Untitled

“Y'all Wanna Hear A Story?...”

Zola is a glittering piece of postmodernism, filtering the infinite jest of touch screen technology through the medium of film. This is appropriate, considering its source material – a 148-Twitter thread from 2015. Narrated with lacerating wit by Aziah “Zola” King, the thread details the Detroit-based waitress’ wayward excursion to Tampa. Packed with suspenseful twists and turns, it's only natural that it eventually became a feature length film. After years of middling in development hell, Zola was eventually released in 2020. Directed with auteur sensibilities by Janicza Bravo, Zola uses a road-trip from hell to interrogate (or subvert) American race-relations, transaction and bodily autonomy. 

The plot unfolds on the heels of a newfound friendship. Zola (the magnetic Taylour Paige) meets Stefani (Riley Keough) at her waitressing job and the two strike up a bond. Both strippers on the side, they appear to be cut from the same cloth – funny, street-smart hustlers and practitioners of a particular brand of femininity. This femininity is one patterned off of Black womanhood and Stefani, who is white, is shameless in her racial posturing. With stray braids, slicked down baby hairs and the unmistakable accent of a white girl imitating Blackness, Stefani represents a post-racial spectacle of appropriation. Keough delivers a comic tour-de-force performance, ringing each AAVE-inflect line with the appropriate amount of misplaced conviction. That Keough is the granddaughter of Elvis is not really relevant, but it does add just a pinch of subversiveness to the proceedings. 

Shortly after they meet, Stefani invites Zola to strip with her in Tampa. Joining them are Stefani’s misbegotten beau (Nicholas Braun, giving a masterclass in patheticism) and her enigmatic, increasingly shady “roommate” (Colman Domingo). Zola comes to discover that she is in the throes of a trafficking scheme and that Stefani’s intentions may not be as innocent as she proclaims them to be. In her essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” author/academic bell hooks writes of cultural appropriation and its manifestation in the media at large. She writes that, “The overriding fear is that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate – that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten.”

In many ways, Zola functions as a story of otherness – specifically White consumption of the other. Stefani is the walking embodiment of white consumption and continual exploitation/coercion of Zola only emboldens this quality. Zola, on the other hand, is expected to look out for Stefani, opining at one point, “Who’s looking out for me?” This line is indicative of Zola’s compromised safety as a Black woman – a figure who is expected to take care of everyone but herself. When Stefani tells her pimp that, “Zola made me a whole new bitch,” she is literally referring to Zola’s help in increasing her net value in the realm of sex work, but more implicity speaking her debt to Black womanhood as a means of adornment. 

Zola and Stefani are depicted as mirror images of one another, both literally and figuratively. Bravo follows in the footsteps of many a psychodrama in her choice to present the two as spiritual twins. Walking down a hallway in corresponding outfits or gazing upon their reflections, they are both augmentations of one another and so completely diametrically opposed.

Elsewhere in her aforementioned essay, hooks states that, “Cultural appropriation of the Other assuages feelings of deprivation and lack that assault the psyches of radical white youth who choose to be disloyal to western civilization.” This feels like an appropriate diagnosis of Stefani, someone who exists outside of white parameters and thus adopts Blackness in relation to her perceived outsider status. 

Bravo has described her films as existing a step-away from reality. This is fitting for a film like Zola, which renders a stranger-than-fiction story into filmic material. In a profile of Bravo for The New York Times author Jenna Wortham wrote:

Her movies are reminiscent of being on psychedelics — the way even the most mundane interactions become revealing, exquisite and worthy of intense examination, and the way something humorous can seem sinister for a flicker of a second before shifting back into levity. Bravo specializes in exploring the way seeing clearly can happen in an instant and permanently alter your experience of yourself and your life.

Bravo walks a tonal tightrope, but through the imaginative force of her storytelling, manages to pull it off.

Shimmering in neons and buzzing like a smartphone, Zola occupies a distinctive sonic and visual landscape. There are qualities that seem like a callback to old Hollywood: orchestral swells and grandiose title cards. These stylistic nods come across a little cheeky, especially considering the ways in which Zola rejects the Hollywood formula. Aided by playwright provocateur Jeremey O. Harris (who co-wrote the screenplay), Bravo presents a narratively frenetic fever dream that sidesteps convention at every turn. Even though Zola is unequivocally the narrator, the nature of authorial authority is subverted in a sequence where Stefani speaks to the camera, telling her side of the story.   

In the Western sphere, stripping is one of the more fascinating, and literal, representations of our bodies’ entanglement with capitalism. The physicality, the need to appease and titilate, the showering of dollars. All of it seems like a particularly charged ritual of commerce. Zola does not incriminate the profession nor does it glorify it. For the titular character, the act of stripping has an autoerotic verve to it: through it she is able to explore the dimensionality of her selfhood. This is most evident in a sequence in which Zola envisions the different personas she can adopt before a performance. Repeating, “Who you gonna be tonight?,” she appears in multitudes, as if in an elaborate musical number (yet another moment that made me recall the stylistic grandeur of Old Hollywood).  

If this moment is any indication, Zola is a film in which pleasure and pain are offered up with equal aplomb. It is a disorienting and spellbinding exercise in absurdism, confounded by the fact that its story is ripped from the digital headlines.

Work Cited:

bell hooks, “Eating the other: Desire and resistance.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation, pp. 21–39. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Wortham, Jenna. “How She Transformed a Viral Twitter Thread about Sex Work into a Sinister Comedy.” The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 16 June 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/magazine/how-she-transformed-a-viral-twitter-thread-about-sex-work-into-a-sinister-comedy.html.

Lesbianism and Gender Presentation in Go Fish

Media representation plays a large role in how society views lesbian identity. Lesbians threaten the survival of the patriarchy by decentering the desire of men, ensuing degrees of stigma and stereotypes related to their physical gender presentation and sexual preferences that is recreated and enforced in popular media (Halberstam). Queer theorist Jack Halberstam identifies in “Looking Butch” that the most present stereotype of lesbians is the butch lesbian, who through her hypermasculinity is able to make lesbianism more understandable to a straight audience. Representations of butch lesbians have been identified as negative stereotypes, as it assumes that because a woman is attracted to other women she must be masculine (Halberstam 176). Halberstam complicates this notion by arguing that stereotypes are another way for heterosexual society to define identity in excess (Halberstam 176). I believe that stereotypes can be both right and wrong at the same time, as they are one representation of a broader identity that can not accurately be reflected within one character. The butch lesbian stereotype is accurate in its representation of one subculture, yet when applied as the most valid form of gay identification it becomes reductive. Sexual labels and gendered behavior are used to distinguish the queer community, based in the assumption that to be queer is to be different. The film Go Fish, created during the new queer cinema of the early 90s, was made by lesbians Troche and Turner. This film was not created to make a direct political statement about lesbian identities, but to show a relatable representation of lesbian life. Characters in Go Fish decenter the male gaze, making it easier to divert normative feminine expectations, yet they can not escape the stereotypes of sexuality, as they are enforced in association to gender presentation and enforcement of labels.

