celestial-depths

[celestial-depths]

Poor Things and Born Sexy Yesterday

(spoilers for Poor Things)

I stumbled on a discussion on whether Bella Baxter from the movie Poor Things (2023) is a representation of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope coined by video essayist Pop Culture Detective, who defines it as a mostly fantasy and sci-fi adjacent trope of a regular human man falling in love with a beautiful, otherworldly woman who, through some plot quirk or another, has no knowledge of social norms and no sexual or romantic past. Even though he is brutally average, he is able to win her love simply because he is the first (human) man she connects with and thus everything that's basic about him is impressive to her. Some examples of the trope given by Pop Culture Detective in his video essay are Leeloo from Fifth Element (the physically grown yet mentally child-like alien creature who falls in love with a taxi driver in a wifebeater) and Madison from Splash (a clothes-aversive mermaid who thinks that Tom Hanks is the most enchanting man in the world). I love Pop Culture Detective's work, and the Born Sexy Yesterday video essay was a cultural reset in my personal history. I saw the video when it premiered six years ago, but it has never fully left my mind, so of course I immediately thought of it when I saw Poor Things a couple of weeks ago. The movie certainly touches on the same themes that the Born Sexy Yesterday is made of. However, I think that the movie is an intentional subversion and a satire of the trope rather than a sincere execution of it.

The main character of the movie Bella Baxter starts out as a grotesquely literal version of the trope, as she is literally a newborn in the shape of a conventionally attractive woman who is being actively shielded from the influence of the outside world. She has the brain of a baby salvaged from the fresh corpse of a deceased pregnant woman, planted inside the skull of the reanimated body of the aforementioned woman as an experiment done by the unorthodox doctor Godwin Baxter. He keeps her locked inside his house and controls every aspect of her life, so when he invites the young doctor Max McCandles to join his research, McCandles is served what is essentially the perfect Born Sexy Yesterday experience: an exclusive access to a beautiful and naive young woman who is in a prime position of being groomed into whatever her keepers wish her to become.

Or so they would think.

A sincere Born Sexy Yesterday would be fully fascinated by this power dynamic and probably leave her here to be romanced by McCandles for the rest of the film. The audience would be expected to assume McCandles's perspective and indulge in the fantasy of falling in love with the untainted woman who has neither the life experience nor the critical thinking skills needed to question him.

But, fortunately, the movie doesn't remain here. After the first act, the movie switches its point of view from McCandles to Bella and starts putting her experiences to the forefront. She starts developing interests that absolutely do not align with the wants and needs of the men around her, and she begins to learn things that clash with the essence of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope. Soon, she has grown into a headstrong, independent, sexually experienced, intellectually curious woman who had zero interest in entertaining the whims of men and who intends to live fully for herself and herself alone: an absolute antithesis of the clueless and subservient blank slate the trope would require her to be. My reading of the film is that it's an intentional satire and an autopsy of the BSY trope and the gender politics that gave birth to it. It criticizes the men who entertain fantasies like it by making them look like absolute losers, urging us to ponder on what the hell is wrong with these creeps who see nothing wrong with drooling over a woman who is mentally a toddler instead of their intellectual equal.

The movie also reads as a critique of how women are socialized into a patriarchy. Godwin treats Bella just like a possession of his. Her body and her life are completely under his control from the moment she is "born" (another act in which neither Bella nor the woman she was born from had any say in), which isn't dissimilar to how a lot of fathers view their daughters. He wishes to keep her under constant supervision until the end of her life, until she protests and gets him to change his mind. When he asks McCandles to marry her, the two men treat the proposed marriage as a contract between the two of them rather than as a contract between McCandles and Bella herself. Again, this isn't too different to what marriage between men and women has meant throughout history.

McCandles is romantically interested in Bella even though he is fully aware of the fact that she is mentally a child. He seems to be looking forward to starting a sexual relationship with her after they are wed, as if the seal of marriage would make the intellectual disparity between them any less iffy. This bears resemblance to the way men in the real world prey on young girls with little to no sexual experience and whose brains are not fully developed because they're easier to control than grown women. I don't think that McCandles's hypocrisy is lost on the film. He agrees to marry Bella almost in the same breath as expressing his desire to keep her safe from other men, as if his desire to bed a person who is intellectually at the level of a five-year-old was any better than theirs.

When Bella chooses to leave Godwin's house to explore the world, the two men immediately replace her with a new experiment, showing that they were never truly interested in her as a person. They wanted the eternal baby, the thing that they can cage and control, and not the person who can think and learn and disagree with them. This exemplifies how disposable women are when they no longer serve their limited purpose in a patriarchy, and how replaceable people are when they are primarily viewed as bodies to be used. (Sidenote: I do think that Godwin and McCandles eventually learn to appreciate Bella for the person she is and that they both grow to be better people by the end of the film, but I still attest that these two are total creeps at least by this point of the movie.)

And then there's the supreme loser of the movie: the sleazy lawyer Wedderburn, who slithers into Bella's life and convinces her to run away with him. He is the darkest example of the kind of person who is drawn to inexperienced women like the ones represented in BSY movies - a predator who finds pleasure in the prospect of getting to corrupt and consume an innocent. He intends to take advantage of Bella and abandon her once he's gotten his fill only to find himself choking on his prey, who turns out not to be the malleable, naive creature he thought her to be.

