The Film Query

All three films are adaptations with literary sources but the commonalities and differences in those sources can tell an interesting tale. Brokeback Mountain was originally written as a short story in 1997 by apparently straight female author Annie Proulx. She has since expressed distaste for how her work, with its tragic ending, has been received. Claiming her readers have “powerful fantasy lives” and “have decided that the story should have had a happy ending”, she insists that her story was “about homophobia” and any attempts to rewrite or imagine a better life for her surviving characters is in appropriate. “They belong to [her] by law.” I understand being protective of one’s work and one’s characters. The issue of fanfiction writing has been controversial and complicated, though from where I stand artists have always created works based on preexisting works, whether it’s Shakespeare deriving Romeo & Juliet from the myth of Pyramus & Thisbe, Leonardo Da Vinci painting scenes from the Bible, or a fifteen year old girl writing novel-length stories about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson being in love.

I personally reject the notion that a story about homophobia must end with the death of a gay person. Is it still 1961, the year that saw the release of The Children’s Hour, where we came so close to a romance between Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, but unfortunately 55 years ago a woman on the silver screen couldn’t realize she was a lesbian without immediately killing herself? Then again, this relies on the also questionable notion that a story about queer people must include dealing with homophobia at all. I don’t know a queer person who hasn’t dealt with homophobia once in their lives, but most of us know that it is possible for us to find loving relationships and “happy endings” such as one can find in real life. It would be nice, today, to be able to see ourselves represented in a world in which homophobia is not a part of our daily lives - just as it would have been nice, in the past, for our queer ancestors to have seen themselves represented in a world in which they don’t tragically die before their time. 

Suffice it to say, I’m not incredibly amused with Proulx and her aggravation at queer people for loving her characters and wishing the best for their futures. Some people can’t seem to imagine queer people of the past doing anything other than living lies and dying tragically, rejected by all those around them. (Hey, Julian Fellowes - I just saw the penultimate episode of Downton Abbey. Fuck you. I’m writing the shit out of Thomas leaving his job and having a million boyfriends, what are you gonna do about it?) Tragedy is something we’ve been forced to expect in our lives for too long. We want a little happiness for ourselves.

Compare, then, the origins of Carol and Maurice. Both films find their basis in controversial novels written in the era in which they are set. The Price of Salt was written by queer author Patricia Highsmith in 1951, the story an amalgamation of her own experiences, seeing and being enamored by a blonde woman in a mink coat in the department store where she worked, and those of her former lover, Virginia Kent Catherwood, whose lesbianism lost her her child in a custody battle. Due to these themes and a happy ending for queer women, it was a hard sell to the publishers and in 1952 it was finally released, but without Highsmith’s name attached so as to protect her identity. 

Maurice had a similarly complicated writing and publishing history. Gay author E.M. Forster, better known for such work as Howard’s End and A Room With a View, wrote his novel from 1913-1914. He was inspired by a visit to the home of his friends, gay activist couple Edward Carpenter and George Merrill, who came from different class backgrounds but formed a lifelong relationship despite those differences. Apparently, there was a note found on the manuscript of the finished Maurice novel that read “Publishable, but worth it?” Ultimately, the answer to that question turned out to be “No,” and due to its explicit themes and happy ending, Maurice was not published until 1971, after E.M. Forster’s death.

The writers of these films’ source material are not the only queer persons at hand in their creation. I want to preface with the fact that I would never speak ill of director Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility? Life of Pi? Thank you, sir), and again, without seeing Brokeback Mountain I can’t really speak to this factor in great detail, but unlike Brokeback, the film adaptations of Carol and Maurice were both directed by gay men. James Ivory made nearly 40 films (several of them E.M. Forster adaptations) with his partner in film and in love, Ismail Merchant. Todd Haynes has produced a few less movies than that, though he is responsible for outrageous necessary viewing bisexual picture Velvet Goldmine - it is on Netflix so do yourself a favor and watch it immediately, preferably with another queer friend so you can look at each other in ecstatic disbelief every five minutes or as needed.

The importance of queer hands shaping queer films, from the writing stage to the guidance of the director to the performance of the actor, cannot be overstressed, in my opinion. I know Brokeback Mountain to have been highly praised, critically, and that its losing of the Best Picture Oscar is thought by many to have been an upset and a regrettable mistake. I feel comfortable in saying, as a queer person, that I think straight people have the ability to sensitively portray queer stories in their work and encourage them to continue to do so. However, they are portraying experiences that are not their own. And sure, Ridley Scott has never been to space but that doesn’t stop him from making Alien or The Martian, and it shouldn’t. But there are artists who have known the anxieties and the joys of experiencing non-normative romantic and sexual attraction and how that does and does not affect their lives as a whole. Both Forster and Highsmith wrote about people like themselves, and I’d much rather hear what they have to say about homophobia in their time than hear what a straight woman in 1997 had to say about homophobia in 1963. Films with queer themes similarly benefit from featuring queer directors and producers behind the scenes. 