As female queerness breaks social expectations of femininity, masculinity becomes the idealized form of lesbian presentation in Go Fish, recreating the butch lesbian stereotype Halberstam called attention to. Max, the main character of Go Fish, attempts to present masculine to feel more visible in her lesbian identity, enforcing the relation between gender nonconformity and queer sexuality. This depiction of lesbianism is intrinsically based within gendered roles and expectations, as society assumes one to be heterosexual until labeling and presenting otherwise (Gaines, 1986). Max, along with other characters, adopt masculine traits and names to attract the female gaze. The cutting of Ely’s hair is used to signal to others that she is a lesbian, showing the physical inscription of gender non-conformity as a signal of queerness. This representation idealizes the masculine lesbian as the most valid in their expression of their sexuality, as they are conforming to expectations of sexuality in opposition with gender expression to distinguish themselves from the heterosexual other. Halberstam describes the social validity of the butch lesbian as a way to make “lesbianism readable in the register of masculinity, and it actually collaborates with the mainstream notion that lesbians cannot be feminine” (177). Sexual orientation is not something that has to be physically obvious, yet stereotypes of what an ideal lesbian should look like highlight the significance placed on visibility of sexuality, delineated through gender nonconformity. These stereotypes, although frequently accurate, reduce lesbian identity to ability to be physically discernible to the heterosexual eye. 

The stereotype of the butch lesbian shows how lesbianism is viewed as negating gender norms, conditioning butch characters to obey the social expectations of masculinity. Throughout Go Fish , there is an assumption of masculine and feminine lesbians as being more naturally compatible. When Ely and Max first meet, they both fall somewhere in between this gender dichotomy. While they both voice being interested in each other, neither of them initiates any romance. It is only once Ely cuts her hair into a boyish buzz and Max takes off her baseball cap to let her hair down that they truly get together, showing how gender roles and presentation impact lesbian courtship. When they both dressed in between masculine and feminine, they did not know what their relationship would look like, as they had less social scripts to go off of. Halberstam directly comments on how the couples in Go Fish are “coded as butch and femme role models, and throughout the film, serious butch-femme clothing codes are in effect” (Halberstam, 224). It is important to interject the stereotype that butch and femme couples are the most suitable, as these labels in the lesbian community are another way of recreating heterosexual assumptions within gay relationships. Even the categorization of butch and femme lesbians works to serve heteronormative ideals of the masculine and feminine as opposites that are attracted. 

The butch lesbian exists within the cultural imagination serving as an antithesis to how straight women should act (Halberstam, 1998). The butch lesbian identifying character Daria challenges who can be labeled as a lesbian through having sex with a man, resulting in outrage from the lesbian community. The scene starts in a dreamlike manner with quick shots of Daria being kidnapped off the street, blurring the line between the reality of the film and the imaginary that Troche and Turner have created. The lighting is harsh, casting the shadow of the group of angry lesbians against Daria, who stands alone against a white wall. The camera flips quickly between her and the women, creating a scene of immediate interrogation. The other lesbians act as social enforcers of the rules of sexuality, evoking a sense that they represent broader societies expectations of lesbians. This scene stands out from the rest; it is a direct argument between lesbians about who gets to identify as a lesbian, showing how important sexual labels are. Labels, represented as being verified by one's physical presentation, define how society views one's sexuality (Grosz, 1994). Troche and Turner chose to have Daria, the most traditionally butch of the group, sleep with a man, challenging conceptions of the label of lesbian. Daria is a masculine presenting woman, making it easy for characters and spectators to understand her lesbian identification. Yet when Daria engages in behavior that is not associated with her sexual and gender expression, her whole identity comes into question. Daria feels confident enough in her gender and sexuality expression that she feels who she has sex with does not have to define her, yet this scene shows how significant sexual labeling is socially.  Halberstam argues that to remedy queer stereotypes, “What we should be attacking in stereotypes is the attempt of heterosexual society to define us for ourselves, in terms that inevitably fall short of the ‘ideal’ of heterosexuality” (Halberstam, 180). The stereotypes that result from typical butch representation is that of a boyish, man-like, lesbian. Yet, Go Fish  negates this limiting representation of a label through Darias unrestricted sexuality, showing how butches are not only masculine women but real people with expansive expressions and desires. Sexual labels are a way for heterosexual society to categorize gay identities, yet they are also important queer community identifiers, making stereotypical representations both important for visibility and reductive of queer identity. 

         As a lesbian, I appreciated the way Go Fish was able to represent the broader social pressures behind stereotypes of lesbians. This film explicitly discusses how stereotypes of butch lesbians have impacted the ways lesbians represent and see their identities. The butch is not necessarily a reductive representation, yet when butch characters are limited to masculinity in order to be seen as valid in their identity, as seen in Daria, we verge into a simplifying stereotype. Not all lesbians identify with masculinity, and not all masculine lesbians identify as butch. Ultimately, lesbians do not need to be visible through gender non-conformity to be valid in their identity, yet expectations of gender in relation to sexuality impose a stereotype that discredits the feminine lesbian. I disagree with Halberstam that Go Fish is a negatively stereotypical “butch-femme narrative of desire”, as the film continuously recognizes the impact that gender expectations have on sexuality, resulting in this stereotype being accurate for many (Halberstam, 224). "Go Fish" is significant for its portrayal of lesbian characters and their everyday lives, offering a more authentic representation of lesbian relationships than what was often seen in mainstream media at the time. Creating a lesbian character is a way for viewers to vicariously experience a relationship, creating a more conscious acceptance, even when it materializes from a stereotyped script. Go Fish may help viewers understand the gender expectations within lesbianism, showing how butch stereotypes can be oppressive and also accurate. 

Works Cited

Gains, Jane. “Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory.” Cultural Critique, no. 4, 1986, p. 59., https://doi.org/10.2307/1354334. 

