Experiencing dudes in rock & roll

Kurt Cobain's shirt on display at the EMP

I hate being a One-Note Nancy, but Seattle’s Experience Music Project is a real sausage-fest. In fact, that’s exactly what one of its employees admitted to my partner when he complained about the lack of women represented in the museum and the gift shop. So, for example, when I entered that flashy gift shop I was prepared to buy (retail!) any one of the following books:

• Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010)
• Marisa Meltzer, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Rock (2010)
• Nadine Monem, Riot Grrrl: Revolution Girl Style Now! (2007)

Turns out you cannot buy anything having to do with any female rocker — not even a refrigerator magnet — nor will you see much about them in the museum overall. So what’s new? And why am I bothering to work up a lather about it?

Here’s what I decided after watching (and writing about) all those cult movies about female rockers last winter: rock is still liberatory. For women, making music rather than just admiring the snarling, strutting, misunderstood dudes who’ve been celebrated for their art ad nauseum can be downright incendiary. It’s because women have been painted as the admirers of male rockers — a dynamic that portrays women as sexual rewards for worthy men rather than aggressive sexual figures themselves — that reversing roles seems so fantastic, so revolutionary.

Thus, how great was it to leave the extensive exhibits of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and the evolution of the electric guitar and turn instead to the Hands-On Lab upstairs, where piles of children and adults were going inside little studios to do computer-led lessons in playing instruments, singing, and mixing songs. And here they were — girls getting the hang of the drum set, the guitar, or screeching along to Nirvana’s “Come As You Are.” (Oh wait — that was me.) Maybe this is just wishful thinking, but after finding none of those great women rockers I grew up with represented in the museum downstairs — Blondie, Lydia Lunch, Joan Jett, Tina Turner, the early Liz Phair, Chrissie Hynde, Queen Latifah, Courtney Love — it was in the Hands-On Project that I started to see that gleam in girls’ eyes as they got over feeling self-conscious and instead focused on getting the beat right.

Which brings us back to feminism, doesn’t it? Is it just me, or does feminism have to fight the same fights over & over again, such that women rockers still have to fight for a place at the table? The only upside, as I see it, is that when women do get onstage, they still have the capacity to blow your mind.

 

“Mildred Pierce” anticipation

Is it noir, or is it a women’s weeper? Mildred Pierce (1945) was both — or maybe all women’s weepers are also noir? No one understands the women’s film genre more implicitly than Todd Haynes, so I’m thrilled to anticipate his 5½ hour remake on HBO starting tomorrow night, starring Kate Winslet. Weepers don’t get much respect, of course, and the Lifetime Channel has done nothing to lift the genre’s reputation. But Haynes’ films explore intimate spaces of people’s family and imaginative lives in ways that are profound. You can watch all 43 mins of Haynes’ first film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), told using Barbie dolls and the Carpenters’ hauntingly soft melodies, and you’ll never think about that music the same way again:

No wonder he could make Safe (1995) or Far From Heaven (2002) with such sensitivity. Haynes was quoted in Sunday’s New York Times last weekend talking about his affinity for the “women’s film,” saying:

“Stories about women in houses are the real stories of our lives,” he said. “They really tell what all of us experience in one way or another because they’re stories of family and love and basic relationships and disappointments.”

His films aren’t perfect, but they speak to me on an emotional level that stays with me for years afterward. (Well, not I’m Not There, but that was about the shape-shifting Bob Dylan. And Cate Blanchett was pretty amazing in her turn as Dylan.) Far From Heaven wasn’t as profound as the Douglas Sirk classic on which it was based, All That Heaven Allows (1955) with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson (below), but it shows that he gets the genre on a cellular level.

I stumbled across a fascinating — and beautifully, lavishly illustrated — essay about Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1954) at MUBI, which sings the praises of the filmmaker’s propensity to create scenes that feel staged and even stilted for effect. Sure, you may not think of yourself as the women’s weeper type. Apparently the film critic Molly Haskell called it “the untouchable of all film genres.” But films by Sirk and Haynes are good. And, with Haynes, I think they say something intense about the emotional lives of women in houses. I can hardly wait to see Kate Winslet as the self-sacrificing mother cum self-made female entrepreneur, wrestling with a spoiled daughter, in Mildred Pierce.