Here I’ve gone on about the writing and the directing and I've barely discussed what the films are about aside from “ultimately happy period gays”. Both films feature the meeting of persons who, despite having differences that should divide them and similarities that, in their time, should have made a relationship all but impossible, fall in love and commit their lives to one another. Carol Aird is an affluent socialite in the midst of her divorce who buys a train set for her daughter from Therese Belivet, a younger woman who works in a department store. Their difference in social standing is certainly evident in the film, though it is not as prominent an issue as it is for Maurice, a young stock broker who falls for Alec, the gamekeeper at his now-married ex-lover’s estate. In both films, the titular character must choose either to reject their identities and their beloved in order to retain their family and their social standing or sacrifice their attachment to other loved ones and the privileges of their rank in order to be with the person they’ve fallen in love with. In both films, they opt for the latter.

We view these as happy endings, but they are hardly fairy tales. Carol loses custody of her daughter; Maurice must choose the life of an outcast. They can be themselves, but choosing that life means losing what they had before. If you want to portray the injustice faced by queer people of the past, it’s quite sufficient to show that loving who you loved came at a cost, without that cost always being imminent death or a life full of constant suffering. Carol and Maurice are brave, strong people to leave their lives behind in favor of being true to themselves, but the times they lived in forced them to be brave and forced them into their impossible choices. 

Their happy endings are complicated. I haven’t yet read Patricia Highsmith’s novel but from what I’ve heard, it sounds like the title of The Price of Salt refers to just this dilemma for queer people in historically forbidding time periods. The phrase never appears in the novel, apparently, but the narration uses the word “salt” a few times as a metaphor. For one example, Therese fears that when a song she hears ends - a song that she associates with Carol - the world will lose its “salt”; the music is alive and without it the world is dead. It calls to mind the “salt of the earth” metaphor from the Sermon on the Mount: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt has lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men”. All this to say - I think The Price of Salt refers to the cost of living your life the way you want it, in this case, living out your queer identity which adds “salt” to your life, as opposed to the dull choice, for Therese, of marrying Richard, who she isn’t attracted to. That would have been safe, but flavorless. She chooses salt, which comes at a price.

I do love these aspects of Carol and Maurice - I can’t help but enjoy obstacles and drama, which make a happier ending so satisfying. But there is joy, on its own, in just reveling in that happy ending: the smile on Carol’s face as she sees Therese across the restaurant, come back to her and presumably ready to reunite and live together at last; the way Maurice and Alec embrace so tightly in the boathouse, Alec having decided not to leave England and in fact never to be parted from Maurice again. There is joy in Therese and Carol’s first kiss, in their first sexual encounter on New Year’s Day; joy when Alec climbs the ladder into Maurice’s bedroom and in their teasing talk in bed the next morning. Simple domesticity between same sex couples onscreen is such a relief and a pleasure to see, and I love these movies for representing that as well.

1. I’ve got a hard on for movies about movies.

And by that phrasing I do mean to imply that it’s not the most academic of reasons. I think it’s probably true of a lot of film buffs, and just as literature lovers devour books about books (The Book Thief?) and Broadway fans adore theatre about theatre (The Producers won the most Tony’s, ever), we love movies about movies. Singin’ in the Rain - set in Hollywood during the switch from silent to sound and the subsequent birth of the musical film - has remained one of the most popular and beloved movie musicals for over fifty years (and holds the #5 spot on the AFI’s top 100 list). I think what we love about self-referential media like that is the ability to enjoy our favorite medium on two levels - format and content. We get to live the experience of watching a film and at the same time receive a story about people making a film or listen to people talk about their love of film. You could say it’s not a recipe for the most immersive experience - if everyone is talking about movies the whole time you can’t help but be aware that you’re watching one. But I don’t think you go into a movie like this to forget that you’re going to the movies. You’re going, I think, to celebrate your love for movies, so being aware that you’re there isn’t really a drawback.

2. It’s the Coen Brothers.

I haven’t been able to figure these guys out. The Big Lebowski - fun nonsense stoner romp. True Grit - classic western adaptation. Inside Llewyn Davis - depressed 1960s folk singer odyssey. No Country For Old Men - drugs and violence and Javier Bardem’s hair. What are they about? I mean, I suppose not all directors are Martin Scorsese (terrible charismatic men do terrible illegal things but in the end the consequences aren’t too bad!) or Wes Anderson (meticulous aesthetic; characters trying to cope with their own mediocrity; Owen Wilson is there) where they sort of have their niche. Not to say that having or not having that niche is an indicator of quality! I love Wes Anderson and I do not love Martin Scorsese. I’m just saying I feel like I get what they’re about - the Coen Brothers are kind of wildcards in my opinion. And that intrigues me. I want to explore their catalog a bit more, and what better way than with their newest feature?

3. Who doesn’t love a good mystery?

As to the actual plot of the film, George Clooney is a prestigious, yet bumbling, lead actor making an important period picture when suddenly, he is kidnapped by a mysterious organization called “The Future”! Hollywood fixer Josh Brolin has little time to get the studio out of this mess. Fellow actors Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson must use their talents to help bring him back. I want my movie going experience to be an adventure and Hail Caesar! certainly seems ready to give me one. Any film that can be described using the word “caper” sounds like a good time to me. The trailer even asks, “Wondering what’s going on?” as Clooney kind of shrugs a non-verbal “yes”. Same, Clooney. Same.

4. “A Day in the Life...”

