Yearly Archives: 2012

The Descendants

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Writer-director Alexander Payne’s films—if About Schmidt, Sideways, and now The Descendantsare any indication—are sensitive, expressive investigations into white, middle-class, heterosexual masculinity.  George Clooney, recently nominated for an Academy Award for his role, for which he already won a Golden Globe, plays Matt King, a real estate lawyer in Hawai’i whose life falls apart when his wife’s injury in a boating accident leaves her in an irreversible coma.  In the voiceover that frames much of the film, Matt admits that he’s always been the back-up parent to his two daughters, and can’t quite fathom what to do with his family when he’s left in charge.

As his wife lies in a hospital bed kept alive by a ventilator and IV fluids, Matt is called to his 10-year-old daughter Scottie’s elementary school to apologize for the photographs the girl took of her indisposed mother, which she pasted into an album to share at show and tell.  Then he has to bring Scottie (Amara Miller) to a classmate’s house to apologize for more of her indiscretions.  The kid is foul-mouthed and unpredictable; as Matt talks on the phone, he sees her throwing deck chairs into the family pool.  So he wrangles Scotty onto a plane and goes off to the Big Island to collect her 17-year-old sister, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), hoping she can help out.

Instead, Matt finds Alex drinking with a friend, out past her curfew on the grounds of the private school at which she boards.  When he and Scottie bring Alex home, she’s hostile and impertinent.  At her last visit home, she fought with her mom, and doesn’t hesitate to inform Matt that his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) was having an affair.  Matt knows he’s been an inattentive husband and an absent father, but this news unravels what he thought was his safe, secure world.

Clooney is a subtle actor, with an admirable willingness to push beyond his handsome, action-star reputation.  (He’s also very good as a corrupt presidential candidate in The Ides of March.)  Matt’s face and bearing change in small but significant ways when Alex tells him about Elizabeth’s infidelity.  He changes from a smooth public operator to a man humiliated by what he didn’t know about the most intimate aspects of his own life.

This new knowledge unmans him, but it also (of course) humanizes him, and sends him careening toward his own redemption.  In his more feminized role as a cuckold, Matt also gets a handle on his parenting.  He and Alex form a bond over their determination to track down and confront Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), the realtor who was Elizabeth’s other man.

Once the story focuses on finding Brian Speer, The Descendants becomes a kind of intra-Hawai’i road movie, except that Matt and his family fly among the islands to track Brian down.  [Spoiler alert, though nothing in the film is really a surprise.]  They’re accompanied by Sid (Nick Krause), Alex’s the hapless guy friend, whose presence she insists will help her be more civil to her father and her family.  While at first Sid seems a thoughtless, insensitive child—he laughs at her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s and doesn’t seem very sympathetic to Matt’s plight—it turns out that he recently lost his father and proves more emotionally acute than Payne at first lets on.  The foursome slowly, carefully reconstitutes a semblance of family by replacing their grief over Elizabeth’s impending death with their wrath about Brian Speer.

When they find him on Kaua’i, and it turns out Speer has a wife and two small kids.  Their rage dissipates into irritated sorrow, as Matt understands that the man he’s pictured as a mythic monster is really just an ordinary person who made a mistake.  In their climactic confrontation, Matt insists things happen for a reason, but Speer argues that, to the contrary, sometimes things just happen.  Living within that capriciousness is part of Matt’s life lesson, and forgiveness becomes the film’s rather pat, too comfortable denouement.

Elizabeth dies after they remove the ventilator—in accord with her living will.  Matt and his daughters sprinkle her ashes off a canoe they row out to sea, encircling the dissolving ash with their leis as the huge hotels of the Oahu shore loom in the background.  In the film’s last shot, Matt, Alex, and Scottie lounge silently but companionably on the family couch, watching March of the Penguins together as they eat ice cream.  With the stationary camera set in a medium shot, we watch them make room for one another, sharing a blanket and their dessert as they listen to Sydney Poitier narrate the epic story of penguin families and their journey.  The analogy couldn’t be clearer.

Payne contrives the plot to serve Matt’s character development.  As in Sideways, all that really happens in The Descendants is that a man weathers a mid-life crisis and comes out on the other side, knowing himself a little better and becoming more forgiving of himself and his circumstances.  Matt, mind you, has a very good life—his last name, after all, is “King,” and his family owns a large parcel of land on Oahu, the sale of which the whole state is apparently tracking.

