what is the point of political film?

"Movies have an accessory and not a decisive usefulness in the various events and elements that contribute to the transformation of society.  It is naive to believe that you can start a revolution with a movie and even more naive to theorize about doing so.  Political films are useful, on the one hand, if they contain a correct analysis of reality, and, on the other, if they are made in such a way to have that analysis reach the largest possible audience."  
                                      --Franco Solinas, screenwriter of The Battle of Algiers

Those of us who are concerned with political storytelling often hear that the goal of a political film is to convince--to sway people who are on the fence on a particular issue.  We are frequently cautioned against "preaching to the choir."  The unspoken corollary is that if you are speaking to the "middle," you must moderate your message.  You must not be too strident, too angry, too militant.  You must not be too "one-sided" by showing oppressors as they really are (particularly if that depiction challenges the dominant narrative).  You must not demand the audience sympathize with characters who may make them uncomfortable (like, for example, the pair of would-be suicide bombers in Paradise Now), or have demands and goals that seem unreasonable.

Personally, I do not think being "moderate" or "toning it down" is the best way to convince someone; I think telling the truth and being unapologetic is.  But more importantly, I do not think convincing the fence-sitters is the best, most powerful use to which political films can be put.

I think of the great political films I love--The Battle of Algiers, Milk, Salt of This Sea, Bloody Sunday, The Time That Remains, to name just a few.  Did any one of these films really convince someone to change their mind, to support gay rights or Palestinian liberation or resistance to oppression?  Probably not.  Bigots and defenders of colonialism were not the target audience for those films.  They weren't made for homophobes and Zionists and racists.  They were made for us, or as Harvey Milk said, for the us-es.  They are our stories reflected back to us.

In a film, the protagonist is the person with agency--it is her action toward a goal in the face of obstacles that drives the plot.  "A movie is about someone who wants something and is struggling to get it," was the mantra drilled into us in film school.  The protagonist is the person from whose perspective we see the world and with whom we identify and empathize.  So choosing your protagonist is often the most political choice you make when writing a film, because you are effectively choosing who to give agency to, and who is worthy of empathy. 

Marxism begins from the point of view that ordinary people make history.  We are the protagonists of the story of the world.  On the most basic level, one of the purposes of political art is to allow oppressed and marginalized people to see themselves represented as the subjects of the story--the subjects of history--not its objects; as beings with agency and the ability to control their own destiny, even if it is only their destiny within a movie. 

This is not in itself enough to defeat oppression.  Oppression is defeated through struggle; through protests, strikes, mass movements and revolutions.  But it is powerful, and liberating, to see the truth of your experience reflected on film, and to watch other people who don't share that experience sympathize with it and root for someone like you.  It's a reminder that our tales are worthy of being told; that we are worthy of being the hero of the story; that there are others like us; that we are not alone.  To remind ourselves that our stories have power is to remind ourselves that we have power.

For the member of an oppressed group, it is a moment of saying, "That is me.  That is my reality and my struggle being represented on screen as something worthy of empathy."  For the ally in solidarity it is saying: "That could be me.  That person is just like me, just as human as me.  My life could be theirs if not for circumstance.  I understand what they are fighting for, and if I was in their position, I'd be fighting too."

This is why political films must always be true--not necessarily true in a factual sense, but in the sense of accurately representing things like oppression, resistance and power.  For the filmmaker this means really understanding your subject matter: researching it if it is not your own life experience, and being able to fully and unhesitatingly identify with the wants and needs of your characters.  It also means being honest and unflinching about the world you are portraying, even when that may confuse the expectations of people for whom it is not their lived reality.

The best way to have political films reach the largest possible audience is to make them good, and that means making them truthful.  Studios are not going to help you there.  The layers and layers of assumptions behind Hollywood studios' self-fulfilling prophecies about who the American movie-going audience is and what they want to see deserve fuller consideration in another post.  Suffice to say that most Hollywood films are like fast food in a poor neighborhood.  Of course people will swallow crap if it's the only thing around.  It doesn't mean they don't hunger for something better.

The audience for a political film is not the kind that's built through studio marketing divisions and subway ads and building-sized billboards on Sunset Boulevard, even if studios ever had an interest in doing that.  It's going to be built like a movement, from the grassroots--by the people it sets on fire because it touches something deep inside them, because it reflects things they know to be true but have maybe never seen on screen.  These people become the film's champions.  They rave to all their friends about it, blog about it, tweet about it, organize screenings of it because it speaks to them and moves them and they have never seen anything like it.  When you see a film that speaks the truth, the effect is electric.

