Can we just talk about Terrace House for a minute?

Something you should know about me is that I get anxious. Whether from insatiable curiosity or self-imposed pressure to achieve (likely both), I tend to count days and hours in terms of how "productive" they are. God knows what yardstick by which I measure productivity, because it fluctuates wildly and consists of a lot of justification. Well, I thought critically about those news articles I read this morning, so that was productive, I'll tell myself. I didn't write anything today but I did listen to podcasts on the treadmill, so it's not a lost day. Needless to say, I don't know how to relax.

So when a friend described the Japanese series Terrace House to me last summer as "a slow TV version of The Real World where nothing really happens and it's so soothing--I'm addicted," at the time I thought, life is already filled with the minutia of boring daily tasks; I look to TV narratives to both escape from and justify my warped productivity yardstick. Why would I choose to watch people being unproductive without spectacle and forego the twisting plots and water-cooler talk of serialized TV?

But then Terrace House came to Netflix. The Japanese-American co-production's subtitle is "Opening New Doors," and I have to say, that's exactly what happened. The premise: six strangers--three men and three women in their twenties--are picked to live in a house and carry out their lives. That's it - no script, no manipulative producers. Elsewhere, the movement of "slow TV" has been gaining traction in Scandinavia, but Terrace House isn't just about watching a train lumber into a station. There are humans and hence plot here, but it's subtle, and that's what makes it both riveting and relaxing, because humans are unpredictable. Even better is the group of commentators who dissect the housemates' interactions with just the right combination of empathy and snark, from interpreting their behaviors to predicting impending romantic fallouts.

it doesn't hurt that the housemates (Ami & Shion here), aren't bad to look at. 

Take Yuudai, the show's 19-year-old dud. He's a cocky aspiring chef who can't seem to find a job in a kitchen, or even roll out of bed before 2PM, but even though his youth and obliviousness cause him to miss social cues, the older housemates still mentor him like a little brother. When they might get fed up is a compelling dramatic tension not unlike when your roommate leaves dishes in the sink for the fifteenth time and you make it a game with yourself to see how long you can go without blowing a gasket at him. Humans are fascinating creatures to observe, like Shion, the Japanese-American model whose unreserved kindness makes you wonder where he got it from. Six out of eight episodes in and all I can really tell you in terms of plot are: Yuudai gets a job washing dishes, he and Ami go on an awkward date, Taka goes snowboarding, Tsubasa wants to get on the national ice hockey team, Mizuki gets drunk, and it snows. But I love it.

So do me a favor--if you use media to sooth your anxiety like I do, watch Terrace House. Your overwhelmed synapses will thank you.

Feeling Younger

It happened. I turned 30. Woe is me. Just kidding--but this milestone has been accompanied by certain clichés: hangovers are more severe, working out is becoming necessary, and I've somehow started to feel like it's really go time. No more dilly-dallying.

Which is why I've really been enjoying TV Land's Younger. The protagonist, Liza, is a 40-year-old mom and divorcée who, after 15 years out of the workforce, pretends she's 26 to get a job in publishing. In getting a second chance at her twenties, Liza reawakens the youthful spirit that laid dormant throughout her marriage. Produced by the guy who brought us Sex and the City, Younger plays out in the typical New York sitcom manner, with plots introduced and satisfyingly resolved in 20 minutes. But there's a narrative through-line that keeps me coming back, besides the will-she-get-discovered anticipation. It's the idea that self-exploration shouldn't have to end when your twenties do.

In other words: "nevertheless, she persisted." 

The show is lighthearted and goofy, but it gets certain things right about millennials and this zeitgeist. For one, it affirms that the ubiquity of social media is both exhilarating and daunting, and that what goes on behind the 'gram isn't always so picturesque. What I love about the show is how effortlessly it empathizes in two generations (X and Y) the struggles that we as women face in excelling in our careers and love lives. The challenges differ according to age but are universal: how do I get taken seriously? How do I figure out what I want?

At 30, I'm smack-dab in the middle of these two generations. For example, the geographic and emotional shifts I made in my twenties are now mostly quelled, but my career is just taking off, not yet fully embedded. Like Liza, I find myself wondering whether everything will work out (though my fears have less to do with fraud than climate change). More personally, though, I find myself still comparing my choices to my peers' and the lives they've constructed for themselves. Whether it's the patriarchy, the millennial highlight reel on social media, or my ever-questioning brain, I don't know, but sometimes the self-imposed pressure of go time mixes with self-doubt and I wonder if I'm just following a formula for success instead of designing one for myself.

Thanks to this character on Younger, though, and her 26-year-old coworker (played fabulously by a millennial whose pop culture appearances I grew up with, Hillary Duff), I'm feeling like time is elastic. Funnily enough, in season two there's an episode featuring a character who is a thinly-veiled Meg Jay of The Defining Decade. When I was in Copenhagen at age 25, trying to figure my life out, I devoured her book, which reminded me to live a life of intention and to eschew the notion that your twenties are a throwaway decade. To see this theme pop up on the show felt circular, like I'm doubling down on that intentionality while also asking some new (but similar) questions. It's funny to remember the same concerns I had then take a new form now, like: what does a (queer) partnership mean for me? How do I make a stable life while holding onto adventure? Younger and The Defining Decade may not be able to answer these for me, but they're providing a helpful lens nevertheless.

Girls, Revisited

It seemed weirdly epic, Sunday night, to be sitting in the dark in K's apartment, binge-watching Season 5 of Girls in preparation for that night's premiere of the final season.  Back in 2013 I wrote about feeling like an 'emerging adult' as I handed in my master's thesis on the show, and now, in 2017, more endings and more beginnings are emerging for me. It's been 3.5 years since leaving Denmark, a year with K, 3 years at Twitter, 3 months since leaving, 3 weeks since the Trump era has begun. So much has changed since that blog post, and yet I still find myself wanting to find some full-circle niceties on which to judge the interim.

still self-satisfied, always wanting more 

Like Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna's world, my circumstances have changed and I'm older, but the patterns of progress and closure still feel messy. Unlike them, though, I hope (to god) I've evolved more than they have. Marred by immaturity, obliviousness, and lack of self-awareness, the girls of Girls are just barely adults after 6 years, yet I keep watching the train wreck for the few, sublime moments of heart that Lena Dunham pulls off. What continues to fascinate me about the storytelling of the show is that the characters, while perhaps caricatures of people, are inexorably who they are. This is different from saying they know who they are, but they chase after some vision of what they want, at all costs. This kind of storytelling is bold; it may diverge from realism into satire, but there's a certain steadfast adherence to depicting the messiness of emerging adulthood in the show's style, stories, protagonists, and comedy that I admire.

It would do me well, in this time in my life, to appreciate that I may not ever be done, baked, out of the oven. I want to remember my former appreciation of the process, not outcome, of adulthood, as I described in the blog post. It's hard to remember, much less accept, that change can feel like crisis, loss, or adventure, and that curiosity eschews closure. These notions are hard for us as we settle into our adult lives, where bank account zeros and career achievements and personal milestones start to feel more like must-haves than guidelines. But believing in the process (especially creatively) means taking risks, and this gets harder as we start to decide, 'well, this is it, this is my life.'

Today, though, on a walk in the sun with icicles dripping off roofs and a podcast in my ear, I vowed to remember my potential to change for the better. Instead of nostalgia for the grad school days of being broke and wistful, I'm choosing to see the past three years as a continuation of emergence into that flow of adulthood. My Danish may be rusty but I'm fluent in queer. I may not long to see all the movies all the time, but maybe I've consumed enough stories to know how to tell a good one someday. We'll just have to see how it plays out.