When it turns out that the Brian Speer (whose name is also perhaps too symbolic) stands to profit from the sale, Matt waxes sentimental about being Hawaiian (his great-grandmother was an island native).  Against the wishes of his (mostly male) cousins, Matt decides to keep the land (and a beautiful stretch of gorgeous blue-green ocean and pristine sand and dunes it is, too—the film makes Hawai’i look like paradise).

Clooney’s performance is open and moving.  He abandons his movie star glamor to play a man who wears short-sleeved Hawai’in shirts and pastel pants with high-riding waists.  His hair is streaked with gray and his face is lined and worn.  He’s deceived by a man who’s clearly not his kind or dignified equal.  But Speer’s very inadequacies secure Matt’s essential goodness.  His emotions move from rage to forgiveness.  He kisses his unconscious wife’s cracked lips when he tearfully says good-bye, using the occasion of her loss to accept his own failings and become a better man.

Matt and Alex find their new and better selves over Elizabeth’s inert body, talking to her as she lies immobile and unhearing.  Alex, too, rises to the occasion of her mother’s death, guiding her little sister and supporting her dad.  Woodley is terrific as Alex, playing a girl thrust into adulthood perhaps a bit too quickly without a trace of sentimentality.  She’s smart, thoughtful, and always seems in control, registering Alex’s emotion without wallowing.  She matches Clooney scene for scene.

But as in Payne’s Sideways, women are the agents of the men’s transformation in The Descendants.  Clooney makes Matt King appealing enough that the film is a pleasure to watch, but I preferred him in Up in the Air, which reversed gender stereotypes by making Clooney’s character the naïve romantic with unfounded expectations of the woman with whom he’s having an affair.

Too many contemporary films rely on the old (often dead) woman-as-agent-of-man’s-self-knowledge-and-redemption trope.  Just in the recent crop of 2011 fall and Christmas movies, for only two among many examples, Ryan Gosling’s character in The Ides of March has his epiphany when the beautiful, young, naïve Evan Rachel Wood character commits suicide over her affair with Clooney’s presidential candidate-senator.

And in the critically touted Iranian film The Separation (nominated for a Best Foreign Film Academy Award), the wife who insists on divorcing her husband is blamed for the subsequent family tragedies and indirectly for the miscarriage of the woman whom he hires to replace his wife’s domestic labor.  The considerably less privileged woman is also portrayed as immoral, while her husband—despite his tendency toward violence—is redeemed by his grief over his unborn child’s loss.  The pattern persists.

The Descendants is well-written, beautifully photographed, and wonderfully acted, but the story it tells is tired and familiar.  And the woman, once again, has to take it lying down.

The Feminist Spectator

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Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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David Fincher’s tense, moody film adaptation of the popular Stieg Larsson book actually improves on the reading experience. Where the book offered a great story with plodding prose, Fincher’s film cuts the narrative to the bone while staying faithful to Larsson’s plot and characters. The film’s visual style makes it a pleasure to watch, evoking both the cosmopolitanism and gritty urbanism of Stockholm and the frozen, snow-blown north Sweden countryside where much of the central mystery unravels.

For a film that’s in large part about an ace computer hacker, Fincher both downplays and makes visually interesting Lisbeth Salander’s notorious skills, intercutting shots of her snub-nailed fingers flying over her keyboard with those of her intense gray eyes, replete with eyebrow-piercings, peering intensely at the screen. Only sparingly does Fincher use screen shots that indicate she’s reading other people’s email.

The film is a huge improvement over the Swedish version released a few years ago and starring Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth, which I found a more literal, bloodless adaptation. Fincher’s slick Hollywood idioms turn the story into a stylish, fast-paced thriller. In the opening credits (as other critics have noted), the director nods both musically and visually to the iconic James Bond films, a nice intertextual reference, since Fincher’s Mikael Blomkvist is played by Daniel Craig, the latest Bond.

Fincher also judiciously uses atmospheric, nearly Technicolor flashbacks to the Vanger family’s 1960s history, when the family patriarch’s treasured niece, Harriet, mysteriously disappeared. Fincher makes the American adaptation of Larsson’s story more vivid, lending cinematic appeal to the narrative while he moves it smoothly through its paces.

The real revelation in Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander. Nominated for a Golden Globe (which she lost to Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady) and now for a Best Actress Academy Award, Mara deserves the accolades heaped on her performance.  Her Lisbeth is slight but fierce; Mara seems both smaller and steelier than Rapace was in the role, more emotionally fragile but more physically and psychically determined.

