"Devour what she likes" - On abject female hunger

Imagine a hungry woman. Hungry for what? Power? Love? Respect? Food? Does it even matter? The image is the same.

"Oh man", my friend told me, her tone elated, when we came out of a screening of Ocean's 8, "did you see that? They were eating constantly! And not even just tiny bits of salad! But, you know, actual food." We nodded along and agreed with her, just happy in that moment, but later I thought, how weird, how strange it is that we find it remarkable that women in a movie were shown eating.

***

Women’s appetites are often demonized, that is hardly a hot take. From media analysis, over poetry and art to political and feminist writings, a lot of women from different walks of lives have written on the subject. It isn’t just a media studies thing, far from it, it is a social justice issue as well, translated and refracted and spread through media.

Nevertheless, I want to share with you a part of my master’s thesis that deals with exactly that topic. I’ll be using excerpts from my thesis as well as additional sources, quotes and thoughts. Enjoy:

***

First off, some context. Women in society are often marked as other. Aliens in media are representative of the other, often of a specific type of human other. The construction of female aliens, therefore, makes symbolic statements about human womanhood. The alien woman discussed in the following is the Empress of Racnoss, the clear antagonist of the Doctor Who episode “The Runaway Bride”. She follows the other-as-enemy distinction, as Carl Malmgren formulates it (18). Using this strategy, the human other, for whom the alien is a stand-in, is dehumanized and presented as an enemy whose defeat is desirable. The other in science fiction, therefore, can be employed as a tool to reinforce desired societal norms. Norms that in Christian cultures often go back to the Bible, as Nina Coomes confirms when she observes that the hungry woman as the ultimate sinner is inextricably connected with Eve and her desire to know and to want and to eat.

The first look at the Empress of Racnoss, portrayed by Sarah Parish, shows her spider-like legs and her red lips and sharp teeth through which she hisses “I’ll eat you up” (28:18) when she sees the Doctor, mixing sexually suggestive language with animalistic intentions, the impression of which is strengthened due to the camera’s close-up focus on her mouth. Because the audience does not see her full face or body, she remains mysterious and monstrous – she is reduced to parts of her that seem threatening – and is, consequently, denied personhood. The empress is from the beginning onwards connected with hunger and desire, both visually and through dialog, and this hunger is also clearly characterized as threatening and abject.

Additionally, the Doctor proclaims the Racnoss to be aggressive omnivores, an statement confirmed through the visual focus on the alien mouth, marking the species as evil and, therefore, preemptively justifying any action taken against them. The Doctor’s description combined with the looks and staging of the empress serves to further dehumanize and alienate her. In combination with her earlier assessment of the Doctor, her “various appetites, be they procreative, literal, or carnal” and her “biological drives” (Rowson 93) are linked to her gender and presented as a threat, positioning a female focus on the body to be destructive. To hunger for anything while being female is to ask too much. It doesn’t matter if this appetite is for attention, sex, power or nourishment, it “always overreaches”, as Jess Zimmerman says in her examination of her own relationship to hunger, literal and emotional, “because it is not supposed to exist”.

It is, furthermore, notable that the alien mother is depicted without a husband or father of the children, centering her desire to procreate on her womanhood, and presenting her as different from the nuclear family ideal of heterosexual mainstream culture. This is how the depiction of the empress falls in line with a horror trope Cynthia Freeland calls “queen bugs” (70). The queen bugs combine “the primitive instinctual drive to reproduce with a tendency to dominate the male of the species” (Freeland 70). The empress being portrayed as a spider-like creature even implies that she consumed the father of the children as some spiders do. Her desire to procreate is, consequently, connected with her literal hunger and made fully her own. It can’t be excused as someone else’s in the same way eating alone in public forces you to own your hunger as Laura Maw describes.

In her evaluation of Alien (1979), Lynda Zwinger concludes that it insists “on a border between representations of the nurturing mother necessary to the middle-class bourgeois dominant culture and the transgressive power maternity might achieve if left to its own (supposed) desires” (74). This assessment can be applied to the empress as well, especially considering that her visual design is in part reminiscent of the xenomorph queen’s. Like the famous alien, the empress’ desire to consume and procreate and her obvious power to do so if not stopped, transgresses accepted boundaries and thus becomes a threat.

