In 1994’s True Lies, Arnold Swarzenegger is Harry Tasker, a James-Bond-like spy for the United States who plays the part of a boring computer salesman for his wife, Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), and daughter, Dana, since both have remained clueless to his true profession over the years. From the beginning of the movie, Cameron establishes the fissure in the Tasker family and the distance between Harry and his wife and daughter. When switching from a fake identity to his real one, Harry forgets his wedding ring and Dana promptly throws away a present from her father calling it “lame.” The film portrays two different worlds: Harry’s fantasy spy world and the real world with his wife and daughter. In his fantasy world, Harry glides easily through large, crowded ballrooms of strangers, making conversation in multiple languages, and accomplishes incredible things, escaping pursuers in an explosion-filled shootout. But in his home environment, Harry looks cramped, “the darkly-lit rooms seem too small for his physique” (Tasker 75), and he struggles to get a part of the bedcovers from his wife. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that to repair the family Dana and Helen must cross over from the real world into Harry’s fantasyland.

The process of this crossover begins when Harry discovers that Helen might have a lover. He decides to use his resources to tap her phone at work and to put a tracking device and bug in her purse in order to track down the man she has been seeing. Harry soon learns that Helen’s lover is a slimy used car salesman named Simon who tells women that he is a spy in order to seduce them. When Simon contacts Helen for a late night rendezvous Harry uses his oblivious co-workers to raid Simon’s trailer and kidnap him and Helen. This kidnapping leads to a pivotal scene in the movie in which Harry, separated from his wife by a one-way mirror and technology that distorts his voice, interrogates Helen about her affair, which actually never progressed into anything intimate, with Simon. This scene “articulates and underscores [Harry’s] failure to communicate and [Helen’s] frustration and isolation” (Tasker 76) as Helen expresses the desires, the need to “feel alive” and “do something outrageous,” that lead her to associate with Simon. The scene also acts as the culmination of Helen’s independent attempt to cross over into Harry’s world. Trying to break free of the domestic sphere, symbolized by her interrogation room, Helen pursues her relationship with Simon, represented by her pounding on the one-way mirror with a stool, but only manages to crack the glass, not break it.

To become free of the real world, Harry must break the glass for her, giving her a fake assignment as a spy, which involves her pretending to be a prostitute. She receives instructions to “dress sexy” for her assignment and arrives for her mission wearing a dress with long sleeves and a high-necked ruffled collar. When confronted with her identity as a prostitute, Helen decides that she must change her appearance. As Sandra Lee Bartky describes, a “generalized male witness [has come] to structure a woman’s consciousness of herself as a bodily being” (38) and in this scene Helen submits to her internalized male gaze. She rips the sleeves, collar, and all excess fabric from her clothing, leaving her in a short, tight, black dress with Jamie Lee Curtis’ ample bosom nearly spilling out of the top. After she sheds her dowdy, though not tomboyish, attire, Helen is placed under Harry’s scrutinizing gaze as he poses as the john she is supposed to contact. Harry instructs Helen to remove her dress for him and then perform an alluring dance in only her underwear. This striptease acts as an agent by which Harry regains control over his wife. By pursuing her relationship with Simon, Helen challenged Harry’s domination over her body and through this ruse of Helen’s kidnapping and assignment Harry regains his power. By subjecting her to his “spectator’s look,” Harry “emerges as the representative of power” (Mulvey 20) over Helen as “woman as spectacle” (20). During the striptease, the main plot of the film involving Arabic terrorists intersects with this subplot as they kidnap both Harry and Helen—only after Helen strips to reveal her body as a sexualized object can she join her husband in the fantasyland of his career. The remaining minutes of the film show Harry fighting against the terrorists with Helen ineptly and accidentally helping him. At the climax of the film, Harry rescues his daughter, who had been kidnapped by the terrorists and, therefore, dragged into the spy world like Helen.

The conclusion of the film shows the Taskers, now a happy, well-adjusted family, laughing at the dinner table before Helen and Harry receive a call about a joint assignment. Helen has shed her dowdy clothing for tighter-fitting, sexier attire and Dana has discarded her androgynous flannel shirts and layered clothes for a sundress. Helen and Harry have become partners in the fantasy world, but the final scene expresses their inequality. When they encounter Simon on assignment, Helen and Harry torment him by feigning anger and pressing a “gun” to his throat. Once Simon humiliates himself and runs away, Helen uncaps her “gun” to reveal that it is a tube of lipstick. This moment reveals that the only power Helen has gained by crossing into this world is the power of her sexuality. The film ends with Harry and Helen tangoing, a dance that involves the man moving very little but the woman drapes herself over her partner’s arm and allows him to drag her across the dance floor.

Works Cited:
Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance and Behavior. Ed. Rose Weitz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. pp 25-45.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1998.

True Lies. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Arnold Swarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, Art Malik, Tia Carrere. 20th Century Fox, 1994.