Grosz, Elizabeth. “The Body as Inscriptive Surface.” Volatile Bodies, 2020, pp. 138–159., https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003118381-9. 

Good Luck to You Leo Grande (2022) is an unconventional romantic comedy, sometimes even described specifically as a “sex comedy,” directed by Sophie Hyde. The film consists primarily of intimate conversations and sex between Nancy Stokes, a neurotic older woman with little sexual experience, and Leo Grande, a charismatic young sex worker whom Nancy hires to explore her sexuality. It stars the incomparable Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack, sure to be a star-on-the-rise, who bring to life a witty, provocative screenplay written by Katy Brand. In my video essay, I employed a narrative analysis to discuss the film’s unique four-act structure against the female sexual response cycle. I also observed Hyde’s subversive use of The Gaze in specific scenes of the film. In this analysis, I will use genre studies to compare Good Luck to You Leo Grande to the typical conventions of the Romantic-comedy, then discuss the racial representation of the film against the oppositional gaze. 

Subverting or Evolving the RomCom? 

The label of RomCom does not perfectly describe Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, but it also doesn’t not describe it. On one hand, it is romantic, flirtatious, and sexy; it is also comedic, approaching the complex moral qualms of its subject matter with honesty and levity. On the other hand, these same moral themes and Hyde’s more artistic ambitions, such as setting most of the film in one location and the seeming lack of plot, have made it all too easy for viewers to label the film as a work of cinema more “elevated” than a typical RomCom. This assumption not only demeans the hundreds of films in the RomCom genre as somehow “low-brow,” but is also simply a misunderstanding of the romantic comedy as a genre. 

In “Genre: The Conventions of Connection,” Leo Braudy boldly defends the cultural importance of genre films, a category which the romantic comedy falls into. He writes “Genre films, in fact, arouse and complicate feelings about the self and society that more serious films, because of their bias toward the unique, may rarely touch” (664). Romantic comedies, at their core, are a digestible way to attempt to make sense of the nebulous concept of love, and the complicated, vulnerable, and often unspoken topic of sex. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, honors this true nature of the romantic comedy, complicating it one step further by discoursing sex work and daring to represent the desire of an older woman. 

Thus the unique “couple” at the heart of Hyde’s film is what sets it apart the most from other RomComs. Popular, mainstream heterosexual romantic comedies nearly always star a man and woman who each absolutely epitomize the beauty standard of the time, and are either young and unstoppable or adults in their thirties with fun yet respectable dream jobs. On romantic comedies, Betty Kaklamanidou writes “One could even argue that the utopian rom com world is the ideal incarnation of a fantasy society where difference is celebrated rather than exorcized, and where every person can truly be equal to the next” (150). It can be said, then, that in this fantasy world, only the most conventionally beautiful people are deserving the most incredible experiences. Good Luck to You Leo Grand abandons this idea of a perfect, utopian world, and exists in a version of the real world. Though unmistakably beautiful, the simple fact of Nancy’s age makes her a subversive RomCom heroine; she is simply an ordinary woman who happens to be older. Leo, too, greatly complicates the squeaky-clean RomCom formula merely in his occupation of a sex-worker. Unlike a certain film known as Pretty Woman and others of its kind, Leo does not need to be “saved” from his lifestyle. In fact, it is Nancy who is framed as needing “saving” and revitalization (something which I will address more in a bit). 

Finally, Good Luck to You Leo Grande subverts the romantic comedy in that it does not end as a romance at all! Hyde does not rely on some forbidden romance between Nancy and Leo to keep her film interesting. They begin their relationship as something strictly sexual then form a strong platonic, friendly bond, these two kinds of connection consistently distinguished from romance throughout the film. Still, their once-in-a-lifetime  friendship follows the prototypical trappings of a RomCom romance: the strange meet-cute, the rough patch, the betrayal, and the reunion. 

With all this in mind, I ultimately find that Good Luck to You Leo Grande is not a “subversive” or “elevated” RomCom, but simply a sign that female filmmakers are expanding the previously limited notions of what a RomCom can be. 

Laughing Through Color Once Again

There is one unfortunate but crucial aspect of many RomComs that must be discussed within the text of Good Luck to You Leo Grande: the Other. Due to the fact that older women and sex workers are two identity categories which are almost never explored in depth, both stars of the film are relative “Others” within the RomCom canon. Still, the factors of race and class are largely at play within the dynamic between Nancy and Leo. 

Leo is a biracial sex worker. Nancy is a white woman hiring Leo for her satisfaction, to feel “young” again. Racial difference is hinted at but not explicitly addressed in the film, though other forms of oppression such as class and misogyny are discussed at length. With these facts in mind, how is the film any different than so many others in which a character of color is used for the development of a leading white character? 

I am not the person to provide a sufficient answer to this question. However, I do feel like this generalizing comparison can err on the side of implying that sex work is demeaning, unwanted work. This is a perception of sex work that the film spends so much time and dialogue trying to refute. Leo is proud of his work; he chose this line of work. There are also so many subtle, intersecting power dynamics at play between Leo and Nancy that make it difficult to decipher who is necessarily “in control” in the many sexual scenarios of the film. While Nancy hired Leo and has the ability to refuse his pay or give a negative rating, Leo has much more sexual experience than her, acting as her kind and willing guide as she is in an incredibly vulnerable state. 

Still, I think the way that Leo is portrayed and the “colorblind” approach to his race seems to be reinventing the wheel of the “palatable” Other. As Kaklamanidou writes, “This deceptive colour blindness applies to an extent to the Hollywood industry which attempts to metamorphose its ethnic stars into profitable commodities by enhancing and taking advantage of their appealing ethnic characteristics and diminishing and/or defusing those traits that may emphasize

their ‘other’ side” (141). This seems to be a very fitting description of Leo, characterized as a “palatable” Black sex worker. Leo seems to be economically stable and presents himself as classy, presumably appealing to wealthier clients. He also had the ability to choose sex work. Would Leo be portrayed with the same amount of charm and sex appeal if this were not the case? 

Finally, the portrayal of postmenopausal feminine sexual desire through the character of Nancy is, undoubtedly, revolutionary and subversive. The film has received several positive reviews from (notably white) older women who never thought they’d be able to see themselves in a RomCom. But the progressive representation in this film only extends to white women. As hooks writes, “Most of the black women I talked with were adamant that they never went to movies expecting to see compelling representations of black femaleness. They were all acutely aware of cinematic racism-its violent erasure of black womanhood” (310). Nearly thirty years after the publication of hooks’ piece, this sentiment has sadly changed very little, and Good Luck to You Leo Grande, though a positive step for some, is no exception.  Ultimately, there is no other film I can think of that is quite likeSophie Hyde’s Good Luck to You Leo Grande. Though it is definitely imperfect, it makes me excited for the future of RomComs.

Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) made history as the first feature film written and directed by a Black lesbian–but the film knows this and extensively explores its appellation as the “first of its kind,” a title Dunye simultaneously treats with frustration and reverence. It’s strikingly self-aware, funny, and inventive, a semi-autobiographical story about Cheryl, a video store clerk and chronically single filmmaker who decides to make a documentary on a mysterious Black actress from the 1930s pigeonholed into playing “mammy” roles who appears in the credits of a film called Plantation Memories simply as “The Watermelon Woman.” It’s a movie about movies! “I am a Black lesbian filmmaker who's just beginning,” Cheryl says, and here the thesis of the movie exhumes itself. The text demonstrates a preoccupation with the power of identity as a representational strategy through imagery and insists on its existence, the Black lesbian gaze resisting hiddenness behind the camera and crafting a visible narrative powered by the excavation of archival memory, the straddling of truth and representations of truth, of real and imagined. Dunye’s filmmaking mirrors her own life while the fictionalized version of herself seeks her own image in the black-and-white static of footage nearly lost to history. The Watermelon Woman chronicles the myriad of interconnected dynamics between art and real life–its awareness of the ways it is speaking about and to itself is demonstratively pointed, with Cheryl often speaking directly to the camera about her project and desire to tell Fae’s story.

Fae Richards, the eponymous Watermelon Woman, symbolizes the Black queer archive that future generations of Black queer filmmakers like Cheryl strive to hold within their canon, and as Cheryl interviews subjects for her documentary on Fae and digs through archives she finds proof not only of Fae’s existence but of her queerness¹. She discovers that Martha Page, the white director of Plantation Memories, and Fae were in a relationship, all the while navigating her own dating life, getting entangled with a white video store patron named Diana, much to her best friend Tamara’s dismay. The ways Cheryl’s relationship with Diana parallels Fae and Martha’s excavates the possibilities and challenges of “race relations” within queerness and the ways white lesbianism often possesses an objectifying curiosity with Blackness. The film’s theoretical standpoint as a piece of media that presents a representational theory of Black queerness pointing out gaping holes in the so-called canon is made imminent by some of its casting choices–cultural critic and infamous haver of weird opinions Camille Paglia appears as a parody of herself and a mouthpiece for white feminist film theory offering a misguided take on the “mammy” sterotype, and love interest Diana is played by Guinevere Turner, cowriter and star of the 1994 lesbian film Go Fish. The Watermelon Woman theorizes that sexuality and race are mutually constitutive and through the production and reception of representational imagery this interrelation is complicated by the relationship between the creator and the recipient of an image–Cheryl is a lover of film as much as she is a filmmaker and a large portion of her desire to tell stories about the complexity of being a Black woman who is many things at once comes from her desire to consume these stories.

Jack Halberstam’s “Looking Butch: A Rough Guide to Butches on Film” bifurcates queer imagery into “positive” and “negative,” necessarily locating “butch” as a visual identity located in media representations in one of two pathologies². Butchness in film is often leveraged to be emblematic of non-normative female sexuality in a way that is easily visually understood, and as a result, butch lesbians in film have more often than not functioned to be objects rather than subjects of inquiry. Halberstam posits that the debate around positive and negative images often returns to early feminist film criticism calling for “positive representations,” categorically rejecting depictions that could be received in their full complexity as anything other than “good.” Halberstam complicates the idea of a positive image by postulating that this desire for queer imagery imbedded with messaging that campaigns for itself places “the onus of queering cinema squarely on the production rather than the reception of images.” The Watermelon Woman explores how cinema is queered both through the production and reception of images; Cheryl watches Plantation Memories for the first time, she reads the queerness in it and it becomes a queer text because of her viewing, then when it is revealed that The Watermelon Woman and the film’s white director were in a relationship, her read is validated. Cheryl’s onscreen presence as a butch lesbian is overtly queer and her and Tamara’s open discussion of lesbianism as well as an intimate sex scene between Cheryl and Diana underscore this film’s goal of moving beyond the implicit in representation, further informing the lesbian lens with with Cheryl uses to analyze and interpret films like Plantation Memories.

Plantation Memories is not a real film, but it might as well be as it represents the startling politics of race films of its time where the white Scarlet O’Hara-type starlet weeps in the arms of the nurturing Black woman with such vigor that it’s hard not to believe in its existence. The consequence of the effects films like it produced continue to be felt in strategies of representation and Fae Richards does not represent an easily “positive” image of queerness–instead occupying a space in the troubling tradition of the racialized dominant images of Black women in film–yet Cheryl recognizes herself in Fae’s performance partially because it is so fraught. She identifies in her relationship with Diana a similar dynamic to Fae Richards and Martha Page, who only cast her lover in highly stereotyped and racially singular roles, where her lesbianism and Blackness are at slight odds with one another when in a relationship with a white lesbian who can relate to her based on only one of those central tenets and displays a voyeuristic and ultimately isolating interest in the other one. The Watermelon Woman argues for complexity beyond “positive” and “negative” imagery and constructs a Foucauldian reverse discourse where negative imagery can be positively productive when viewed critically and rethought. The film invests in the prospect that art can be a two-way conversation and that by beholding representational images, we project our possibilities onto it. The image on the screen dims and the reflection of the audience is left peering back at itself--Dunye holds onto this moment and treats it with tenderness, imbuing this empty space with hope.

@theuncannyprofessoro

Ratnarajah, Anoushka. “Indisputably Real: Cheryl Dunye’s the Watermelon Woman.” Out On Screen, August 6, 2021. https://outonscreen.com/blog/2020/news/indisputably-real-cheryl-dunyes-the-watermelon-woman/.