This is the point where I think the movie goes from simply critiquing the BSY trope and everything it represents to successfully subverting it. The characters who embody the BSY trope don't really evolve. The movies they appear in are not really interested in their inner worlds and individual experiences beyond whatever serves the interests of the male protagonists. These characters are projections of male fantasies, so there really isn't a way for them to exist without centering men. This is not the case with Bella, who quickly grows into her own woman who is only tangentially interested in the men around her.

The bright side of Bella's condition is that she isn't just unaware of the ways of the world, but that she's also unaffected by the years of patriarchal conditioning that most normal women are burdened with. She literally has no shame, no internalized misogyny, no history of crushing blows to her sense of self-worth, and no looming knowledge of societal norms society. She has skipped the part in life where she is constantly bombarded with demands to make herself smaller and more palatable, to hate herself, to think of her body and the way it finds pleasure as something disgusting and abnormal, to treat other women as competition, and to think of herself as so much less important than men that she must pursue their validation beyond all else. Because of this blessed defect, she is free in a very rare way.

Wedderburn absolutely cannot handle that. When Bella first gets to know him, he paints a flattering picture of himself as a proud social deviant who gleefully eschews the rules of polite society. However, when faced with the actually deviant Bella, who flatly refuses to obey and center him, Wedderburn is revealed to be a phony. He is not a genuine libertine. He does not want to live in a truly free world with a free spirit like Bella, because he is a pathetic, insecure little man who only likes women in scenarios where the power balance is stacked against them. In my opinion, this is a direct shot fired at the BSY trope and its average enjoyers: if your ideal woman is someone who is many steps behind you in terms of mental capacity and experience, you are quite pitiful and would not stand a chance in an equal playing field.

It's hilarious how Wedderburn loses his mind when Bella starts exhibiting the kind of behavior he himself has proudly displayed earlier in the film: having multiple sexual partners, keeping sex and feelings separate, not falling in love with him or treating him like he's special, dropping him once she's had enough of him, and generally living life in an unconventional way. Again, the movie is pointing out the hypocrisy in men who fetishize inexperienced women while bragging about their own sexual conquests.

The part in the movie where Bella becomes a sex worker delivers the final blow to whatever is left of the BSY trope in her story, because the trope relies on sexual exclusivity and the fetishization of virginity. By having many partners and gaining lots of sexual experience out of her own free will, Bella stops fitting the ideal of the untouched woman who can be deflowered and exclusively possessed by the male protagonist. Also, through the conversations between Bella and the other sex workers, the movie finds another way to address the politics behind certain men's sexual fantasies of women - such as pointing out that some men enjoy sex with women more the less the women themselves enjoy it. It's a stray observation that the movie doesn't get deep into, but it has its place in the tapestry of the general theme of what desire reveals about people.

Finally, there's Alfie, who gives Bella (and us) an idea of the kind of life Bella's "mother" lived - as well as the kind of life Bella herself might be living had she grown up the normal way. It seems hellish. She'd be living under the tyranny of her awful husband, under a constant threat of violence, under absolute bodily control. Alfie wants to impregnate her against her will and to mutilate her genitals to deprive her of pleasure, and there's nothing that she could do about it because he is her husband and thus legally allowed to lord over her. She sees a terrifying glimpse of the role even privileged women like her have in this world: objects who exist solely for the pleasure of the men who own them. I would venture to say that the same description lies in the underbelly of the BSY trope.

I am happy that the movie doesn't take its sweet time to revel in the horror of this part of the story like so many other movies that address the oppression of women do. Instead, Bella stays with Alfie just enough time to say a hard and a well-informed no to his bullshit before getting on her merry way.

I think Poor Things is such a great example of taking a trope and exploring its implications in a way that goes beyond just pointing it out or parodying it by simply repeating it.

[celestial-depths]

Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Mehness

(SPOILERS FOR DOCTOR STRANGE AND THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS) I was really expecting to love Doctor Strange And the Multiverse of Madness, but I didn’t. It did contain fun moments of splashy camp horror, but as a whole it sorely lacked soul and emotion, and the pacing was very much off.

Here’s a long-ass post detailing the problems I had with the movie:

1. Previously, in the MCU

Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness relied way too heavily on references to previous installments of the MCU in place of genuine plot and character development. Instead using the tools of filmmaking to set up the story and building emotional beats that lead to a pay-off, the movie just sort of vaguely waved its hand at its cinematic past and expected it to be enough.

The problem with this isn’t really even about some of the audience not being caught up (though that is not not a problem). I’ve seen all the previous movies and series, and I was nevertheless annoyed with the way the movie used references to other movies as a substitute for work it should have done for itself. Hence, the movie was missing many of its vital organs.

Example: Instead of taking the time to establish the concept of the multiverse and, most importantly, Stephen’s attitude towards it, the movie just skipped this whole part by quickly referring to the events of the recent Spider-Man movie. It’s perfectly fine for the movie not to pretend like the multiverse is a thing Stephen isn’t already very much aware of, but what the movie ended up throwing away with the bathwater was Stephen’s point of view.