There is a moment I love in the beginning of Salt of This Sea, when Soraya, the main character, arrives at Ben Gurion Airport.  Unsurprisingly, she is searched by a couple of humorless Israeli security agents.  They even search her voluminous curly hair.  Both times I saw this film in the theater, people laughed at that scene.  In that laughter is a moment of release from alienation.  It's the laughter of relief, of realizing, "Oh, there's someone else out there who gets it."  Other times, the exact same feeling can make you cry.  There are several scenes in Milk that have that effect on me every time.

People make films for all kinds of reasons, but for me, it's always in pursuit of that moment--to feel it myself and to be able to bring it to others.  I haven't set out to try to tell the stories of oppressed, exploited and marginalized people out of some abstract sense of political mission.  I write those kind of stories because they're the ones I identify with.  I don't think there's anything special about me.  If I can identify with them, then other people can too.  That means there is an audience for those kind of films--a powerful, passionate audience if you know how to connect with it.  After all, we the us-es are the majority.

in which i finally write something about the hurt locker

A few weeks ago I posted something about The Hurt Locker. Then I deleted it because after reading review after review, I still wasn't completely sure what I thought of the film. But now it's won Best Picture and Kathryn Bigelow has become the first woman in history to win Best Director, so I have to say something about it.

I saw the film when it first came out--twice, in fact. The first time, I got there late and had to sit in the very front row. I didn't realize you could actually feel the riveted attention of an entire audience behind you as a physical sensation, but you can.

Artistically, The Hurt Locker is just about perfect. The script (by a former embedded reporter), the casting, the acting, the physical production--flawless. The dialogue is minimal but at the end you realize you understand an extraordinary amount about these characters without them ever having said it. Bigelow spins off virtuoso sequences of suspense that just keep escalating to new levels of craziness like some insane circus act. And the brief monologue that Jeremy Renner's character delivers to a baby near the end of the film is one of the saddest, most existentially lonely moments I've seen in recent film.

My gut reaction to The Hurt Locker was to really like it. I like war movies. I like action, suspense and violence. Like Bigelow, I am fascinated with people who choose to put themselves in danger, who enjoy cheating death. If those kind of themes and stories don't interest you, The Hurt Locker is probably not your film. If they do, you'll probably walk out of the theater the way I did, which was thinking "Daaaaaaaaamn."

In fact, I liked the movie so much, it actually took me several months to admit to myself that its politics were crap.

This doesn't usually happen to me, you see. It's extremely rare for my gut emotional reaction to be at odds with my intellectual, political reaction to a film. If the latter is off, it usually short-circuits the former (see: Avatar). After two years of trying to teach myself how to create good political films, I've become extremely sensitive to things like perspective and representation and choice of protagonist and how they impact a story. But here, the sheer intensity of the sensory and emotional experience won out. This tells me that The Hurt Locker is a very, very good film. And for a long time, I defended it to filmmaking colleagues with whom I'm usually in agreement on political questions.

The review that finally broke me was this one. While I think Arabian is a bit harsh at times, he accuses The Hurt Locker of one sin I can't ignore: contextlessness. Here he is worth quoting at length:

The Hurt Locker completely forgoes any discussion of the many huge issues surrounding the Iraq invasion, choosing to treat it as simply a neutral fact. For this reason, some critics have called it an apolitical war movie. But that's not only an oxymoron (war is politics, and vice versa), it's also impossible in this age where buying a cup of coffee is a political act. In leaving out any consideration of the big picture of America's Iraq enterprise, and treating the war as just a setting, Bigelow and writer Mark Boal have made a decision that is indeed political, whether or not they and their admirers see it that way. They've presented an ongoing real-life conflict as something that appears to have no history, no subtext, no depth—it's simply there as an arena for the soldiers to do what they do.

This is related to another oft-raised criticism of the film, that of perspective. The Hurt Locker keeps us rigorously, relentlessly and totally in the perspective of the American soldiers on the ground. Artistically, this works brilliantly. And I actually don't think I would have a political criticism to make of that choice either, if, at any point in the film, even one character had raised some question about what it was the Americans were doing there in the first place. Do these guys, who defuse bombs all day, every day, for their entire tour of duty in Iraq, really never stop and think about why it is that Iraqis might be planting bombs all over their own city?

The Hurt Locker is not so much pro-war as it is unquestioning of the war. I do not think the film is a piece of blatant military propaganda as some have claimed. The main character is basically incapable of functioning in normal society, which isn't exactly something you put in a recruitment ad. It certainly does not make war look fun. But it does achieve a clever sleight-of-hand by focusing so narrowly on this particular bomb-disposal unit.

