Tag Archives: Movies

Presence (stage, screen, or otherwise)

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I’ve recently read two different proposals for a gay version of the Bechdel Test. The Bechdel Test is described in a comic strip by Allison Bechdel back in 1985. It is usually described as a simple way to gauge the active presence of female characters in Hollywood films and just how well rounded and complete those roles are. The test is in three steps, 1) There must be at least two named women, who 2) talk to each other, about 3) something besides a man.

It is frightening how many movies and TV shows fail the test. Having just watched, over the course of a month, the first five seasons of Supernatural, for instance, I can report that not a single episode out of those 65 episodes passes the test. To be fair, since I’ve also watched a few later episodes out of order, I can report that one recent episode in which Felicia Day reprises the role of a lesbian hacker played in an earlier season very nearly passes the test. Nearly.

While the results of applying the Bechdel Test to your favorite shows can be depressing, it is even worse if you try to apply a similar test about gay characters. If you transliterate the Bechdel Test into a test of how gays are treated in storytelling, it might look like this proposal:

  1. Are there at least two gay/lesbian/transgender people?
  2. Do they talk to each other? Or even do more than shock horror kiss?
  3. Do they talk about anything other than sex/being gay/shopping/cats?

With extremely rare exceptions, only movies made by queer writers/directors and explicitly aimed at a gay audience pass the test. Most fail at item number one. And most of the few who pass would fail if you changed it to say “is there one out gay/lesbian/transgender character.”

I insist on the “out” part because, I’m sorry, characters such as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter stories don’t count. He is never identified within the books or the movie as being gay. It isn’t even really hinted at in a meaningful way within the story. Having the author tell people during a book tour (and then only after having been confronted umpteen million times about the lack of gay characters), that one character who is portrayed as completely asexual throughout the books doesn’t count. Because this is about recognizing the existence of gay people, not compounding the closet.

Of course, Brokeback Mountain fails this test, because the only gay characters who appear are all deeply and tragically closeted. Which was true to the historical period, but also integral to the fundamental point of the story. Because of that historical reality, I find this other version I found a bit more useful:

  1. The movie includes two gay characters who interact in some way,
  2. Do not offer sassy advice to the protagonist,
  3. And are not dead by the end credits

At least with this test, Brokeback Mountain doesn’t fail until the third bullet.

The point of the original Bechdel Test wasn’t to assess whether a movie treats female characters equally, or whether there are stereotypes, or even whether or not it is misogynist. All it does is establish a baseline that the writers have actually imagined the women in the story as being full-fledged human beings, with lives and feelings and interests of their own. It’s useful not so much as a way to judge a specific movie or story, but to make us think about the presumptions of story telling.

Movies and books and stories are full of a variety of fully realized male characters, who range from good to nasty, from important to silly. And even most of the throw-away male characters have hints of a life and personality of their own that isn’t defined by the protagonists or their family. Where as the default position for female characters are to be the sister, wife, ex-girlfriend, or mother of one of the characters who is actually doing something in the story.

And let me just say, it’s disturbing, as a writer, to go apply the Bechdel Test to your own work and discover just how many of your own stories fail it!

So, the two versions of the Gay Bechdel Test aren’t quite the same as the original. Both have at least one step that focuses solely on clichés rather than just establishing whether the writer has actually developed a personality and backstory for the characters. So I think I prefer this version:

  1. The movie/story contains one identified gay, lesbian, or transgender character,
  2. Who has a conversation with any other character,
  3. About something other than sexuality*.

With the corollary that under sexuality we include topics that are typically (and lazily) considered a subset of “queerness.” So if all they talk about is gay rights legislation, or AIDS prevention, or who uses which bathroom, those count as a failure, too.

Not that we need to be the stars, or that we need to appear in every story, but we’re part of reality, and there are far more of us than there are people capable of dodging dozens of machine gun bullets while driving a car at very high speed through a crowded place without hurting anything other than a single vegetable cart, while reloading their gun and explaining the intricacies of a multinational conspiracy.

And we see thousands of them in movies all the time.

A beach, a blanket, and a song

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I’m not quite old enough to remember the original Mickey Mouse Club. It was cancelled almost exactly a year before I was born. Three years after cancellation, the original hour-log recordings were edited down to half-hour segments that were shown in syndication for a few years, and my Mom said I watched it fairly faithfully. I don’t know how much of my memories of the show are from that exposure, because those edited episodes was re-re-released into syndication around the time I was in middle school. I watched some of those episodes, though if my friends caught me, I claimed that I was just watching it to humor my younger sister.

I was already an Annette Funicello fan before. I remember her most from the Beach Party movies co-starring her and Frankie Avalon. When I was in grade school, before modern cable systems, when most places had only three or four stations, there always seemed to be one of those stations that ran movies in the afternoons. Silly comedies were a staple of those afternoon movies, so Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo, and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini made frequent appearances.