"L.A. is like... nowhere. Everybody who lives here is lost. " -The opening quote of Nowhere

"In general, these films worry that the most violent and degraded acts are possible to those who do not inhabit a home or homeland." -Helen Addison Smith, "E.T. Go Home: Indigeneity, Multiculturalism and ‘Homeland’ in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema"

Gregg Araki describes his film Nowhere as "Beverly Hills 90210" on acid. Nowhere follows a number of uniquely-named, all somewhat inter-connected teenagers (Lucifer, Dingbat, Egg, Jujyfruit...) in Los Angeles over the course of one day as they engage in an aimless cocktail of drugs, sex, polyamory, BDSM, and parties. The world of the film is in constant flux between reality and fantasy (and it is very, very, very queer). Everything is extremely heightened: there are lengthy, gratuitous sex scenes, a seemingly unlimited access to space, an abundance of drugs, and vast, artistic bedrooms that real teens would only dream of.

In my interpretation, the film's world is an external representation of the teens' imaginations and their feelings of an endless, indestructible youth. While this world is a step above reality for the viewer, it is real to the characters. However, this overindulgence is not without it's consequences. The first half of the film is a sort of queer, sex-positive utopia seemingly free of prejudice in which the teens can have sex with whoever they want, go wherever they want, and so on. This all seems to crumble in the second half of the film, as the teens' endless consumption unravels into overdose, sexual assault, suicide, violent fights, and broken hearts. Araki does not seem to be prudish or critical of this queer nomadic lifestyle, though. He seems to posit that this imaginative world is sadly incompatible with the "real world" of capitalist society at the turn of the century.

Now for the sci-fi. Unbeknownst to every character except Dark, the day on which this film takes place is sort of Judgement Day; the last "normal" day before aliens come to take over the planet.

Dark is the main character of the film, and offers some narration through diary entries and videos he takes of himself and his friends. He is played by James Duvall, a multiracial actor. Dark becomes increasingly unhappier as his girlfriend Mel spends more and more time with her girlfriend Lucifer, who he hates. He grows weary of their indulgence sexually-open arrangement, simply wanting to fall in love and be committed to one person that will anchor him in a world he feels lost in. As he gets more disconnected from Mel, he finds himself infatuated with Mongomery, a boy who goes to school with the teens but who Dark knows little about.

At the same time as Dark's discontent with his lifestyle grows and he finds himself falling in love with Montgomery, he sees a bunch of giant alien creatures roaming around the city, abducting people. Dark is the only character able to see these aliens, which seems to be no coincidence alongside the fact that he is the only character verbalizing any anxiety about the future and the teens' lifestyle. In one diary entry, he says: "I feel like I’m sinking deeper and deeper into quicksand, watching everyone around me die a slow, agonizing death. It’s like we all know, way down in our souls, that our generation is gonna witness the end of everything. You can see it in our eyes."

In the final scene of the film, Dark returns home after an empty night of partying and a fight with Mel. Montgomery appears at his window and tells Dark that he was abducted and tested on by the aliens. The two boys lie together on Dark's bed and confess their love, promising to never leave each other. Just when it seems like Dark has found what he has been longing for, Montgomery goes into a violent coughing fit and explodes, leaving a bug-like alien in his place that crawls out of Dark's room, and the movie ends.

While the aliens in Nowhere are not necessarily representative of a racialized Other according Addison Smith's analysis of Sci-Fi films, the impending doom of an alien invasion and Dark's isolating anxiety is quite in line with Addison-Smith's reading of home and homeland. Araki's identity as Japanese-American director and Duvall's as a multiracial American actor are factors in this reading of the film. Since this film is thus told from a mixed/multiracial perspective, the its anxiety is not surrounding the (white/Western) fear of "losing" a home to outsiders, but the fear of not belonging to any one home in the first place.

Addison-Smith writes:

"For many people in self-avowedly multicultural nations such as the United States, their status as migrants, be it forced or economic, recent or later generational, means that 'home’ has become a complex, multiple and sometimes fraught notion. That such multiple belongings to place is not confined to recent migrants can most immediately be seen in the labelling of many ethnic groups through the joining of two place names (African—AmericanJapanese-American)" (28).

Araki uses Los Angeles as an unstable home in this film (note the opening quote at the top of this post). He plays upon the notions of transplants to the city, and the stereotypes that the city and its inhabitants are vain and superficial. The characters move throughout the city at will, with no connection to any particular space. Actual homes are places of confinement and depression (both the suicides in the film occur in character's bedrooms).

I read that Dark's ability to see the aliens is a representation of his sense of displacement and anxiety for the future. When Montgomery enters his room and the two share an extremely intimate, tender moment, his room finally begins to feel like home, rather than its previous role as a space for his lonesome brooding and masturbation. But when Montgomery explodes as is replaced by an alien, Dark's vision of home and someone to share it with also figuratively blows up in his face; home feels impossible.

Finally, Montgomery's objectification by Dark's infatuation and his identity as a white queer man seem to be an inversion of both romance and Sci-Fi tropes. Montgomery seems to occupy both the role of the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" in Dark's desire to be saved by him, and the racialized alien Other in his mysteriousness and his constant affiliation with the aliens. Addison-Smith writes, "An alien is easy to identify, and particular judgements about them are thus easily drawn from their appearance alone, so rooting their ‘racial nature' in their biology" (27). Montgomery definitely stands out in this world. He has different colored eyes, is always dressed in white, appears to Dark miraculously by a sign that reads "God help me," and, unlike very other character, is quiet and keeps to himself. He is alien and even an angelic figure to Dark, a unique representation against Addison-Smith's notions of the racialized alien as either invader or teacher.

The entire movie Nowhere is on Youtube! I think it's really great, but there's a ton of trigger warnings (sexual assault, drug abuse, suicide, eating disorders, physical assault, gore). The quality is also very bad. Proceed with caution.

Attack The Block (2011), directed by Joe Cornish, is a sci-fi film that takes place in South London, and follows a group of trouble-making teenagers who must defend themselves and their apartment complex from extraterrestrial beings. The film begins with the group of teenagers attempting to rob an innocent woman, but their attempt is cut short when something falls from the sky, and lands in a nearby car. Once the woman runs off, the boys go to investigate the car, and stumble upon an alien creature who lunges at them. Originally, it seemed as if the villains were the teenagers, however the landing of the alien establishes the real danger of the story. After they take off the bandanas they had obscuring their faces, and we get a glimpse at their comradery, it's obvious that they are just children. 

The boys' failed robbery from the beginning comes back to haunt them, as the woman, Sam, contacts the police to find them. Now, not only does the group have to run from aliens, but the police as well. As the group runs for their lives from aliens, two police officers manage to grab hold of the group's "leader", Moses, played by John Boyega. This is one of many times that the police chase after them, as if they are the aliens, rather than catching the actual aliens that are killing civilians. Here, a comment is being made on the fact that teenage boys of color, specifically Black boys are disproportionally sought after by law enforcement. Moses even goes, to say "I reckon, the Feds sent them anyway. Government probably bred those things to kill black boys. First they sent in drugs, then they sent guns and now they're sending monsters in to kill us”, showing that even in a world where rampaged aliens are killing humans, children of color are seen as the threat.