These guys are doing something that appears to be completely selfless--risking their lives to defuse bombs that would otherwise kill civilians. And because we never see the context that might lead people to plant these bombs in the first place--one of the most savage aerial bombardments in history, the daily humiliations of occupation, midnight house raids, torture, collective punishment of whole cities, looting disguised as reconstruction and a total contempt for Iraqi sovereignty--occupying US soldiers become heroes and Iraqis become that favorite Middle Eastern character, the Unmotivated Terrorist.

I'm certainly not suggesting that there is no value in a film told exclusively from US soldiers' perspective. Or that the absurdly dangerous job these men (and they are all men) volunteer for does not require courage. But there is nothing heroic about occupation. It is by definition inglorious, brutal, nasty, racist, and dehumanizing to all involved--not to mention insanely expensive at a time when funding for everything other than war is being slashed to the bone. Those who pay the highest price are the Iraqis. But the damage done to US soldiers asked to participate in the domination of another people is not slight, nor is that inflicted on all but the very richest Americans as our government spends a billion dollars a day on war.

I waited, as Kathryn Bigelow gave her acceptance speech, for her to say one word about the Iraqi people. I waited for her to say "Bring the troops home now." At at time when over 60% of Americans oppose the Iraq War, this would hardly have been a controversial statement. But she did neither, which to me says all you need to know about where the film's politics lie. The Hurt Locker may be a great film, but it is not an antiwar film. Does every film about the Iraq War need to be antiwar? Perhaps not, but I think we must seriously question what the role of a film like The Hurt Locker can be when our government shows no inclination of ending a war that nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose, and for which all stated justifications have been proven to be utterly specious. Given the straggering financial and human cost of said war, this is hardly an academic question.

what's wrong with percy jackson

It seems I have been posting a lot of movie reviews of late...maybe because I'm back to putting the political part of my brain into my writing (particularly my TV pilot about war reporters, which I'm really excited about) which is where it clearly belongs. I swear I do have several "serious" posts in the works, but for now, you are going to hear about Percy Jackson & the Olympians, and why it sucked.

The full title of the film is Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Rarely are you in a good place when your movie title contains both an ampersand and a colon. Percy Jackson is Hollywood's latest effort to find the next pre-awareness*-loaded young adult fantasy franchise megahit, as the decade of Harry Potter ticks rapidly to an end. The film is based on a series of books about a young boy who discovers the ancient Greek gods are real (and live above the Empire State Building, natch) and his mysterious deadbeat dad is actually Poseidon.

If this is starting to sound a bit familiar to you, you're not alone. A quick Google search will reveal there are plenty of similarities between Percy (short for Perseus, get it?) and a certain boy wizard. Troubled pre-teen boy named Harry/Percy with an abusive aunt and uncle/stepfather discovers he is actually a wizard/demigod, is whisked off to a magical school/upstate New York summer camp, and with his two best friends (one girl, one boy), goes on lots of adventures involving magic/Greek mythology. (In the books Percy begins his quest at age twelve; in the film he's been updated to about sixteen, unfortunately without the trade-off of better acting.)

To qualify as anything better than a glorified fanfic, Percy Jackson would have to bring something genuinely fresh to the crowded YA fantasy arena. I confess I have not read any of the books. But if there was anything fresh to be found in them, it has certainly been sucked out of this toothless, Disneyfied, paint-by-numbers piece of schlock. The film could have been salvaged from condemnation as a vapid Harry Potter rip-off by at least one of the following: a decent script, decent acting or decent directing. Unfortunately, epic fail on all counts.

After watching the bonus features on the first two Harry Potter Ultimate Edition DVDs, I have a little more respect for Chris Columbus as a director who is actually competent, if not particularly imaginative. Hence I must conclude that here he was just being lazy. Veteran actors deliver terrible performances. It's impossible to tell whether any of the young actors are any good, since they're all weighed down with dialogue that sounds like it was written by a childless forty-year-old who watched a few episodes of Hannah Montana. And as if the film didn't need any more strikes against it, it suffers from several of the crassest cases of product placement (and politician placement--listen for a lame Obama shoutout early in the film) in recent history.

