Heavenly Creatures, 1994.
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Throughout Monster, Wuornos expresses a deterministic view of her life. She insists she had no choice in either her killing or in the way her life ended up. In a way, the film aligns her story with an increasingly accepted narrative of sex workers—that even though, technically, they’re committing a crime, they have no say in the matter. A study by Julie Bindel, for example, compares sex workers to modern-day slaves, finding that “prostitution is rarely, if ever, a choice.” Instead, sex workers’ positions are compulsory, and their “profession” is one they are forced into. Wuornos articulates a similar understanding of her own subject position when she says, “Fuck, man, circumstance, that’s exactly it, that’s exactly it. You know I feel like I never even had a fucking choice.” The film suggests that although Wuornos may be culpable for her actions, she is not necessarily to blame for the climate that engendered them. Thomas reinforces and further normalizes her position by tying it to soldiers’ experiences in the war. He believes, “What you’re feeling right now is just guilt, over something you had absolutely no control over. You know how many of us came back from the war? And almost killed ourselves because we felt exactly the same thing you do, right now.” She is as subject to the system as anyone else, and she finds herself trapped in the crossfire. Accordingly, although the film doesn’t excuse Wuornos’s actions, it culls sympathy for them, relating her crimes to those of sex workers and divesting her of a degree of her responsibility.
All of the presentations looked so fun and interesting! It made me wish I could see all the finished products. Aamir’s project looked great. It was about how crime films’ depictions of religion have shifted over time to reflect American society’s growing tendency towards individualism. My favorite part was how he tied in globalization as an explanation, because that argument felt so original and unique to me. I also think that he picked great films, The Godless Girl and Seven. I can’t wait to see how his project turns out. I was also super excited about Hannah’s project. For hers, she plans to make a Cards-Against-Humanity-style board game about vigilante justice. Her sample cards, “Judge Cards” and “Citizen Cards,” looked so cute, and this sounds like such a fun idea. She even included a little instructions pamphlet to explain her game, and it made it look even more official. My questions was about whose perspective the game would adopt—criminal or cop. I would totally play a game like this. One of my other favorite projects that I saw was Matt’s. His was sort of a choose your own path, sort of about vigilante justice, too. Basing his argument on Deadpool and Batman Dark Knight, he shows how different choices lead you through a circuit, increasing or decreasing your energy and using 1s and 0s. As a big fan of choose your own adventure games, I was particularly intrigued by this project. I loved the way he tied circuitry in to add another dimension to this project. I also would be excited to see Race’s finished short story, and I loved the premise of Alec’s paper, which was about crime films’ shifting views of women.
In terms of inversions in marriage and domesticity in Fargo like we were talking about in class, Marge and Norm’s relationship offers a reversal of the typical feminine and masculine roles. When Marge has to get up to go to the crime scene, Norm is the one who offers to make breakfast, while Marge tells him to stay in bed and sleep a little longer. Even in Jean and Jerry’s marriage, a possibly more traditional marriage, Jerry is always the one coming in the door with groceries. This film plays with the audience’s expectations of what constitutes a marriage and what role each spouse has to play. At the same time, it’s not a strict inversion, either. Marge is still pregnant, and still incorporates this fact into her identity. In this sense, Marge still keeps her connection to womanhood and motherhood. Accordingly, the film shows that these inversions don’t have to come at the expense of femininity; rather, Marge can keep her femininity and connections to it, while still being competent, rational, and in charge.
Today, I was reading a poem by Adrienne Rich, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of Thelma and Louise. It’s like she wrote it for them:
Twenty-One Love Poems, XIII
The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we’re out in a country that has no language
no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years… we’re driving thought the desert
wondering if the water will hold out
the hallucinations turn to simple villages
the music on the radio comes clear—
neither Rosenkavalier nor Gotterdammerung
but a woman’s voice singing old songs
with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute
plucked and fingered by women outside the law.
Not only does it speak to the plot of Thelma and Louise—two women outlaws, in the run in the desert—but it evokes the feelings underlying the film, feelings of discovery and dissent. Like the subjects in the poem, Thelma and Louise are free to create their own rules, their own understandings of their positions within society and in relation to each other. They don’t fulfill strict roles and positions, but rather work in concert, listening to their own language and their own laws.
It’s interesting how, in Fury, the vigilantism is two-fold. The entire town is guilty. Not only are those who act and take part in the violence responsible, but so are the onlookers who facilitate the violence. The women’s gossip in the film acts as a form of social policing, a sort of vigilante justice in itself, in the way it passes judgment and assigns value to different indiscretions. In a way, the film is implicating us, the viewer, just as much, by suggesting that even passive viewers are complicit in the crime of lynching. We are both the executioners and Joe, victim and victimizer.