Most of the film takes place inside, or just outside of a giant housing project in South London, known as, “The Block”. We learn that this is where almost all of the boys live, and a place they feel is their duty to protect, often stating "nobody fucks with Block"(7:09). The building is akin to an eery, futuristic fortress, however it is a clear home for the boys. Though the boys have different personalities, and we get brief glimpses into their differing home lives, The Block marks a universal place of belonging for them. A place where identity is characterized by protecting one another from the impending threats of aliens and law enforcement, both of which have no regard for the boys as people. Though they are seen merely as thugs by law enforcement, the movie works to bring humility to them through giving depth to their personalities, and addressing the socioeconomic context of their lives.

René Laloux’s La Planète Sauvage (1973), an experimental animated science fiction art film, is as strange as it is dense with implications. The politically charged dissonance of psychedelia combined with the film’s Dali-esque surreal cutout stop-motion animation universe, realized by French avant-garde artist Roland Topor, has solidified this film as a seminal work of animation and a cult science fiction feature. The film is set in the hallucinatory landscape of the planet Ygam, where gargantuan blue humanoid creatures called Draags who rule the planet enslave humans (called Oms–a play on the French homme)--Terr, an Om who has been kept as a pet since Traag children killed his mother in his infancy escapes from his child captor and bands together with a band of radical escaped Oms to resist the Draag regime and impending genocide. The film is markedly allegorical for its use of imagined alienness to establish otherness and marginalization, and the techniques the Draag use to subordinate the Oms evoke historically significant racist discriminatory practices. Simply, it feels like a movie that is bluntly about something beyond what it appears to be, and the slight heavy-handedness of its messaging reifies its goal of engaging in racial discourse.

The racial politics of Fantastic Planet are strange in that the broadness of the trenchant sociopolitical commentary imminent in the dynamic between oppressor and oppressed has led critics to draw comparisons between the plot and the narrative around “animal rights” and the (mis)treatment of domesticated animals, yet the human-ness stitched into the film’s fabric positions it as a text specifically interested in the ways humans create divisions among themselves. The Draags and the Oms, despite their vast difference in physical size, do resemble one another and take on different forms of the corporality of a human being, and for this reason and many others, Fantastic Planet seems to be a film about how we could recognize ourselves in one another and still splinter into factions and enforce senseless violent domination.

Terr’s captor, a girl named Tiwa, has given him a collar to control him as he attends “school” with her, which involves her wearing a headset that transmits facts into her brain, and a defect in his collar inadvertently allows him to learn the same knowledge as Terr, knowledge he ends up using to save the Oms. Intelligence is the gateway to capital in Ygam and the Draags are highly intellectualized beings who pride themselves on their inborn wisdom and biological superiority that allows them to far outdo the meager Oms in their knowledge–the film comments on the complications of the racialized bioessentialist understanding of knowledge that would posit that being smart, and subsequently having value, is a fixed innate biological trait. The Oms navigate the world through cunning, outwitting the Draags practically in ways they might fail to do so intellectually and the Draags and Oms counter one another in the film on what “counts” as knowledge: the Draags favor transcendental meditative practices that imbue them with highly complex perspicuity, whereas the Oms argue that their knowledge is more useful for the ways it enables them to survive despite their circumstances. The Oms are made alien not only through their physical inferiority but also because they exist in a society that was not built for them. Fantastic Planet depicts an idea of home that is stringent upon exclusivity and requires technical superiority to belong; shoring up racial politics, Fantastic Planet deploys a social constructionist standpoint that colors these divisions as the products of structural forces benefitting only those who erected them.

Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis and released in 1997, follows the story of Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, who is an astronomer looking for proof of extraterrestrial life in space. Her dream began at a young age with the help of her father, who suffered a heart attack when she was nine years old but she persevered and continued to follow her dream in honor of him. As a young adult, Ellie started working for the SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), but the program is threatened to be terminated by the President’s science advisor. Four years after starting to work for SETI, Ellie discovers a signal coming from the star Vega, and after further investigation, her team decides that this transmission should be strong enough to allow them to travel to Vega by penetrating the Earth’s ionosphere and sending them back to Earth. She decodes the signal and finds that it contains information about a machine that can be built to transport an individual between space. Human made technologies are utilized in this film, which are used to connect with the extraterrestrial world.

Even though this film stars a female lead, it does have a predominantly male, white cast, and one of the only characters of color is Rachel Constantine (played by Angela Bassett), who is the National Security Advisor to the President. She is the only other predominant female figure in this movie alongside the lead. Her role in the government’s involvement with the extraterrestrial contact mission and construction of the machine is very significant and she is a very authoritative figure within the film. 

Contact brings up questions surrounding religion and science, as when controversy arises over the machine being built, religious extremists strongly oppose the mission due to claims about it challenging their faith and humanity’s place in the universe. The machine ends up being bombed on the day of its launch, preventing any sort of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence and unknown entities. Later, a second machine is secretly constructed in Japan and Ellie is chosen for the mission. She travels through multiple wormholes and finds herself on a beach similar to one from her childhood, where she sees an alien-like figure that appears to be her deceased father. In a way, Ellie’s home is with her dad, whether or not that is physically on Earth or on Vega, reuniting with him as a young adult in a strange sort of dreamy way. After reconnecting with him, she loses consciousness and finds herself back in the machine’s pod, with the mission team trying to contact her through her recording device. She tells them that she was gone for 18 hours, but they insist that all they received was static noise for just a few seconds.

In a dystopian future, mutants face extinction at the hands of the Sentinels, killing machines developed to detect the mutant gene and kill anyone that carries it. The Sentinels are part of the Sentinel program, created by Dr. Bolivar Trask in the 70s. The Sentinel program was approved following the assassination of Dr. Trask, which was carried out by Mystique. Following the assassination, she was kidnapped and her DNA was obtained and altered to advance the Sentinel program. With her powers of transformation, the Sentinels became more advanced killing machines, escalating the extinction of the mutants. The last of their kind, a small group of mutants fight off the Sentinels while Xavier and Magneto plot to alter history by preventing Trask’s assassination and Mystique's kidnapping. Kitty is able to send Wolverine’s consciousness back in time to 1973 to try and prevent Mystique from going after Dr. Trask. Wolverine wakes up in his younger body and he recruits some mutants to help him, among them Charles Xavier (Professor X), Hank (Beast), and Eric (Magneto). The plan fails, Dr. Trask survives the assassination attempt and he warns President Nixon of the danger of mutants and he approves the Sentinel program. During the assassination attempt, Hank and Mystique reveal themselves as mutants to the world and the Dr. Trask gets Mystiques’ DNA. 