There’s something special to me about movies that confine their scope to a single day. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dog Day Afternoon, Do the Right Thing, and 12 Angry Men all follow ordinary people on single extraordinary days of their lives. I mean, I also love The Shawshank Redemption, which drags a man through twenty years of wrongful imprisonment - that can be fun too. It’s just appealing to think that one day can change your life, for better or worse, and I love watching that unfold on film. I’d like to believe that I’ll wake up one day expecting the same old thing and suddenly Josh Brolin comes in, tells me to adopt a disguise, and sends me off on an adventure. Or something like that, I’m not picky. 

5. A cast of thousands! (Or at least a ton of famous faces.)

I owned the soundtrack for a good month before I finally saw the film. I would listen to it a lot between December 2013 and June 2014, during which time I studied abroad in London, went through a sudden break up, felt very isolated in an unfamiliar place, and walked the streets with headphones constantly glued to my ears. I think I first became interested in the music due to the involvement of Marcus Mumford and Justin Timberlake, not exactly a duo I expected to collaborate. But I was also taken by the film’s trailer, and one of the songs prominently featured in it.

I hadn’t realized at the time that it was a song I’d heard before. Known as “Dink’s Song” or alternatively “Fare Thee Well”, its origins are foggy but the stories go back to an African-American woman, named Dink, washing clothes in a river and singing the song, overheard by ethnomusicologist John Lomax who wrote it down and made the first recording. During the 20th century it was recorded by countless artists, including Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk, the real life inspiration for the character of Llewyn Davis. When I was a child I’d heard a version by Carly Simon on a compilation album of hers that my mother owned. Folk songs like this one, recorded and rerecorded by so many people, never sound exactly the same twice; utilized verses can vary from cover to cover. The soundtrack to Inside Llewyn Davis, in fact, includes two versions of the song with slightly different lyrics.

One version appears late on the soundtrack and late in the film. Llewyn, at the end of his week-long odyssey surfing couches and pissing off every friendly face he meets, plays one last song at the Gaslight, a rendition of “Dink’s Song” that closely matches the style of Dave Van Ronk’s. The other version is a duet - IRL, between actor Oscar Isaac and musician Marcus Mumford, but in the reality of the film, the voices you hear are those of Llewyn Davis and his deceased partner, Mike Timlin.

I have found, personally, that I often have to listen to an album or even a song many times over before I really hear the lyrics and take in their meaning. I loved the Isaac-Mumford duet and probably played that song the most (or at least, second to “Please, Mr. Kennedy”, and could you blame me?). It took about a month of listening to the Inside Llewyn Davis soundtrack, but at some point I finally had a realization about the second verse of the song. The men sing, “Well I had a man/Who was long and tall/He moved his body/Like a cannonball.” 

After weeks of singing along and/or dramatically staring out windows and imagining myself in a music video while the song played on my headphones, it finally occurred to me that two men were singing this song. About a man. In a romantic context. Why? The line stuck with me and I realized that Llewyn’s solo Ronk-esque version featured the alternate line “The woman I love/Is long and tall/She moves her body/Like a cannonball.” Why does one song profess love for a woman while the other professes the having of a man, even though they are really the same song? As I often feel is the case, the solution is bisexuality.

One of Llewyn’s preoccupations over the course of the film - and he has a lot of them - is the death of his partner. We never learn much about Mike Timlin, but the effect his suicide has on Llewyn is apparent whenever another character brings him up. We see it when he storms out of a dinner party after patron Lillian Gorfein tries to sing Mike’s part on “Dink’s Song”. Music producer Bud Grossman sees that Llewyn can’t make it as a solo act and needs to get back together with his partner. He almost seems to have lost half of himself in losing Mike. Certainly their bond was strong and with music being Llewyn’s passion, whomever he made music with would be important to him, but it could also be said that he reads like a bereaved widower who can’t openly grieve due perhaps in part to a need to meet the standards of masculinity and heteronormativity that are expected of him.

The idea of the line in “Dink’s Song” applying to a romantic relationship between Llewyn and Mike is further corroborated by the method of Mike’s suicide. “I had a man” implies that the man is gone, just as Mike is dead. “He moved his body like a cannonball” can refer quite literally to what Mike did: in Llewyn’s words, he threw himself from the George Washington Bridge, and went down like a cannonball in the water. Directors Joel and Ethan Coen, on a special feature on Criterion’s special edition DVD of the film, also discuss with music producer T Bone Burnett how they titled the Timlin & Davis album “If We Had Wings”, a reference to another line in “Dink’s Song”, additionally in reference to Mike taking flight off the bridge. Artists don’t just drop details into their work; details are chosen to convey meaning, even if they are details featured in the work for mere seconds before they are gone.

The way the songs are featured in the film also support the theory that Llewyn is a bisexual man on the down low. He can sing the female-directed version of the song openly, in front of a crowd of people, because why shouldn’t he? A man can profess loving a woman in public without event. But the version with the line directed at a man barely plays diegetically: Llewyn picks the album he and Mike made together from a shelf, plays the record, and we hear the song begin, but by the next shot he is leaving the Gorfein’s apartment and the song continues even after he would have been out of earshot had he left it playing as he exited. We hear the line, but Llewyn neither sings the line onscreen nor listens to a recording of himself singing the line onscreen. While still clearly perceivable the line is almost being hidden by the narrative structure, the way a person might have to hide a non-normative sexuality. 