In Terminator 2: Judgement Day, made in 1991, Linda Hamilton plays the heroine, Sara Conner, a woman just as capable as Aliens' Ripley, who finds herself in a similar situation. Surrounded by doubting men and women, Sara has been labeled insane and placed in a mental hospital. Again, the audience, having presumably seen the first film, recognizes the doctors’ stupidity in not believing Sara, who tries to warn them of the rise of the machines. The scenes in the hospital create sympathy for Sara as she struggles against the male-dominated power structure of the institution, lead by the mocking Dr. Silverman. Her time at the mental ward has changed her into an animal of sorts, exemplified well in the scene that introduces Sara. The camera pans over her sweaty arms and shoulders as she does chin-ups before capturing her face in a shot in which her wild hair frames her face, nearly obstructing her eyes. As the doctors and visitors peer into her cell to observe her, she shifts, fidgets, and snorts like an animal at the zoo. Trapped in the hospital, Sara’s plight could suggest the presence of medicalization in society. Society uses “medical language to [mystify] human problems, and thus removes them from public debate” (Riessman 46). Sara’s doctors would rather not accept the possibility of Sara’s warnings of intelligent machines overthrowing the human race, so she has been labeled as sick, which discredits her claims. While most people would understandably doubt her assertions of future knowledge, placing her in a mental institution and discrediting her as insane prevents people from considering the implications of her claims, namely the possible ramifications of research into artificial intelligence.

While not as androgynous as Vasquez, Cameron pays similar attention to Sara as he did to Jenette Goldstein’s character in Aliens. The clothes Sara wears throughout the movie accentuate the more masculine shape—broad shoulders tapering down to slim hips—of Hamilton’s body and Cameron tends to compose his frames to feature her rather impressive biceps. But unlike Vasquez, Sara eventually accepts her role as mother, which Cameron demonstrates as crucial to the survival of both Sara and her son.

Knowing that her son John will become the leader of the resistance against the machines, Sara has raised him constantly in military training, concerned with preparing her son for battle rather than nurturing him. When John rescues her from the mental ward in a flurry of bullets, Sara throws her arms around him, which John interprets as a hug, to check him for wounds rather than to express pleasure at seeing him. Sara does not seem to become aware of her lack of maternal bond with her son until she observes the Terminator (Arnold Swarzenegger) interacting with John. In the first film, Swarzenegger plays an evil machine sent back from the future to kill Sara before she conceives her son. In the sequel, he reprises the same role, but this time Swarzenegger’s Terminator has been sent back to protect Sara and John from another Terminator, the T-1000. With his mother absent, John soon bonds with the Terminator as the father he never knew, teaching him how to talk more like a human and less like a machine and how to exchange high fives. Sara notes that “The Terminator would never stop, it would never leave [John]…And it would never hurt him…or say it couldn’t spend time with him because it was too busy.”

When Sara decides to take the future into her own hands and kill the man who would invent the technology that would make the highly intelligent machines of the future possible, she reaches a crisis point in her relationship with her son. As the man’s son tries to shield his father from Sara, she crumbles and lowers her gun, teary-eyed, confronted by the strength of the bond between parent and child. In this moment, she finally confesses to John that she loves him. Cameron expresses Sara’s blindness to see her son as her son rather than a future political leader through visual cues. In the beginning of the film, before her acceptance of motherhood, Linda Hamilton’s eyes always seem covered in some way: her bangs, which extend below her brow, or sunglasses or a hat obscure her vision. During the scene in which Sara tearfully expresses her love to John, her hair is completely pushed back from her face and John removes her hat as she embraces her mother role to her son. For the rest of the film, her eyes remain un-obscured; even though her bangs still hang past her brow, they are parted in a way that leaves her eyes visible. As with Ripley in Aliens, musculinity and motherhood combine to form a “warrior mom” figure; however, unlike Ripley Sara cannot protect her child alone. Ultimately the Terminator must save both Sara and John from T-1000 and then destroy himself to protect the future.

Works Cited:
Riessman, Catherine Kohler. “Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance and Behavior. Ed. Rose Weitz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. pp 25-45.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Arnold Swarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick. 20th Century Fox, 1991.

When one picks up a copy of Cameron’s 1986 movie Aliens, one becomes aware that this film does not strive to be a typical action movie. The cover image depicts Sigourney Weaver, dripping with sweat, holding a small child on one hip and a large gun on the other with images of a battle-torn spaceship in the background. Ellen Ripley, the role Weaver reprised for this sequel to 1979’s Alien, probably represents Cameron’s most successful challenge to gender norms. At the beginning of the movie, Ripley is found floating in outer space, the only survivor of the attack in the first film, and is rescued. Despite her hesitations, Ripley soon finds herself returning to LV-426, the planet where she nearly died, possibly to face the same creatures from which she managed barely to escape. The scenes that precede her departure to LV-426 attempt to create previously unmentioned backstory for Ripley, specifically that she had a daughter who died during Ripley’s 57-year hypersleep in space. This establishment of Ripley as a mother, especially a mother with an absent child, becomes critical in determining her character.