How does he feel about messing with the multiverse with Spider-Man? Does he regret it? Has he learned something? Did this experience warn him against doing it again, or is he even more curious about exploring the possibilities multiverse?

We don’t know. The movie never allowed him to go there and show us what he thinks of his past actions.

2. According to the legends...

I bet that this movie went through many, MANY rewrites because it can’t seem to commit to a plot point long enough to turn it into something that matters. I felt like I was playing a game with way too many time-wasting side quests and a main object that never delivers.

The characters keep running from one mystical thing of utmost importance only to abandon it for the next mystical thing of utmost importance, and all that only ends up diluting the significance and muddying the meaning of these things in the process.

Meanwhile, the movie was sorely lacking in moments that do feel meaningful. Moments when character grow, when they bond with each other, when their conflicts clash, when they make crucial choices that tell us who they are deep down inside, when they just feel their feelings. There wasn’t any time for those, with the next big action sequence or the next magical ritual just around the corner from the previous one.

This is also a pacing issue. The movie had very few peaceful scenes, which also hurt the action and the excitement. It’s hard to remain invested in what’s essentially a two hour chase sequence when you’re allowed no moments to take a breath and reflect. Even Mad Max: Fury Road had pit stops.

3. Quo Vadis, Stephen Strange?

Marvel movies tend to work more often than not because the studio has had the good sense to focus on building strong characters who keep all the spectacle grounded.

Spider-Man: No Way Home, which premiered not long before this movie, is a very good example of this practice. That movie was full of hyped-up crossover appearances, mind-warping dips into the world of magic and multiverses, and maximalist action sequences, yet the movie worked because it was all anchored in Peter’s emotionally resonant character arc and the relationship he had with the people he loved. 

Multiverse of Madness lacked that emotional anchor, and it showed. Stephen Strange didn’t have a well-defined character arc of his own in this movie, and his relationships with the other characters in the film were barely fleshed out. There was a hint of a theme in him being sort of unhappy about not ending up with his ex and a highlighted yet disconnected line about his obsession with being in control, but the movie didn’t spend enough time exploring those inner conflicts long enough for them to truly matter.

I do feel like there’s a story to be told about Stephen’s hubris going wild in the multiverse when things don’t go his way, and that story was already told in one of the better episodes of What If...? Somehow, the Multiverse of Madness ended up doing so much less with Stephen than a single episode of a mediocre AU animated series did, and that’s telling.

I’m honestly not sure if anyone in charge of this franchise knows what to do with Stephen. He seems kind of lost and unmotivated in the beginning of this movie and ended up pretty much the same way. What’s his story, where is he going? Why is he the main character of this movie? I know that seems like a superfluous question because the movie bears his name, but being the main character requires more than just standing in the spotlight. We need to know what drives Stephen into what direction and why we should care, and I feel like this movie just didn’t do the work on that front.

Doctor Strange shouldn’t be a stranger in his own movie.

4. Wanda Why?

Wanda’s motivations in this film were strongly established, yet simplified to a fault. She was the best character in the movie thanks to Elizabeth Olsen’s magnetic performance, and because she got to be the centerpiece of the most memorable scenes of the movie. Sadly, it all came at the expense of Wanda’s complexity.

Gone was the layered character Wanda became in the brilliant WandaVision, in which she gained power and learned a valuable lesson about dealing with grief and loss, and in her place was a flattened villain who has completely forgotten that lesson and incapable of thinking past her most primal instincts. This was explained in the movie by her having been corrupted by the Darkhold, but that felt like a lazy excuse to get out of coming up with more interesting a way of turning her into the relentless yet soulless monster the story needed her to be.

What a force of nature she would have made had she been allowed to be the villain of this movie while still retaining the depth, the heart, and the mind she had when we last saw her.

Now, this is also a problem I have with the way the character is sometimes written in the comics, but it just really annoys me that Scarlet Witch falls victim to the sexist tropes of a) the woman who goes crazy because she has too much power for her pesky female emotions to handle, and b) the woman who goes crazy when she loses her children because motherhood is apparently an all-consuming identity that leaves women no other reason to exist.

I was kinda hoping that the MCU version of Wanda would not go there this hard. Wanda could still struggle with her mental health, love her children fiercely, and do very questionable things without being this unhinged.

There’s also an ableist angle here: this whole concept of “going crazy” and what it entails. As a personal with a long history of mental health issues, I care a lot about how all sorts of mental health struggles are portrayed in popular media, and one of my biggest annoyances is the way they are often treated as something that inevitably turns people into unhinged murderers. Even if this movie is just a bit of light entertainment, it still shapes the attitudes towards mental health issues, and I would rather not see yet another piece of media that equates “going crazy” with becoming a violent killer. 

5. And Why Are They Here?

The other characters of the movie felt also more or less empty.

America Chavez was allowed to be little else than a passive plot device who spend way too much time standing around and looking scared instead of making conscious choices or emotionally resonant contributions to the story. We barely got to know her personality and she never developed a meaningful bond with Doctor Strange, which hurt the climax of the movie. They ended up being just co-runners-away-from-scary-things with no personal relationship.

