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juushikaI've been watching a ridiculous amount of Supernatural lately. Stop! Hold your fangirling! I do not actually like it that much. I've been going through a rough time—a few solid months now of back pain and comorbid depression; mindless distraction is about all I'm good for, and Supernatural is plentiful and precisely mindless. I nearly gave up during the first season (as I liveblogged at the time: "Yup, women in Supernatural are like Bond girls: all the appearances of power and autonomy and competence, except that they're all traditionally attractive (and white) and replaceable/interchangeable. It's as much chick of the week as it is monster of the week. Super classy guys, nice going."), but stuck with it because I liked the aesthetic (so much better in the first few seasons, when it's a Sleepy Hollow ever-autumn of midwestern forest and desaturated color) and it eventually developed a plot.
I started season six yesterday, and I'm still here mostly because it's there: with a few exceptions the plot works for me, but I've yet to develop an emotional attachment to almost anything. The "almost" is Castiel, who is perfect. Misha Collins is a superb actor; he pulls off the possession/multiple character aspect with a skill that the rest of the cast should envy, and brings enough depth and humor to his character that I actually give a damn. I don't give a damn about much else—the stakes should be huge, and the characters claim to suffer so much; eventually it even pulls away from women in refrigerators, a small blessing. But so help me, even when bad things are happening directly to the boys themselves do not pass go do not collect $200, it all reeks of manpain. Look, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes either, but you have family, biological and otherwise, to love you (so please put away the goddamn brotherly angst) and at least be thankful you're impervious to actual death or bodily harm—unlike the hundreds and thousand of civilians who suffer in the course of the show. It's not bad, a few specific episodes (5.9 "The Real Ghostbusters" goddamn) aside; it's perfectly watchable, an increasingly strong balance of episodic and overarching; I've yet to find either Sam or Dean attractive but that's okay because Cas and I will get married soon and have awkward angel babies.
But then some new films went up on Netflix instant, some of which were on my physical disc queue, so I took a break and watched them.
Did you know it's possible to tell compelling stories about female characters? To cast and costume women not as a decorated, sexualized Other, but rather as a diverse group of unique individuals? (Supernatural does subtle, natural makeup and grooming on men, but women must look made up, with visual makeup atop their traditionally attractive appearance—it's not just about being appealing, but about the cultural demand on women to make themselves appealing.) To have multiple women in a scene, having conversations among themselves, perhaps with no men present? Maybe even to explore the same aspects, like objectification and gender roles, which make Supernatural so innocuous but so troubling? See, I had forgotten.
I watched St. Trinian's—a group of students save a wacky private school for strange, erstwhile unschoolable girls. It's not meters deep but it's just what I expected, and delightful as such: colorful, silly, with some fantastic character design (amid plenty that's just okay) and an encouraging, if not entirely unproblematic, assumption that women can dress, speak, and do just about anything they want with any possible motivation. Who would have thought!
I watched Sleeping Beauty, which stars Emily Browning and is a fascinating inverse companion to Sucker Punch: Sucker Punch tries to have its cake and eat it too, exploring the issues of women's objectification and sexual exploitation while objectifying and sexually exploiting its cast, yet nonetheless creating a somehow fantastic exploration of sexual violence and dissociation (well discussed here). Sleeping Beauty is more about the desperate search for dissociation, prompted not by distinct sexual trauma but rather by an insidious prolonged culture of female objectification; it's explicitly sexual, but cold, almost sterile, and only once remotely titillating and there in the strangest way. It's almost too oblique and perhaps too cold to be completely successful, but it captivated me.
I watched Sister My Sister, a dramatization of the Papin murder case which is good but on the whole a poor cousin to Heavenly Creatures (read my nattering about that film here): same basis in true crime, where an unusually intimate relationship leads to murder, but Sister My Sister is less vibrant and more absurd in its mundanity, and so less memorable despite offering an compelling glimpse into class and family relationships. But it grabbed me in the opening credits, because nearly every name is female: producers, director, writer, and every actor (there are two male voiceovers, but no men seen in the entire production). Supernatural's credits are a predictable but depressing inverse.
I recommend all three films, by the way.