But there are also deeper structural problems at work here. Percy's mom bites the dust early in the film, to which Percy has...no reaction at all. Come on! He never knew his dad, and his mom just got killed by a minotaur! (One review I read mentioned that the film never uses the word "dead" to refer to what happened to her, just "gone.") When it's revealed soon after that Percy's mom is not, in fact, dead, but a prisoner of Hades in the Underworld, Percy goes on a quest to save her. This video-gamey adventure plot could work just fine if the film had spent even one scene establishing any kind of genuine, loving relationship between Percy and his mother, but it does not. This leaves us with zero emotional connection to our hero and his goal. That's Screenwriting 101, folks! Even watching a guy fight a CGI hydra is boring when you don't care about what he's fighting for.

(For contrast, watch how masterfully the Harry/Sirius relationship is set up, cemented and then destroyed in just three scenes in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Good writing, good directing, good acting.)

The filmmakers also have to contend with the unfortunate reality that Greek gods do not make very sympathetic characters. They were, after all, the ancient Greeks' way of explaining a world that often seemed capricious and cruel. They fight with each other over trivial things and leave humans in the middle of it. They send mortals on pointless, impossible, obstacle-course quests for their own amusement. They fuck humans when they feel like it (often under circumstances of, let's just say, questionable consent, but you can bet that's been excised from the story) and leave the world littered with their abandoned children. In a time when single-parent families aren't the unmentionable disgraces they were once perceived to be, one can't help thinking that the demigods aren't really missing out on that much not being part of a nuclear family with these jerks.

We might not care so much about this if Percy himself was a compelling character. But he's a cardboard cutout of a teenager with all the emotional depth and complexity of a bit part from High School Musical 3. As a protagonist, Percy is utterly lacking in any of the qualities that make Harry both a likable hero and a believable teenager. Harry's stubbornness, his rage, his impulsiveness, his perpetual resentment of unearned authority, the intensity of the emotional landscape he and his classmates inhabit--these are all the things that make Harry Potter feel engaging and real.

One of JK Rowling's greatest gifts is that she understands children and teens on their own terms and takes their heightened and volatile emotional world just as seriously as they do. Maybe some of you out there had peaceful, serene, Ministry-approved childhoods, but for many of us, childhood was an intense, scary, confusing and sometimes traumatic time. Rowling takes that teenage feeling that the whole world is out to get you and projects it onto a universe where the whole world really is out to get you, and it works gangbusters.

I keep coming back to something Mel Brooks said when he spoke on campus last semester. (Yes, he was hilarious.) He talked about how good comedy is like bouncing a ball--to make something funny, you need to have something hard, serious, to bounce it against. I think good fantasy is like that too--you need to have a solid foundation of real stakes and real emotions to build it on. The best fantasy franchises to come out in recent years, series like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, have, at their heart, real struggles, real danger, real fear, and real, flawed, human characters we can identify with and root for. Anyone who wants to learn from Harry Potter's success should take this lesson to heart, instead of merely casting around for available fantasy elements that are still in the public domain.

*Pre-awareness: a Hollywood term for the opposite of original content. An already-existing brand that can be turned into a movie. This can be a remake, a book, a TV show, a video game, a comic book, a toy, even a board game. Seriously. Google "Monopoly movie."

war on film: avatar

Before going to see Avatar, I read Annalee Newitz's heavily circulated io9 article, "When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?" in which she skewers the all-too-common scenario in which "a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member." I found the article pretty funny and insightful, but then I read responses from a few people whose judgment I trust saying that Newitz was being too harsh and Avatar was awesome and maybe the most politically radical blockbuster of all time. So I decided to approach the film with an open mind.

And I have to say, it was kickass. James Cameron has made an anti-colonial popcorn movie, and damn is it fun. If you are going to the movies to watch shit get blowed up real good, having it be some colonizer's shit for a change is really, really awesome. I saw Avatar on Christmas Eve, two days before flying to Cairo for the Gaza Freedom March, and I won't deny that it felt like a perfect sendoff.

Avatar is clearly a technicolor sci-fi re-imagining of the colonization of the Americas, complete with environmentally rapacious extraction of raw materials and displacement and massacre of the indigenous population. But Cameron mixes in plenty of neo-colonial imagery along the way. American audiences will instantly recognize visual echoes of Vietnam in Avatar's lush jungles and helicopter gunships. The phrase "Shock and Awe" is dropped into the dialogue at a key moment, and the squad of corporate-funded contract killers hired to conquer Pandora seems to be what a hybrid of the East India Company and Blackwater might look like if it were run by Colonel Kurtz.