This was no fault of actor Xochitl Gomez, whose performance left me looking forward to seeing her character again. In fact, the cast was overall very good, and they all felt more or less wasted in thankless parts that either gave them nothing to do or too little depth.

Rachel McAdams is way too good an actress to be here just as Dr. Generic Love Interest. I am eternally confused about why the movie kept putting such an emphasis on the importance of her relationship with Stephen while also having zero interest in exploring it the slightest. Chiwetel Ejiofor returned as Baron Mordo and once again gave too much to a part that gave him nothing in return.

As for the parade of Marvel cameos, it was a mixed bag for me. Live action Captain Carter made me weak in the knees, and just a few minutes of Lashana Lynch as Captain Marvel convinced me that Maria Rambeau should have the title in the 616 universe as well (sorry, Carol). I don’t usually care about Black Bolt, but the two scenes that showed off his power were some of the highlights of the whole movie for me.

Meanwhile, I wish that Sir Patrick had not walked back his previous decision to let his appearance in the tremendous Logan be his last round as Xavier. As much as I love seeing him, I just feel like his presence here was unnecessary and not good enough a reason to bring back his beloved Xavier. I hesitate to use the phrase “this cheapens the legacy of the character” in a world where Wolverine: Origins exists, but yeah, that.

John Krasinski as Reed Richards was the biggest bummer for me because I was still hoping that Marvel was going to cast someone other than him. I am always happy to see Charlize Theron, but her mid-credit scene was probably the laziest and least exciting mid/post-credit scene to date. Seriously, guys, if you’re not even going to bother, just cut the scene and grant her the dignity of getting a proper introduction scene in another movie.

Even though I really enjoyed seeing some of these characters on screen, this aspect of the movie just seemed like the worst kind of audience pandering. Marvel cameos and crossovers are great when they lead to fun team-ups or emotional reunions. This didn’t work (beyond Captain Carter and Captain Marvel getting to kick some ass together; petition for a new Disney+ series plz) because Strange doesn’t have and didn’t end up developing a meaningful relationship with any of these characters. He didn’t care, so I couldn’t care either.

6. Some Credit to Sam Raimi

I’m not sure who to blame for the failings of this movie, but I have a feeling that it’s not director Sam Raimi. Whenever the movie did work, it worked because it felt like a good old Raimi movie.

Raimi is at his best when he gets to deliver dark humor, campy horror, and inventively gruesome imagery. He turned Scarlet Witch into a spectacular movie villain and made her seem truly terrifying whenever she got creative with her deadly powers. My favorite scene in the movie was Scarlet Witch’s first dreamwalking scene, which conjured up psychedelic images reminiscent of trashy horror movies from the 60′s and 70′s.

Raimi allowed Strange to have his moments, too. There was some real magic in the sight of him entering the haunted house version of his home inhabited by his darkest alternative version, and the image of Zombie-Strange wrapped up in the souls of the damned was nothing short iconic.

But all those cool images and atmospheric moments were not enough to save this movie from the weak story and undercooked characters. It’s just garnish on the top of a heap of hot air.

There are directors who are all style and no substance, but Raimi isn’t one of them. His Spider-Man movies are great examples of superhero movies that manage to find a balance between character development and action (yes, even the third one; it’s not good, but at least an attempt was made).

That’s why I am wondering whether this movie is yet another victim of studio interference instead of a failure on Raimi’s part. Disney tends to hire visionary directors with bold visions and then tying their hands because they’re too afraid of taking creative risks, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that explains what went wrong here.  

7. Summa Summarum

Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is far from the worst MCU movie to date, but for me it’s probably the biggest letdown so far. I feel like it failed to live up to the promise it had, and it fell victim to the worst patterns this franchise has.

[celestial-depths]

Harry Potter has always been much less progressive than its fandom: a retrospective