There are two outright references to queerness in the film itself, which reveal nothing about Llewyn on the surface but may be interpreted otherwise by me, who is always ready and willing to interpret otherwise. On his road trip to Chicago, Llewyn meets the rude and sickly Roland Turner (frequent Coen actor John Goodman) who frequently accosts him about what music he plays, the shade of his skin (Llewyn says his mother was Italian, while Isaac himself is Latino), and the cat who accompanies him on the drive. Not one to filter his thoughts, Turner muses, “Folk singer with a cat. You queer?” Llewyn doesn’t answer yes or no, but rather stammers out that the cat is not actually his.

The second reference comes near the end of the film, with Llewyn at the end of his rope, drinking too much at the Gaslight. The owner talks conspiratorially to Llewyn about why their musician friends Jim and Jean are so successful there - a lot of men come to see them play “because they want to fuck Jean”, and a lot of men, he says with twisted glee, come to see them play “because they want to fuck Jim!” The man finds the concept hilarious, hoping that Llewyn will join in the joke, but he only sits there quietly and, in a tired voice, acknowledges that he gets it, “They want to fuck Jim.” 

In these instances, Llewyn evades questions about his sexuality and refuses to partake in mocking theoretical homosexuals. He won’t incriminate himself by revealing his identity but he also won’t overcorrect his behavior by being outwardly homophobic just to escape suspicion - a fine line walked by a person perhaps not ashamed of his sexuality but rather aware of the reality that he cannot safely own up to it in front of either strangers he will never see again or friends he works with every day.

Another problem that can arise for a bisexual person is a lack of belonging, as having such a multi-faceted identity can sometimes result in rejection from all sides. Despite his love for folk music Llewyn doesn’t fit in well with his own community and frequently clashes with other folk singers. When desperate for a place to stay, he sometimes finds himself uptown with an academic set which enjoys the novelty of his presence, and though he appreciates being welcomed there he certainly does not belong with them either. Reading Llewyn as bisexual then adds to his already demonstrated misfit status. His Greenwich Village community (historically a major queer section of New York as it is) can represent a queer community that he, as a bisexual person, is not “queer enough” for, while his uptown academics represent the kind of liberal straight community which accepts him but does not truly understand him and almost fetishizes his difference. He can travel in multiple circles but finds that he can never quite be at home - he is, after all, homeless, and spends the entire film looking for what he knows is only temporary respite. 

I wrote a so-so essay about the queer subtext of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs for my senior Film Theory class and my professor asked, when I explained to her my initial premise - that the story of the film closely mirrors the story of Romeo & Juliet, which it most certainly does - she said she was intrigued, but that my job was to then say, “So what?” So what if I can map the two stories onto each other, what does it matter, what is the significance? I don’t know that my essay answered so what, and probably suffered for it. 

BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER

Holy shit, okay. The first S&G album I ever bought was the Bridge Over Troubled Water album, which was actually their last, sniff. They have no chill and open with the title track. You hear that piano get going and it’s like fuck, okay I guess it’s time for the sad feelings. This is your classic Hurt/Comfort song. Like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind. I’m on your side when times get rough. But here’s what gets me about it, personally, true story. My mom and I were watching TV and clicking around and we stumbled onto this S&G concert, I think it was a reunion, in Central Park and all, and so we watched it a little bit and Garf comes on and starts singing this in his angel voice right. And he gets to the bridge and he says “Sail on, silver girl, sail on by/Your time has come to shine/All your dreams are on their way.” And my mother turns to me and she says “He’s talking to you.” And I’m like what the fuck is the matter with you mom? This is me, unemployed and depressed and trying desperately not to give up hope that I will get to move to New York and be a real person one day and she’s telling me that Art Garfunkel from IDK the 1980s spiritually foresaw me in this state and sang just for me that if I keep sailing on then I will get to my dreams, and if I need a friend he’s sailing right behind god damn it he cares about me so much I’m crying right now

FLOWERS NEVER BEND WITH THE RAINFALL

This here to me is pretty self explanatory but I’ll get right into it. It may have a pretty upbeat melody that you can bop your lil head to but realize that you’re bopping your head to “I don’t know what is real/I can’t touch what I feel/and I hide behind the shield of my illusion”, so, pretty heavy stuff there buddy boy. It’s kind of like the good old finger gun, winky face, “life is meaningless!” definition of nihilism we enjoy in these parts. It puts a smile on my face even as I cope with feeling so depressed I can’t function like a normal human being. The song is a barrel of laughs but it is so hashtag relateable. I have no direction in life! I don’t know who I am! I’m questioning reality itself! I can suffer from depression even though I’m privileged person in other respects! So I think I’ll just live in a fantasy world and pretend that I will never have to look death in the face just so I can get out of bed in the morning! It would be a downer but it just sounds so positive and the harmonies are really killing it and as a result I can take my devastation here with a smile and face tomorrow!