Cameron has never been known for his subtle and delicate touch--but then, neither has colonialism. I never thought the colonizers, who are after a valuable metal called...wait for it...unobtainium, were too crude or violent or racist. Colonialism is crude and violent and racist. Aliens are often a metaphor for the other in science fiction, and these colonizers regard the other with an utter contempt that is thoroughly believable. They build schools and use anthropologists to manipulate the population into trusting them. When that doesn't work, they use spies like the film's protagonist, Jake Sully. And when Sully and his Scooby gang decide the natives aren't so bad and turn against the colonial masters, the colonizers are perfectly willing to switch tactics to full-scale genocide.

There are plenty of cliches in Avatar. Yes, the Na'vi dress like stereotypical Hollywood Native Americans for no apparent reason. (In one of my sci-fi pet peeves, lots of things also happen to have extra legs and grow to enormous size for no apparent reason. Why does a galloping animal need six legs? That makes no anatomical sense.) Yes, of course the white guy main character falls in love with the tribal chief's svelte blue cat-daughter Neytiri. Come on, did you really think there wasn't going to be a love story to write a ballad about for the closing credits? Might as well go ahead and just call her Pocah'ontas.

But none of these cliches were terribly unexpected, and I was having enough fun enjoying the ride that none of them would have been a fatal flaw and Avatar could have been an exceptionally well-made popcorn action flick with a solidly anti-colonial message.

Except.

Except for the part when the white guy flies in on a giant pterodactyl (I swear I'm not making this up) and saves the day. And magically sweeps away all the indigenous leadership and unites the Na'vi tribes in a way no Na'vi has ever been able to do and then leads them in battle (where, conveniently, both of his two male rivals for leadership, Neytiri's father and betrothed, are killed.)

And then I started to see the point of Newitz's article.

Here's the thing. I have absolutely no problem with a movie in which some of the oppressors switch sides and decide they're willing to fight and die on the side of oppressed. I think that's quite awesome. In theory, I would not have a problem with a scenario where these race traitors provided a crucial bit of information that led to victory. That's exactly why double agents and collaborators are so dangerous--they know the other side. But, because it's a Hollywood movie, the white guy (and ex-Marine!) who switches sides to stand in solidarity with the blue people can't just be part of the struggle--he has to lead the struggle. And he has to lead it way better than any of the blue people ever could. Because clearly they weren't capable of winning their own liberation; they needed some white dude to roll in and convince them he deserved to be their leader because he could ride some giant bird like one of their ancestors could. And because they're simple native people, they believed him. And because it's Hollywood, he was right.

All of this, in turn, begs the question: why is there a white guy as the protagonist at all? Why isn't badass fighter and hunter Neytiri the protagonist? Or, if a blue catwoman is too radical for Hollywood, what about her father? Or Tsu'tey, a gutsy warrior whose role in the two hours of the film before the final battle is mostly to cock-block Jake?

I don't buy that it's because audiences can't identify with a blue-cat-person protagonist. The creators of Wall-e made us identify with a toaster.

There's a white male protagonist in Avatar for the same reason there's a white male protagonist in Dances with Wolves, or The Last Samurai, or Blood Diamond, or Glory. (You can play this game with so many Ed Zwick movies!) Because the missing element that the oppressed need to win their liberation is clearly Kevin Costner. And because the presumed mainstream movie audience is white, and male for anything involving action, and the Hollywood studio presumption is that people can't identify with a protagonist who doesn't look like them.

Turns out, there are a few people who've had no trouble at all identifying with the Na'vi. A tribe in eastern India is appealing to James Cameron to help them stop mining company Vedanta from drilling into a mountain they consider sacred. (Think he will?) And last Friday's weekly protest against Israel's apartheid wall in the West Bank village of Bil'in featured an Avatar re-enactment by Palestinians and Israeli supporters. The Israeli soldiers standing by seemed not to get the joke, and fired tear gas and sound grenades per usual.

The Bil'in Na'vi pictures zipped around the interwebs and reached such diverse sources as the New York Times, AP, the Telegraph (UK) and AOL News. I don't know if I think this is a brilliant PR move, completely silly, or a bit sad that these demonstrators--who've been protesting nonviolently for nearly five years against the wall that's cutting their village lands in half--had to dress up as fictional characters to get the point across about their real-world struggle. But then, maybe when you've been protesting every week for the past five years, you just need to do something different every once in a while to spice things up.

hunger games post #2: katniss, race and casting

So, not surprisingly, The Hunger Games is gonna be a movie. And since THG has already developed a substantial (and, judging by writing style, I'd guess mostly teenage) online fandom, that means that the fantasy casting mill is already grinding away, despite the film deal being still in its infant stages.