The different identities in the film are established through the mutant gene which only few people carry. They are singled out and labeled as “mutants,” separating them from the rest of humankind. Mutants hide their abilities and the fact that they are mutants in fear of prejudice and hatred. The events that unfolded in the first assassination attempt on Trask helped push a narrative where mutants are considered dangerous and must be eliminated, therefore getting the approval for the Sentinel Program. Mutants are now hunted by human technologies thanks to the prejudice of one man, his creations, and the narrative he pushed. Before the technology developed for the Sentinel program, mutants were able to live peacefully and unnoticed among humans. 

In the final act of the film, Mystique once again goes after Trask at an event in Washington D.C. where the Sentinel program is unveiled. A fight breaks out between Xavier, Beast, and Wolverine who want to stop Mystique, and Magento who has taken over the Sentinels and intends to kill everyone at the event. Xavier persuades Mystique to spare Trask and she saves President Nixon from Magneto. This results in the Sentinel program being shut down, altering history and making Mystique a hero.

"District 9" is set in an alternate version of Johannesburg, where a massive alien spacecraft hovers above the city. The extraterrestrial occupants, known derogatorily as "Prawns," are resettled into a government-controlled district. The narrative centers around Wikus, a bureaucratic functionary assigned to oversee the forced relocation of the aliens. When a mysterious alien substance alters Wikus's biology, he becomes a target for both the government and the aliens. Fleeing to the district he once oversaw, Wikus forms an uneasy alliance with an intelligent alien named Christopher Johnson.

How does the film use human technologies and/or imagined alienness to establish different identities?

The film employs a pseudo-documentary style, blending real-world news footage with filmmaking. The human technologies, such as military weaponry and surveillance equipment, highlight the power dynamics between humans and aliens. The alien technology, on the other hand, is portrayed as highly advanced and mysterious, emphasizing the contrast between the two species.

The imagined alienness is crucial in shaping the narrative's socio-political commentary. The physical appearance of the aliens, resembling insect-like creatures, contributes to their dehumanization. This visual otherness reinforces the xenophobic attitudes prevalent in the film's fictional world, drawing parallels to real-world issues of racism and discrimination.

How does film de-individualize and/or biologically reify alien characters that mimic racial prejudicial and discriminatory practices?

The film de-individualizes the alien characters through various means. Firstly, the aliens are collectively labeled as "Prawns," stripping them of individual identities and reducing them to a derogatory, dehumanizing term. Secondly, their living conditions in the segregated district contribute to their de-individualization, as they are confined to shantytowns, reinforcing a sense of collective suffering.

In what ways does the film depict home for the characters?

For the humans, Johannesburg represents their home, and the arrival of the aliens disrupts this sense of familiarity. The district where the aliens are confined becomes a physical manifestation of their displacement, a makeshift home reflecting their marginalized status.

How does technology inform definitions of home/land, indigenes, and aliens?

The powerful human military technology reinforces the idea of humans as the dominant kind, asserting control over the land. The alien ship, initially a symbol of hope for the aliens' return home, becomes a source of conflict as they all vie for control.

The film suggests that technology, whether human or alien, is a double-edged sword that can be both a tool for empowerment and a catalyst for conflict. The question of who controls the technology becomes central to the characters' struggles for autonomy and a sense of home.

In what ways do the character relations reflect anxieties of racial identity, racial mixing and/or passing, migration, and invasion and/or colonization?

The segregation of the aliens in a specific district echoes the forced segregation of racial groups in apartheid-era South Africa. The relationship between the human protagonist, Wikus Van De Merwe, and the alien Christopher Johnson challenges preconceived notions about racial identity and cooperation.

Men in Black details Agent J’s first mission for the eponymous government agency who regulates alien activities such as the immigration of said aliens to Earth and any threats they may pose. Agent J and his mentor, Agent K, remedy an alien diplomatic crisis and prevent the disintegration of Earth. 

In Men in Black, many aliens pass for humans and have adopted disguises to help them live among humans. However, many of them still have their alien features that set them apart from the human population ranging from double pupils with gills, regenerative limbs, animalistic features, or being miniscule. Once revealed to be alien, however, it is impossible to unsee them as aliens and there is an uneasy horrificness at these strange creatures.  

The main antagonist is a newly landed alien who is portrayed as quite volatile and hostile towards all humans. His species is literally referred to as “bugs.” He adopts a human skin that gruesomely decays throughout the movie and at the end, reveals his true appearance which is of a monstrous, huge cockroach like creature. This is the main alien that is consistently shown throughout the movie despite their depiction of other aliens as overall helpful, intellectual, and peaceful refugees. As a result, the audience focuses on the evilness and non belonging of aliens. This is similar to the typical reactions towards immigrants because current residents are not welcoming to new people especially people of color who are deemed not worthy of a place in the community as they are disgusting or contaminating (like the alien protagonist) and would ruin their current balance. 

Citizens are also scared of immigrants having the same privileges and opportunities as them or even succeeding more than them, thus endangering their own chances which also applies to the aliens in the film. Most of the film’s aliens pass for humans which would freak out Earth’s human citizens as they are being threatened by these new unexpected populations. The Men in Black agency actually already has limited these aliens' success as the agency profits off the technology they confiscate (steal) from the aliens like Velcro. This is representative of how it is the aliens “teachings rather than their continued presence that is vital” especially because Earth is doing them a favor by providing the aliens refuge (Addison-Smith 31). The emphasis of the aliens seeking refuge on Earth is also an example of how the aliens are homelessness and have to rely on New York and its multiculturalism to blend in and survive. However, they are not completely at home and secure. Like human immigrants in our society, they have to build new lives in their new world due to their escape from their legitimate homeland and have to assimilate to the new society and current residents. 