Wolf of Wall Street Film Connections
One of the parts of Wolf of Wall Street I found most hilarious was when Belfort and friends were talking about throwing little people, then started chanting, “One of us—gooble gobble, gooble gobble.” Here, they reference the famous chant from Tod Browning’s Freaks, where little people welcome a newcomer to their circus family. I think this, first of all, highlights Belfort’s charisma as a (psychopathic) businessman by showing his cultural capital and, second, situates Belfort and his gang of conspirators as the “freaks” they are—people willing to exploit their own and others’ underlying perversities in order to turn a profit. Also I just loved that Scorsese included this, in general.
Although WoWS doesn’t make as direct a reference to American Psycho as it does to Freaks, it reminded me of Mary Harron’s film, nonetheless. DiCaprio’s voiceover has uncanny parallels with Christian Bale’s narration as Patrick Bateman. Both create an intimacy with the viewer, inviting us into their subjective, deviant perspectives. Between the cutthroat Wall Street life (I’m reminded of the business card scene) and the psychopathic lack of empathy of the main characters, the films offer striking parallels. And while one man may be an actual murderer and the other a white-collar criminal, they manage, somehow, to come across as equally psychopathic.
Challenge Post 13: Spoofing
Even though we haven’t gotten to it yet, I’m choosing Thelma and Louise for this post because I love it. In The Simpsons, Thelma and Louise earns not just a reference but a whole episode paying homage to the plot of Ridley Scott’s film. In “Marge on the Lam,” Marge gets increasingly close to her new friend, Ruth, who takes her to bars, clubs, and shows her how to shoot a pistol. The episode ends in a police chase, and the parody of Thelma and Louise is most evident in the climax. In this rendition, though, the women stop short from flying into the abyss, and it’s the men, Homer and Chief Wiggum, who go over the edge instead.
Another consideration in documentary ethics is that of authenticity. In documentary, filmmaker and viewer alike must question the extent to which something can be “real” if the subjects are aware of the presence of the camera. Merely knowing they’re being watched may cause people to act differently than they otherwise would—calling into question whether it’s even possible, in that sense, for a documentary to be real.
At the same time this critique of authenticity informs film ethics, I think it also helps explain why the boys from the Central Park Five might have confessed. The camera recording their confessions, in concert with the coercion of the police, could explain why the boys would confess despite their innocence. The mere presence of the camera elicits the response they feel is the “right” response–in this case, their guilt. While their experience being recorded is different, of course, because theirs wasn’t for a film, it still relates to those same principles. I think their coerced and recorded confession can also tie into the idea of interpellation. When the cops position and read the young boys as criminals, the boys themselves internalize this identity, accepting their assigned role as offenders. The cops view the boys as guilty a priori, and the boys are encouraged to perform this pre-established subjectivity, one that is founded on race and racial prejudice.
This semester, my roommate, Maddie, is in a program where she goes into a prison to volunteer and work with the inmates each week. Since we’ve been focusing on prisons and prison experiences throughout this class, and since Maddie’s been witnessing it firsthand, she and I will discuss the discrepancy between the media representation of prisoners and their lived realities. In one of our conversations, we talked about the perceptions of prisoners and the ways those have come up in her program. Maddie explained that the volunteers aren’t told what the prisoners’ crimes are, and they’re not really supposed to ask—because it supposedly changes the volunteers’ perceptions of the prisoners. Maddie said she assumed maybe one or two of the prisoners were in there for murder, solely based off the length of their sentences. Then, when she was talking with one of her classmates, she inadvertently found out that seven of the ten inmates were in for murder. She told me how she was so surprised because she’d already been working with them for weeks and had established friendly relationships with them. She couldn’t imagine any of them—except for one lol—being violent or anything other than pleasant and civil. Her description and assumptions tie into the humanizing depictions of prisoners we’ve seen in media like Orange is the New Black and Ear Hustle. Maddie’s real-life experiences, like the media we’ve seen in class, differ from the traditional media narratives that paint criminals as fundamentally different or less human than other people. In these portrayals, however, criminals are given backstories, nuance, and dignity.
Challenge Post 7: Extremes of Representation
Though definitely not crime film, the Pixar short “Mike’s New Car” makes obvious and explicit use of off-screen space. I haven’t watched this clip since my middle-school theatre class, but it was my immediate thought of an example of this technique. In the film, Mike and Sully, the characters from Monsters’ Inc., experiment with buttons and features of Mike’s car, causing more and more damage. Finally, as Mike drives off-screen and leaves Sully behind, he crashes—but the viewer only sees tires rolling across the screen. The film displaces the action from the visual car crash to the accompanying sounds and Sully’s facial expressions. By having the crash take place off-screen, the clip heightens the humor—it leaves the destruction up to the viewer’s imagination, actively involving them in the film’s plot.
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