It's not that Supernatural is a horrible awful no-good egregious example of misogyny in media. It's that it's dead-center normal. It's that I would really like to watch something which is accessible and consumable enough for my addled brain, but has strong female characters or queer relationships or just about anything non-heteronormative and empowered which actually made me feel okay about being a living breathing human being, and my options for such range between limited and nonexistent: this run of good films is as miserable as it is refreshing, because I know too well that they're the exception to the general rule—a rule so general, so pervasive, that even when I see and know that it's being followed I may forget that it could ever be broken.
I started season six yesterday, and I'm still here mostly because it's there: with a few exceptions the plot works for me, but I've yet to develop an emotional attachment to almost anything. The "almost" is Castiel, who is perfect. Misha Collins is a superb actor; he pulls off the possession/multiple character aspect with a skill that the rest of the cast should envy, and brings enough depth and humor to his character that I actually give a damn. I don't give a damn about much else—the stakes should be huge, and the characters claim to suffer so much; eventually it even pulls away from women in refrigerators, a small blessing. But so help me, even when bad things are happening directly to the boys themselves do not pass go do not collect $200, it all reeks of manpain. Look, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes either, but you have family, biological and otherwise, to love you (so please put away the goddamn brotherly angst) and at least be thankful you're impervious to actual death or bodily harm—unlike the hundreds and thousand of civilians who suffer in the course of the show. It's not bad, a few specific episodes (5.9 "The Real Ghostbusters" goddamn) aside; it's perfectly watchable, an increasingly strong balance of episodic and overarching; I've yet to find either Sam or Dean attractive but that's okay because Cas and I will get married soon and have awkward angel babies.
But then some new films went up on Netflix instant, some of which were on my physical disc queue, so I took a break and watched them.
Did you know it's possible to tell compelling stories about female characters? To cast and costume women not as a decorated, sexualized Other, but rather as a diverse group of unique individuals? (Supernatural does subtle, natural makeup and grooming on men, but women must look made up, with visual makeup atop their traditionally attractive appearance—it's not just about being appealing, but about the cultural demand on women to make themselves appealing.) To have multiple women in a scene, having conversations among themselves, perhaps with no men present? Maybe even to explore the same aspects, like objectification and gender roles, which make Supernatural so innocuous but so troubling? See, I had forgotten.
I watched St. Trinian's—a group of students save a wacky private school for strange, erstwhile unschoolable girls. It's not meters deep but it's just what I expected, and delightful as such: colorful, silly, with some fantastic character design (amid plenty that's just okay) and an encouraging, if not entirely unproblematic, assumption that women can dress, speak, and do just about anything they want with any possible motivation. Who would have thought!
I watched Sleeping Beauty, which stars Emily Browning and is a fascinating inverse companion to Sucker Punch: Sucker Punch tries to have its cake and eat it too, exploring the issues of women's objectification and sexual exploitation while objectifying and sexually exploiting its cast, yet nonetheless creating a somehow fantastic exploration of sexual violence and dissociation (well discussed here). Sleeping Beauty is more about the desperate search for dissociation, prompted not by distinct sexual trauma but rather by an insidious prolonged culture of female objectification; it's explicitly sexual, but cold, almost sterile, and only once remotely titillating and there in the strangest way. It's almost too oblique and perhaps too cold to be completely successful, but it captivated me.
I watched Sister My Sister, a dramatization of the Papin murder case which is good but on the whole a poor cousin to Heavenly Creatures (read my nattering about that film here): same basis in true crime, where an unusually intimate relationship leads to murder, but Sister My Sister is less vibrant and more absurd in its mundanity, and so less memorable despite offering an compelling glimpse into class and family relationships. But it grabbed me in the opening credits, because nearly every name is female: producers, director, writer, and every actor (there are two male voiceovers, but no men seen in the entire production). Supernatural's credits are a predictable but depressing inverse.
I recommend all three films, by the way.
It's not that Supernatural is a horrible awful no-good egregious example of misogyny in media. It's that it's dead-center normal. It's that I would really like to watch something which is accessible and consumable enough for my addled brain, but has strong female characters or queer relationships or just about anything non-heteronormative and empowered which actually made me feel okay about being a living breathing human being, and my options for such range between limited and nonexistent: this run of good films is as miserable as it is refreshing, because I know too well that they're the exception to the general rule—a rule so general, so pervasive, that even when I see and know that it's being followed I may forget that it could ever be broken.