Looking to Stories of Queer Resistance

As always, in times of uncertainty, I look to stories for answers. I am still reeling from the election, but I've found a teensy bit of inspiration in unlikely fictional sources: the new Harry Potter film and HBO's film The Normal Heart, both of which have subtle or not-so-subtle blueprints for engaged citizenship and activism in the face of oppression. 

As I was watching the new installment in the Harry Potter franchise, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, I was momentarily overcome with a certainty that JK Rowling's intended her screenplay to be a comment on political resistance in oppressive times, which she confirmed at the premiere: "I conceived this story a few years ago, and I think I was partly informed by the rise in populism around the world." The film is laced with signals as to how people and groups cope with oppression, and how they respond in popular movements. For example, Grindelwald's radical campaign for Wizards to use violence to emerge as dominant is met with caution and fear of dismantling the regulations on magic. On the other hand, there is a damaging secrecy to the way the Wizarding community in New York has gone underground in the face of xenophobia and oppression; risking exposure means war, but self-containment is also dangerous, as is most powerfully articulated by the concept of the Obscurial, a dark, uncontrollable magical force which threatens to destroy a wizard from within if suppressed. 

is this the proto-Dementor? 

Either way, we're looking at a narrative that contemplates strategies for resistance, either through slow progressivism or radical change. In the words of Audre Lorde, we're looking at the dispute over whether "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Fantastic Beasts doesn't particularly sway us either way (yet), beyond portraying Grindelwald as somewhat of a radical nut. But I find the depiction of Creedence, the (spoiler) young man whose Obscurial wreaks havoc on New York, to be a deeper symbol of a state of specific oppression: that of current LGBT discrimination. The Obscurial is an elegant metaphor for queer kids who know themselves to be different, and how the public's condemning of that difference threatens to spur on a dark, sometimes suicidal and life-threatening, self-hatred in those kids. Fantastic Beasts shows just how many lives we stand to lose if we do not recognize and champion that magical diversity in our children. 

Queer self-hatred and public shunning also comes to the fore in HBO's The Normal Heart, which I rewatched this weekend. Mark Ruffalo's portrayal of relentless activist Ned Weeks faces defeat and tragedy after defeat and tragedy as the medical and political communities turn their backs on a generation of young gay men dying from AIDS in the '80s. The interesting and arresting portrayal of self-divisions among gay activist groups, and the corrosive quality of public and private shame vs self-acceptance in these groups, gives the film its heart. But what I find most applicable for the fight ahead of us in 2017 is how much speaking out is too much, as Ned learns when he ostracizes almost everyone he knows and loves with his fervent passion for justice in the AIDS crisis. The film asks, what avenues should activists take to make effective change? Is there such a thing as being too radical? Where do our voices matter most in the face of oppression? 

"What do you mean, no one knows you're gay, when you're the president of the Gay Men's Crisis Center?"

I find myself asking these questions every day these days--do we focus our efforts on contacting our representatives? Building grassroots/local/community awareness? Attempt to curtail corporate influence? There's much for us to learn, but I do think watching films like these can give us models for progress. As always, we look to the queers for evidence of the brave, continued fight for equality and change. 

This Is--or Isn't--Us

I resisted NBC's new family drama This Is Us throughout the autumn, turning my nose up at the network's seeming attempt to replace Parenthood, thinking it was going to be just too mainstream for my liking. But now, after binging the first ten episodes, I'm circling back to that idea of what 'mainstream' means and what it can accomplish in television.

My dad and I were philosophizing about narratives in the car the other day, as we do in my family (it's in my blood, damnit!), and I felt it important to reiterate to him what's been swirling in my head for a while: I believe in the power of mass media to change hearts and minds. He brought up the very good point that yes, narratives consumed en masse are powerful, especially for the wide-reaching beast that is television, but often the cultural shifts that result come in waves that are clearer in hindsight. It may not be one or even a few groundbreaking TV shows that actively change people's minds, but if we look in the rearview mirror we can see the patterns forming from all of our cultural products of an age. This thought was a great reminder for me, who tends to be critical of and dissect shows and movies as individual entities, and who judges whether their individual merits affords them less or more impact in the public sphere.  Yet, I'm thinking now that what constitutes the mainstream stories we devour on TV may occupy an even more powerful place than we often notice in this realm, due to their subtle treatment of progressive ideas.

Network dramas, due to their advertising structure, have to appeal to mass audiences, and so it is often a critique that these shows are not niche enough and therefore not bold enough in their storytelling. Insecure on HBO may only get a couple hundred thousand viewers on Sundays but those viewers, who pay for their subscription, are probably ready to engage with complex story lines that resonate with them.  The TV landscape is definitely becoming more courageous in its storytelling in an attempt to reach splintering audience segmentations, but for the most part, boldness in TV is still found on cable, not network.

This Is Us wants us to see that families come in all shapes and sizes 

I'm therefore pleasantly surprised with This Is Us, which, like ABC's Shondaland shows, is looking at diversity through an interesting lens. For Shonda Rhimes's shows, diversity is just a given that is seamlessly woven into the plot lines (aka, inclusion), but This Is Us actively comments on it. The story of the black adoptive son into a white family chugs along side by side with one of a gay father figure and another of an obese character struggling with her weight, and while some critics have condemned the show's treatment of progressivism as too safe, others have argued that tackling these issues on the small screen is crucial when our country is so divided after the election. It's definitely not perfect, but I applaud This Is Us for using its intersectional stories not as a one-sided soapbox, but as a way to let good storytelling do the legwork and then using the platform as an opportunity to examine bias. Mainstream audiences are thus sucked into the drama of a story, with an added benefit of receiving subliminal messaging-like advocacy for championing diversity. This subliminal messaging, in my opinion, is not of the brainwashing, I-may-have-just-seen-a-cheeseburger-and-now-will-buy-one variety, but rather an opportunity to actively and yet safely question your own preconceived notions about certain identities. Fiction is always good for empathy; even better when that fiction reaches millions. Mainstream television can champion empathy as a storytelling tool to push the boundaries of viewers' receptiveness to new portrayals of American life. If it's done in a safe but subtly challenging way, like in This Is Us, it has the potential to change hearts and minds without alienating audiences. After all, for example, I fully maintain that the LGBT acceptance movement of the last 20 years partly has TV shows to thank, among them Queer as Folk, The L Word, and The Real World. 

There's definitely a deeper discussion about the tools of activism to be hashed out, for example whether progress is made through slow and steady steps or through radical disobedience. I'll leave that to another blog post, perhaps about the new Harry Potter installment, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which echoes these dueling strategies of resistance movements in the worlds of Wizards vs Muggles. For now, I'll continue watching NBC in the hopes that the progressivism stays just sneakily mainstream enough to make some resonating statements.

Post-election thoughts

Some may chide me for being so invasively personal in this entry, in a potentially public setting, but I don't think now is the time for censorship, but rather that honesty is the best policy under the threat of an attack on freedom of speech. So here goes. 