Presenting the Racnoss as conquerors and omnivores has the effect of categorizing the empress’ appetite as abject because its satiation would be to the detriment of innocent human lives. It has, additionally, the effect of denying the validity of any of the empress’ desires since they are, as the Doctor and the narrative clarified, monstrous and destructive in nature. Her drive for procreation, however, the desire to see her decimated species alive again, is one the Doctor - and the audience - should be able to at the very least relate to.

There is a compelling comparison to be made to Donna, whose exaggerated desire for companionship is ridiculed and ultimately the source of her suffering. As Jess Zimmerman notes, to want something for yourself as a woman, is to be seen as ‘attention-seeking’. Donna’s wanting is purposefully designed to be over-the-top, to be mocked and made the butt of a joke, something to laugh at, because how dare she actively pursue love.

It is significant here, that even though the empress has been consistently portrayed as a monstrous villain who needs to be defeated and has caused her personally harm, Donna is seen empathizing with the empress’ pain and being perturbed at the Doctor’s seeming unaffectedness. Even though the music takes on triumphant notes, the camera shows the scene in a Dutch angle, adding a sense of unease. Donna’s empathy for what is essentially a grieving mother links them in their womanhood.

In the end, the Doctor kills the Racnoss children with water and therefore puts an end to her procreative desire. The empress herself escapes by teleporting to her ship and vows revenge but is promptly killed by Earth’s military; her female abjection is thusly thoroughly defeated by male forces. Her excessive overreaching hunger could only be stopped by not allowing her to continue. Because a female creature whose appetite becomes uncontrollable is a monster like no other.

***

Sources from my thesis (I’m only citing them this academically because of the master’s thesis excerpts, don’t expect that for future posts):

“The Runaway Bride.” Doctor Who, written by Russell T. Davies, directed by Euros Lyn, Special, BBC, 2006.

Freeland, Cynthia A. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Westview Press, 2000.
Malmgren, Carl D. “Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 1993, pp. 15-33.
Rowson, Emily V. Impossible Girls and Tin Dogs: Constructions of the Gendered Body in Doctor Who. 2017. University of Northumbria, PhD dissertation.
Zwinger, Lynda. “Blood Relations: Feminist Theory Meets the Uncanny Alien Bug Mother.” Hypatia, vol. 7, no. 2, 1992, pp. 74-90.


Extra sources:

Coomes, Nina. “On Eve’s Temptation and the Monsters We Make of Hungry Women.” Catapult, 15. Jul. 2019, https://catapult.co/stories/on-eves-temptation-and-the-monsters-we-make-of-hungry-women-nina-coomes

Maw, Laura. “There’s Nothing Scarier Than a Hungry Woman.” Electric Literature, 17. Oct. 2019, https://electricliterature.com/theres-nothing-scarier-than-a-hungry-woman/
(The title quote is from this essay.)

Zimmerman, Jess. “Hunger Makes Me.” Hazlitt Magazine, 7. Jul. 2016, https://hazlitt.net/feature/hunger-makes-me

Z Nation and the glories of "trash TV"

When I wrote the other comparative post, the one about The Witcher and Game of Thrones, I made sure to tell you that it wasn't meant to elevate one over the other. Here it definitely is.

So, disclaimer: I will complain about what I didn’t like about TWD, if you don’t want to read that, turn back now.

Lately I rewatched some The Walking Dead and I realized that even in my most negative assessments I have given it too much credit in the past. Even the few "good" episodes per season, aren't really all that entertaining to begin with. What had happened instead was that I tried to justify my six-season long loyalty to the show by insisting that from time to time it was actually good and enjoyable, when the only thing I really enjoyed where the characters.

Of course, you have to credit TWD with the reinvention of the zombie apocalypse genre or at least with its re-popularization. Z Nation wouldn't exist were it not for TWD. TWD, however, does not exhaust the potentiality of the genre and instead reiterates the same narrative elements over and over again in an attempt to stay serious quality TV.

 Z Nation is different from the get go. Produced by the people that made Sharknado it was already conceptualized as more trashy, which granted it the freedom to play with the genre and its tropes. It is in no way meant to be realistic and combines over-the-top gory moments with ridiculous happenstances like a giant wheel of cheese rolling down the countryside smashing zombies along the way.