The movies were extremely silly, with outlandish plots. Despite being movies about kids spending a summer at the beach and the ensuing romantic soap opera, a lot of them had at least one sci fi/fantasy element (the professor’s ability to paralyze someone by touching a “nerve-cluster” at the temple, the “improved” chimpanzee that could surf and dance better than a human, a Martian teen-ager sent to the beach as an advance scout for an interplanetary invasion, a mermaid falls in love with one of the surfers, and Frankie hires a witch doctor is to send a sea nymph to the beach to keep the other guys away from Annette while he’s in the Navy).

Not exactly high-concept, but probably a big part of the appeal to grade-school-aged me.

She was in a few of the sillier Disney films of the sixties, as well (The Shaggy Dog, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, and The Monkey’s Uncle).

In all of those movies she played the wholesome good girl. The girl any boy would be lucky to have. Setting aside all the levels of sexism in that, it meant when I was a kid, I wanted to be her. I didn’t consciously admit it. I’m sure that to some of the adults in my life they assumed that I learned all the lyrics to all of her songs, et cetera, because I had a crush on her. (And for the record, I didn’t have a crush on Frankie; his pretty boy persona was totally not my type.)

So I’ve always had very fond memories of Annette and was sad to read that she died. I’m a bit miffed that news of her death has been overshadowed by reporting about the death of a certain former British Prime Minister. I certainly understand why the latter is considered more newsworthy.

Good-bye, Annette. I hope that somewhere you’re strolling along a beautiful beach, surrounded by love and music.

It’s been done

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I watched a teaser for a movie I’m looking forward to seeing later this year, and accidentally got sucked into the comments.

As a rule, I try to ignore comments on the internet. Wiser people than I have written extensively about why some of the worst humanity has to offer seems to congregate in the comments sections of articles and the like. Sometimes, on some sites, you can’t help be see at least the first few comments while you’re looking at the actual content.

This comments section began with someone writing a long rant about how the movie, and previous entries in the related franchise, were not original. They had borrowed this element for an older series, and that element for an older movie, and so on and so forth.

Except, of course, none of the things he cited had been original in their use of those elements, either.

Humans have been telling each other stories, constructing various finds of flights of fancy, for tens of thousands of years. Every twist of plot has been thought of, in some form, thousands of times before, for instance. Technology and cultural changes allow some of the details and contexts to change, but in some ways only on the surface. If you abstract any idea out far enough, it becomes a trope or cliché that’s been around for ages.

Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to distinguish between a genuine effort to tell a story that is yours, and a lazy copy of someone else. But it does mean that pointing out some element or bit of a story “has been done before” isn’t saying anything terrible profound.

And certainly not original.

Head spaces, part 2

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There’s a particular TV show that I like, but don’t watch often. There are certain lazy tendencies in the writing that rub me the wrong way, such as treating technology as magic whenever convenient for the plot. There are other aspects of the show I really enjoy, so I tend to let episodes accumulate on the TiVo, saving them for times when I’m in the mood for some mindless action and adventure.

There’s another show which also uses technology in improbable and impossible ways that I watch faithfully each time a new episode comes out. One of the diffences between the shows is that the second one states its premise upfront, and then tries to stay consistent with that. Yes, what they’re doing is impossible, but it’s the same impossible everytime, and the stories revolve around the question of how people might behave if computers happened to work this way. The first show just plays fast and loose without any thought about whether they’re contradicting something they did in a previous episode.

Neither show is packaged as science fiction. The first one definitely isn’t sci fi. It’s a cop/action show whose writers don’t understand or care about what computers and crime labs really can do and what they can’t.

I have seen discussions on science fictions forums where some fans have objected to the inclusion of the second in a list of sci fi shows currently airing, primarily because the show doesn’t claim to be set in the future, and acts as if all the things they’re doing are possible with our current technology. But the show postulates the existence of a computer that can do things currently impossible, and then it explores what might happen if that were so. That’s the epitome of science fiction.

I can only enjoy the first show if I’m in the right head space. I have to be in the kind of mood where I can give my inner critics the night off, kick back, and just watch a group of interesting characters run from one dangerous situation to another. I have to be in a “I don’t care if it’s wrong” head space.

The second show puts me into its head space. Regardless of whether this is wrong, what might things be like if it were?

That’s not just good science fiction. That’s good fiction. The goal of a story teller should be to draw people into the story. Make this imaginary situation or world so enticing that the reader has to step inside to see what it’s like.

The other kind of story is like mass produced snack food. If it’s there where we happen to be and when we’re hungry (or bored or at least not feeling too full to eat), we’ll pick it up and munch away. But later we may not even remember what it was we ate.

The other kind doesn’t just pull us away from whatever we were doing to check it out, but it leaves us thinking afterward. Like an extremely good meal, we want to linger in the head space of the story after it’s ended.

And that’s the best kind of head space.