It’s been two weeks since the election, and a month since leaving Twitter. In the deluge of alarming articles I’ve consumed over the past 2 weeks, a few have stood out, and one in particular holds the most urgent personal call to action I can do right now, while parts of me are still paralyzed by fear, and any activism I harbor is just starting to wake up from hibernation. As we head into a most assured autocracy/kleptocracy/borderline tyranny, a Dutch journalist who has covered these regimes recommends writing down personal values and things you’d conceivably never do, as things stand right now, since you will surely do them in the future for survival. This collection of thoughts, emotions, and values may therefore serve as a reminder of my morality in the scary times to come. I’m already feeling myself be slow to act, perhaps leaning on my white privilege even when I need to actively denounce white supremacy along with my white comrades, but at least this record can serve to show me what I was like at the beginning of the Trump era, lest things change for the absolute worst, which I am terrified will happen.

Tuesday night and Wednesday after the election were the most unstable I have ever felt in my entire life. I had already felt the stirrings of fear wrapped up in the multiplication of anxieties over the past 6 months, and a few days before the election I even told my mom, ‘this is the first time in my life that it feels like everything is not going to be ok.’ I was sobbing all day Wednesday, an absolutely inconsolable mess, as K had to pool together the puddles of me that had dripped with tears into her couch. I felt completely hopeless in a way I never had before, as if the election had rocked my moral center and life philosophy in a way that was irreparable. Optimism gone with nothing to replace it. The blows kept on coming as I realized further aspects of a Trump presidency that would probably come to fruition: the racism, xenophobia, and homophobia in a first wave (already started, even to me with that homophobic dude yelling out his car at me on Friday), the threat of nuclear war in a second wave (predictable given Trump’s short fuse), and then climate destruction (almost certain). Each realization left me sobbing again, and as news of Trump’s cabinet picks have unfolded these last two weeks, my anxiety feels justified again, just as it had pre- and post-Brexit.

Yet in these two weeks I have also felt myself actually grow up. It was almost a physical, tangible shift, as my pre-election priorities left my body, to be replaced with a resilient assertion of adulthood. Gone were my wistful notions of a return to Europe; I have to stay and fight. I waved a (temporary?) goodbye to the idea of working in TV in favor of a career shift towards sustainability (if only I can hold on to that motivation). The sense of duty as an American to be on the right side of history has become my priority; I don’t want to become one of the “nice neighbors who made the best Nazis.” Yet my belief in our political system is so weak right now, I haven’t been able to will myself to call Senators or go to rallies – all I’ve done is report that harassment and donate to charities. Next is hopefully using this career opportunity to enter the climate change arena, and continuing the work of dismantling the pervasiveness of white supremacy, first by acknowledging that it has afforded me much of my position in life, but that I must not coast on it.

So, to complete that assignment from the Dutch journalist, here are some things I must keep in mind about values and action over the next 4 years, as we see our freedoms start to erode away:

• Recognize that much of my success can be attributed to my relative privilege in life and therefore work to give back in a way that attempts to combat white supremacy (whether through time, money, words, civil disobedience, or other forms of resistance)
• Remember that being the most hysterical person in the room can be good sometimes; it reminds me that I have not normalized the situation and that anxiety can serve as a warning. But I must not let anxiety get the best of me and prevent action or clear thinking, as it has been doing for several months. I should, however, continue listening to my intuition, as I did when I worried that Twitter’s passive support of the alt-right would help Trump get elected.
• Remind myself that climate change is the thing that scares me the most, but that other things do too, in particular xenophobia and homophobia. I will not be prevented from living my life as an openly queer person nor will I condone xenophobia.
• Refuse to stop living my own life or recognizing the joy in things, while demanding the most out of life as I always have. I have high expectations for myself, and I don’t want that to stop, but sometimes, civic duty is a higher calling, and obligation can be both more rewarding and matter more than hedonistic personal pleasure.
• Commit. Commitment means a lot, especially now. I must not flake out on this commitment to a greener planet, even when my hope wavers. I may have lost my optimistic worldview, but if it is to be replaced with a pragmatism or even pessimism, I want to be able to honor my own character with a sense of commitment to the cause.
• Create a new set of goals. This is in the works, but I think it’s part of why I’ve been off balance even before the election—I had either achieved goals or they were no longer applicable, so I was grasping around, trying to clench onto anything that resembled an appropriate goal, but my fists kept coming up empty.  While the youth-entrapped Kate valued externally motivated goals such as global travel, language learning, media consumption, and adventurous self-expansion, the new, more adult Kate is starting to formulate more internally motivated goals such as physical and mental health, a career dedicated to more than myself, and self-expansion through writing/reading/knowledge.
• Finally, practice radical love and patience to the best of my ability. These times may test our patience and dedication, but I will try to invoke patience, love, and compassion more often than not, especially when encountering differences of opinion.

Who knows where the next few years will take us, and I am scared to see how this last, gasping whitelash will shape generations to come for the worse, but at least, two weeks out, I am not quite as continuously despairing as I was on November 9th. I’d like to think of it more as a workable anxiety, not a hopeless one.

'Finding Love' on Reality TV

Today on the subway I was sitting next to K, goofing off in the way we do, even in public, and a man sitting across from us smiled and said, "I've seen you two before, and you always look so happy. What's your secret?" That gave us both pause, to which I could only brush off an answer, jokingly: "It's only been six months...and it's all a façade!" Joking aside, it made us stop and muse about serendipity, human connection and the small ways in which the universe organizes itself to confirm things that feel right (or that we just make things into signs of that rightness by the power of our own will).

These small moments of kismet come in direct opposition to a theme in summer's reality TV, which seems overrun by programs in which people attempt to 'find love' on camera. There are three in particular on this trend that I've been consuming with abject fascination and just a little guilt lately: "Bachelor in Paradise," "Finding Prince Charming," and "Married at First Sight." The first takes former "Bachelor" contestants and puts them on a beach together with enough competition to pair off that the pressure is on to find a mate. "Finding Prince Charming" takes the "Bachelor" concept and mixes it up with all-gay contestants, and "Married at First Sight" does exactly what its title indicates: matching two strangers in a legally binding marriage, at the alter, and seeing what unfolds for six weeks, after which they choose to stay together or divorce.

meet Finding Prince Charming's (mostly basic) "gay Bachelor" and his suitors

These three shows are deeply formulaic in their orchestration of connection, yet their conflicts are vastly different, even though they all involve the almost desperate striving by participants, and some sort of achievement or competition that enforces compliance with the formula. With something so variant and unpredictable as love, why do these shows win us (or me, an ever-sappy consumer of romantic stories) over with their formula? Have we come to believe that the trappings of romance, and the repetitive way its stories play out in media, are legitimate enough to be mistaken for actual connection? Are butterflies enough to go on? The contestants on these shows seem to think so, judging by how often they utter the word 'connection' as the token or proof of something promising, and legitimate.

I actually don't think it's just a matter of enjoying these stories because our hearts have been pumped full of romantic comedies. I am legitimately interested in how we 'perform' love in conjunction with our expectations for it, and reality TV is a perfect medium to explore this phenomenon. Think about it: assuming we all desire romantic human connection, what better way is there than consuming it vicariously, sped up, on TV, as it happens to 'real' people? But we must remember the artifice of the concept of reality TV love, which may or may not have any realness involved, and here's where it gets juicy. You get to see people's emotional baggage affect their behavior, their dispositions create conflict, and their expectations for the future either enhance or sabotage their search for connection (or just fame), all under the pressure of performance. Also, if you're introspective like I am, you may be able to turn the camera's lens on yourself in the process and think of how your own history would inform your performance of love on TV; would you be able to stay authentic or exaggerate yourself as you get sucked up into the 15 minutes of fame? Furthermore, how do you, yourself, perform love in your life?