Because the audience has the advantage of knowing the events of the first film, Cameron’s choice to surround Ripley with people who doubt her claims of these monstrous aliens immediately establishes her as the most effectual member of the crew of Marines sent to explore LV-426. However, Ripley does not assume that position until they discover a young girl named Newt on the planet with whom only Ripley can communicate at first. As well as setting up a parent-child relationship to foster between her and Newt, this encounter seems to empower Ripley further to assert her competency amongst the crew. Soon after, the crew encounters the aliens, who capture or kill a majority of the Marines, and during the attack Ripley seizes control of the crew’s vehicle to rush to save the surviving three members of the crew.

With the senior Marine officer incapacitated, perhaps as punishment from Cameron for doubting Ripley, she comfortably assumes leadership of the remaining group to organize their plans to escape from the encroaching aliens. During this section of the film, Cameron alternates slower, character-building scenes in which Ripley and Newt bond as mother and daughter with faster-paced exposition-filled scenes in which Ripley coordinates crew members’ assignments, striding forcefully around the control room, surrounded by phallic weapons that occupy every frame, carelessly flicking a cigarette in an almost masculine way. Scenes such as the one in which Ripley exerts her authority over Burke, shoving him against a wall and telling him that she is “glad to disappoint [him],” contrast sharply with images like Ripley crawling under a bed to cuddle with a sleeping Newt, but Ripley seems comfortable and confident in both types of situations. “Masculine” attributes, such as aggressiveness and rationality, and “feminine” attributes, like nurturing, meld in Ripley to create the ultimate weapon against the aliens: the warrior mother figure. In Ripley, “The maternal recurs as motivating factor with [the female hero] acting to protect [her] children” (Tasker 69). With six people as her allies, Ripley spends most of the film avoiding conflict with the aliens, and understandably so, but once they capture Newt, she returns to face all of the aliens by herself to rescue her child and manages to destroy all of the creatures.

Because Aliens falls under a horror/sci-fi genre, “body count, as well as who compose and why they compose that count” (Green 61) becomes important. Offering an opposing image of femininity from Ripley, Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) represents a more “masculine” woman. As Yvonne Tasker describes in her work Working Girls, Vasquez exhibits a “musculinity,” “an enactment of a muscular masculinity involving a display of power and strength over the body of the female performer” (Tasker 70). She remains androgynous in appearance throughout the film, prompting the comment from a male Marine, “Hey, Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?” while she does pull-ups. She replies, “No, have you?” sharing the joke with a fellow Marine. In his book Cracks in the Pedestal, Philip Green suggests that Cameron intends this exchange as a joke, which audiences will find funny only if they equate masculinity with physique and physical prowess. He further extrapolates that this scene demonstrates a valuation of “natural” musculature in men over “unnatural” musculature in women and indicates that while an “unmanned” man will die before Vasquez, she must ultimately die for violating these laws of naturalness (Green 62).

While Vasquez does die in the movie, Green overlooks an important aspect of the film. Three soldiers survive the first major attack from the aliens and remain throughout most of the film: Hicks, Hudson and Vasquez. While Hicks represents Cameron’s preferred version of masculinity in this movie, Hudson provides the best example of an “unmanned man” in the film, yet he survives longer than the more “manly” members of the crew. Besides being emasculated by Vasquez’s comment, “No, have you?” Hudson loses credibility as Green’s version of a “manly” man in a scene in which Bishop demonstrates a talent by jamming a knife into a table in the spaces between each of Hudson’s fingers. While he asked Bishop to show off, Hudson squirms uncomfortably when another soldier encourages Bishop to use Hudson’s hand rather than his own to demonstrate his skill, screaming louder and louder as Bishop moves the knife faster and faster between his fingers. With his fellow Marine buddies laughing at his discomfort, Hudson complains that the trick “wasn’t funny.” After barely escaping from the aliens’ first attack, Hudson, and only Hudson, exhibits a rather un-"masculine” tendency toward hysteria, proclaiming, “That’s it, man. Game over, man. Game over. What the fuck are we gonna do now?” Burke, who is not a military man and therefore not trained for combat like Hudson, and Newt, who is only about seven-years-old, do not even panic while Hudson rants wildly.

Because the unmanly man and the unwomanly woman survive for comparable amounts of time, far longer than most of the men who represent more stereotypical versions of masculinity, Cameron must have another criterion for survival in this movie. Because, in the very end, only Hicks, Bishop, Ripley and Newt manage to escape, nurturing seems to function as the salvific force of the film. When comparing the two main female characters—Ripley, who lives, and Vasquez, who dies—their relationships with Newt provide the clearest distinction between the two women. Both women are competent, assertive and ruthless, but unlike Ripley, who becomes Newt’s surrogate mother, Vasquez does not direct a single comment toward the child. Throughout the film she remains focused upon what she enjoys most, namely firing big guns and killing things, just as Hudson remains focused on bemoaning the situation and trying to protect himself.