OLD FRIENDS

Okay this song is devastating enough by itself but I made it into a gay tragedy in my own head so if that’s something your into - and as a Known Gay I know it sucks that everything gay has to be a tragedy, and we’re moving away from that fortunately but I can’t help myself, I love evil gays and I love tragic gays, what can I do - then come with me on this journey. Old Friends is about two old guys sitting in the park together. Friends forever and forever is kind of running out because, you know, mortality. But there’s a kind of a bridge that seems to be sung by a young man and oh no, it inspired this tragedy. Okay. So the line is “Can you imagine us, years from today? Sharing a park bench quietly. How terribly strange, to be seventy.” And the scenario took shape okay. So it’s World War II or some shit and these two best friends since they were kids are soldiers. And at least one of them is in love with the other one. It could be mutual if you want. Unspoken or not, there’s something gay going on. Unspoken is more tragic in a way isn’t it? Tragedy. And they’re in a battle and oh noo, one of them gets hit and is lying in the snow bleeding out (I feel like it’s winter? I don’t know!) and the other one is panicking but is trying to comfort the other one and is like, we’re gonna be old friends, you know? We’re gonna be seventy years old sitting around on park benches all day reading the newspaper. But it’s all a lie. The gay one is dying in the snow and they’ll never get to be old men who love each other and spend their lives together. They’ve already spent their lives together. Basically I have a heartbreaking Act II death scene/musical number for my Simon & Garfunkel musical that I will never actually write. Think A Little Fall of Rain. Except gay. Sorry this song can destroy a person with or without my addition you choose your own adventure buddy.

THE ONLY LIVING BOY IN NEW YORK

Oh FUCK. This song was enough on its own but Ryan fucking Murphy terrible gay Glee ruining TV show making man had to come in and alter my perception of this song F O R E V E R. Right so Paul wrote this song about Art - they used to play music under the name Tom & Jerry and so, you know, Tom, get your plane right on time. Art. He was acting in a movie in Mexico and missing out on recording with Paul and this one was on the Bridge Over Troubled Water album so you know, they’re about to break up. Tragically. It’s a bit of a break up song then. It made me think of my own loneliness cause I’m a folk emo little shit. But rYAN mURPHY okay I don’t know if he is uniquely responsible for the decision but in the year 2014 he directed a Televised Film for the Home Box Office network entitled The Normal Heart about the beginning of the AIDS crisis in a community of gay men in New York City. Lots of gay actors are in it and bizarrely beloved but straight actor Mark Ruffalo is the lead (I love him but it was a bit jarring that amongst the Known Gays was a Known Straight, and he was the main - not important, not the focus here). So a lot of characters die, and it’s very awful, and in the end, spoiler alert, Matt Bomer, who is the partner of Bark Fluffalo’s character, dies as well. And so the final scene of the film sees Bark living his life and another character keeps track of all the people he knows who dies and more and more gay men die and the list is so long. And over this scene? Is the song The Only Living Boy in New York. And what is the song about now? Now it’s about the only gay man who has survived the AIDS epidemic in his community because violent homophobia caused the world to ignore the problem until everyone he loved died. That’s who the only living boy in New York is. I’m absolutely overwhelmed by this song choice this is the most correct thing Ryan Murphy has ever done and I can’t talk about it anymore don’t ask me.

AMERICA

A harsh statement! Again here I am terrorizing defenseless famous females, betraying the sisterhood by tearing down women just doing their best! Well, I have to get my kicks somewhere. In all seriousness, I want to point the finger just as much, if not more so, at Russell and the entire Hollywood community that made this all possible.

In Silver Linings Playbook, the unholy trinity’s first screen venture together, Lawrence at 21 somehow played a sex addicted widow opposite fifteen-years-her-senior Bradley Cooper (who should exclusively play gay camp counselors in my humblest of opinions). Despite thinking her too young for the part, Russell was impressed by her talent and hired her. She went on to win a very premature Oscar for her role and adorably and infamously tripped up the stairs on her way to accept it.

In American Hustle, Lawrence at 23 plays the insufferable but flawlessly hot wife of sixteen-years-her-senior Christian Bale. The real life inspiration for her character, Cynthia Marie Weinberg, was meant to be in her 40s at the time of the film’s events. The film received accolades on accolades on accolades, but fortunately the Oscars saw it fit to award Lupita Nyong’o for her work in 12 Years A Slave - something the Golden Globes notably did not do.

I haven’t seen Joy, but once again, we find Lawrence at 25 playing a divorced mother (her ex-husband played by thirteen-years-her-senior Edgar Ramirez) in her thirties who invents a mop (?) and Bradley Cooper is there, also. At yesterday’s ceremony, Lawrence won her third Golden Globe for her work with David O. Russell, playing women ten to twenty years older than her, romantically opposite men ten to twenty years older than her. 

This problem does not begin and end with the Lawrence/Russell/Cooper team. We’ve seen charts visually representing the age gap between male and female leads (and which male lead appears in all three of those charts? None other than Bradley Cooper himself). We’ve heard Carrie Fisher - herself fourteen years younger than her apparently still fuckable costar Harrison Ford, 73 - call out the critics of her appearance saying “Men don’t age better than women, they’re just allowed to age.” And let’s not forget that Maggie Gyllenhaal at 37 is too old for a 55 year old man. 

It’s not Jennifer Lawrence’s fault that Hollywood has sexist and ageist casting double standards and it isn’t her job to fix it - but she’s making a habit of gaining notoriety and acclaim for playing roles that should have gone to women in their 30s and 40s. She was nearly cast in the role of Daisy Domergue, the one major female character in Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight - a role ultimately won by Jennifer Jason Leigh, 53, but only after Lawrence turned down the part due to scheduling conflicts. She is also set to play war photojournalist Lynsey Addario, 42, in a Steven Spielberg film about her life - and granted, biopics tend to require younger actors who can play a range of ages as time progresses in the film, but they could have at least found an actress who actually looks/is Italian American.