If I were still well-versed in film theory I might be able to dig up some scholar's argument about the documentary film's inherent alteration of its subject, but broad strokes may suffice here: reality TV either has verisimilitude, or it doesn't at all. My question is, does the performance of love on TV, or even the audience's consumption of that performance, give it some sort of validity if there is even a smidgen of real feelings involved? The love doesn't have to be of the mind-altering, love-of-your-life caliber, but just the enacting of an inkling of chemistry, and the television's documentation of it, perhaps makes it so, because it creates a trope much like how romantic comedies encourage us to buy roses and chocolate for our loved ones. In clearer terms, the love might not last, or withstand real-world circumstances, but in showing us an example of how we could act in our pursuit of love, we end up playing the part in our own lives too -- looking for 'a connection' on OKCupid, listening to the fluttering of our stomachs on a first date, or even dramatizing a conflict "like they do on TV." It's like the Kardashians, who've achieved truly blurred lines between their TV selves and their authentic ones.

Any good story has a conflict, too, and in an attempt to spin a story out of 'reality,' reality TV love consumes conflict like wind to a fire for the sake of storytelling. Conflicts go from fabricated to authentic back to fabricated in the pursuit of a story arc; Chris Harrison arrives with a new 'date card' for the player who's just kissed someone else, or the gay bachelor conceals himself as a contestant to get 'true' first impressions of his suitors. I love this finagling of reality to produce conflict, because we watch as artifice has the potential to spur on actual conflict between actual humans. The humans may ham it up on camera, but I believe anger and jealousy are hard to fake.Yet the key difference between your own conflicts and the ones televised on these reality programs is that the camera has the power to change the performance and content of them, as the behavior triggered by the problem becomes more important than the root of it. I would say that most of us value equilibrium over conflict in our relationships, so we try to resolve issues, while reality TV contestants are perhaps emotional masochists in which they mine the circumstances for conflict, hence enhancing it.

It's so easy to get disillusioned, though, about love when we watch too many of these shows, because the formula becomes too prescriptive. The danger of reality TV is that it goes for sweeping gestures, romantic or dramatic, instead of mundane ones that have the potential to be so much more powerful. I, for one, am learning to recognize the small moments that build upon the big stuff in my relationship with K, and trying to silence that desire for broad, symbolic moments that fit so nicely into a crafted, neat story about love. The funny thing is, in recognizing a promise to love the moment for what it is, you are inherently building it into a story you tell yourselves, warts and all.

The Core of Togetherness, and Me

Recently a certain someone giggled when I told her that the reason I dreamed of studying film was because of the Lord of the Rings special features. Yup, in high school my sister and I would watch "Cameras in Middle Earth" over and over, and not just for the fun of watching Legolas swing up onto that Oliphaunt.  I loved learning how tricky camera angles and painstaking animation work transformed Tolkien's words on the screen. So in giggling, she reminded me, rightfully so, that I am a (film) nerd. Somehow, though, over the past few years, I have misplaced that excitement, and that makes me nervous.

In HBO's Togetherness, Brett has also misplaced his. A father of two young kids and a saccharine but somewhat distant husband, Brett finds his life somewhat lackluster. He's a sound editor for the movies, and watching his friend Alex and sister-in-law Tina struggle financially has lulled him into inertia. In the first season, a memorable scene features him throwing a bit of a tantrum during a long film editing session because he's hungry (but really because the director doesn't like his attempt at some original sound-mixing). As Alex's career takes off in the second season, and after a brief confession of infidelity by Brett's wife blindsides him, Brett spins out in desperation; to cope with the news he follows Alex on a convalescent pilgrimage to their hometown of Detroit. There, they fall into the typical regression into boyhood, but it's fruitful thanks to a dug-up time capsule that contains a letter from teenage Brett and Alex to their adult selves. In it, they beg their future selves not to "be lulled into a mediocrity like everyone else and to remember our vow to stay true to the spirit of life." It's a majestic scene that contends with something so essential; the worry that in adulthood, we fork ourselves over to our numbing responsibilities.

Regressing means thrift store suits

Despite its naivete, the core of their adolescent wish resonates with me--someone who's seen their interests morph over time. Five years ago, film and culture dictated my passionate disposition and geographic location, but now I find myself less enthusiastic about those things -- so is the question that the core of me is muted, or has it merely changed? On the one hand, I'm nostalgic for the days I thought I knew what I loved. On the other, I think maybe I should accept that interests evolve but don't have to segment into disconnected pieces. Maybe my desire for pop culture informs my job in social media, which informs certain social justice leanings.

More recently, though, I think I've been conflating complacency with fear, and that's where it gets perilous. As a fascist presidential candidate gets more and more amplified thanks to our 24/7 news cycle, I wonder if I'm being paranoid, thinking that being complacent means I'm part of the problem, as a propagator and consumer of mass media. Am I a bystander of this terrifying political climate, or are my media habits actually doing some harm? Furthermore, have I lost all perspective on my core by being so exposed to media, something I've always been interested in?

Maybe it's a matter of rewatching Mr. Robot to assuage my guilty conscience.

What is Genius? From Mozart in the Jungle to London Spy

When I was in college I took a film class on Biopics. The central question of the class was, What makes a great life? And furthermore, What makes that great life worth telling? Indeed, the crux of a compelling narrative is, in my opinion, interesting characters. But so much of our current television landscape goes beyond depicting simply interesting characters into depicting extraordinary ones, however that may look. Don Draper, Walter White, Carrie Mathison, and Eliot from Mr Robot are all exceptional people in some way or another. Commonplace lives are boring, while great ones are watchable.

So how do you tell the story of genius? Amadeus (1984) picked the lens of mediocrity in Salieri, using his averageness to elevate and evaluate Mozart's talent. I still maintain that movie is one of the finest depictions of humans grappling with the edges of their abilities ever made. Yet more often, biopics take the genius as a given and instead depict the life circumstances surrounding that genius, rarely questioning it in the first place.

This is why Mozart in the Jungle, Amazon's surprise winner at the Golden Globes, is refreshing to me. It's about the New York Symphony, with its conductor and all its players, so it's not about an individual genius - it's about an entire body of people channeling some original sort of genius lying dormant in classical sheet music through their own individual interpretations, and hence risking being second-rate. Rodrigo, the flamboyantly rule-breaking conductor, has a multitude of talent as a musician and conductor, but he must contend with the mediocrity of his orchestra; as he says after a performance, "it wasn't bad. But it was also not not bad." Hailey, one of his youngest oboists, wants to be great someday, but only within the confines of an orchestra - why not on her own as a soloist? There's also Gloria, who gave up her singing career in favor of fundraising, or Thomas, the maestro emeritus who's now trying his hand at composing and will not listen to the critics who call him derivative. In essence, what I like about this different take on talent is that it cannot be taken for granted because it is not a constant. It's a highly flammable variable that can get extinguished at any time thanks to disuse, fear, or lack of work ethic.

Does Rodrigo hear his orchestra's talent going astray? 

Stories then seem especially tragic when talent is extinguished too early, as in when someone dies. In London Spy, BBC2's emotional spy thriller, Danny (the always watchable Ben Whishaw) falls for an inscrutable investment banker, Alex (Edward Holcroft), whose tight-lipped, tight-assed virginal innocence stands in for the more sinister government secrets locked in his mind. When Danny discovers Alex's decomposing body in a trunk at the end of the first episode, he's convinced that Alex was murdered because he knew something important. Over the course of the five episodes, we go from disbelief to disregard to conviction of Alex's mathematical genius as we get closer to what those secrets are. Yet if Alex hadn't been endowed with such gifts, how would his life have been different? Would he have loved the same way? The show is brooding and dark, and at the end we're left a bit unsure of everything except what genius can do to haunt someone's life.

