

Karin:  “No man will get me to bed without marriage.”

Ingeri:  “And if he meets you in the pasture and pulls you down behind a bush?”

Karin:  “I’ll fight my way free.”

Ingeri:  “But he’s stronger than you.”

Stupid girl — Karin won’t learn until it’s too late.  Like De Sica, Bergman uses the contrast of the promiscuous girl against that of the beautiful virgin — and why?  To illustrate a chaotic view of the world around us.  Karin’s rape and murder result in her father avenging her death by brutally murdering the shepherds — at which point they discover that a new spring of fresh water has grown up out of the ground below her dead body.  This isn’t a film about revenge, as some critics have suggested; it’s a film in which nothing makes sense, in which every effort to make sense of the world results in confusion.  Thus, the contrast of the blonde with the dark-haired Ingeri serves no other purpose than to remind us that women’s sexuality is always somehow relevant, meaningful, dangerous.

The argument for showing a rape in film is, I suppose, that its horror will repel viewers, alert them to the terror women experience, and draw larger conclusions about the terrors of war and the meaninglessness of the universe.  But it’s not worth it.  I’ve been thinking about this subject ever since seeing “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” a couple of months ago, with its brutal rape-and-revenge plot.  Rape scenes onscreen tell audiences far more than simply transmit antiwar messages or allow us the satisfaction of a rape victim eventually kicking her oppressor’s ass.  They offer up dividing lines between men and women and insist on showing physical terror that has no comparative violent act against men.  Moreover, rape is an uncontrollable plot device that associates women’s sexuality with fear, violence, and shame.  We need to stop showing them.

Isn’t it interesting that as these filmmakers were producing their films in1960, the so-called “sexual revolution” was beginning to be discussed — The Pill was hitting the market, rock and roll was showing everyone how to use their hips, and the western world was taking a turn toward public discussions of sexuality that had only been glimpsed with the earlier Kinsey Reports and Beauvoir’s Second Sex.  Isn’t it interesting that one of the harbingers of that shift was two prominent films that used rape as a plot element; rape allowed these directors to make “serious,” hard-hitting, perhaps even controversial films.  But ultimately they simply warn girls to watch out.  We need a moratorium on rape scenes in film and television.