As I've been poking around for interesting Hunger Games-related stuff on the interwebs, I've noticed a disturbing trend. In the majority of fantasy-casting and fan art that I've found, Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of The Hunger Games, has mysteriously become white.

The whole question of how race operates in the world of The Hunger Games is pretty interesting in itself. The books take place several hundred years into the future, after who knows what has happened to the population of North America. And also people can dye their bodies green and stuff. So there's no reason to assume people in Panem think about race in remotely the same way we do today. Many of the geographic and ethnic labels we currently use to identify race probably have no meaning in this world, since countries and even continents may no longer have the same names.

But given the general overall trend toward increased migration to and from increasingly diverse parts of the world, and a general relaxing of taboos against interracial marriage (unless of course you live in Louisiana), it seems a reasonable assumption that a future North America would contain more people of mixed race and fewer people who could be clearly identified as white.

Katniss and her best-friend-maybe-boyfriend Gale, who both grew up in the Seam, the poorest part of District 12, are described in the book as having "straight black hair, olive skin, [and] gray eyes." (On a side note, I'm pretty sure black hair + olive skin + gray eyes is a fairly statistically improbable phenotype, since gray eyes are produced by the same gene as blue eyes and tend to be more common in light-skinned, light-haired people.)

I've always pictured Katniss looking sort of Native American, maybe like a teenage version of Tonantzin Carmelo:

If you pictured her as looking sort of Latina you're probably not that far off either. The point is that Katniss, Gale, and most of the people of the Seam seem clearly (to me at least) not white.

The world of Panem, as I noted in an earlier post, has many features in common with the world of European colonialism (and slavery--we'll get to that.)* One of these is that there is a pigmentocracy in District 12. The people of the "merchant class," to which Katniss's mother, and Katniss's other potential love interest Peeta, belong, are described as having blond hair and blue eyes, while the poorer coal mining families of the Seam are dark-haired and dark-skinned.

And yet in the vast majority of fan art and fan casting, Katniss is depicted as having brown hair and light skin (and often looking about 30, but that's another issue). And while the casting suggestions have ranged from intriguing (Ellen Page--did you see her in Hard Candy?) to atrocious (Megan Fox. Um...WTF?) they have been 99% white. (Although I have to say the suggestion of Hugh Laurie as Haymitch made me laugh out loud.)

Even more disturbing is what's happening to the characters from District 11. District 11 is a plantation. If you didn't pick up on the not-too-subtle hints toward this in The Hunger Games, it's made explicit when Katniss and Peeta go there in Catching Fire. All the characters we get to know from District 11 are Black. Rue, the little girl with whom Katniss makes a heartbreakingly brief alliance in The Hunger Games, is described as having "dark brown skin and eyes." And yet somehow white Rue has popped up a few times too.

I'm pretty sure the British cover of The Hunger Games, which is otherwise very cool, is to blame for some of the whitewashing.

(By the way, this all reminds me very much of the controversy over the US cover of Liar, by Australian YA author Justine Larbalestier, which you can read about here and here. As a matter of fact, read her whole blog. She is a damn smart lady who has a lot of great things to say about race, gender and representation in YA literature.**)

But I'm also not entirely convinced that all the fans out there have seen the British cover. I kind of think they're doing this whitewashing on their own.

To me, the most disturbing thing is when fans say something like "That's how I always imagined that character looking!", when it's very clearly not how they are described in the book. If it were just Hollywood doing the whitewashing, I wouldn't be surprised. That's par for the course. Hollywood has spent most of its existence whitewashing the moving image, and it goes far beyond the really obvious stuff like blackface. (Alec Guinness is an Arab! Charlton Heston is Mexican! To name just two examples I can think of off the top of my head.) But the idea that fans themselves--who have actually read the book, which may not be the case for a Hollywood exec--are imagining all the characters as white, when they are very clearly not described that way, is something I find kind of frightening.

And yet, in a certain sense, I realize it is Hollywood doing the whitewashing, by constantly and overwhelmingly presenting images of whiteness, assuming white is neutral, and therefore implicitly (or explicitly) short-circuiting the careers of talented non-white actors. Is it really that surprising, in today's media world, that when asked to name half a dozen actors who can play a tough sixteen-year-old girl, almost all the choices are white? Life ain't easy for actors of color, and it's even harder for actors who don't fit into an easily-identifiable racial box. I don't have to go on about the obstacles for non-white actors in Hollywood--which are of course related to the obstacles faced by writers, directors and producers of color as well--and are as ubiquitous as the fact that if you don't specify a character's race in a script, they are universally assumed to be white. (I do, however, recommend this excellent article from Racialicious, which deals with the matter far more eloquently that I have done so far.)