What did Alex know?

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, knows about the haunting notion of genius. In her new book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, she gives all us wannabe-artists the hope we need by reconstructing the concept of genius. Nodding to her previous book's enormous success, she writes that she would be plagued with self-doubt as a writer when tasked with chasing that success if she had believed that a genius was something she just inextricably was. Instead, she believes, as we all should, that genius is like magic, lingering in the atmosphere, and if we're lucky enough and we work hard enough, it may flow through us momentarily. That's why similar movies get made at the same time, or why two startup ideas are weirdly similar, or why someone may write 'your' book before you do. It's the genius finding a vessel, or few, at just the right time. Most of the time, our creativity is a slog of hard work, but we do it so we can be ready to receive the genius if it comes.

This is such a healthier perspective on genius, I wish film and tv shows would pick it up more. That way, all of us with any sort of creative aspirations wouldn't be crippled by insecurity if we saw more people like us on screen. We're ordinary, we work hard, and perhaps the work possesses genius. The trouble is, is that watchable?

Representing Sexual Abuse in Outlander and Spotlight

I spent this weekend in 1740's Scotland and 2000's Boston thanks to Starz's Outlander and Tom McCarthy's Spotlight. These are two very different (excellent) stories depicting two very different times, but they overlap on one key element: they both contain stories of rape and molestation committed by men, on men (or boys). Here's my attempt to work out how those representations worked, and what they might mean.

Outlander's male protagonist is the strapping, fearless Scottish Jacobite soldier Jamie Fraser who is married to Claire, a time-traveling combat nurse pulled back to 1743 from 1945 (forgive the premise; it's actually great). Jamie's dealings with the Scottish rebellion from the British has left a price on his head, and when he is captured and sent to prison close to the end of the first season, Claire musters up some comrades and cattle (yes, cattle) to break Jamie out before he is hanged. However, it's not Claire who gets to him first but rather the show's villain, "Black" Jack Randall, a redcoat gone rogue who has a perverse obsession with Jamie. How perverse? Let's just say that movie blood hardly ever makes me squeamish, but Black Jack's brutal flogging -- 100 lashes -- of Jamie midway through the season made me yelp in protest despite being alone in my apartment.

Black Jack's goal is not just to torture Jamie. He wants to break him. Tobias Menzies, who plays Randall, has said that he thinks Randall is an exercise in sadism and that some viewers reckon Randall loves him, and he plays the character with just enough empathy for the viewer to feel horror and pity in equal measure. I won't go into all the details, but Black Jack breaks Jamie down not only by raping him but by inflicting so much shame against his masculinity, sexuality, and love for Claire that he is left staring, unmoving, wishing for death. And we see it all.

 Randall's sadism at work

Spotlight, on the other hand, relies on testimony by victims of Boston's priest abuse scandal to represent male sexual abuse. What starts as a seemingly regional story based on a single priest and a few hush-hush settlements begins to spiral as more leads point to a city- and even country-wide scandal. It's as if all of Boston had been muzzled for decades by the Catholic Church; the abuse was rampant, everyone knew, and no one could speak up. Shame and silencing were everywhere. We don't see reenactments of these crimes but rather feel their gravity thanks their simple multitude. Numbers speak loudly here -- 13 priests becomes 90 becomes 250 -- and the breaking down of a few survivors as the film employs them to recount what happened to them as boys is more than enough. We feel those broken spirits multiply as we see the names and addresses of the priests tally up.

One of many of the Boston priests' victims, Phil Saviano

Both stories examine what it means to be a victim just as much as they examine what it means to be a predator, especially when those victims are male. For some reason, watching Randall rape Jamie made me more uncomfortable than watching him attempt to rape Claire, which he does earlier in the season. Maybe it's because I have seen rapes against women on screen before. Heck, SVU is dedicated almost entirely to this phenomenon. Yet I think it's because seeing an ultra-masculine man who builds his manhood on his strength being broken down into helplessness was as tragic as the thought of pedophile priests singling out boys from poor families with absent fathers.  The victims are different but their pain is the same. It's that of the predators boring shame so deeply into their souls that silence is their only companion. Especially when those predators have incredibly unshakable systems of power to shelter them from justice (the priests were simply sent elsewhere; Black Jack's got Britain propping him up by his Redcoat).

What resonates most with me when comparing these stories is that we can't and shouldn't qualify shame by degree, and that watching a depiction of abuse is just as powerful as not seeing it. We tend to think of masculinity as synonymous with resiliency, as if men should be unbreakable. And if they are broken, their pain must be suffered in silence, lest they betray weakness or invoke systemic abuse. So whether or not a film or TV show chooses to physically show an instance of male sexual abuse, it's so incredibly moving and sad and important to infuse the subject matter with vulnerability and to show the power dynamics at play. In Spotlight, the Boston Globe must go after the Church and not the individual priests to make the magnitude of the scandal resonate, and that's what stories about male sexual abuse should do too, if they are approached well; they should go after the system. They can expose the cracks in the power structures that keep hegemonic masculinity afloat by emphasizing the importance of speaking up and being vulnerable. I'm not saying that every show should undertake a rape scene, but rather I am happy that these two stories were able to humanize and empathize with victims while simultaneously exposing the cowardice of the people in power to keep such atrocities under wraps.

Mr. Robot and my guilty conscience

Permit me to explode for a moment about Mr. Robot, USA's remarkable summer series about unreliable narrator Elliot (Rami Malek) and his hacker involvement in taking down corporations.

This show is un-effing-believable. And not just because we have a hard time believing Elliot. It's visually stunning, morally argumentative, powerfully written and narratively captivating. Think Fight Club and American Psycho and A Clockwork Orange for 2015, in a 10-episode serialized form.

What I love most about this show is Elliot's unabashed, paranoid take-down of capitalism, corporate America and the hyper-connectivity of our world. There are several standout characters, including Tyrell with his Swedish chill (the excellent Martin Wallström), and Mr. Robot himself, but Elliot is the most compelling (and confusing). As a skilled hacker whose delusions fuel his drive both to destroy and also unite, Elliot's world is scattered and disjointed yet webbed like a computer security network, bits and pieces whirring together. He's an angry young man who hates greed and people and in his extreme loneliness he may or may not have the means to destroy both these things. I won't spoil it, but the question of what's real nowadays, for Elliot and hence the viewer, is ever wavering after the explosive finale.

This show unhinged me a bit this week. His stance on social media (as well as consumerism, naiveté and a host of other social maladies) is that it's an infectious disease--super spreadable and toxic. Complacency through social media leads to laziness which leads to helplessness and mental illness. It's a strong viewpoint to be fair, but it left me nevertheless extremely conflicted about how networked my life is, personally and professionally.

Here's the thing about Mr. Robot. I watched it relentlessly, captivated, glued to the TV while trying to avoid spoilers on Twitter. But as soon as a huge plot point or character reveal happened (ummmm BD Wong as the White Rose?? Wut that was amazing!) I wanted to tweet my heart out with others watching. Thus employing what Elliot denounces. Thus buying into the system he crusades against. Sam Esmail, the creator of the show, seems to be using Mr. Robot as a platform for his brutalist perspective on the world, yet he nevertheless has a platform entirely supported by advertising to get his message across (ie, basic cable broadcasting). Such a morally complicated narrative would be a no-brainer fit somewhere like HBO or Showtime, whose subscribers dictate the kind of stories told on the channel, not like USA.  Which is why this show fascinates me - it actively calls out the evils of advertising/corporations/the 1% even though those things are its foundation. That this particular show exists on basic cable makes me think of Brutalist architect Le Corbusier's Pilotis pillars (PS do he and Sam Esmail share a philosophical brain?), those concrete columns that hold up stories upon stories of concrete.  If those pillars crumble, so does the whole structure, but they are deceptively, relentless strong. So is capitalism. So is advertising. So is Mr. Robot.

