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Archive for July, 2009
08
Jul
09
Feminist Music Geek Update!
So, you may have seen yesterday’s Vulture post on the trailer for Jennifer’s Body, screenwriter Diablo Cody’s anticipated follow-up to Juno. If not, you can view it here.
Some thoughts:
1. I haven’t seen Megan Fox in anything. I’ve kind of avoided the Transformers franchise because, eh, well, let someone else do it. I’ll definitely see this, though. I wonder how this movie and this role will evolve Fox’s Jolie 2.0 bombshell persona. I’d be curious what my friend Annie has to say about it.
Film still of Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body; image courtesy of weblogs.variety.com
2. I do kinda wish Jennifer was being played by Kat Dennings (Norah from Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist). I feel like Fox is ripping her off. That and I just want to see Dennings in more movies.
3. I like that the popular girl is a demon. Making the normatively feminine monstrous? Yes. “No, I’m killing boys” might be my favorite line in the trailer (the “Am I too big?” line is a close second). I see some potential feminist commentary.
4. Fox’s “I swing both ways” line to Amands Seyfried suggests one step forward, two steps back. I’d pair this with the shot of panty-clad Jennifer leering at Seyfried’s character and saying “we always share your bed when we have slumber parties.” Hello, boys. I’m sure having Jennifer play for both teams also builds up Fox’s star persona as a lipstick bisexual.
5. Why is Jennifer friends with the nerdy girl? Is it some kind of psychological “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” thing? We know that Veronica Sawyer couldn’t stay friends with Betty Finn to be one of the cool girls in Heathers. I’m intrigued.
6. It’s interesting to me that Cody’s is doing horror (albeit decidedly of the black comic variety). This suggests the influence of movies like Heathers and Scream on Cody as a screenwriter in ways more pronounced than Juno, which was cultivated and marketed as a prestige picture.
Heathers; the legacy continues
7. It’s a little annoying that the screenplay comes from “the mind of Diablo Cody.” Um. Karyn Kusmana directed it too. Plus I’m ambivalent about Cody’s writing style. Kids just aren’t that slick. And even with Daniel Waters’s super-heightened Heathers screenplay, a lot of the banter was slang-based. Or it was gross, which teenagers definitely are. I have an easier time believing a teenager would ask someone if they had a tumor for breakfast than telling a grubby-fingered peer to have a Chinese nail technician “buff your situation.” Plus, points off for reusing the fuck/Phuk Thailand joke.
7A. But the Buffy the Vampire Slayer dialogue didn’t bother me, in part because it seemed to be making a commentary on other network teen dramas like Dawson’s Creek. We shall see.
8. It seems that the soundtrack may play an important part for the movie’s burgeoning franchise. In the trailer, the soundtrack’s featured artists appear before the production credits and boasts hot acts like Little Boots and Panic at the Disco. Pair this with the prominent use of bad girl hits like The Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb” and The Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like” and you have a potential Billboard contender. This is important. Apart from the Disney machine, I can’t think of a teen movie with a soundtrack so at the fore of its marketing strategy since the mid- to late 90s (ex: She’s All That, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Cruel Intentions, Ten Things I Hate About You, and Clueless). I’ll be listening as well as watching.
As you all know, it’s summer. For many, a fun and sticky time. A time that involves drinking, BBQ, and pool parties. I checked all three off my list this weekend. Hope you did too.
Because it’s summer, and it’s a fun and sticky time, I’ve been listening to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s Orange on the regular, which my partner and I found in a discount bin. A song like album opener “Bellbottoms” should explain why.
The first time I heard the JSBX (now going by Blues Explosion) was on the Tibetan Freedom Concert album (the same one Cibo Matto is on). Spencer was doing his Elvis schtick, going over real stupid with banter like “When we’re talking about freeing Tibet, we’re talking about . . . LOOOOOOOOVVVVVVE.” The first time I saw them was their video for “Dang!” (another Orange single) on Beavis and Butthead. I can’t find a version from the show, but you can imagine their reaction. A lot of screaming. A lot of “Yes! Yes! Yes!!!” I felt similarly. I still do. This video is crazy.
But what does all this have to do with Winona Ryder? Indeed, what do three sweaty guys have to do with this blog?
The second time I saw JSBX was in the music video for “Talk About the Blues.” The band goes on a heist while actors play them in performance. Guitarist Judah Bauer is played by Giovanni Ribisi. Drummer Russell Simins is played by John C. Reilly. And frontman Jon Spencer is played by someone who a more glib person than I might call Gen X’s Audrey Hepburn. Yes, Ms. Winona Ryder.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I love the concept of a female lip syncing a man’s song in a music video. If I directed, say, LCD Soundsystem’s music videos, I’d have a woman or a girl pantomiming for James Murphy every time. Imagine how much better a song like “Losing My Edge” would be if the music video showed a teenage girl lip syncing some neurotic guy’s monologue about how old he is and how much he knows about music in deadpan. See what I mean? YouTube sensation.
To me, having a female actor stand in for a male singer destabilizes what for many is a clear marker of gender — the voice — and renders that voice inauthentic or alien or wrong. It also makes more explicit and parodic the performative aspects of rockist male posturing and, you know, performing in a music video. This of course is itself a process of faking authenticity — trying to con the TV audience into believing that the recorded voice is any way connected to the soundlessness that the video’s performers are actually (not) producing. Having a woman in a man’s place pronounces the artifice at work. Her presence also potentially comments of the limited space for female participation in music culture by contending the exnomination of masculinity through heightening man’s visual (but not aural) absence. In short, it’s gender fuckery.