In her early scenes in her kindly employer Dragan Armansky’s office (Goran Kisnjic, in a small but empathetic supporting role) and in her first meeting with Nils Bjurman (Vorick van Wageningen), her evil new guardian, Lisbeth refuses to make eye contact.

But when she does shift her gaze to look directly and defiantly at her interlocutors, you see a young woman who’s absolutely in control of her traumatic past (about which we learn very little in this first film of the trilogy).  She’s taught herself a kind of discipline that keeps her highly functioning while letting her passion for vengeance simmer just underneath the surface of her skin.  Those gray eyes become the swing door to a boiler room of the soul, where her rage is stoked by knowing that the social corruptions—most of them gendered—that have kept her a ward of the state since she was twelve continue to structure Swedish life.

On the other hand, if you don’t know her backstory, Lisbeth doesn’t necessarily seem motivated by revenge.  My intrepid film-going companion, Feminist Spectator 2, hasn’t read any of the Larsson books, and found Lisbeth even more fierce and fascinating because she appears brilliant, scary, and tough without being psychologized.

Dragon Tattoo is, of course, just the first in what will be a new trilogy of films based on Larsson’s story.  In this one, all we hear of Lisbeth’s past is what she mutters to Blomkvist when he’s finally gained her trust.  When he asks her why she’s still a ward of the state, Lisbeth admits matter-of-factly that she’s considered criminally insane because she set her father on fire and burned 80 percent of his body.  But since even this tiny, teasing revelation comes relatively late in the film, FS2 says spectators have already come to admire her without needing this justification.

Lisbeth’s sordid history will be fully explicated in the next two films.  Mara, however, plays her with full knowledge of the character’s past and her journey into her vexed present.  Mara’s achievement is to make Salander a fierce, even feminist, character without creating her as a monster.  Sure, all her Goth accoutrements are in place, from her jet-black Mohawk to her kohl-lined eyes to her multiple facial and body piercings, along with her leather jacket, knapsack, boots, and green canvas cargo pants.

Lisbeth smokes like a tough, holding her cigarettes between her thumb and her forefinger and squinting at the ubiquitous smoke.  She wears ratty black t-shirts and sweatshirts with hoods she pulls up to hide beneath.  When Blomkvist barges in on Lisbeth and a one-night-stand she’s picked up at a lesbian bar, her tattered t-shirt reads “Fuck Off You Fucking Fuck” in faded stenciling.  (But he’s undeterred.)  Her neck is adorned with heavy chains and razor blades, the jewelry of a woman who refuses to submit.

[If you haven’t read Larsson’s books or seen the Swedish film trilogy or Fincher’s adaptation, spoilers follow.]

Although Lisbeth is a force to contend with, her new guardian decides he can use his power over her for his own nefarious sexual purposes. Bjurman forces her head into his lap at their first meeting, threatening to commit her to an institution if she doesn’t comply. When she sees him again, required to ask him for money since he’s taken control of her affairs, he rapes her brutally, sadistically enjoying the pain and humiliation he inflicts. But it doesn’t take long for Lisbeth to exact her revenge, forever reducing her rapist to a quaking eunuch.

To Fincher’s credit, the film doesn’t sensationalize Lisbeth. The other characters don’t react to her as though she’s a spectacle, undercutting what might be spectators’ expectations that she’ll create a stir simply by how she looks. Instead, lawyer, Dirch Frode (Steven Berkoff), dispatched by the wealthy Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), treats Lisbeth respectfully, aware of her talent as a researcher and overlooking her open hostility.

Likewise, when Blomkvist peremptorily visits her apartment after he learns that she’s hacked into his computer, he, too, is unfazed by her unkempt appearance and aggressive demeanor. Instead, he insists that she drink the coffee and eat the breakfast he fixes for her while he persuades her to help him find Harriet Vanger’s murderer.

As FS2 points out, that the film’s “good” men react generously to Lisbeth directs spectators to see her magnanimously, too. On the other hand, FS2 continues, Mara is a beautiful young woman, and the camera exploits her small, perfect features, her flawless skin, and her clear gray eyes. That is, despite all her bravado and her frightening accessories, Fincher takes care to on some level glamorize Lisbeth, to keep her safe from the audience’s, as well as the other characters’, antipathy.