In June 2020, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling decided to use her platform to devalue trans people by ridiculing a headline with trans-inclusive language and going on to spout hateful nonsense like insisting that recognizing trans women as real women makes the experiences of cis women somehow less valid. I’m not going to repeat her baseless arguments here because I’m not really interested in picking them apart, as more qualified commentators than me have already done that, and doing so would be like throwing rocks at a house of cards anyway. Instead, I want to reflect on the fan reaction to her statements. The response has been overwhelmingly negative, with many fans expressing feelings of disappointment and surprise over her choice to further vilify a group of people who are already marginalized and vulnerable to violence and discrimination. I was disappointed, too, but, sadly, not surprised. Not because this isn’t the first time in recent history when Rowling has aligned herself with TERFs, but because I think her writing and interviews have always suggested that her politics are way more regressive and conservative than what most of her fans may have assumed. Me and Harry Potter go way back. I’m in my thirties now, and I remember reading the first two books at the age of eleven, just before the global Harry Potter hype had really taken off. In fact, I may have been among the last wave of readers who got to start the series without the faintest idea what the books were even about. At the time, I had a habit of reading books without checking out the blurbs first because I enjoyed the feeling of diving into a story and being taken completely by surprise, so I didn’t even know that wizards were involved when I started reading. I couldn’t have been at more perfect an age to discover the books. For pre-teen readers like me, they were the perfect mix of escapism and relatability. It was wild adventures and magic combined with the everyday reality of a school-aged child, which is probably why I felt more connected to it than I did with other fantasy books I also enjoyed, such as The Lord of the Rings. Harry would learn spells and fight dragons in one chapter and worry about homework and making friends in the next one, which was why it was always easier for a kid like me to daydream about going to Hogwarts than it was to imagine fighting orcs in Middle-Earth (sidenote: this is also why I was never a big fan of the HP movies; they kept the exciting highlights but they left out the slice-of-life parts, which instantly made them seem less relatable to me). My generation also got to grow up with the series. I read the first book at 11, and the final one was released when I was 19, so I was always roughly the same age as Harry during my first read of each book. But by the time I read that final chapter, I was no longer as enamored with the series as I used to be – not because I’d grown bored with the series, but because its politics had started to worry me over the years. I didn’t like the story it was telling between the lines, and I certainly didn’t like the note it ended on. I wasn’t really involved in the fandom during my first years of being a fan of the series, but I did step into it around the time Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released. I was fifteen, I was extremely excited about the release of the first new HP book in three years, and I soon found myself spending hours in fan message boards speculating about future plot twists and discussing my favorite characters. The fandom had its flaws – you don’t know the meaning of the word “petty” unless you’ve witnessed the absolutely brutal fights adult human beings in the HP fandom had over their Hermione Granger shipping preferences – but overall the community was inclusive and open-minded. The fans were a diverse bunch of people who generally seemed to agree that the world of HP was as progressive as they were, since the main message most of them picked up from the books was that one should not discriminate anyone based on the qualities they were born with. I agreed with that reading of the books for a long time, but as I grew up I began to pay closer attention to what the books were actually depicting and what it was leaving out altogether, and I eventually started to wonder whether the series was progressive as it was made out to be. The story was seemingly preaching a message of inclusion, yet all the characters were straight (no, Dumbledore doesn’t count because his sexual orientation was never brought up in the books), cis, and able-bodied, and non-white characters were barely there. What is there to be inclusive about when there’s hardly any real diversity among the very, very vast cast of characters, especially not among the main heroes? Moreover, HP’s way of using non-human characters as metaphors for discrimination yielded very questionable results. The series used house-elves as a metaphor for slavery, yet it ends with the conclusion that the enslavement of house-elves was only wrong when they were treated cruelly, and that they actually preferred slavery to freedom, which was why Hermione was depicted as being silly for fighting for their emancipation. That’s a load of yikes. Werewolves, the series’ metaphor for the HIV positive, were violent, tragic, and uncontrollable, which is... also not great. And don’t even get me started on the books’ take on goblins, who bore extremely uncomfortable resemblance to antisemitic caricatures. The series built a hierarchy between species and used it to address real-life inequality between groups of people, but it never dismantled or even properly questioned that hierarchy, In fact, the biases towards and unequal treatment of other species was ultimately made to seem natural and right. So, there’s that. The books were also littered with awful fatphobia, which doesn’t comply with the anti-discrimination message by any means, and the apparent importance of personal choices and accomplishments got lost by the final two books. For instance, the penultimate book explores Voldemort’s origins and concludes that he was simply born evil, either because he lacked a mother’s love or because he was born from a loveless union (a rape, if we’re being specific, though the books doesn’t recognize it as such, and that’s a whole another can of problematic worms). I don’t even have the time to unpack all the twisted ideas about gender roles that plot point suggests, but my main point here is that it seems like Voldemort never chose to be evil, and apparently neither did his followers, as most of them seem to be villains because they were sorted into Slytherin, or that they were sorted into Slytherin because they were already villainous. At the age of 11. Even the two Slytherins who actively choose to do the right thing in the end (Draco and Snape) do so out of cowardice (Draco) or selfishness (Snape). Meanwhile, as the series progresses Harry’s goodness is less and less predicated by his actions and more based on the virtue of simply being the Chosen One, all the way up to the point where Harry ends up resorting to torture and mind-control – two of the three “unforgivable“ acts as determined by a previous installment in the series – and suffering absolutely no consequences, because he is the hero and nothing the hero does can be bad. The world of Harry Potter, which steers towards being morally ambiguous around the midpoint of the series, ends up being disappointingly black-and-white and deterministic by the end. Choice ends up having very little to do with anything. And then there’s the gender issue, which bothered me most of all. The series exhibits very old-fashioned and restrictive gender roles without ever really questioning them, throws around casual sexism, and it paints a really appalling picture of femininity through its overly sentimental, subservient, frivolous female characters, whose only motivation for doing anything is far too often devotion to a male character or their children, and who are always defeated by their pesky female emotions. Rowling is a self-declared feminist, and I distinctly remember this one writing of hers where she was congratulating herself for championing characters like Hermione Granger over characters like Pansy Parkinson, and that’s her view of feminism I guess? Putting down one female character in favor of another? Pitting women up against each other, urging them to be good girls instead of bad girls – doing all that instead of paying attention to the structural, cultural, ideological reasons why gender expectations and inequality are harmful? Honestly, I don’t think that HP is pro-women at all; the female characters lack agency and are constantly sidelined in favor of male characters, and the series valorizes a very narrow view of womanhood that’s obsessively centered around motherhood and sacrifice.   Overall, the HP series seem to idealize this aesthetically and ideologically old-timey view of society where the world is unrealistically white and straight, and where static hierarchies prevail. The story does not end in a revolution, rebellion, or reform because the story isn’t really about progression; it’s about following traditions and preserving pre-existing power structures. The epilogue of the series really hammers down this point: in the final chapter, the main characters have grown up, married their (white) childhood sweethearts, assumed the roles and biases of their parents and named their kids after their dead relatives, joyfully returning to the origin point of a cycle that brought death and destruction into their world as if there was never anything wrong with that cycle to begin with. So, yeah. I’m not really shocked to see J.K. Rowling expressing awful opinions about trans people because the world of HP was already built upon a whole bunch of awful, traditionalist ideas. As a teen, I’d been read the series through the hopeful lens of my own set of values, but by the time that final book was released, I’d become disillusioned with Rowling and the series, and I no longer took HP for the forward-looking, inclusive story I had made it up to be. I didn’t stop liking certain aspects of the books, but I did stop thinking of Rowling as someone to look up to. For some time, I hoped that Rowling was simply misguided and that she would eventually listen, learn, and rethink. But she keeps proving herself as someone who absolutely refuses to see past her privileged, white, and straight point of view despite all of her resources, and who has inexplicably chosen to crusade against trans women, of all the people in the universe, as if the world wasn’t already hostile enough towards them. So, fuck her. But you know what? The HP fandom doesn’t have to take its cues from J.K. Rowling. The fans don’t have to condone her discriminatory views or agree to read her books in the light of her backward politics. They’ve never done that. From Wolfstar to Black Hermione and from Gay Draco to Trans Snape, the fandom has always been a nurturing environment for fan interpretations that aim to add diversity and complexity to the books, whether Rowling agrees or not. Long live the headcanon. (The fans have also learned to tune out Rowling’s unnecessary comments when they feel like it. Two words: wizard poop. That alone should suggest that the things she says aren’t always worthy of anyone’s attention.)