This is further enforced by how Winona is dressed and styled. While she already looks a little bit like Spencer (similar coloring and willowy figure), having her replicate his dress, posture, and performance style makes the con more convincing. I also think that having Ryder play the lead singer is important — making a clear case for the feminized presence of the frontman in rock music (indeed, the other two actors are male). Perhaps casting Ryder also feeds into Terri Sutton’s assertion that alternative rock’s masculinity in the mid-1990s was embodied by “soft boys” who were sensitive, androgynous, and awkward. When you open her chapter in Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, who should appear on the first page? A picture of JSBX.
Obviously, there’s a clear indebtedness to drag going on. However, this tactic doesn’t always yield transgressive or progressive results in music video. For example, model Gemma Ward’s performance in the music video for John Mayer’s “Daughters” creeps me out because her childlike appearance (along with Mayer’s authorial presence in black and white, lip syncing and playing his guitar) seems to further enforce the song’s patriarchal bent. And even in “Talk About the Blues,” I’m never wholly convinced that Ryder’s drag is successful. I never forget her breasts, for example. I also wish that she was playing her guitar instead of using it as a prop, as Ribisi and Reilly are both clearly playing their instruments.
But I think the effort is important, and should not be overlooked. So keep your eyes and ears open for female actors in music videos. Especially when their bodies don’t match up with the voices supposedly coming out of their mouths.
04
Jul
09
Music Videos: Fireworks!
Happy 4th of July! What better way to commemorate U.S.’s Independence Day then watching some shit get blowed up real good? And, to that end . . .
Feist
“I Feel It All”
The Reminder
Directed by Tim Daughters
Wendy and Lucy
I wanted to see Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy since I first heard mention of it (I wanna say in the AV Club’s 2008 Oscar-O-Meter).
Lots of things caught my attention about this one. Independent female director. Neo-realist aesthetics. Financially hard-luck woman and her dog en route with the promise of a job in Alaska while stranded in Oregon. Exchanges that heighten the subtextual sexism between a stranded woman with a broken-down car and a mechanic who thinks he can swindle her out of some money just because she’s poor, female, and out of options. And, by the time I saw it, a recession had eclipsed the ongoing struggles from survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Ike, making movies like this one and the fantastic Frozen River all the more poignant.
And surely, by now, we all know how I feel about female interactions with the street and the road.
I was also sold by Michelle Williams in the starring role. I thought Williams was great in Brokeback Mountain and Synecdoche, New York. I even found her adorable and charming in The Baxter, an otherwise airless rip-off of The Apartment. I’ve been a fan since Dawson’s Creek and feel that her emergent success in the American indie/prestige/smart wave film scene is vindication for all the punishment she had to endure on the WB teen soap as the tragic bad girl Jen Lindley who withered away while the two boys who really loved each other fought over the self-righteous good girl who bit her lip and tucked her hair behind her ears while America briefly considered it acting. I know now that many think of her as Heath Ledger’s pseudo-widow or Spike Jonze’s perhaps-girlfriend or a TV actress who lucked into some hipster cache, but I think Williams is great in her own right. I think Wendy and Lucy is the first time we really get to see what she can do.
Williams tremendously underplays Wendy, making her at once vulnerable and unmoved; a real survivor who occasionally loses her patience with cruel, illogical systems of power (for example, the cost of throwing her in jail for shoplifting a can of dog food exceeds the retail value of said dog food), but never loses her grace, resourcefulness, willingness to connect with others, or sense of moral decency.
Also, as my friend Curran pointed out, there’s an ambiguity to Wendy that is interesting — we know very little about her, including her orientation, which is never made explicit. In the context of Reichardt’s body of work, a queer reading seems possible. For example, Old Joy is an achingly romantic story about two male friends, one of whom is assuredly in love with the other, the other ambivalent of his feelings. And, in the context of Wendy’s plight, her emotionally distant family members (who we never see) may speak to the larger problem of homeless and drifting LGBT youth cast out by their families.
But the thing that made me really want to see the movie, and that stayed in my ears long after the screening, was the music. And God no, not this.
I’m referring to the “score.” I put the word in quotes because it consists of a few bars of a melancholic, unresolved tune, hummed periodically by the protagonist. The piece was written by singer-songwriter Will Oldham. Unfortunately, I can’t find a clip for you dear readers, but I encourage you to see and hear it for yourself.
What made me want to see a movie based on its score was the response it got from some cinephile friends. They hated it, considered it pretentious. I think it caused them to dismiss the film outright.
However, I love the score. For one, I think it makes sense — the movie’s commitment to realism is reflected in its strict use of diegetic sound (fancy term for sounds organic to the narrative environment). Thus, if Wendy’s car breaks down (and with it, her car radio), it makes sense that she’d hum something to herself, if only to break up the tension of being stranded in an unfamiliar place.
More importantly, I think we have another site through which to interrogate the notion of sole authorship. The score was written by Will Oldham. However, it is performed by Williams as Wendy within the movie, thus blurring the boundaries of writer, performer, and instrumentalist and demonstrating the true collaborative nature of filmmaking. By making it less apparent who is actually responsible for providing its musical accompaniment, perhaps there is room to consider both Williams and Oldham (along with Reichardt) as authors of the movie’s sound.