 Pilotis : brutalism :: advertising : Mr. Robot

I can't wait for the next season.

The UnReal-ity of the 'Bachelor' Universe

It's been a hot minute, I know. Working in TV and social media makes it harder to dedicate your free time to TV and social media. Who knew?

Nevertheless, I am currently swept up in the faraway land known as the Bachelor/ette/inParadise franchise. There is something very interesting happening in this world, which I've written about before, but you might not know it unless you are an avid fan able to parse out which tropes and codes are being disrupted in the Bachelor-verse this summer. These disruptions fall under two categories; one within the series The Bachelorette, the other outside it, namely the seriously compelling Lifetime (what, did I say those words together?) show UnReal. 

Let's start with how Kaitlyn Bristowe, the most recent Bachelorette to be whisked away by the glamor of 'dating' 25 men on TV, purposely or purposelessly spun the show on its head. See, Kaitlyn seems to behave like a woman of 2015, meaning she has a sex drive that leads to certain events. A few weeks into the courtship, when there are still ~8 men left in the game, she sleeps with one of the contestants. Normally in this show, sex happens under verrrryyy controlled circumstances and locations that are actually called 'fantasy suites,' which serial viewers of the franchise will tell you only pop out when there are 3 guys left. Usually these 'overnight dates' happen on a tropical island, complete with pillows and candles and maybe some palm trees rustling in the wind. Everyone knows sex goes on, but it is never talked about, because the show seems to pander to what it believes to be Middle American values (for its Midwestern mom demographic, maybe). This season, Kaitlyn sleeps with Nick in Dublin, in a hotel room. It's so pedestrian in comparison, but so much more real, because the next morning the crew catches her on camera having a heart-to-heart with one of the producers on her balcony, reciting all those things we millenial women sometimes recite to ourselves and to friends after sleeping with someone too early. She doesn't regret it, but now she has to figure out how to break the news to the others. Furthermore, she had already told another contestant in private (Shawn, who would end up with her heart), that he was the one.

How did the production team approach this behavior? They sort of embraced it and altered the format of the show. Yes, they seem to have scrapped the other exotic locations in favor of staying in Dublin with a shorter schedule (could this have been a weird punishment? Nah, since producers will do whatever they can for ratings), but they actually gave Kaitlyn the go-ahead to have overnights with four men, not three. They also exposed all the slut-shaming tweets aimed at Kaitlyn in a reunion special (and my feminist heart whined as I heard this vitriol) in order to incite and maybe defend their now-controversial commentary on sex. Then Kaitlyn only met two families instead of 3, which was probably a good call on the producers' part when they must have known pretty concretely that Kaitlyn only really cared about those two guys. It may have been a misstep on the production's part to bring the 'loser' all the way to a proposal, but again, ratings rule.

 "raise your hand if you have ever felt personally victimized by Regina George Twitter trolls"

Why is this important? Finally, after a bajillion seasons of this show perpetuated archaic values, romantic inventions, and hegemonic gender roles, we're finally seeing the cracks in that rigidity. I wouldn't go so far as to say that we're getting a positive representation of healthy relationships, but Kaitlyn has ushered in a frankness about sexuality that is welcome on a show that has, for better or worse, dictated some standards around courtship and romance in pop culture. That this franchise is also responsible for Bachelor in Paradise is interesting because the otherwise proper values steeped in the Bachelor/ette are nowhere to be found in "Paradise," where sex, backstabbing, and manipulation are called "love" to hide the jealousy and competition that draws us in like any good trashy tv.

Then there's UnReal. A scripted series that draws quite tightly from the Bachelor universe (it's basically a fictional behind-the-scenes look at the Bachelor), it tells the story of the backstabbing, manipulative producers responsible for this good trashy tv. What's great about UnReal isn't so much the scandals and cat-fights the producers encourage, but that these producers are women living in the feminist/post-feminist media landscape, grappling with their conflicting desires: power and morality, danger and safety, love and lust. For example, the female showrunner Quinn is a ruthless yet intuitive boss gunning for her own franchise, and she wants to take her best associate producer, Rachel, with her, despite Rachel's paranoia that this world is drawing her irreversibly farther away from escaping the manipulations and destruction she happens to be good at.

 Quinn certainly isn't nice, but she knows people, and she knows what makes good TV.

Honestly, I sometimes feel like Rachel. It is difficult to work in media without internalizing a general feeling that the internet brings out the worst in people. Being addicted to social media, like many in my generation, has made me less patient, less able to be in the moment, less empathetic, and less able to think deeply about issues larger than 140 characters. Yet when I see complex stories on TV about complex women, I feel like at least I have a voice, because stories like mine are starting to be told in mass media. I'm trying to escape it all, but I end up sucking myself back in. Maybe it's a vicious cycle, condemning the hand that feeds me because media also tells the stories I care about, but the fact that dating shows actually resonate on my feminist scale gives me hope.

Jane the Virgin & risk-taking

Jane the Virgin mostly makes me giggle, but one episode struck more than my funny bone in the way it treats the theme of taking risks as a young, responsible woman.

This show, which is in its first season on the CW, tickles with its undercover feminism and genuine emotions amidst goofy, over-the-top characters and telenovela-inspired plot twists. Gina Rodriguez excels as Jane, a thoughtful young woman who gets accidentally artificially inseminated and (small spoiler) develops feelings for the father of the baby. Jaime Camil, as Rogelio, is actually hilarious as a superstar who discovers he is Jane's father. Add a thousand other events and people in Jane's life and you've got a hit that, surprisingly, doesn't get swept away by its own drama.

In a recent episode, Jane finds herself doing something she never thought she would; she breaks up with her stable, detective fiancé for the man whose baby she's already carrying. Michael, the fiancé, is her rock and his feelings for Jane never waver. Rafael, on the other hand, is passionate but harder to nail down. But they have undeniable chemistry, so she goes for it. This sounds like a completely typical trope in romantic comedies, which it kind of is, but for some reason it doesn't feel cliché. Here's why.

Yup, I can feel the chemistry from here. 

Up until this point, Jane has lived her life avoiding risk and instead banking on responsibility and stability. She harbors dreams of writing fiction but has gone to school for teaching. Her mom raised her as a single woman, so Jane has learned never to be dependent on men. She works two jobs to put herself through school. So when she finds herself actually a pregnant virgin at no fault of her own, she wants to throw her hands up, admit defeat to the gods of "good things come to those who wait,"  and pursue those potentially life-changing butterflies she feels with Rafael, especially after hours-long conversations with him are making her fall in love.

I sort of love this story line. First of all, Jane is a character who is strong-willed without being reckless, considerate without being demur, and a role model while still allowing room for error. We need more characters like her on television.  Second of all, the story subverts the traditional romantic comedy, which treats the woman as a shell of a person by which the obstacle of securing a man she becomes whole. Jane is already her own person with legitimate aspirations, and she is feeling things in her heart that make her want to take a risk which could enhance her life, or change it for the worse. For once, this "risking everything for love" story is one I can get behind, because Jane feels more three-dimensional than many romantic comedies--a character with real agency.