Even the police officers she approaches while she’s doing her work seem to find nothing remiss in Lisbeth’s outfit or her bearing. They worry that the information she wants will upset her or they’re annoyed because she expects unusual access and demands too much time. But they obviously don’t see her as a freak.

Nonetheless, she rides a mean motorcycle and wears a fearsome helmet. Lisbeth’s heroism comes from her character more than it does from her actions. When she forces the villainous Martin Vanger (Stellan Skarsgard) off the bridge on his family’s island, causing his car to overturn and catch fire as he stares out, doomed and helpless in the driver’s seat, Lisbeth watches without remorse.

And what a nice switch to see her rescue Blomkvist from certain death instead of vice versa.  Too often in suspense films like Dragon Tattoo, it’s the woman—however intrepid and smart—who is saved at the end by the man when she finds herself unwittingly trapped in the villain’s house.  InDrag Tattoo, on the contrary, at the film’s climactic moment it’s Craig/Bond/Blomkvist who is trussed up like a bird waiting to be plucked, and it’s Lisbeth whose eleventh hour appearance, wielding a nasty golf club, saves his life.

Lisbeth and Blomkvist simultaneously solve the central mystery of who has been murdering women—all gruesomely raped and slaughtered with references to Bible verses—around the time Harriet Vanger disappeared.  But it’s Lisbeth who tracks the killer to his lair after Blomkvist falls into his trap, and Lisbeth who, once the demon is dispatched, goes on to vindicate Blomkvist’s wrongful slander conviction in the Wennerstrom corporate corruption case that sets Larsson’s plot in motion.

The Wennerstrom revenge subplot of Dragon Tattoo is nearly campy, as Lisbeth sheds her signature style for a Dolce and Gabbana look that one critic rightly called “drag.”  She dons a blond wig and outsized sunglasses, a form-fitting dress and stiletto heels, to move some funds around various off-shore banks, creating a trail of financial malfeasance that bankrupts Wennerstrom, exonerates Blomkvist, and secures Lisbeth’s independent future.

In her drag scenes, Mara beautifully performs Lisbeth’s disdain for her temporary performance of conventional femininity.  When her masquerade is over, she tosses her earrings down an airport sink and throws her wig out the window of a train.  The sequence is a wonderful illustration of Lisbeth’s skill as an operative, but an even better demonstration of her utter aversion for traditional feminine costumes and behavior.

I was actually surprised that Fincher’s film leaves Lisbeth’s feminism so intact.  I found Fincher’s representations of women in his film, The Social Network, misogynist.  Those who disagreed with me often pointed to Mara’s character in that film; she plays Mark Zuckerberg’s smart and cutting but quickly dismissed and ultimately irrelevant girlfriend.

But while women were incidental sexual playthings in The Social Network, Dragon Tattoo is very much Lisbeth’s film.  She’s its moral and narrative center and its keen social observer.  Watch Mara’s ears and eyes perk up when Blomkvist invites her to help him find “a man who kills women” (which was apparently the title Larsson preferred for his first book).

Lisbeth is also the film’s most interesting character study, not because of how she looks and dresses but because of how she reacts to the world around her and then acts.  Mara has little dialogue, but her expressive face and her physical commitment to Lisbeth make her fascinating.  Watch her exit from the elevator where she excoriates the reprehensible Bjurman and leaves him terrified as the doors close behind her.  Just turning her back on her guardian is a moment of utter command, clarity, and complexity.

Lisbeth/Mara also brings Dragon Tattoo a surprising sense of humor.  When she begins working with Blomkvist, the couple hunch over his laptop in the cold cabin Henrik Vanger has provided for him.  She rolls her eyes as Blomkvist slowly pecks at the keys to bring up screen images.  It’s a small but hilarious moment, as Mara gives Lisbeth an interior life lets her drolly, wordlessly comment on her male partner’s technological inadequacies without needing to perform her superiority.

Lisbeth is firmly in control of their relationship.  She initiates their first sexual encounter; she demands that he stop talking until she has her orgasm; she saves him from certain death; and she delivers the goods on Blomkvist’s nemesis, Hans-Erik Wennerstrom (Ulf Friberg), which restores Blomkvist’s reputation.