Hicks is the only Marine who nurtures Newt as Ripley does—their parental roles toward her become established early in the film—and, consequently, Hicks survives the film unlike his colleagues. He first notices Newt and prevents a soldier, mistaking her for an alien, from shooting her. As well as Ripley, Hicks tries to shield Newt’s body with his own from dangerous flying debris and he watches Newt around the weaponry to ensure that she does not injure herself. He notices her curiosity to see blue prints, which the group studies during a summit meeting, and lifts her so that she can see. Indeed, Hicks functions as the nurturing member of the entire crew, checking his fellow soldiers for injuries after altercations and bandaging their wounds. He becomes a nurturer to Ripley as well, asking after her well being when he notices her hesitation at entering into the main structure on LV-426 and gently urging her to sleep. Hicks, however, does not escape unscathed, obtaining wounds when an alien’s acidic blood sprays on him. His wounds might act as a punishment for not fulfilling the nurturing role as completely as Ripley. When Newt becomes separated from Ripley and Hicks, he immediately suggests trying to rescue her. However, when they do not find her in time and an alien captures Newt, he urges Ripley to escape to the waiting ship, unwilling to risk his and Ripley’s lives even though Ripley protests that the aliens will not kill Newt immediately. Only after he makes this decision to abandon Newt, Hicks becomes injured.

The other survivor, Bishop, does not quite meet the nurturing standards set by Hicks and Ripley, but perhaps due to his being a synthetic person rather than a real one Cameron holds Bishop to different standards. Bishop does show concern for his fellow crew members though, most notably when he volunteers for a dangerous mission, for which no one else would volunteer, and the successful outcome of his mission results in the remaining survivors escaping the alien-filled planet. Since only Ripley achieves Cameron’s ideal in this movie, Bishop must also receive wounds of some kind, which he does when an alien rips him in half. Bishop manages to help save Newt, even though his torso is laying several feet away from his legs, which perhaps secures his place on the survival list.

Works Cited:
Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Lance Henrikson. 20th Century Fox, 1989.

Green, Philip. Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1998.

I found an old sociology paper that I wrote when I was, I think, a sophomore in college for a Sex and Gender class. Within the paper I discuss James Cameron's portrayal of gender in three of his films (Aliens, Terminator 2, and True Lies). Here's my introductory paragraph:

Filmmaker James Cameron, creator of the Terminator trilogy, has spent his career making action films, usually in the science fiction genre. As well as penning the famous catch phrase “I’ll be back,” Cameron directed the second movie of the successful Alien film series and one of the highest-grossing films of all times, Titanic, which swept the 1998 Oscars and won almost every award for which it was nominated. Though the historical romance differs greatly from the slime-filled Aliens, both films, as well as most of the films in Cameron’s filmography, reveal their director’s interest in toying with notions of masculinity and femininity within the action movie genre. Instead of always relying on the stereotypical image of a limp woman clinging to the muscled hero who rescues her countless times, Cameron includes multiple portrayals of masculinity and femininity within his films. While Cameron does try to explore gender roles in his projects, he ultimately conforms to society’s norms, limited perhaps by the type of films he has chosen to make, specifically mainstream action movies.

I talk about all three films pretty separately from each other, so I thought that they lent themselves well to being posted here, but I decided to separate them because a blog is not a place to plop down a ten-page academic paper. Now, remember I was, like 19 or 20 when I wrote these. My writing...needed some help.

I worry a little for people who might pick up Hard Candy because they see Ellen Page's name on the cover, because this film is about as far from her star-making turn in indie darling Juno that one can get. Director David Slade's debut feature film is an intense, disturbing psychological thriller of the highest caliber. Brian Nelson's script does not shy away from addressing a controversial topic in a controversial manner, leaving plenty of room for questions and ambiguity.

Having been chatting online for a few weeks, 14-year-old Hayley Stark meets thirtysomething photographer Jeff Kohlver at a local coffee shop to finally see each other face-to-face. The pair returns to Jeff's house, where Jeff will presumably follow through on the pedophilic tendencies their online and coffeehouse conversations suggest. But before he can attempt anything Hayley reveals that she has her own agenda. The entirety of the film plays out as an extended cat-and-mouse pursuit, with Hayley and Jeff slipping in and out of the roles of predator and prey.

Hard Candy reminds me not just a little bit of Richard Linklater's excellent 2001 film Tape. Linklater's film is another psychological suspense that involves a protracted dialogue between a small number of characters in a confined space. Where the two films diverge is their treatment of characters. Tape is very much a character study. At the end of the film, the audience feels as though it knows Vince, Jon, and even Amy a little better than when the film began. The events of the film create a catharsis intended to change the characters in some tangible way. However, when Hard Candy's credits roll, I don't know that we know Hayley or Jeff any better. In fact, in Hayley's case one could argue that the audience knows even less about her. The characters go through the film's events for the sake of going through them. Of course, Nelson explores the emotional journey that parallels the physical one, but ultimately Hard Candy is a purely visceral experience that exposes raw human emotions not often seen in cinema. Slade and Nelson give enough hints to cover the holes one might poke into the plot, but they by no means fill them, which ultimately doesn't really matter. If you're wrapped up in discerning character motivation or consumed with dissecting the probability of some of the film's physicality, you are watching the wrong movie.