Basically, if David O. Russell wants to keep casting Jennifer Lawrence in his films, then he should write her characters in their mid-twenties. However, if David O. Russell wants to keep writing female characters in their 30s and 40s, and I would not want to stop him from doing so, then he should cast women in their 30s and 40s. Or wait until JLaw is old enough to play them. Although, once she is old enough to play these roles, will Russell lose interest and find a new 18 year old to play Bradley Cooper’s grandmother? Does even JLaw have an expiration date?

Am I being too severe? Should I be commending Lawrence for playing Strong Female Characters and speaking out about women’s rights? Am I focusing too much on her culpability for something that started long before she was born and would be raging today with her contribution or not? Well, probably a yes to the last one. But here’s the thing: there are a lot of young, attractive, thin (no matter what she says on the matter, she is not “obese” by Hollywood standards), heterosexual, white female actresses getting represented positively on film today. 

There is a myth that we can’t criticize choices by feminist-ish (feminish?) white women because if we do, then non-feminist people will think that we agree that Women Are Not Funny or Women Cannot Draw An Audience or that Feminism Sux and all of our favorite white female content will cease to exist. However, there is no point in film history in which white women were absent or very difficult to find onscreen. POC, queer people, transgender people and so on were only visible for so much of history and only humanely represented for so much less. White women had their own representation glass ceilings to break through and stereotypes to overcome, but they’ve always been around. I love many white film actresses and the work they do but we cannot look at them as untouchable for fear that they will disappear if we do - they’re not going anywhere. 

Which is why when Jennifer Lawrence agrees to play a woman in her 40s, or when Emma Stone agrees to play a biracial Asian woman, we have to call out their part in the larger Hollywood-wide problem. Emma Stone didn’t need to take the role in Aloha to help her career (and it certainly didn’t, ultimately), as she was already a high profile actress with franchises and modern classic comedies under her belt. Jennifer Lawrence became the highest paid actress through the Hunger Games, in which she plays a character even slightly younger than herself alongside male leads of a similar age - taking roles as older women wasn’t something she was forced to do to stay relevant or employed. She has benefited from those choices several times over, however, in the annual awards season.

Whatever good Stone and Lawrence and other young white women in Hollywood have done for the representation of women today, they have still been complicit in assuming roles that do not belong to them, whether because of their age or race. Women of color are not afforded the same opportunities as white women when it comes to exposure and casting decisions - and even if a white woman does enjoy fame in her 20s, by her 30s or 40s she may be cast aside in favor of a new crop, and god forbid she show her face in her 50s unless she has bathed in the blood of virgins for thirty years to keep up her youthful glow. 

So, to Jennifer Lawrence: you are a part of a community that values your youth and your whiteness that does simultaneously devalue your femaleness. There’s a lot happening at once. Yes, you should make the same amount of money as Bradley Cooper, but you should also make the same amount of money as, say, Zoe Saldana, who starred in one of the highest grossing films of all time, two major franchises, and whose net worth you outrank by over $40 million. You have a lot of power and you need to think more critically about what you do with it - you’re in high demand and you can’t change which roles are being offered to you, but you can choose which roles you perform.

Further than that, the Opera industry in America can be about as problematic as you might expect. While researching the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, I found an article declaring that in their upcoming production of Otello, the tenor playing the title role would, for the first time at the Met, not be performing in blackface. That’s great, I thought - I mean, it’s 2015, so I’d think it’s a bit late in the game for this to be the first time, but okay! Great, so they cast a black actor in the role, right? Nope. He’s a white Latvian guy. They’ll admit what they’d been doing was wrong and stop doing it, but they just won’t go far enough to actually correct the deeper problem: Shakespeare’s one specifically black lead character still won’t be given to a black performer. Sorry Met, the “best person for the job” would be the best performer who actually looks the part.

Opera is still a conservative, problematic institution - though I would note that almost anything that qualifies as an “institution”, especially those as old as Opera, is going to be significantly problematic. But it has one thing going for it: a surprising amount of accessibility. For starters, do a YouTube search on any opera you’ve ever heard of, and you’re likely to find at least three full-length professionally recorded performances of that piece, free, legal, and quite frequently, captioned with English translations.

If you’re willing to spend some money, you can get a subscription to Met Opera On Demand, a $15/month streaming service consisting of over 550 full-length performances from the Metropolitan Opera. The Met professionally records its operas and for the last ten years it has been possible to even view them in select movie theatres across the country, big screen style. If you want to get into opera, you don’t have to live in New York or rely on foreign language sound recordings alone - there are options out there for the art lover on a budget.

Even with the advent of the promising BroadwayHD platform, options are much more limited for fans of Broadway. I actually began this article the night before BroadwayHD launched, as tension on my social media outlets was rising over the inaccessibility of musical theatre today. When I heard about the website, I thought that my article had become obsolete, because finally, a solution! A streaming service for recorded theatrical performances! An answer to everything we’ve been asking for! Well, maybe. The platform is brand new, and I’m personally willing to give it time to improve, but currently it promises more than it gives.

Many of the articles I’ve seen about the website are accompanied by cover photos of the Wicked logo, despite the fact that Wicked is not available on the website. In fact, of the 100 or so productions the site has to offer, only about five of them are Broadway musicals. Much of the offerings are made up of years old Shakespeare performances and imports from the West End and the BBC. One offering is a 1981 production of Othello starring Anthony Hopkins in the title role - theatre can’t seem to get it right on the racism front, either. 