My quibbles with Fincher’s representation of Lisbeth are minor.  For example, after she’s raped by Bjurman, she stumbles home for the de rigueur victim-in-the-shower scene, where we see her bruises and the blood running from her body into the tub.  (I guess it’s difficult to signify pain in a film without these iconic signs.  Although Mara does an excellent job screaming Lisbeth’s rage as she struggles against Bjurman’s restraints.)   The next time we see her, Lisbeth is in a lesbian bar, where she picks up the (beautiful) woman who Blomkvist finds sharing her bed the next morning.

The juxtaposition of the rape and the lesbian bar scene makes it seem as though male sexual violence has propelled Lisbeth toward sex with women.  Instead, in the book, she has an on-going relationship with a woman that mirrors Blomkvist’s relationship with his colleague, Erika Berger (Robin Wright), and clarifies that one of Lisbeth’s charms is her assertive bisexuality.

Likewise, Dragon Tattoo’s last several scenes focus too much on Lisbeth’s unexpected affection for Mikael.  She tells her beloved former guardian, Holmer Palmgren (Bengt CW Carlsson), who’s in a nursing home recovering from a stroke, that she’s made a friend.  She buys Blomkvist an expensive leather jacket and she rides off to deliver it to him.

Despite her strength of character and insight, Lisbeth is emotionally immature, and hasn’t picked up Blomkvist’s cues.  So she’s devastated when she arrives at the Millennium magazine offices to find the flirtatious Mikael going off in a taxi with Erika.  The film ends on Lisbeth’s romantic disappointment, which undercuts her earlier rejections of heterosexual femininity, especially for those spectators who haven’t read or seen the earlier version of the trilogy and don’t understand—as they say—where she’s coming from.

But still, Fincher and Mara make Lisbeth complicated enough.  That final moment could be read as a strong woman realizing she was about to succumb to sentiment and abruptly choosing not to. (Well, maybe that’s a stretch).  And Lisbeth does seem young.  In comparison, Fincher portrays Blomkvist as squarely middle-aged, and steers Craig far from his Bond action hero routine.  The actor sports an unshaven, grizzled salt-and-pepper chin throughout the film, and rather than leaping tall buildings and consulting cool gadgets, he’s often physically compromised.

For example, when he creeps around Martin’s glass-walled lair in the film’s climax, he’s the one who takes a kitchen knife from the counter, intending to defend himself as ineffectually as a typical female victim in a horror film.  Blomkvist is the one who falls when he tries to run from Martin’s house and who is lured back in to the man’s trap.  As Martin boasts with a sneer, people’s desire not to offend often trumps their instincts for self-preservation. (Skarsgard plays the villain with the perfect mix of unctuous obsequiousness and arrogant pride.)

Blomkvist is the first man who’s demonstrated this self-defeating instinct to Martin.  Blomkvist is a metrosexual intellectual, a not quite effete representative of the fourth estate, and Craig plays him with intelligent bemusement and horror at the grisly murders his research uncovers.  His black-rimmed glasses hang crookedly off his ears instead of over his head, and he pulls them onto his face to peer into documents and computer screens.  Using eyeglasses to signify intelligence is a tired cliché, but Craig at least makes the gesture convincing.

Wright plays Blomkvist’s long-time friend and sometime bed-mate Erika as his intellectual and political companion.  Wright’s beauty is only enhanced by the lines on her face.  The middle-aged couple has a lived-in relationship, even though she remains married to her husband.  Blomkvist and Erika are comfortably established in their lives, in contrast to Lisbeth, who’s still struggling with the tangled tendrils of her past.

Lisbeth’s relationship with Blomkvist might be a turning point.  A scene in which they work together on the bed in a hotel room, with him in a white terry robe and her in her Goth outfit, is a nice moment of intimacy across clear differences.  But she’s still testing new contours for her life, while his are indisputably firm.

It’s a shame, then, that the film’s ending makes Lisbeth seem a jilted lover, when her character is otherwise so compelling, strong and competent.

One last note:  I’m surprised that critics and spectators refer so often to what they consider the film’s extreme violence and sexuality.  While the rape scene is certainly horrific, Dragon Tattoo didn’t strike me as significantly more brutal than any other shoot-‘em up, set-‘em-on-fire action flick.

Does this film seem more extreme because its hero is a woman?  Because Lisbeth neutralizes Bjurman with a stun gun and then tattoos “I am a rapist pig” across his naked stomach?  Because it’s Martin, the male killer of women, who dies in a ball of fire?  Or because it’s Daniel Craig who’s victimized and saved by a woman in the end?  Just wondering.