[celestial-depths]

What’s Great About Cats (The Musical)

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Cats. The movie adaptation of the famous Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical premiered last month to absolutely scathing reviews. The critical and the popular response to the film has been so abysmal that it has become a spectacle of its own. Everyone in the world seems to have gathered around to join in the gleeful axing of this one trainwreck of a film – which is kind of cute. At least there’s one thing we seem to agree on in these divisive times. This is not a review of Cats (2019), because I have not seen it. I don’t care to, at least not for now. I couldn’t even get through the trailers without cringing myself to death. Still, I do have some fascination with the film as a cultural event, and I have found myself watching and reading numerous reviews and think pieces on Cats, both the original stage production and the movie adaptation, which all seemed to revolve around two major questions: 1. How did a movie like this get made? and 2. Why was this show ever popular in the first place? The latter question on particular has been on my mind. I should know the answer, because I was completely obsessed with it for a funny couple of years of my early teens – and I’m not sure why anymore. I first saw the 1998 adaptation of the musical on TV when I was 13, and something about it instantly struck a chord in me. I started watching it over and over again, until I knew every character by name and every step of the choreography. I know which cat is called Munkustrap and which one is Tumblebrutus, I’ve seen the show live a couple of times, and yes, I can even tell you what a goddamn Jellicle cat is. But eventually my interest in the musical waned, and I moved on to obsess over something else. Probably Neil Gaiman. In some ways, it’s no mystery to me why I fell in love with the show so hard at that point of my life. Teenagers tend to get obsessed over things they’re fond of, especially if they’re lonely. The show made me happy, so I kept watching it on repeat in search of a lost sense of joy. I have a tendency of becoming intensely invested in all sorts of cultural properties due to some part of my personality or brain chemistry that absolutely refuses to enjoy the things I like within reasonable limits, so of course I couldn’t stop watching it. And the show was campy as fuck; that’s certainly a common feature in a lot of things I’ve stanned since and before. So, that’s a part of the answer: I have an embarrassing history of being an ardent fan of Cats because I came across it in a time when I was in need of something fun and campy to escape to. But was in the show that made me like it so much more than anything else I might have caught on TV? That’s a harder question to answer, because I frankly can’t see it anymore. In fact, my enjoyment of the musical left me pretty much as soon as I stopped being a fan of it; just a couple of years later, I found myself looking back and wondering what on earth I saw in the show in the first place, because I could no longer stand it.