It is often self-referential and employs meta-humor that explicitly lampshades conventions of the genre (they also call zombies zombies). Nevertheless, it isn’t a comedy. It has its comedic elements sure and its comic relief but the main story is a dramatic one. Instead of the goal of the protagonists being survival, however, as it is in TWD (after season 1), they have the clearly defined mission of getting a man, whose blood might be the only chance at a vaccine/cure, to a lab. This goal makes the characters in Z Nation more proactive, as they are moving towards something, while the survivors in TWD mostly just react to threats to their safety. It also allows for story progression in a way TWD does not.

Due to TWD’s insistence on “realism” and the differing structure - the protagonists in TWD often stay in one place while in Z Nation they are constantly on the move and cover a lot of ground between episodes - the possible narrative beats are limited and it shows, when the ‘temporary sanctuary overrun by enemies and/or zombies’ is still the main source of conflict 8 seasons in. Z Nation on the other hand not only starts 3 years into the apocalypse already (a good choice, in my opinion, as it makes the chaos and decay of the world that much more believable), it also features a variety of absurd apocalypse inhabitants and scenarios.

The group, among others, meets a fanatic zombie media enthusiast, a Mexican drug cartel, people growing weed from zombie-infested plants, a Mad-Max-esque caravan, and post-apocalyptic bounty hunters. They have to stop a nuclear power plant from melting down, escape a zombienado, deal with an anthrax infection, and a half-zombie baby. And that’s only in the first two seasons.

Despite the show’s obvious “trash TV” nature and usually fast pace, it does not lack genuine drama moments. One of my gripes with TWD is that a lot of the dramatic potential is lost because characters constantly have extended fake deep conversations about it. Z Nation doesn’t attempt to cram as much meaningful-sounding dialog into its episodes and instead focuses on the novel action (for the most part). In this way, however, dramatic scenes are allowed to stand for themselves.

At one point, for example, the group finds themselves in Roswell, where people gathered that believe that aliens are going to come and rescue them from the apocalypse. One woman, so they say, was contacted by the aliens and soon, the aliens would take them all away. Over the course of the episode the group goes investigating in the military base and finds out that it wasn’t in fact aliens but one man with high tech equipment. The woman is with them when they find out, but still goes back to her people and keeps the belief alive because she recognized that hope to them is more important than the truth. None of this is spelled out or explicitly mentioned and this is exactly why it has the impact it does.

In conclusion, Z Nation’s categorization as “trash TV” allows it the freedom to be creative and combined with the narrative drive it is, to me, very much enjoyable.

Satori over and out

See also Nadine Dannenberg’s article “‘Is This a Chick Thing Now?’ The Feminism of Z Nation between Quality and Trash TV” in Gender and Contemporary Horror in Television

Widely decried “overused” filmmaking things I actually like

I spend a good amount of my life concerned with media. Consuming it, analyzing it, reading about it, creatively engaging with it. In that process, I've also read and listened to others’ opinions on movies and how they are made. There are certain things in filmmaking, be it tropes, camerawork, or aspects of post-production, that are widely decried as overused - or just bad. I want to use this space here to share with you some of these things that I actually sincerely enjoy:

Star Trek 2009 (syfy.de)

- lens-flares: dammit but I love the light reflecting off of surfaces and shining brightly into the camera. It gives everything an otherworldly feel. It’s very sci-fi to me and I think lens-flare aficionado JJ Abrams put it into words well: “The reason I wanted to do [lens flares] was I love the idea that the future that they were in was so bright that it couldn’t be contained and it just sort of broke through.” 

- this action scene is just noise: How often have I heard that an action scene in a movie is meaningless because it’s just noise and nothing else and while that might be true, I tend to still enjoy it. It’s cinemasins’ “explosions! running! excitement!” sin but fully genuine.

300

- slow motion, especially slow motion fight scenes: I just can’t help but think that slo-mo shots are stylish and cool, no matter how often they appear in a movie. Slo-mo makes fighting especially look very sleek and I love that.

- person in the foreground doesn’t notice fight in the background: That’s just a little fun thing to do. Whenever I see it in a movie or show I just think it’s a joy.