At least Scrooge found redemption

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Many, many years ago, before what most people think of as the internet, I was active in several forums on Fidonet. One December someone started a thread about Christmas movies, and someone else posted into that thread a brief explanation of why The Bing Crosby, Danny Kay, and Rosemary Clooney White Christmas was their favorite movie.

And one of the first replies to that post was a cranky rant about how that movie was not the film which had introduced the song of the same name, that the song had been originally written for the Fred Astaire film, Holiday Inn, and no one should like White Christmas because it wasn’t the movie that introduced the song.

Nothing in the original message had even mentioned the song, “White Christmas.” The person had even said that the movie was full of corny and silly bits, with a highly improbable plot.

I shrugged my shoulders at the cranky, crazy person, and went on to read other people’s recommendations of their favorite Christmas movies.

A year or so later, I think it was on a Usenet forum, a similar thread was in progress, and again, not long after someone mentioned White Christmas, there was another angry rant about how that movie wasn’t the one that introduced the song, and how much the person wished people would stop saying it had. Except, of course, that once again, no one had.

I’ve seen it again, and again. Mention the movie, White Christmas, and some troll will post a rant about it not being the movie that introduced the song. Now, sometimes, before the troll got there, someone would mention in a more friendly way the fact that the song was originally written for another movie, but had become so popular that a studio decided to base an entire film on the song. But eventually, there would be the angry post conveying the same fact.

When I posted on an old blog a list of my favorite Christmas movies, I got an anonymous message from someone, ignoring all the other movies in the list, to angrily tell me he’s tired of people mistakenly believing that White Christmas, the movie, introduced “White Christmas,” the song. Which, of course, I hadn’t said.

It’s perfectly legitimate to dislike a movie that someone else likes. It is also socially acceptable to join a virtual conversation about a movie by sharing some trivia about the film, one of the people in it, and so on. The part that I don’t get is why this movie, of all the innocuous, corny, trivial films that have ever been made, seems to always attract this one particular rant.

I have wondered if it’s just the same troll. Does he have alerts set up searching for mentions of this film, so he can log into whereever someone mentions it and post his rant?

If it isn’t the same troll, what makes several people feel a need to react with righteous outrage about a movie named after a song which it didn’t introduce? How can such a trivial detail provoke such outrage?

People get angry about things that other people enjoy all the time. No matter how wrong headed (and factually wrong) it is, I underatand why people get worked up about the so-called war on Christmas, for instance. Something that represents their faith and their personal history appears to be under attack. I think they are deluded to think it’s under attack, but I understand why traditions and beliefs and treasured memories are important to them.

But which movie introduced a sentimental holiday song? Really?

And of all the things about that song to get exercised about, again, it’s which movie introduced it? Not the fact that it’s a secular song about a sacred holiday? Not that a song for a Christian holiday was written by a Jewish man? (Actually, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that—because now the war on Christmas folks will decide that Irving Berlin started their whole war, or something.)

Maybe these folks just need to be visited by some ghosts, perhaps the spirits of Musicals Past, Present, and Yet To Come.

Haven’t you always wanted to see those ghosts doing jazz hands?

Nightmares

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I have trouble with scary movies. At least certain types of scary movies. They give me nightmares, and I’m the kind of person who, while having a nightmare, climbs out of bed, running around waking up everyone I can find, frantically trying to explain the horrific danger we’re facing and how we have to come up with a plan to deal with the threat now.

I love certain types of scary movie. I could watch the 1931 Dracula, or the ’31 Frankenstein or ’35 Bride of Frankenstein, or the ’32 Mummy over and over and over again. Give me a classic Godzilla any time!

Sometimes while explaining this, I’ve had friends ask how this can be true, when they know I have written some pretty creepy and horrific stuff. Or, as a friend very recently put it, “How can you love Fringe so much? It presents a lot of things far worse than many scary movies you’ve refused to watch!”

Part of the issue is control. If I’m writing the scary stuff, I’m in charge. I can save whoever I want. I can make the bad guy lose when I want and how I want.

To a lesser extent, watching a scary movie (or series) at home on TV or iPad is different in part because I have some control. I can pause or stop the movie when I want. More importantly, if I’m not immersed in the big screen setting without the theatrical sound system it’s easier for me to remember I have control. I’m not trapped in the center of a row of strangers in a dark room. And sometimes just looking away isn’t enough.

There’s also familiarity. Forbidden Planet was one of the first movies to trigger this reaction when I was about five or six years old (it’s the one my Mom still tells stories about), but now, it’s one of my favorite movies of all time. I know how it ends. I know what the monster is and what its limitations are. None of that was true the first time I saw it.

And in Fringe‘s case, there is an additional salvation: there have been very, very, very few scary movies ever made which any character who is even one-tenth as smart as Walter is on the good guys’ side.

Because what’s missing from most nightmares is a hero you’re confident will win the day.