In addition to this migration and passing of aliens as humans (akin to racial passing), Men in Black explores alien invasion and how aliens can lead to the downfall of the very planet that protected them. Firstly, the whole crisis is caused by an unsanctioned alien who landed and started wreaking havoc the moment it got to Earth. This causes an alien species ship to come to destroy Earth, even though Earth was a refuge for one of their royalty. Throughout the film, there are also many aliens who have decided to flee Earth because of its impending doom and leave it to be destroyed even though it was a safe haven for them as refugees. This mirrors the uncertainty of the loyalty of immigrants to their new home or rather their self-preservation or old motherlands. However, it is understood because, like immigrants, aliens “are always overwhelmed numerically by humans” (Addison-Smith 32). As seen in the Men in Black agency, aliens are not in any leadership positions. The majority of the aliens who help the agency are treated very hostilely in return for their services and intel. Aliens are mistreated by the only human group that knows of their existence and could validate that existence. The aliens in Men in Black reflect the opinions of immigrants and refugees in regards to how their differences, their lack of belonging in their new land, and the lack of human empathy is emphasized.

How does the film use human technologies and/or imagined alienness to establish different identities?

In spite of taking place in a dystopian future, there is no explicit depiction of advanced technologies. Born in Flames is set ten years after a peaceful revolution that has rendered America a Democratic socialist state. This supposed stride in progress has not stopped the oppressed from being marginalized. As a response to their oppressive conditions, a group of women-led community organizers take matters into their own hands with increasingly radical approaches. Writer-director Lizzie Borden's vision of the future suggests that dystopia might not be too different from present-day society.

How does film de-individualize and/or biologically reify alien characters that mimic racial prejudicial and discriminatory practices?

There are no aliens in this film, but alien identity is certainly a central theme. Women themselves are presented as somewhat alien in the ways they have been ostracized/signaled out as other. One such example is women being fired on the basis of sex. Different forms of labor are depicted from secretarial work to construction, showing the ways in which identity can be informed by one's contribution to capitalism (even if it has been repackaged as socialism).

In what ways does the film depict home for the characters?

Home is shown through varying New York apartments. Outside of the tumultuous cityscape, these are places of respite. Food is served, community is engaged with, friendships are formed. I was reminded of multi-disciplinary artist Carrie Mae Weems' "Kitchen Table Series," which featured photographs of Black women in varying tableaus. Within Weems and Bordens visual landscapes, kitchens are portrayed as emblems of intimacy and identity.

How does technology inform definitions of home/land, indigenes, and aliens?

As I stated earlier, futuristic technology does not factor much into this particular film. That said, television/radio broadcasting are used to relay messages of political ideology and statehood. In one sequence, a women's group breaks into a news station and holds employees at gunpoint until they play a message about a Black community organizer who mysteriously died in prison. Born in Flames shows the power of mass media as a form of control and resistance.

In what ways do the character relations reflect anxieties of racial identity, racial mixing and/or passing, migration, and invasion and/or colonization?

As a magnum opus on intersectional feminism (before the term was coined), much of the film concerns the cultural forces that separate different groups of women. There is a group of white, female journalists who decry the "separatist" actions of more radical groups. In the end, it is unity amongst women that is the enactor of change, signaling a present-day call to action as broadcast from Borden's not so distant future.

They Cloned Tyrone is a sci-fi mystery drama that follows the story of a drug dealer named Fontaine, who discovers a shocking conspiracy that his entire neighborhood is a part of. Starring John Boyega as Fountaine, Teyonah Parris as a sex worker, Yo-Yo, and Jamie Foxx as a pimp named Slick Charles, the film follows Fountaine and the gang as they try to figure out the truth while finding themselves sinking deeper into the rabbit hole of lies and secrets spread farther than they’d imagined. Fountaine, who was shot in a drive by shooting, came back the next day as if nothing had happened. Slick is shocked because he saw them murder him and immediately knows something is up. When they go to get Yo-Yo's help, they are led to an abandoned house where they find an underground lab where these scientist are running human cloning experiments. This is where they find Fountaine's dead body, the one that Slick had seen the day before.

Fountaine realizes that he is a clone and that the government is surveilling all of Glen, the fictional town in which they live. Slick finds a white powder in the lab which he figures out if being put in the chicken they eat, the hair relaxer at the salon, and in the juice they give out at the communion. Along with this, the music is also a factor of hypnotism against the black community.

Lionheart is a film directed and written by Genevieve Nnaji, who also stars as the main protagonist, Adaeze Obiagu. Adaeze is the logistic director of a family-run company, but when her father suffers a heart attack, he hands the company to her brother Godswill instead of her, whom he often praises. This causes tension between her and her brother, though they make a good team and can work together to save the company from debt. Jane Bryce's "Signs of Femininity and Symptoms of Malaise: Contextualizing Figurations of 'Woman' in Nollywood" discusses and contradicts Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi's ideology of Nollywood films, which discusses the idea that most films follow the 'mirror image paradigm,' a way in which woman in Nollywood are always portrayed as either powerful and dangerous, or as though they are suffering, exhibiting and amplifying how this culture and society perceives them and alternatively also showcases what society expects of women (72). However, Bryce offers an alternative approach to this statement; she expresses that not all Nollywood films engage in this, and some films within the Nollywood sector challenge how we perceive gender roles and femininity. I believe Lionheart is an example of this as main protagonist Adaeze is neither power hungry, as she can work alongside her brother, nor a figure who is suffering; she is a very successful character, and finally, she is a character who contradicts Adeleye-Fayemi's point that ".. theater and television genres in Nigeria have been shaped by male-defined values" (71), as she is not a woman who is defined by male-defined values, or the 'mirror image paradigm.' 

In Jane Bryce's "Signs of Femininity and Symptoms of Malaise: Contextualizing Figurations of 'Woman' in Nollywood", she discusses how the representations of women in Nigerian film are limited by the restraints of the patriarchy. She argues this problem is not specific to only Nigerian film, but rather representative of broader stereotypes of women's roles. Women in film tend to be represented as either power hungry rule breakers or submissive yet beautiful accessories. Media not only reflects society, but recreates and therefore enforces it. The movie Lionheart, by Genevivie Nnaji, reclaims this power of influence through developing complex female characters that symbolize more than the monstrous/perfect feminine. Ada, the main character, is determined to succeed in work, yet is not portrayed as overly aggressive. She is seen by her peers as respectable and ambitious, able to succeed both in work and in romance. Nnaji is able to portray Ada beyond feminine expectations, focusing on her career journey rather than her love life. This movie exemplifies the importance of female directors in creating media that will create and represent the nuances of womanhood.