The Feminist Spectator

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George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, 2010-2011

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Just a note to say that The Feminist Spectator blog won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2010-2011.  I’m delighted by this honor.  The Feminist Spectator is the first blog ever to receive the award in its 56 year history, and I’m only the seventh woman to win in the history of the award.  The last woman so honored was my friend and colleague Alisa Solomon, who won for her book Re-dressing the Canon:  Essays on Gender and Theatre in 1998.  I attended Alisa’s celebration party at PS122 that year, and remember the pride I felt in her accomplishment.  I’m thrilled to be joining her and so many other critics and writers I admire in this distinguished company.

Other recent award winners include Charles McNulty (chief theatre critic at the LA Times), Marc Robinson (for his book The American Play), Randy Gener (for his writing at American Theatre), H. Scott McMillin (for his book The Musical as Drama), and Ray Knapp (for his book The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity).  The prize is adjudicated by the chairs of the English Departments at Cornell, Yale, and Princeton, though Cornell administers the award.

Karen Fricker wrote a lovely post in her theatre blog at The Guardian about the significance of my award, noting that Nathan award’s history of gender imbalance “might reflect the field’s demographics, [but] it does nonetheless prompt questioning about why criticism is still largely perceived and practiced as a man’s game, when the accomplishments of Dolan and other leaders in the field . . . prove that turning out incisive, engaging critical prose about what happens on a stage does not require a Y chromosome.”

The significance of the Nathan award going to a blog has also been remarked by various commentators.  London-based theatre critic Mark Shenton, on his blog Shenton’s View, suggests that “the web can also usefully provide a forum for critics to do their work away from the commercial and space restraints that typically operate in newspapers.”  Shenton discusses the recent firing of long-time Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman as an example of the sad state of contemporary arts criticism, and says that Hoberman has responded to his ouster by announcing that he’ll start a blog.  Shenton also notes that Howard Kissel, who once wrote for the New York Daily News, now regularly contributes his criticism to the online Huffington Post.

Clearly, there’s a lot to say about the state of theatre and arts criticism.  I’m hoping to sponsor a panel discussion about gender and criticism, and about blogging as a forum for criticism, as part of my Nathan award celebration.  Save Saturday, April 28, tentatively planned as the date for an event here in Princeton.  Details forthcoming.

Meanwhile, I want to take the opportunity of the award to thank those of you who read this blog.  When I first started writing The Feminist Spectator (seven years ago this August), I felt like I was sending words out in the void, happy to see them move off my private screen but unsure where and with whom they might land.  Learning that so many of you read the blog, and engaging your comments and quarrels, gives me great pleasure, and encourages me about people’s desire to engage long-form, generative arts criticism.

I’m so grateful for the critical community your reading creates for my writing.

The Feminist Spectator

Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same

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I had the pleasure of seeing Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same at the Galway Film Festival in Ireland last summer.  It’s now playing through January 12 at ReRunGastropub Theatre in DUMBO (more info below).

The film, written and directed by Madeleine Olnek, is a lovely, quirky, comic fantasia, with a beautifully understated performance by Lisa Haas as the sweetly codependent lesbian who’s fallen in love with a space alien.  Filmed in a sort of Ed Wood, low-budget camp sci-fi style, Codependent offers a fun queer evening at the movies.

Olnek was a regular at the WOW Café in the 1980s, when the underground lesbian performance space was breaking rules about theatre and poaching from popular culture to rewrite what we understood of gender and sexuality norms.  The film is based on her play of the same title, which will soon be published in a collection of work from WOW that Holly Hughes and Alina Troyano (Carmelita Tropicana) are co-editing for the University of Michigan Press.  Olnek made the play into an indie feature film that’s now making the rounds on the festival circuit.  I caught the showing on the first night of the Galway Film Festival at Town Hall last July.

In true WOW style, the film both quotes and breaks the genre conventions on which it’s based. Jane (Haas) is a desperately shy, lonely lesbian clerk at a greeting card store, who finds a note dropped seemingly out of the blue in which a lesbian space alien asks if they can be friends.  As Jane’s therapist (the wry Rae C. Wright) tries to help Jane puzzle through her emotions while persuading her that she hasn’t really been contacted by aliens, the planet Zots suffers an environmental crisis.  They believe their ozone layer is being destroyed by “big feelings,” and resolve to send to Earth any of their citizens whose love affairs are damaging their planet.  On Earth, the reasoning goes, the aliens’ hearts will be broken, and they’ll return to Zots cured of their commitment to love.