This issue has been of particular concern to me of late since I'm writing a script, Gaza Sunrise, with a biracial protagonist, Moira Shaheed, who's the child of an Irish mother and a Palestinian father. In the script, Moira is described as being able to pass for white. In my mind, that is not the same as being white.

I picture Moira looking quite a lot like Lubna Azabal looks in Paradise Now.

She's fairly light-skinned, and probably has naturally curly hair like most Arabs, but straightens it and maybe highlights it a little to make herself look whiter. If you saw her on the street in Marseilles, where she lives at the beginning of the script, you might assume she was Italian or Spanish.

Okay, so technically Moira is half white. But the life experience that defines her is not that of a white European, but of a Palestinian refugee. And I know I would be goddam pissed if a white actor ever got cast in that role. (I'm hoping to circumvent this with the fact that the script is 90% in Arabic...unless someone decides to make it in English...don't get me started on that.) But do you know how many casting suggestions involving white actors I've gotten? Including Natalie Portman, who was BORN IN ISRAEL.

As for who will play Katniss, I have to say I think the chances of her being whitewashed are pretty high. I will probably be happy if they don't cast someone who looks 30. Which brings me back to Ellen Page, one of the few young actresses out there who I think could actually rock Katniss's non-feminine gender expression. Which is the subject of my next post.

But if Rue turns out to be played by Abigail Breslin, I'm boycotting.

*Actually, if you think of Panem as the product of a society that's collapsed, and is now re-forming itself by going through a process of primitive accumulation, the presence of social structures that resemble slavery and colonialism kind of makes sense.
**She also has footnotes on her blog! I want to learn to do this! Because I'm a giant nerd.

from wall street to hollywood?

My friend Karen over at Scarlett Cinema has written an excellent response to this article in the New York Times, about laid-off i-bankers who, thanks to being forced to take six-figure severance packages as their companies collapse, are finally able to pursue their creative and artistic dreams.

Karen is eloquent as always, so I won't repeat her arguments. But I will say that, having worked at the same Times-Square-based financial company she mentions in her post, I also reacted to the New York Times article with a big dose of "reeeeaalllly?"

Does Hollywood, one of the most white-male-dominated industries in the US, really need an infusion of "talent" from the financial world...another one of the most white-male-dominated industries in the US?

Of course, all four former bankers interviewed for the article--all executives--are men. I cannot say whether they are all white, but, having worked in the financial industry, I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess yes. I found it interesting that the first guy interviewed has dreams of sketch comedy--probably the most white-male-dominated art scene in New York. His group has secured a spot in the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival. Now that he'll no longer be distracted by his day job as an executive director at Morgan Stanley, I'm sure they'll have a TV show on FUSE and a movie in the works within a year.

If the New York Times article shows anything, it's simply the persistent unreality that a large swath of New York City (like these people right here) lives in, where the arts are a hobby to entertain the rich between various money-making adventures.

Interestingly, one of the auto-generated links on Scarlett Cinema as I was reading Karen's piece was to this Washington Post article, about the Oscar-nomination gender gap. Not only is it interesting, but it's FROM THE FUTURE!

oscar noms: ur doin it right!

The Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. Not only have some excellent high-profile films been rewarded, but a few lesser-known indie gems got a well-deserved nod.

I was happy to see that Milk scored Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay nods, along with well-deserved nominations for Sean Penn as Best Actor and Josh Brolin in the Heath Ledger...er, Best Supporting Actor category. More surprising were the Best Screenplay and Best Actress (Melissa Leo) nods for the highly-regarded Frozen River, from first-time writer/director Courtney Hunt.

And while the Best Actor category was filled with the predictable slate of Penn, Frank Langella, Mickey Rourke and Brad Pitt, my heart leapt a bit to see Richard Jenkins up there for The Visitor--a simply fantastic movie in which Jenkins is adorable, moving and perfectly cast.

I was also pleased to see Man on Wire, which is great, in the Best Documentary category, and Waltz with Bashir, which is a masterpiece, in Best Foreign Film. (It recently won the category at the Golden Globes.) There was even a Best Screenplay nod for the underrated In Bruges!

All in all, it's shaping up to be an awards season in which I will actually give a shit.

catherine hardwicke canned by "twilight" producers

Despite the fact that I skewered Twilight in my review on Scarlett Cinema, I was just as pissed as the next aspiring female filmmaker to learn that Catherine Hardwicke has been booted as director for the film's two planned sequels, New Moon and Eclipse. (Plans to film the series's gruesome and bizarre fourth book are not yet finalized.)