Kingsman

- fun songs during fight scenes: No matter how often I hear a joyful song playing during a fight scene, I will always enjoy it greatly. I’m thinking Freebird in Kingsman, Istanbul in The Umbrella Academy, or I’m Just a Girl in Captain Marvel. I like fight scenes and seeing someone kick ass to a cheery tune is just great.

- narration: I know it’s ‘show don’t tell’. But sometimes I like to be told. Sometimes I just like to be explicitly told what’s going on.

I’m sure there’s more that I’m currently forgetting. This post kind of fits with the theme of the “Good films don’t have to be good” post. These things are used for a reason and even if they are seemingly overused, they can still spark joy in your heart.

Satori over and out

Sometimes...

I wanted to write this whole thing about how sometimes the determined attempt to make your movie/show appeal to the largest amount of people (in order to make the most money) works to the detriment of the product in question and how movies/shows that are made with more freedom are better. Then I realized, however, that I touched on this issue in a previous post and that other people have written enough about it. So instead of a nuanced comment, have this meme:

Game of Thrones, The Witcher and genre fiction

So. To be clear, this is not meant to complain about GoT and in turn praise The Witcher, because I genuinely did love GoT and The Witcher also only has one season right now, so there's still ample time for Netflix to mess it up real badly. Instead, it is an examination of the fantasy genre and how these shows embody or don't embody it (for the purpose of this post I’ll just compare the show incarnations and disregard the novels and games). I am also not the first person to write about GoT's relationship to the genre (see, for example, this NYTimes article), so I'll be concentrating on The Witcher a bit more.

People like The Witcher. According to google 95% of viewers liked it, its imdb rating is 8.3 and its rotten tomatoes audience score is 92%. There are a multitude of covers and remixes of “Toss a coin to your witcher” on youtube and immediately there were loud calls for a second season. As obvious as its success seems today, it wasn’t so clear before. Most people were familiar with The Witcher from the games and not the novels and video game adaptations are notoriously ill-fated. People were unhappy with Henry Cavill’s casting and the first images of him in costume were widely ridiculed. When the show was announced in 2017, Game of Thrones was still much beloved and seemed to set the standard not only for fantasy TV but for quality TV for years to come. Everything, so it seemed then, would be measured against GoT and inevitably found lacking.

And then it came different.

I am convinced that The Witcher would not have become so popular so fast, had a large amount of people not been extremely disappointed by GoT (there’s an ongoing petition to remake season 8 with, at time of writing, 1.8 million supporters). Now, the two are very different, of course, from their conceptualization and narrative structure to their content, setting, and themes. They do, however, belong to the same rough genre, that genre being (dark) fantasy.

Fantasy is, among other things, concerned with a society’s relationship to magic and the metaphyiscal powers and how that relationship changes or evolves. It deals with questions like what does the existence of magic/magical beings mean for a society, how does it shift power balances, inhowfar does it inform the structure of society and people’s everyday lives and belief systems. As already implied, politics is, also, a significant aspect of a lot of fantasy stories. The alternate world is examined and its political structures embedded in the fantastical context reflect familiar structures. As Ross Douthat, from the NYTimes article, concludes: “thus fantasy villains are sometimes fusions of premodern and postmodern forces — the demonic industrialist Saruman in Tolkien, the technological deities in Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods,” even Martin’s White Walkers, part Faerie and part climate change”.

GoT - the show - obviously and purposefully stripped the story of quite a bit of its fantasy elements. The showrunners famously said that they didn’t want to create genre fiction and instead wanted to appeal to a mainstream audience (see, for example, this Independent article). Therefore, they concentrated on the political intrigue and the fights, strife, and struggles of the characters. Many (for example, this dude*) cite this decision as one of the main reasons for GoT’s success. This decision did, however, pose the challenge of how to adapt the more classic fantasy elements not only present in but central to the narrative of the source material. Thus, characters ended up deprived of their motivation and depth and story arcs ended up not fulfilling their purpose.