Which, of course, makes me reflect on all the times I have or haven't taken risks. Yes, I moved to two foreign countries to pursue passions, but I always knew I could come home (and alas, I have), so for some reason those adventures still feel like calculated risks. More often, though, I've had the nagging "should I text" thoughts after someone exited my life too soon (either by my design or theirs) and the hope that going all-in could change our fate. I've had the friendly brunches/drinks/dinners with exes, where I've kept my composure and shown them, mostly truthfully, that I am doing great and that my life has its direction (like Jane's, regardless of partner). Many times I've accepted these events as the right thing and eschewed regret. But I don't think I have ever irrevocably risked it all, even though when I was younger I thought I wore my heart on my sleeve; I've discovered I'm sometimes way too rational, and hence I shy away from true risk-taking behavior.  Even recently I realized, thanks to a discussion with a friend, that the way I drink (casually, never in excess) has never been to let loose to the point of forgetting or exceeding limits; it's to get a little closer to the authenticity of a moment in which the rational details of time, place and company merge with the monumental emotions of certain moments. I love feeling overwhelmed by the emotional gravity of stories I hear/read/watch, but in my own life I tend to let rationality dominate. When slightly buzzed, I feel that it's easier to merge the rational with the emotional sides of my brain and I want to get better at this sober.

But I also can't lie and say I don't dream about a moment in my life where I grab my bike, pedal through the snow, and show up unannounced at someone's door and say, let's do this. For real. You're worth the risk.

The Affair

I've never had an affair, but recently I was pulled towards one. I found myself not answering texts, canceling plans, and saying to myself just a bit more, then I'll stop. I was enamored, enraptured. I lost the whole weekend to it.

That thing, while not an affair with another human, does bear its name: The Affair on Showtime. I'll only say a bit about the show because you should really watch it yourself. It's essentially the same recollection of an affair from two perspectives, Noah's (Dominic West) and Alison's (Ruth Wilson), each taking up half of an episode. However, things get complicated with and beyond the affair as the deeper, sadder details of these two peoples' lives emerge. You'll notice right away that little, superficial details change according to whose narrative we're in: the color of a dress, who kissed whom, when in the day something happened. Beyond showing us the faults of memory, these little details also highlight each character's worldview and self-perception. This narrative style is why I felt an affair-like addiction to the show, because watching was like uncovering the layers (and the deeper, sometimes sadder details) of the characters like you would a lover. I wanted more, more, more.

So many secrets.

What is it about television dramas that make you feel like you're cheating on your life with your TV set? How can we go hours and hours holed up with only food, sleep and HBOGo like we would with a new flame?

Binge-watching is rampant now that we have Showtime Anytime, Netflix, Hulu, and all the other il/legal streaming sites, but I think the technology is just an enabler for a certain personality type. Not everyone has this desire to tv-marathon. I was talking to a friend recently who said something along the lines of, if he watches more than a few episodes of something in a row, he wants to throw up and then go for a run. Good for him for avoiding atrophied muscles from too much couch-potato time.

I'd posit, at least for myself, that the personality type that can watch tv for hours, even ashamedly, is the same kind that thinks a lot (or too much?) about stories, connection, and possibly also about love and relationships. I've written about media voyeurism before, where I let media teach me lessons instead of experiencing them first hand in the world, and I think we media types like neat, dramatic, and constructed narratives because they are easier to follow than the random events in our lives. For example, how do I even know what an affair looks like? Since I've never had one or known anyone to have one (I'm still in my twenties, and at my age people are young enough that cheating usually leads to a clean breakup before marriage or kids), it's the movies and books and television that show me what the guilt and the illicit pleasure and the heartbreak feel like. While I'm definitely NOT wishing an affair on myself to chalk up to experience, I still use the power of storytelling to show me the truths and authenticity of humanity in the places I haven't gone.

Here's an embarrassing example that might help clarify my point. About a year ago I dated someone briefly (keyword, briefly) who dumped me for another girl. The Facebook message signaling the breakup cited an exclusivity talk with the other girl and not wanting to blindside me when we were going to hang out that night, hence the Facebook message. I wasn't falling in love in the slightest but I still felt rejected and undignified enough by the cowardly message for a good cry. The thing was, this person had made me a really beautiful, wood-carved plaque with a quote from Before Sunrise on it (readers of this blog will know that film is my absolute favorite ever). In my indignation over the breakup I grabbed the plaque, swiped the hammer from my desk drawer, and tried to break the thing. When that didn't work, I took a sharpie and scrawled "Fuck you" on it and threw it away. 

But that didn't make me feel better, only worse. I missed the plaque immediately, not because it was a symbol of our time together, but just because I liked it. What's worse, while destroying it I felt like I was watching my body write the swear as my brain was thinking, this is something someone in the movies would do. Silly, yes. Pathetic, slightly. But the takeaway there was that I should listen to myself instead of deferring to a narrative cliché. I tend to like my rational ability to know what keepsakes and memories to hold onto, however hurtful they once were, and I ignored that disposition in my moment of weakness. Because I watch too much tv, maybe.

Oh well, at least I'll have the Instagram snapshot of the plaque to remind me to listen to the moment. Haha, the irony.

Blue Is the Warmest (Hair) Color

Instead of dwelling on the explicit 10-minute sex scene in Blue Is the Warmest Color, which I've finally motivated myself to watch and which divided critics and the queer community (so much scissoring!), I want to focus on a smaller question:

Why has this movie's title been translated as Blue Is the Warmest Color? 

The French title, La vie d'Adèle, meaning "The Life of Adèle" after the lead character (played by Adèle Exarchopoulos), works so much better as a title for a 3-hour exploration of female sexuality. Ok, so there is the irony that blue is considered a 'cold' color. Yes, director Abdellatif Kechiche, whose previous film L'esquive is a subtle and brilliant exposé on France's multicultural youth, dresses his protagonist in blue and makes her girlfriend's hair blue for edginess and lesbian appeal. But everything that's meant for warmth in the film has the opposite effect.

First of all, Kechiche's choice of constant, extreme close-ups on Adèle's face made her seem bland and vacant rather than emotive. I think this choice was intentional, and it works at the beginning, when Adèle is still discovering herself and her sexuality, but it turns quickly annoying as all I could focus on was Adèle's inability to keep her lips closed. Her mouth had this lazy pout on it that I can't make sense of. Is she a daydreamer? Is she not self-aware? I was relieved by the final scene in the art gallery where we finally see her in medium long shots - still so uneasy about her surroundings but at last not the center of our attention.

 Look at that pout.

Secondly, Kechiche takes the path of least resistance to portray the romantic connection between Adèle and Emma (Léa Seydoux), but it's a shallow one striving for depth. Adèle's into books, while Emma's studying painting. Adèle is a helper, while Emma's a talker. They supposedly have sexual chemistry (more on that in a minute). This is supposed to be a life-altering shift in Adèle's life, but Emma seems to figure only sexually into this shift. There are no coming out scenes, only a meager (yet affecting nonetheless) instance of homophobia, and just one Pride Parade, but no real scenes of romantic support, admiration, or devotion. Aren't they supposed to love each other? I want more of those scenes. Kechiche gives Adèle's personal development a shot in that we watch her graduate, march in an education protest, and become a teacher. But really she's just a muse (Emma's muse and Kechiche's) and we all know that a muse's pedestal matters more than her heart or mind.