Say what you will about the film's quality (and believe me, I have). There is no doubt that it was a resounding commercial success, and will probably end up as one of the top ten grossing films of 2008. And, while I have my beef with the Twilight series, I believe very little of what leaves a bad taste in my mouth can be laid at the feet of Hardwicke herself.

While production company Summit Entertainment is reporting that the decision was due to "scheduling conflicts," at least one blogger, Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood, is reporting that Summit found Hardwicke "'difficult' and 'irrational'" and her agent Beth Swofford "alternately ineffectual and hysterical."

While the real truth may never be known, it's pretty hard not to see Hollywood's double standard at work here. "I can't help thinking that a guy director who's brought in over $140 million on a budget of under $40 million would be treated differently," noted Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood.

And who will be replacing Hardwicke? Why, the producer of American Pie! Okay, to be fair, Chris Weitz also directed the well-respected About a Boy. But still...

i'm just a girl

The LA Times recently published an illuminating article with the forthright title "Film directing is still a man's world," about the dearth of female directors in feature film. For a young woman preparing to enter the film industry, the statistics are not encouraging. All 30 of the top 30 top-grossing films of 2007 were directed by men. Of the 250 top-grossing films, only 6% were directed by women. In fact, this figure has actually declined from 9% ten years ago--despite, as the article points out, the healthy number of women producers and the presence of women as heads of several major studios. In the whole history of the Oscars, only three women - three! -have even been nominated for Best Director, and none have won.

"If you were looking at Hollywood's history through a gender lens," the article's author perceptively observes, "you might say the industry went straight from male domination to post-feminism without ever enjoying a true feminist age."

Sadly, this statement seems to be proven by several influential women interviewed in the article. Sony Pictures Co-Chairman Amy Pascal, who "has hired more female directors than any studio head..."

...says summer movies just aren't an area of interest for most women. "It simply may be a matter of self-selection, since most studio films are aimed at young boys," she says. "Look at my summer slate. I don't think there's a woman who would've wanted to direct 'Hancock' or 'Pineapple Express.'"

Um...hello?! Antihero superhero? Stoner action movie? Those both sound awesome! I personally would love a chance to direct either of those movies. Will Smith has some mysterious charm that can make even syrupy dreck like The Pursuit of Happyness mildly watchable. And who wouldn't want to hitch a ride on the Apatow-and-friends train to Awesomeville these days?

All the studio heads (and some of the female directors) quoted in this article seem to be laboring under the assumption that women only want to direct certain kinds of movies. And I am sure there are female filmmakers out there who want only to work on small, "character-driven," explosion-free dramas or comedies which will be marketed to other women. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. As I am not one of those people, however, it stands to reason that not all female filmmakers fall into this category.

The subjects of the last 5 screenplays I've worked on in class have been: robots, Macbeth set in Vegas, political intrigue in Latin America, immigrant family running from unscrupulous immigration cops, and a coming-of-age story about a 20-something guy who discovers his father had a secret other family. Four out of these five scripts have a male protagonist. (One has a robot protagonist who looks like a human female.) Their genres can be loosely classified as sci-fi, thriller, action, thriller, drama. I would not call any of them chick flicks. In fact, I would call all of them "guy movies."

I would say that I tend to write guy movies because I tend to like guy movies. And if I, a humble film student, would much rather work on Indiana Jones (aliens and all) than Sex and the City, I am sure that there are any number of talented, experienced female directors out there who feel the same way. I find it hard to believe, as DreamWorks Co-Chairman Stacey Snider snidely states, that "there just isn't a very wide pool of talent to choose from."

The article also contains a link to a very interesting DGA Quarterly interview with six successful female directors. Some of these women point out that there are more opportunities for women in television, where the sheer number of creative opportunities helps level the playing field a bit. Of course, television is not exactly a magical land of opportunity, either. Discussing one popular crime show that has supposedly only hired one female director in its run, prolific TV director Lesli Linka Glatter comments: "No one would ever say, 'We hired a white guy, and it didn't work. So we're not going to hire any more white guys.'"

As an aspiring member of the next generation of filmmakers, I have to operate on the assumption that there's some hope out there. Perhaps the most promising development, as the women in the DGA interview point out, is the rise of so-called new media, the Internet, and digital video, which has the potential to put the tools of filmmaking into many more hands than ever before. If any idiot with a webcam can become world-famous on Youtube, I can only hope that some of those hands will belong to some of the many talented women out there.