Revisiting the musical today, I don’t even feel any nostalgia for it. I don’t like the songs. I don’t find the characters compelling. The show is childish, but it never fully commits to being children’s show, which gives it a weird vibe. The lack of plot is a common complaint, but that one doesn’t actually bother me all that much, since I’ve always viewed it as a kind of a revue – but it’s not like not having a plot does a show as thematically empty as Cats any favors. The dancing is pretty good, and I quite like the costumes and make-up designs of the stage production, but not enough to say that I like the show overall more than I dislike it. So, what was it? Did I simply have a poorer taste in music as a thirteen-year-old? Probably. Am I secretly a furry? Definitely not. Is there a deeper meaning to Cats that most people simple miss? I don’t know. I thought about this a lot in the wake of the crazy reaction to the first trailer of the movie. That’s also where I eventually found my answer. I try to keep up with news about upcoming movies, and I first heard that they’re turning Cats into a movie right when they first announced it. I immediately thought it sounded like a bad idea, and I assumed that the movie would never actually make it into production. Then the casting announcements starting dropping, each wilder than the one before. Dame Judi Dench! Rebel Wilson! SIR IAN? TAYLOR SWIFT? IDRIS ELBA AS MACAVITY THE MYSTERY CAT??? At some point there, I started wondering if there really was something genius about the visual presentation or the script of the movie that was drawing all these big names in, but nope – even the news about the making of the film kept me reassured that the movie was going to be... not good. I heard that Tom Hooper was directing, which did not bode well since he’s not exactly the type of visual or conceptual mastermind (unless you’re very, very into unnerving close-ups, fisheye lenses, and unmotivated mise en scène) that a source material like Cats would need in order to become remotely interesting on the big screen, and because Hooper’s previous take on a from-stage-to-screen movie was pretty uninspired, at least as far as musical movies go (Les Mis is a garbage movie FIGHT ME). And then came the news about the state of the art digital fur technology, and I could already predict that the movie was going to be not just bad, but a disaster. The first trailer and the unanimously awful reviews only confirmed what I already knew. I’m not going to pan the actual movie because, as I said, I haven’t seen it. It looks too creepy, and I am not interested in spending my money to see what I imagine is the worst possible version of something that I already dislike. But I did see enough trailer footage to realize what was it about Cats that made me like it in the first place because it was so obviously missing in the movie adaptation. Allow me to explain. In the stage version of Cats, the performers are dressed in painted leotards, shaggy wigs, and ragged leg-warmers, and their faces are covered in fanciful make-up designs. The choreography is a mix of ballet, jazz, and modern dance moves with feline movements and hisses thrown in. In other words, the costumes and the performances suggest felinity rather than attempt to represent it as closely as possible. None of the performers look or act like real-life cats – yet the magic of the theater allows the audience to accept them as cats for the duration of the show. Cats also makes very good use of its format. It’s tailored to be enjoyed live in the theater, where the audience can really appreciate the big, elaborate dance numbers and feel the scale of the set, which usually consists of big junkyard items. The performers regularly jump off the stage and come out to interact with the audience, and they tend to goof around in the background during someone else’s number, which adds to the unique and personal feel of each performance. In the movie, wigs and leotards are ditched for CGI, which turns the actors into horrifying human-cat hybrid monstrosities. While they arguably look more cat-like with their hideous moving ears and furry faces than the stage actors, they also don’t look enough like cats to justify the decision to take the look of the characters so far. The rules of the theater don’t apply to CGI; it either looks right, or it looks wrong. And Cats looks VERY wrong. From what I’ve heard, the movie has also chopped down its dance numbers into such little pieces through quick-paced editing that it’s hard to appreciate the dancing. There’s obviously no audience interaction either, no electrifying presence of a live performance. The movie has apparently taken the show and stripped away everything that might have made it somewhat enjoyable. Which brings me to my point. What’s great about Cats? It’s not the music or the costumes. It’s not the characters or the lyrics. It’s not Memory. It’s the fact that Cats channels the essence of theater. It may not be good theater, but it’s definitely theatrical to the highest degree. It’s a show that brings out and relies on elements that are unique to the medium: the presence of a set and talented live performers, the interaction between the actors and the audience, the magic of conjuring up an impression that the audience believes in through clever costuming and movements alone. Take those elements out, and you’re left with nothing but an awkward group of celebrities prancing around to dated showtunes with nonsense lyrics.   

There’s a reason why theater hasn’t become outdated as a form of art, even though it’s been competing with movies for over a century. The two mediums are not interchangeable; there are still plenty of things the theater can do that simply do not work on screen. I’m sure that this isn’t the only reason Cats the movie became such a colossal failure (I’ve heard that human-faced cockroaches who were later consumed by Rebel Wilson’s character were also involved), but I like to think that it’s a part of it.  

I was pretty new to theater when I first saw Cats. Looking back now, I can finally tell that the thing that I fell in love with wasn’t the actual show, but theater itself. Cats introduced me to stage musicals, and while my interest in that particular genre has diminished over time as well, I did develop a life-long affection for theater in general. 