The idea behind this service is great, but for now it’s just not enough. If the producers behind BroadwayHD or the Broadway community at large want to deter people from disrupting performances with their cell phones, recording the event for the fans back home, then they ought to just give the people what they want. If there were a legal, affordable alternative to watching bootlegs, I guarantee most fans would go for it. What needs to be realized by the powers that be is that a streaming service would exist as an alternative to illegal bootlegs - not as an alternative to showing up in person. They’re afraid that if someone can pay $15/month to watch many musicals, they’ll stop paying $100-$500 for a single night at the theatre. But I don’t believe that’s so.

The people who can already afford that kind of (astronomical, entirely inaccessible) price will not stop going to the theatre. The theatre is an experience. There is a magic to it. Every live performance is unique and it will never be seen quite like you saw it that night ever again. It’s just that that uniqueness and that magic comes at a heavy cost. My family is intending to fork over stacks and stacks of Hamiltons just to see Hamilton live sometime in the next year. In the meantime, I have the amazing soundtrack I can (and do) listen to daily. But I want to see Lin-Manuel Miranda in a rap battle against Daveed Diggs in person. I want Philippa Soo to break my heart in the finale right before my very eyes. And I will probably get to, because I live 90 minutes away from New York and am lucky enough to be in a financial situation in which, though it will be a splurge and we’ll probably all chip in, we can afford some tickets.

To be brief, Supergirl is Superman’s cousin who followed him to Earth just prior to their home planet’s destruction. She grows up in a normal life and watches from the sidelines as her cousin becomes a hero, wishing that could be her saving the world. The show follows her on her own journey to becoming a hero - and on the way, she meets opposition in the form of Rampant Evil Sexism! The show anticipates audiences underestimating a Female hero and punches them in the face with how wrong they are, and I don’t really mean that in a good way.

In the first two episodes that have aired so far, there have been a number of lines - meant to prove how pro-woman the show is - that grate on my ears. One occurs in the first episode while Supergirl fights a male alien baddie - he says something along the lines of “On my planet, women bow to men!”, but of course Supergirl shows him how wrong he is by defeating him! Feminist victory over misogynists, yay!

Except it just made me groan and roll my eyes. Check up his sleeves, that misogynist character is made of straw. People want to pretend that things like sexism and racism and homophobia are simple and one note and other. Men don’t really go around saying that women should bow to them anymore. What they do is more subtle - like when Kara tries to tell her male coworker Winn (clearly and annoyingly pining for her) about her powers, he jumps to the conclusion that her big reveal is that she’s a lesbian, and that’s why she’s never been interested in him. It’s not a malicious conclusion, but he’s so relieved for a moment because otherwise, why shouldn’t he have a right to her affections given how nice a guy he is?

Note: I’d like to go on about my annoyance with the “Haha, it’s sounds like she’s trying to come out to him but she’s actually saying she’s a superhero!” moment and how there are a lot of queer little girls who’d love to see a heroine with a girlfriend on their television screen, but that’s not the focus of this piece and I have no faith that we will be seeing anything like that anytime soon, so I’ll just say as an aside: I was kind of annoyed.

But I digress - the show presents this literally other-worldly figure (the alien bad guy) and has him say something so ridiculously sexist so that when Supergirl defeats him, it’s like she’s symbolically defeating all of sexism. Furthermore, his otherness supposedly allows us to comfortably associate his sexism with that otherness - that kind of attitude doesn’t exist here on Earth, we (and the show’s human male characters?) have nothing to do with it. 

Another questionable moment transpires between Kara and her boss Cat Grant, who christens the superhero (whose secret identity is unknown to her) Supergirl, much to Kara’s chagrin. Why not Superwoman? she asks. Cat wants to own the title of “girl”, and insists that if anyone underestimates her because of the title of “girl”, then they’re the ones being sexist, not her. It’s not an argument I’m totally on board with. I’m all for reclaiming words, but calling women “girls” has the effect of infantalizing them. Clark Kent gets to be a man but Kara Danvers has to be a girl. I imagine the writers are looking to spin the title of the comic book character (who first baffled Superman with her ability to fly AND be a lady in 1959) into a positive and feminist thing. 

Oddly enough, Kara is meant to be older than Clark. In the show, Clark is sent away as a baby, and Kara follows him shortly after, as a girl of around ten years old. Due to Circumstances her sleep pod gets side tracked, she stays a little girl for many years until she is found by her now adult cousin who finds her a family to take care of her. Kara was supposed to look after Clark, but the narrative literally infantalizes her by keeping her a child until her literal infant cousin can become a man and take on the role of protector which was supposed to be hers. Kara will always be a girl, but Clark gets to grow up - and he’s not even a full time character the show.

So far, the show has been pushing a “Girls can be superheroes, too!” agenda that seems unnecessary to me. At this point, we’ve had Black Widow, we’ve had Agent Carter, the women of Thor, that one time when Pepper Potts got to wear the Iron Man suit and then got scary fire powers and killed Guy Pierce and it was awesome - they don’t tend to get their own stories, but they’re there. Supergirl shouldn’t have to say “I deserve to be here!” How many times is a character going to say, “Why [don’t you think she can do this]? Because she’s a girl?” 