Ok, I will talk about that sex scene. There are the obvious criticisms, a few of which I'll name. It turns pornographic and male gaze-y in Kechiche's hands because he's a straight man trying to represent female sexuality.  There is a lot of focus on bums and panting. It involves positions that seem potentially unreasonable for a first sexual encounter (and some, like scissoring, that are stereotypical of lesbians and that may or may not be performed outside of porn, depending on whom you ask). It's not even that sexy but rather borderline animalistic.

Yet my biggest problem with the scene--and really, the whole film--is that it is supposed to represent the apex of female sexuality - pure pleasure, desire, fulfillment, even ecstasy - but we are not really there with Adèle and Emma even though we're watching them. We're not sympathizing or even experiencing vicarious/movie-watching pleasure. Rather, the tone I get is of Kechiche feeling jealous. Later in the film there is a group discussion about how female pleasure is deeper and more complex than male, and I get the sense that this is personal for Kechiche. He's making a movie to try to get at an understanding, but he's actually pushing himself, and therefore us, farther away from that understanding by defaulting to voyeurism. If we understood Adèle better (meaning Kechiche had actually made her a complex character instead of a shell of a young woman), we could have gotten there, together. But as we watch her walk away from the camera down a street in the final shot, her blue dress diminishing against the sunset, we don't know her at all, or what this sexual "awakening" has done. This is a shame, because I could have seen a lot of myself in her.

Connections, and Her

So I cried at Her, again. Those lonely characters seeking companionship in technology made me sad about how we connect with others, and the second viewing wasn’t any less intense.

Both times I saw the film in the same theater—the first time alone, the second time not. The first time I was two weeks into my job, and taking myself to the movies was thought to be a detox from the overstimulation of adopting the new skills needed for a job in social media: the ever-presence of screens, instant communication, and connections through technology. What I got out of watching Her for the first time was not a detox but an accentuation of those things, albeit without the fast-paced excitement of my job. Her is pretty melancholy and takes a subtly cautionary stance on the future of technology as a crutch and sometimes impediment to true human connection. I sat through the credits, tears streaming down my face, thankful for being alone in a dark theater where no one had to share my discomfort.

The second time I was three months into the job, more confident in my work (and less exhausted by it) and also more optimistic about the power of social media to bring us together. Yet the tears came for the same reason, and I felt overwhelmed by the tendencies we have to use media for what we think is connection but really may be preventing it. My discomfort this time extended to my movie-going companion, who was less moved by it but who did articulate that it made her uncomfortable. So did my tears, it was clear, as she eyed me sideways while the credits rolled. It took us a while to dissect what had happened to me in the theater, and we slowly inched from a place of distance at our differing reactions back to a place of understanding.  The whole post-viewing discussion, and even tone, was surprisingly Her-like, as it highlighted how we, as people, can go from connection to disconnection and back again in the smallest moments, like flecks of dust being brushed off a table only to fall back upon it again. With or without technology, connection is hard, but I am thankful that Her made me aware of how humans need it, try to get it, block themselves from it, and finally find it, even if only for a moment.

The Complicated Feminism of "Frozen"

I watched Disney’s Frozen on a plane today – it was on one of those shared teleprompter-like screens that, nowadays, you’ll only find on domestic flights. This lack of individual screen permitted me to watch the gaggle of college girls sing along to the movie in front of me. They knew every word, which should have felt to me no different from the nights my own college roommates would put on the sing-along version of “Mamma Mia” and bop around the dorm room to find some cheer during finals week. But with Frozen, I kept in mind their enthusiasm for this movie as a backdrop to the fact that, while watching, I couldn’t make up my mind about whether or not this movie had a feminist stance. 

I’ll give you the rundown of the story, fittingly based on dour fairy-teller Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” so that we can make sense of it together. Sisters Elsa and Anna are princesses, and when they are kids Elsa is cursed with a variation of the Midas touch – what she touches turns to ice. As a child Elsa has trouble controlling her power and accidentally strikes Anna with ice, injuring her. As a result, their parents decide it is best to keep Elsa’s power a secret, encasing her hands in gloves, shutting her away in the castle, and isolating her from her sister. Not surprisingly, this turns her into a closed-off, protective, literally frigid older sister.

As young adults on Elsa’s coronation day, Anna—the compulsive, spontaneous, evidently modern one—meets Prince Hans and gets engaged to him (on the same day, omg what?). Elsa finds out, and in her anger, accidentally freezes the ballroom and the rest of the town, which the townspeople interpret to mean that she’s dangerous. She runs away in exile to her own icy castle, where she sings a song about being free. Anna hunts after her with the help of loner mountain man Kristoff. A series of things happen as various parties try to lure Elsa back to the castle to end the eternal winter, during the last of which Elsa again strikes Anna with ice, freezing her heart. In keeping with fairy tale lore, only “an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart,” so Anna races to kiss Hans to break the spell, only to find that Hans is just using her to get to the throne. When he tries to kill Elsa, Anna jumps in front of the sword, though, which is the actual act of true love that revives her back to her full warmth. Yay, and they all live happily ever after.

So, what’s complicated about that? The thing is, many of the story elements could be subversively feminist, or not. So, let’s make a list:

Wait, I think this is feminist:

-       The Prince and Princess theme feels like a comment on exhausted tropes; for example, when Hans turns out to be a bad guy, we’re relieved and turn to root even more for the imperfect, clumsy, good-hearted Kristoff. We’re equally excited to see Anna, who’s not the helpless princess type, take matters into her own hands. She leads the effort to find Elsa, and Kristoff is an often self-interested, begrudged helper. Yay strong female characters!

-       Elsa’s self-imposed exile in her icy castle could be seen as a liberating break from patriarchal/feudal oppression

-       When Prince Hans reveals himself to be evil, the story is counteracting the countless romantic comedies and Disney movies that place a female character’s worth and self-worth entirely in the male lead’s heroism

-       There’s a song about both Anna and Kristoff being “fixer-uppers,” which proclaims that we all have flaws that can align in true love.  No more having to be perfect for a man!

-       “True love” turns out to be familial and not romantic, with romantic happiness a serendipitous side effect

Or is it?

-       Elsa can only feel free in isolation, because being at ease in society and/or having connections with people while also cherishing her gift is impossible, because that gift is damaging to the patriarchal status quo

-       For every time Anna saves Kristoff, there’s a time he saves her as well (or at least tries to). But this could also be advocating reciprocity, equal respect and contribution to a relationship, regardless of gender. Ahhh I don’t know! 

-       When Hans reveals himself to be evil, Anna is made to seem weak and a fool for falling so quickly, and can only redeem herself by kissing another dude. Oh no, bye strong female character!

-       Kristoff is the more obvious fixer-upper, according to his family’s song, but the part about Anna that needs fixing is that she compulsively decided to marry another man after one day. So she needs to change for a man anyway?

-       The fact that Hollywood still feels the need to write female protagonists into the world of princes and princesses frustrates me to no end! What is it about this ideal, this fascination with princesses?

-       There’s still a need to include Anna and Kristoff’s love at the end, as if we wouldn’t be satisfied with just the sisterly love story.

So I’m stuck; each point for feminism has a problematic (maybe postfeminist?) counterpoint. Maybe all this doesn’t matter and we should just be happy that Frozen passes the Bechdel test. But I’d like to think that a higher standard for our movies, especially our kids’ movies, is warranted. I also can’t help wondering if the girls in front of me loved the movie just for its music, or if they perhaps appreciated its complexity. Sound off in the comments if you think this film is progressive, transgressive, regressive, or if you don’t care!