[celestial-depths]

Dracula (2020)

(spoilers) I’m kinda sad that I didn’t watch this one with one with a bingo chart or a drinking game. Even with all of its plot mutations and character updates, Netflix’s Dracula (2020) is pretty much exactly what I expected from a Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat take on the classic source material: a self-congratulatory, over-produced adaptation obsessed with its own “cleverness” and with its overbearing main character, sprinkled with juuuust enough moments of genuine innovation to make it really sting when it all amounts to a big dud. If you have seen Jekyll, Sherlock, and the worst of Moffat’s Doctor Who episodes, you know exactly what I mean. If you don’t, I refer you to this entertaining and ridiculously long video essay (that absolutely merits every second of its 1 h 49 min runtime) by YouTuber hbomberguy: https://youtu.be/LkoGBOs5ecM; even though I don’t completely agree with all of his points, he does make a strong, multifaceted argument on why, despite his admitted talent, Moffat’s writing usually ends up sucking hard. Anyway. I think the first episode of the three-part Dracula series does make some kind of case for itself. It sets a distinctive mood, includes some pretty solid performances, tells a coherent story, and introduces some truly impressive and creepy horror imagery. I also enjoyed the inclusion of Sister Agatha - even though her being revealed as the Van Helsing of this version is definitely one of those Gatiss & Moffat moments that the writers thought would be much more of oooooh moment than it actually ended up being - who did serve as a formidable opponent for Dracula for the first two episodes. As I said, Moffat tends to anchor his stories to an overbearing lead around whom all other characters revolve, and while that’s is definitely the case here as well, Sister Agatha does stir up the dynamics by refusing to dance to his tune. Still, the writing is also riddled with the usual Moffat plagues, which stay mostly at bay in episode 1 but end up becoming more of an issue in the second episode. The second episode, which fully takes place on the doomed ship Demeter’s journey to Britain (which I believe has been the subject of a horror film script that has been stuck in Hollywood’s development hell for years and years - I wonder if it’ll ever get made now that the story concept was basically executed here?), is overlong, and it’s weighed down by an unnecessary framing device that develops into an unsurprising plot twist, and by the general lack of interest in creating emotional investment in any other character besides the two leads. Just like the ship, the story drifts in the fog for ages but almost makes it to shore in one piece, only to be sunken down by the most stupid thing I’ve watched in a very long time: episode three. Yikes. I do my best to give credit when credit is due and point of the merits of things I overall disliked, but I honestly can’t say that there was anything in the finale that I liked. It’s a mess, and not even a hot one. It’s more like they dug up the long-dead remains of Jekyll, carved out the most awful bits, reheated them, and then left them out to cool down again. I could go on and point out every little thing I found exasperating about the episode, from the regrettable time jump to the lack of thematic focus, to Van Helsing going on and on about the “illogical” nature of Dracula’s weaknesses like it’s remotely interesting, to the clumsy narrative structure that picks up and abandons plot threads like it’s an indecisive customer in a thrift shop, to Zoe Van Helsing becoming just another addition to Moffat’s long line of seemingly “strong” female characters who are rendered basically powerless by the overwhelming charms of the male lead, and all the way to what must be my least favourite horror trope - a paramilitary, pseudo-scientific secret organization set on capturing and studying monsters (seriously, can we please retire this unexciting trope that has never once improved any horror property?) - but for now I’m only going to address the one that made me groan the hardest: Lucy. If you are at all familiar with the novel or any of its numerous adaptations, you might also be aware of the conversation around Lucy and Mina, the novel’s two female characters who both embody Victorian ideas about women and sexuality. A popular reading is that Lucy, the flirty little minx with various suitors who ends up being seduced and corrupted by Dracula, is the whore to Mina’s virgin, which reflects the narrow, black-and-white, judgmental attitudes towards women who stray from the Victorian ideal of the virtuous, demure woman with no appetite for sex or male attention outside marriage. In that sense, the 2020 incarnation of Lucy is a faithful adaptation of the character from the book. And that’s precisely the problem! Just because Bram Stoker’s book is sexist, it doesn’t mean that this version should be that as well. But it is, and oh god I hate it so much. Gatiss & Moffat’s Lucy is a glittery, uncaring thot who takes selfies and DMs strange men, because of course she is; shaming young women for liking sex, being beautiful, and enjoying attention is exactly the sort of thing men who cannot relate to women do when they’re trying to be insightful. And as if that wasn’t enough, they also give Lucy “depth” by making her resent her beauty in some way that remains woefully unexplored, because heaven forbid pretty girls should have any thoughts inside their head that aren’t directly related to being pretty. Even the shallow, dark edge they give to the character fails to bring her any sense of complexity and humanity, and she ends up being just a beautiful creature for men to gaze at in both adoration and condemnation. A beautiful creature who must ultimately be cruelly punished for the sin of being lovely and untameable. How’s that for some Victorian bullshit? More than anything, Dracula reads like a revue of Gatiss & Moffat’s (particularly Moffat’s) greatest and most recurring grievances as writers: a self-defeating attempt at outwitting the audience with “surprising” plot twists hammered awkwardly into the story at the cost of anything that might have made it good, ambitious world-building ideas left to die as soon as they’ve been introduced, an overreliance on a scene-chewing, dickish male lead character who’s supposed to be bad but, like, in a fuckable way, pointless queer-baiting that is guaranteed to elicit frustrated screams from certain parts of the internet, and terribly written female characters with inner worlds conceived by a middle-aged man who is evidently unable to imagine a woman whose every thought isn’t motivated by uncontrollable lust for aforementioned dickish male lead. Jesus.