I guess my problem is that Supergirl is being very tell and not very show. You can tell a woman’s story without prefacing it with “This is a woman’s story! Oh, you don’t think it’s going to be interesting? You don’t think she can hold her own against the men? Well, she’s going to prove you wrong!” Now, I know that that is how a lot of people feel - we would have had a Black Widow movie by now if the Marvel execs weren’t so timid about changing their formula. Women will see movies about men, but there’s this idea that men won’t see movies about women - this is a problem going on right now for sure. But I wish that Supergirl’s attitude was less focused on proving sexists wrong and more on telling a compelling story about a woman.

It’s nice that Supergirl is one step past movies like Ant Man, where a fully capable woman is told to wait her turn to save the world so that the mediocre man the film is named for can have his obligatory two hours in the spotlight first. It’s nice that this superhero show allows itself to be optimistic and sunny, distancing itself from the ongoing grimdark trend in genre fiction which can be so exhausting. It’s nice that Supergirl has a female heroic protagonist (the super Kara Danvers), a female best friend/ally (adoptive sister Alex Danvers), a female authority figure (Kara’s boss Cat Grant), and a female villain (Kara’s aunt Astra). That puts it far ahead of the Marvel films which tend to boast of about one woman per go around only. I think there’s hope for Supergirl and I’m going to keep giving it a chance - it takes most shows a while to find their footing.

[Note - with approximately zero people of color in the entire 2 hours and 21 minutes of this partially Brooklyn-set film, none of the subversions I discuss here do anything to address the racist undertones of light/dark symbolism, but I thought it important to at least allude to the association in my own writing.]

The film follows insurance lawyer James Donovan (Tom Hanks, ever the face of cinematic Americana) as he defends Soviet spy Rudolph Abel (Mark Rylance, hopefully a Best Supporting Actor contender), receiving negative backlash from a country that only wants to see him in the electric chair. Donovan ensures that Abel’s life is spared, arguing that he may one day be used in a prisoner exchange with the Soviets, and what do you know, a handsome young pilot gets captured flying over enemy territory, and Donovan is the man to negotiate the trade.

After Abel’s sentencing - 30 years imprisonment not sufficing for the red-blooded Americans who lust for the death sentence - Donovan and his wife Mary (Amy Ryan, doing her best with very little to work with) are barraged by the press as they exit the courtroom. The reporters, holding giant cameras, hound them with questions as their flashbulbs explode with light. Mary is visibly perturbed by the erratic flashes and attempts to blink them out of existence. She and her husband escape the horde and flee, stepping around the broken glass of the shattered flashbulbs which litter the ground. 

These faceless men with their cameras seek to invade the lives of the Donovans - illuminate their faces so that the world can see the man who defended a spy. The film portrays the general opinion of the American people as opposing Donovan’s dedication to due process and a fair trial for all, thinking him traitorous - so from their perspective, exposing him and his family through the light from their cameras amounts to revealing a truth, something the light is said to symbolically do. But Donovan is the film’s hero - we follow his story, and these lights flash harshly in our eyes as much as in his. These lights are a harbinger of the strangers on the train who glare at him over newspapers bearing his image; the image that was captured by the lights on those cameras. Here the light is a weapon used against James Donovan to invade his privacy and make him the second most hated man in America (after Abel, of course).

Later in the film, we see captured American pilot Francis Gary Powers (the blandly attractive Austin Stowell) imprisoned in a damp and cramped cell. Repeatedly, Soviet agents rouse him from his sleep to question him about his American secrets. A bright light on his ceiling awakens him just before the Soviets come to pull him out of his cell and push him into an interrogation room, where an even brighter light greets him. He begs for sleep. He writhes away from the light, turning away and shutting his eyes to protect himself. You get the sense that these awakenings don’t occur after solid 8 hour stretches and that Powers has been coping with this treatment for too long, exhausting him. The film reinforces that sense by following this scene immediately with a nearly identical one, with lights suddenly bursting on, endlessly interrupting Powers’ attempts at rest and forcing him into interrogation.

In between these two scenes, Powers is escorted back to his cell and the light is turned off. The darkness becomes a relief. He huddles onto his cot, desperate for the darkness which will allow him, for now, to sleep. The light is demanding, the light is controlled by his captors who seek truths from him that he is duty bound to withhold. The light is inescapable, no matter how tightly he shuts his eyes. But in the darkness, he is released from the questioning and the effort he must put into avoiding the light. Darkness in Powers’ world becomes a symbol of peacetime, where he can momentarily stop fighting the war. Darkness becomes a hiding place where a good man can feel, if only briefly, safe.

In both of these instances, the people wielding the light believe themselves to be in the right. The Soviets are looking to defend their country from Powers, a foreign threat - just as the Americans who take pictures of Donovan are looking to expose him as in league with Abel, a foreign threat. In Bridge of Spies, the metaphorical value of lightness and darkness is entirely relative to who holds the light. On a concrete level, Donovan argues in an appeal for Abel’s sentencing that Abel is a good spy, an honorable spy, only that he is such for the other team. But because he works for the other team, he is reviled. The film encourages sympathy for both Abel and Powers - both remain loyal to their countries in the face of imprisonment yet will face suspicion upon their return home for having been captured. Neither man is infallibly virtuous - their virtue is dependent on context.