Of course, the success of a film this intimate and character-driven rests on the shoulders of the leading actors. Patrick Wilson is a musical theater veteran who has recently beefed up his film resume with appearances in movies such as The Phantom of the Opera, Evening, and Little Children. He plays Jeff with a perfect combination of menace, callousness, and vulnerability that keeps the audience at a distance sometimes and draws them in unexpectedly at others. Though undeniably a physically taxing shoot for both him and Page, Wilson takes the brunt of the physical discomfort, filming the majority of the movie bound in some way. At one point, Jeff's hands appear blue, deprived of blood by the binds at his wrists. No make-up was used for that scene — Wilson's hands had really turned that color. He passed out from overexertion at one point when filming Jeff's attempts to free himself from the ropes. Wilson also very effectively changes the quality of his voice throughout the course of the film, going deeper and more gravelly as Jeff is forced into darker territory and finally speaking in an almost feral growl when he emerges at his darkest.

Her charming performance as the titular character in the much-hyped, very likable Juno may have garnered her an Oscar nomination, but Ellen Page's work in this film affirms that she belongs on that short list. Of course, Jeff needed to be played adeptly by an accomplished actor, but had Hayley been played by an actress of lesser talents than Page the film would not have worked. As one of the producers has said, Hard Candy's plot rests essentially on a gimmick: a potential victim of a pedophile turns the tables on her would-be aggressor and victimizes him instead. If the filmmakers can't sell the gimmick, then they can't sell the film. Page sells the gimmick in spades. Some critics of the film say that a 14-year-old wouldn't be capable of planning and executing what Hayley does. But, again, it doesn't really matter if any 14-year-old could perpetrate Hayley's actions. It only really matters that the audience believes Hayley could do it. Not once throughout the entire film did I doubt that Hayley had control of the situation, and only an actress of Page's depth and intelligence could have created that sense of dominance over a man more than twice her size. Here Page uses the worldliness and sardonic wit that made Juno so appealing to create a truly cold and calculating anti-hero. I also love that by chance Page had something of a pixie cut during filming, because she had shaved her head for a previous role. Combined with her slight build, the effect lends her something of an androgynous appearance. Given that Hayley posits herself as a potential "every victim" of molestation, her almost sexless physical presence underscores that suggestion powerfully.

While ably assisted by Wilson and Page's dynamic performances, Slade offers some fine direction and some lovely photography with the help of cinematographer Jo Willems. Slade mirrors the emotional journey of the characters and creates dramatic tension through effective use of focus and color correction. He films the actors against a lot of solid backgrounds, often solid blocks of color. The effect is an interesting one, sometimes creating a sterile environment devoid of emotion or feeling, sometimes underscoring Hayley's black-and-white worldview, sometimes creating a false sense of warmth. Jeff's house is chillingly uncluttered, free of moral and ethical boundaries that would inhibit the "justice" that Hayley serves.

As I watched the film, I began to consider that the writer or director might be Asian. Though neither are, Hard Candy certainly resembles much of the cinema that has come to the United States in the past decade from Asia, particularly Korea and Japan. Along with the work of directors like Quentin Tarantino and Mel Gibson, this body of work uses violence as a vehicle to explore the psychologies of extremely violent people, which in the best case scenario somehow humanizes them. However, in the case of these other films I have always felt as though the violence was either gratuitous or manipulative, designed to illicit a certain emotional response. With Hard Candy, I didn't feel as though anyone associated with the film really cared if I felt one way or the other about the characters as along as I found the story compelling. Perhaps because I'm a woman, I connected with Hayley for most of the film, but I was allowed — not encouraged but allowed — to sympathize with Jeff when I felt so impelled. And as for gratuitousness, for an arguably quite violent film very little violence and even less blood actually makes it onto the final print. During the most violent scene, all of the violence occurs off-screen and, ultimately, is only suggested rather than committed.

Hard Candy is certainly not a film for everyone, but it provides a rewarding film experience for those looking for challenging psychological exploration of two compelling characters.

Julian Jarrold's Becoming Jane tells a fictionalized account of the relationship between Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy, a young barrister whom Austen met when he stayed with relatives from December 1795 to January 1796 in Steventon, the coutryside where Austen spent much of her life. Letters from Austen to her sister Cassandra reveal that Austen spent a good deal of time with Lefroy, despite the brief duration of their acquaintance: "I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together." Lefroy admitted to a nephew in his later years that he had been in love with Austen: "It was boyish love." For the purposes of telling a better story, screenwriters Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams have embellished the relationship and have drawn Austen and Lefroy, the characters, to resemble Austen's own Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Visually speaking, the film is gorgeous, thanks to Eigil Bryld's beautiful photography and David McHenry's impeccable art direction.

Jane Austen's life is an interesting one on which to base a romantic drama, given that Austen never married and died at the early age of 41. But perhaps it is that juxtaposition between Austen's writings and the events of her life that make Austen a person of interest, though surely the popularity of modern film adaptations and re-imaginings of Austen's novels significantly contributed to this project being green-lit. Becoming Jane suggests how Austen might have personally experienced the central conflict of much of her work, that is the dilemma of whether to follow one's head or one's heart in matters of marriage. However, I'm left feeling as though Hood and Williams artificially impose an imprint of Austen's work onto her life and I wonder what it is exactly that Jane is becoming in this film.

