Category: Feminism

The Screaming of Subtle Sounds

Everything about Kitty Green’s The Assistant seems muted. The colors are drab. The office looks boring, indistinguishable from any other cubicle labyrinth. The voice of Julia Garner’s Jane barely rises above a whisper. But the sounds of the mundane, humdrum daily noises scream. You hear every click of a door opening and closing. When Jane scrapes a stain off the couch, the sponge seems to scratch directly on your ear drum. The tinkling of an earring, the unwrapping of a sandwich are deafening. The quiet sounds are shouting. It’s purposeful, and it’s brilliant.

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Little Women, Big Finishes

Warning: The Following Contains Spoilers for Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. But honestly, how did you not already know how it ended? Louisa May Alcott’s book has been made into a movie 1,933 times. No 1,949 times. Well actually 1,994 times. Ok, at least 2,017 times. I can’t tell if they just do it again for every era’s it girl, or if there’s some menstruating god above who, based on a moon-cycle I can’t decipher, has need of a cry and a pint of Hagen-Daaz at specific intervals.

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Holy Hot Girl! Look out! She’s got Super Powers!

I’m addicted to a premise. (Admittedly, I’m addicted to several, otherwise saying no to romcoms and space odysseys about boys with daddy issues would be much easier). Here it is: an absurdly hot girl (who’s also absurdly unaware of how hot she is) finds she has super powers, which enter her into a world full of magic and more absurdly hot people.

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Stealing Bechdels

The Bechdel Test is laid out very simply. For those of you who don’t know it, there’s a whole website that explains, but basically it’s three rules that actually fit into one sentence: There are two or more female characters with names (1), who talk to each other (2), about something other than a man (3). That doesn’t seem that hard. That happens to me every day, even if just me calling my mom to talk about myself. But, as any explanation quickly makes clear, precious few movies make it into this category.

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Accusing Blonde

Warning: This post contains extreme spoilers for the movie Atomic Blonde (which, let’s be honest, you weren’t seeing for the plot anyway).

A friend of mine recently taught a short course called “Accusing Women,” which he was kind enough to ask me to TA.  The theme of the class was the recurring literary trope of Potiphar’s wife, the woman who falsely accuses biblical hero Joseph of raping her when in fact she is the villain who came on to him and, after being rebuffed, decides to make him pay for it. (Oh the guile of women!)

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