And so begins a tale of aliens-on-another-planet, in which the sexual and cultural mores of Earth clash with the otherworldly style of the citizens of Zots.  Beaming down into Jane’s world, Zoinx (the handsome, square-jawed Susan Ziegler) targets the shy lesbian for her experiment in Earth-bound relationships.  Despite her monotone, high-tech, echoing voice and her utter lack of human affect, Jane finds Zoinx charming.

Part of the film’s joke is that Jane never acknowledges Zoinx’s strangeness, accepting the alien’s bald head, her never-removed large, Elizabethan-style collar, which nearly encircles her starkly prominent pate, and her strange way of expressing affection (she puts her hand against Jane’s nose in an awkward gesture whenever she’s feeling intimate).  Jane is so delighted by Zoinx’s company that she happily engages her alien customs and generously teaches Zoinx the equally strange ways of Earth.

Two other aliens have been sent to Earth to participate in Zots’ project.  Bar (Cynthia Kaplan) and Zylar (Jackie Monahan) have the misfortune of having “big feelings” for one another, but try to find earthlings who might cure them of their mutual affliction.

Olnek includes hilarious scenes in which various local lesbians respond to Zylar’s personal ad (written and videoed), and find themselves incapable of understanding or accepting what looks to them like weird role-playing.  In their one-note delivery, Bar and Zylar’s declarations of desperate love both undercut and underline the typical (or is it stereotypical?) excess of lesbian attachments with truly funny, sweet knowingness.

Two “men in black,” federal agents of some sort who track the aliens’ activity on Earth, shadow Jane and Zoinx, trying to figure out the place from which the aliens enter and leave the country. Their scenes are filmed almost entirely in a parked suburban van, where the senior agent (Dennis Davis) complains that he’s always passed up for promotion, watching those he’s trained leapfrog over him professionally.  His junior partner (Alex Karpovsky) asks him probing questions, inquiring, for instance, whether his wife, Debbie, is a “transman,” to the guy’s utter perplexity.

The two men’s deadpan humor offers a terrific counterbalance to Jane and the aliens’ shenanigans. Their surveillance activities also allow Olnek to feed them anthropological lines about lesbian relationships, as their ridiculous comments about whether these romances last (for one example) provide both a dominant cultural voice and an eye that lets them peer into the margins with a rather friendly, liberal curiosity.

Davis and Karpovsky play their scenes with a lovely improvisational tone and Davis, in particular, comments as much on conventional masculinity as Jane and the aliens comment on lesbian relationships.

Codependent Lesbian Space Alien is filmed with an intentionally low-budget gestalt reminiscent of Ed Woods’ opus and the science fiction movies of the 1950s.  Olnek uses low-tech special effects to represent the aliens’ space ship, and the film’s black and white stock lets her use fun ‘50s-style titles and images of galaxies swirling in space.

The music, too, quotes ‘50s melodramatic film conventions to over-emphasize emotions and to help announce Olnek’s affectionate parodies not only of sci-fi but of stereotypes of contemporary lesbian relationships.

Watching actors dressed as aliens walking robotically through real New York East and West Village locations while no one on the streets blinks an eye is also a hoot.  Codependents ends up being a sweet, funny love story in which two deeply “different” women triumph over their odds.

>At a public discussion after the showing in Galway, Olnek described how she researched the genre and understands its roots in Cold War paranoia.  Aliens, she pointed out, where often portrayed as they are in her film (that is, bald and homogeneous in appearance) to represent Americans’ fear of the uniformity a Soviet take-over might impose.  Likewise, Olnek suggested, their monotone speaking voices borrow from those ‘50s sci-fi movies, in which the aliens’ voices, too, were leeched of individual character and affect.

Putting these characteristics in a lesbian context, however, makes them sweet and hilarious.  Jane takes Zoinx out for a drink at the Cubbyhole, a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, where Jane whispers that the clientele tends to be unfriendly.  When Zoinx asks Jane to dance, she happily complies, trying to turn her embarrassment into a kind of pride when Zoinx’s moves prove anything but conventional.  The reaction shots are hysterical.

Go; you’ll have fun.

The Feminist Spectator

Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, through January 12, ReRunGastropub, DUMBO, Brooklyn.

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