Many lovers of Jane Austen and her work balked at the suggestion of Anne Hathaway, an American, playing the notable British personality, and I have to say that I agree. While Hathaway by no means embarrasses herself here, she certainly does not own the role in a way that would preclude the hiring of a different actress, maybe even an English one. For my taste, Hathaway plays Austen as just a little too subdued — she fades into the background where she should stand out. James MacAvoy fares a little better as Tom Lefroy, but his character lacks definition. His transition from egotistical, hedonistic reprobate to sensitive, headstrong romantic seems sudden and inauthentic, as do many points in the script. I don't believe the family's rather extreme reactions to Jane playing the pianoforte early in the morning, nor Jane's tearing of her poem after overhearing Lefroy's criticism. Hathaway and MacAvoy do have real chemistry that is evident from Jane and Tom's first meeting; however, the inevitable budding of their romance seems perfunctory and not sufficiently earned by the preceding pages of the script. Becoming Jane is also plagued by too many false stops: I thought the film would end at least twice before the credits actually started to roll.

But despite the weaknesses of the script, the film provided for me a unique opportunity to consider the limitations that a poor financial situation placed on both sexes in Georgian-era England. Most films I have seen that take place in or around this era involve a woman from a lower station being pressured to marry a wealthy man but ultimately marrying a poor man for love. Becoming Jane depicts that situation as well as the exact opposite. Because his mother married for love below her station, Tom is being pressured by his uncle and feels obligated to his family to marry a wealthy woman. Indeed, Jane's cousin Eliza says that due to his meager finances he cannot make a marriage proposal. Money, not gender, offers romantic freedom in this world: Mr. Wisley may make a proposal to Jane, much to his wealthy aunt's incredulity, and Eliza, a widow made wealthy by her late husband, may marry Jane's brother Henry, who is ten years her junior as well as a poor clergyman's son.

Hazel didn't really tag me, but I decided to make my own list because I was intrigued mostly by the number seven and because Hazel is awesome.

THE RULES:

1. Post your list of the seven best albums, the seven bloggers you will tag, a copy of these rules, and a link back to this page.
2. Each person tagged will put a URL to their Blogger Album Project post along with a list of the seven best albums in the comment section HERE at Hill’s Country. Enough already!
3. Feel free to post the “I Contributed to the Blogger Album Project” Award Graphic on your sidebar (even though I couldn’t find it), along with a link back to this page.
4. Post a link back to the blogger who tagged you.
   

My major criterion in selecting these albums proved to be whether, when listening to the album, I felt like I would commit a crime if I skipped a single track. These are albums that I always listen to straight through and I'm never tempted to pass over a song. Of course, I excluded compilations and "best of" albums.

Abbey Road, The Beatles

"Come Together" and the George Harrison penned "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" became popular singles for the group, but the furious guitar work on "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", Paul McCartney's raw pop vocals on "Oh! Darling", and the perfectly harmonized "Because" convinced me to choose this album over Revolver or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Blue, Joni Mitchell

Blue, for me, is the perfect singer/songwriter album with its spare arrangements, melancholy melodies, and confessional lyrics. Carole King's Tapestry came in a close second to this album, but I chose Blue because in every song I feel like Joni Mitchell is exposing a raw nerve. Even the more upbeat songs like "All I Want", "Carey", and "My Old Man" are suffused with a sense of loneliness and loss.

Dig Me Out, Sleater-Kinney

Sleater-Kinney doesn't so much play the brief 36 minutes of Dig Me Out's running length as they attack it. Rolling Stone justifiably named the title track one of the 100 greatest guitar songs of all time. Other album highlights include "Turn It On", "Words and Guitar", and "Little Babies". Dig Me Out is the album on which Sleater-Kinney defined their style: the conversation of Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein's vocals and guitars and their sometimes angular, off-kilter melodies are in full effect. Janet Weiss makes her first appearance on this, Sleater-Kinney's third album, adding her energetic and ferocious drumming and completing the band's roster that endured until the announcement of their indefinite hiatus in 2006.

Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair

Whenever I listen to Liz Phair's 1993 debut album, I can't help but feel transgressive, as if I'm hearing something that they don't want me to hear. Phair talks about sex and specifically how women feel about sex with frankness, in terms that women weren't, and indeed aren't, really supposed to use. Besides being something of a landmark album for women in music, Exile in Guyville is really fucking good. Most tracks feature a lo-fi production of only Phair's reedy voice and her distinctive guitar work, but with only a couple of instruments Phair crafts memorable and surprisingly accessible songs with an emotional honesty rarely paralleled.

Murmur, R.E.M.