The Witcher on the other hand is unapologetically fantasy. It does nothing to slowly accustom the viewer to its world and the magic within. In the first episode there’s a dramatic battle, Geralt (Henry Cavill) fights a monster which makes his eyes go black, and meets a shady sorcerer in a bigger on the inside tower. In the next episode the audience starts to follow Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) through her sorcery-school while Geralt picks up a bard and a princess (Freya Allan) runs for her life. The show does not bother to explain that all these happen in wildly different decades, it trusts that the viewer understands from context clues. That this world is teeming with magic, curses, potions, elves, monsters, magical beings and sorcerers is a given, as is the existence of various kingdoms and the struggles between them.

And that is what makes it enjoyable. It is clearly and unselfconsciously genre fiction, relying on and remixing true and tried fantasy tropes and elements. It explores the different relationships the three protagonists have to magic and society and works towards a central conflict that is going to dominate the narrative going forward.

The Witcher might, therefore, not appeal to an audience wholly uninterested in fantasy, but as its popularity shows, fantasy appeals to the mainstream.

Over and out.


*His opinion is mostly included as a counter-opinion to what I'm trying to argue (I disagree with almost everything he says), so you can check out other opinions as well. Be warned, though, his assessment of the GoT finale critics is just a tad insulting.

A decade in review: TV shows

When I said it was impossible for me to track the TV shows I watched each year, I menat that. Nevertheless, it is possible for me to pick my top 4 TV shows from the last decade and I will be doing just that. Just in case you haven't seen them and might still want to.

Following in no particular order:


Hannibal (2013-2015)

I've said it before and I will probably say it again until the day I die: Hannibal is pure art. From the cinematography to the dialogues to the acting and writing, it is so brilliant and artistic I don't know anything comparable. That said, I totally get why someone wouldn't want to watch it, it is filled with violence, gore and body horror after all. Oh. And cannibalism of course, can't forget that. 



Sense8 (2015-2018)

Look. I just love the concept of sense8 so much and I do love the execution as well. These eight people, whose chaotic lives just suddenly connect to each other, and who have to adjust to each other and fight those that would harm them. In the end their love for each other and the people they chose triumphs and that's so beautiful to me (there's a post in the works talking about that specifically, so look out for that).


Black Sails (2014-2017)

I've praised Black Sails on this blog before but I recently rewatched season 2 and was once again struck by how amazing it was, how complex the characters how intricate the story. Definitely one of my favorite TV shows of all time.


Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013-today)

Okay, maybe it isn't fair to include B99 since it is still ongoing but it started in 2013 and it is so wonderful and hilarious and just very good, so on the list it will remain.



As you can see my favorite shows are actually much more diverse in genre and content. Maybe that's at least partially to do with creators increasingly moving to TV or the simple fact that I, naturally, watch more TV than I go to the movie theater.

Anyway. We will continue our scheduled essay/commentary blogging as soon as possible.

Satori over and out

A decade in review

Everyone's doing 'decade in review' statistics or lists or overviews or what have you. I thought I'd join in the fun and tell you about my favorite movies that I watched in theater each year. This is, markedly, no quality assessment, so there's no need to tell me that the movies I picked aren't the best movies of their respective years by far. This is based solely on my own enjoyment.

Unfortunately, there is no way for me to track novels or shows, so sadly there will be none of that.

But movies. Let's do this!

2010: Megamind

Honorable mention to Buried, which is an intense thriller featuring Ryan Reynolds and only Ryan Reynolds. 

2011: X-Men: First Class

This year was a hard one, but considering how much I love this movie, there's really no contest.  

2012: Django Unchained

The other contenders this year are Cloud Atlas and Rise of the Guardians, both of which I like very much. Django won out because it's my favorite Tarantino in the end.

2013: Pacific Rim

There was no contest for this year. 

2014: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Honorable mention to Big Hero 6 and Gone Girl. 

2015: Mad Max Fury Road

Honorable mention to The Martian and The Force Awakens.

2016: Rogue One

This year also had Star Trek Beyond and Deadpool but since I didn't pick the Star Wars movie last year, I picked it now.

2017: The Shape of Water

Honorable mention to Wonder Woman and Thor: Ragnarok.

2018: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Honorable mention to Black Panther, Love, Simon, and Bohemian Rhapsody. 

2019: Captain Marvel

I realized while going through the movies that I've not been to the theater that much this year.


In review, I see it's very heavy on the superhero front and very few of these movies aren't action movies. What can I say, I know what I like. Although that might change in the future.

Happy new year to everyone! May the change you crave come to you!