Michael Stipe has said that R.E.M. chose to name this 1983 release Murmur because it's one of the easiest words to say in the English language. It also aptly describes Stipe's vocals on the band's first full-length album, which in combination with his inscrutable lyrics, Mike Mill's rumbling and prominent bass lines, and Bill Berry's often sharp, clashing drums sustain a dark and somewhat ominous mood throughout the album's 44-minute running length. Peter Buck's jangly guitars and folksy playing style lightens the sound here and there, but Murmur is a twitchy, almost uncertain album, full of songs that talk of transition, pilgrimage, and movement. Unlike much of R.E.M.'s earlier, and quite frankly better, work that sounds very much of a certain musical era, Murmur has a timeless quality, which is perhaps why I chose it over the equally excellent Reckoning, Life's Rich Pageant, and Automatic for the People.

OK Computer, Radiohead

Radiohead's first two albums, especially 1995's The Bends, were full of anthemic, soaring ballads with dark, introspective lyrics, though still musically accessible and radio-friendly. With OK Computer, Radiohead ventured out into waters uncharted by Britpop bands of their time and created a dense, almost frightening musical landscape, blending their guitar-heavy rock with electronica beats, eerie keyboards, and odd syncopation. Lyrically, Thom Yorke tackles topics like consumerism, social alienation, and political inaction. OK Computer laid the groundwork for Radiohead's later experimentation, but it remains the pinnacle of the band's excellent career.

Pink Moon, Nick Drake

I like moody music. I admit it. And when it comes to moodiness it's tough to top Nick Drake. Pink Moon is the last and most sparse of Drake's albums, featuring only Drake's voice and guitar on most of the songs. It's a short album, not even half-an-hour long, with many of the songs clocking in at under 3 minutes, but as one of Drake's friends put it, "If something's that intense, it can't be measured in minutes." Drake's voice is light and whispery but full of a melancholy that's somehow very intimate and comforting, even though it's difficult to tell sometimes what he's saying, let alone what the songs are about. Any of Drake's albums could easily have been on this list, but Pink Moon feels like a letter that a good friend wrote you many years ago that's so full of secrets and truths that you just can't throw it away.

I was very surprised/a little disappointed in myself that my list of 20 favorite actresses was composed completely of white, straight, able-bodied females. The list was made only slightly diverse in that it included seven non-American women (eight if you include Natalie Portman), two of whom speak English as a second language. A couple of women of color almost made it onto the list but didn't make the cut mostly because I didn't feel like I had seen a large enough chunk of their body of work.

So I decided to adjust my criteria a bit and have another go at it, this time including only women who belong to one or more, er, non-dominant groups. (You know, "minorities" only not that word because I hate that word.) Although I may not have seen most or even much of these women's oeuvres, their work has made an impression on me and I'm always pleased to see them.

Rosario Dawson
(Death Proof, Sin City, RENT, Kids)



America Ferrera
(Ugly Betty, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Real Women Have Curves)



Jodie Foster
(Silence of the Lambs, Nell, The Brave One, A Very Long Engagement, Taxi Driver)



Leisha Hailey
(The L Word, All Over Me)



Irma P. Hall
(Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Collateral, The Lady Killers)



Salma Hayek
(Frida, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Fools Rush In)



Marianne Jean-Baptiste
(Secrets & Lies, Without a Trace)



Lucy Liu
(Ally McBeal, Kill Bill, Vols. 1 & 2, Charlie's Angels)



Marlee Matlin
(Picket Fences, The L Word, Law & Order: SVU)



Parminder Nagra
(Bend It Like Beckham, ER)



Sandra Oh
(Sideways, Under the Tuscan Sun, Grey's Anatomy)



Michelle Rodriguez
(Girlfight, Lost)



Grace Park
(Battlestar Galactica)



Queen Latifah
(Living Out Loud, Chicago, Set It Off)



Tracie Thoms
(Wonderfalls, Cold Case, Death Proof, RENT)



Gina Torres
(Serenity, The Matrix Reloaded, Angel, I Think I Love My Wife)



Gabrielle Union
(Cadillac Records, Bring It On, 10 Things I Hate About You)



Ethel Waters
(Pinky, The Member of the Wedding)



Vanessa L. Williams
(Ugly Betty, Eraser, Soul Food)



Michelle Yeoh
(Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Tomorrow Never Dies, Memoirs of a Geisha)

The men look bad. The women look bad. Only Jane Powell escapes this movie unscathed.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is hardly an evolved movie, but my feminist sensibilities weren't nearly as offended as I thought they would be. Even though I don't like them, I can't really fault Stanley Donen for the film's representations of gender and gender roles reflecting the dominate social constructions of the 1950s. The enforcement of gender roles is definitely integral to the plot, but this film is largely an exploration of class.

The film begins in Oregon in 1850 with Adam Pontipee arriving in town to sell his beef, buy some supplies, and find himself a wife. Ignoring warnings that all of the women in town are spoken for due to the high ratio of men to women in the West, Adam takes a stroll around town and runs into Milly, the cook for the local bar. Adam sees a practical, pretty woman who can cook and clean, but Milly falls in love with Adam at first sight. Milly's idealized notions of wedded bliss are immediately confronted with reality when she arrives at her new husband's farm to be greeted by his six brothers, whose manners and hygiene are somewhat different from the townsfolk's to which she is accustomed. Milly quickly begins to teach her new brothers-in-law how to "act like gentlemen" so that they can court some wives of their own.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers lends itself well to a Freudian interpretation. The town and the "deep woods," where the Pontipee brothers live, act as opposing forces, representing the superego and the id. Having grown up in the deep woods, the Pontipees lack a developed ego, due to little exposure to the superego (the town). Moving from town to the deep woods, Milly acts as an agent of the superego and exposes the Pontipees to the cultural structures that have regulated her behavior.

As in much of American storytelling, women appear here as the socializing force, with Milly and "the brides" possessing a little more "super" in their egos. All of the men, even the townsfolk, are portrayed as ids barely held in check by the ego, as the brawl at the barn raising demonstrates. Some men simply suppress the id better than others.

The scene I find most interesting, and embarrassing, is the one in which the women result to catfights after insinuating that some amongst them had been mooning over the brothers. The fights come after they had been stranded in the deep woods for two months, two months during which the girls only had contact with the id (the deep woods) and no connection with the superego (the town). Even though they are women possessing better-developed egos, prolonged exposure to the id affects their behavior, causing them to behave much like the brothers at the beginning of the film.

As musicals go, Seven Brides is fairly entertaining. The songs are catchy enough, but quickly forgotten once the credits roll. Michael Kidd's choreography is the highlight and, arguably, the focus of the film, given that all of the actors, with the exception of only a few, were hired for their dancing abilities. Kidd creates unique musical numbers out of mundane frontier tasks, such as chopping wood and, most famously, barn raising. (Note: I don't think I'd really understood what a barn raising was until I saw this movie. I thought it was just a dance, a metaphorical "raising" of the barn.)

Jane Powell deservedly receives top billing for her portrayal of Milly, which grounds the film. A young, pre-West Side Story Russ Tamblyn also stands out as Gideon. I was happy to see Tommy Rall, though disappointed that his marvelous hoofing skills weren't able to be showcased in this film. I was surprised to learn young Julie Newmar, the original Catwoman, played the unfortunately named Dorcas. I have seen Howard Keel twice now as a leading man — first in Kiss Me, Kate — and I have mixed feelings about his ability in this arena. Milly spends more time with the brothers than with Adam, so Keel is missing during large chunks of the film and frankly I don't really miss him. Keel is a fairly generous actor and freely allows other actors to make the most of their screen time, which sometimes results in his failing to make more of an impression. With the case of both Kiss Me, Kate and Seven Brides, I'm left remembering more of the secondary characters than Keel's.

Ultimately, I have mixed feelings about Seven Brides. I'm too much a feminist to enjoy the story too much, but I was fairly surprised that the women have as much agency as they do in this film. If the film had concluded with the women explaining to their fathers that they choose to marry the Pontipees instead of a mass shotgun wedding I would have been more mollified. However, as a piece of entertainment, Seven Brides, with the help of Michael Kidd's unique choreography, does satisfy.

Criterion 1: I must have seen a significant amount of the actress' oeuvre.
Criterion 2: The actress should demonstrate some range by having acted in more than just one genre. (Sorry, Tina.)
Criterion 3: I have watched films that I'm embarrassed to admit just to see the actress.

In alphabetical order:

Julie Andrews
(The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, Victor Victoria, Princess Diaries)



Juliette Binoche
(Bleu, Caché, Bee Season)



Cate Blanchett
(The Missing, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Heaven, Notes on a Scandal)



Holly Marie Combs
(Charmed, Picket Fences)



Holly Hunter
(Living Out Loud, Thirteen, The Piano)



Diane Keaton
(Annie Hall, Manhattan, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Something's Gotta Give)



Frances McDormand
(Fargo, Friends With Money, Laurel Canyon, Wonder Boys)



Julianne Moore
(Children of Men, Far From Heaven, An Ideal Husband, The Hours)



Mary Tyler Moore
(The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Ordinary People)



Catherine O'Hara
(Beetlejuice, A Nightmare Before Christmas, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration)



Natalie Portman
(V for Vendetta, Closer, The Other Boleyn Girl, Star Wars: Episodes I-III)



Vanessa Redgrave
(Isadora, Julia, Atonement, Mrs Dalloway)



Susan Sarandon
(Igby Goes Down, Little Women, Thelma & Louise)



Barbra Streisand
(On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, What's Up, Doc?, Nuts, The Way We Were)



Tilda Swinton
(Stephanie Daley, The Deep End, Constantine, Thumbsucker)



Amber Tamblyn
(Joan of Arcadia, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Stephanie Daley)



Audrey Tautou
(Amèlie, Dirty Pretty Things, He Loves Me He Loves Me Not, Venus Beauty Institute)



Sigourney Weaver
(Aliens, The Ice Storm, Dave, The Village)



Kate Winslet
(Heavenly Creatures, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Finding Neverland)



Evan Rachel Wood
(Once and Again, Thirteen, The Missing)

Edited 1/19/09 to include Frances McDormand and Julianne Moore, who were grossly overlooked during the composition of the first list.