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POC on the CW 2012-2013

Anna Martin considers the diverse casting in three new CW shows, Arrow, Cult and Beauty and the Beast.

This season on the CW there is something I keep noticing: someone there suddenly seems to care about casting POC. While dramas have for some time been relatively racially diverse, genre shows have resisted diversity.  This year, however, three new genre shows on the CW feature POCs as regulars: Cult has Skye, the female lead; Arrow has Diggle, the hero’s sidekick, and Beauty and the Beast has a lead (Catherine Chandler) and (at least) two supporting roles. Let’s take a look at what's new. (Note: this article is not meant to be exhaustive as, sadly, I don’t have time to watch everything on the CW.)

Digg trains with Oliver in the CW's Arrow. Arrow On the surface of it, a black guy as a white guy’s sidekick isn’t big news. It’s pretty rare, however, that a black sidekick gets to call his white superhero on White Knight Syndrome, and yet that’s exactly what John Diggle (David Ramsey) did in the third episode of the series. Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell)—the eponymous Arrow, aka the Hood—has decided to open a nightclub in the “ghetto” area of town, the Glades, in order to cover up his nocturnal absences from home. He asks Digg, who is at this point Oliver Queen’s bodyguard and not yet the Hood’s sidekick, his thoughts on the project.

Oliver: So, what do you think? Digg: Well, I’m here to provide security, sir, not a commentary. Oliver: Aw, come on Digg, do me a favour. Speak freely. Please. Digg: Well, this is the Glades, right? Your rich white friends wouldn’t come to this neighbourhood on a bet. Oliver: I am Oliver Queen, right? People would stand in line for three hours if I opened a club. Digg: And no one who actually lives in the Glades will see a penny of those cover charges. Oliver: We make it a successful business, we gentrify the neighbourhood. Digg: I was wondering when we would get to that. The White Knight swooping in to save the disenfranchised, and all by his lonesome, with no help from anybody. Oliver: Wow. You don’t think very much of me, do you? Digg: No, actually, sir, I have a very high regard for how perceptive you are.

Jessica Lucas with Matt Davis, Robert Knepper and Alona Tal.

Cult Cult is in this list due to the fact that one of its leads is a POC, though the rest of the show is still very white. In Cult, Jeff Sefton and Skye Yarrow partner up to investigate mysterious disappearances seemingly related to the show-within-a-show, Cult, for which Skye is a researcher. Skye is played by Canadian actress Jessica Lucas. She is as yet the only POC in an otherwise white regular cast, but her position as lead character and one half of the central romantic pairing on the show puts Cult in second place. Though The Vampire Diaries have paired a white guy with a WOC (Jeremy and Bonnie), the vast majority of lead couples on a show are white. At least Cult is breaking that pattern. With Detective Sakelik (Aisha Hinds) and Matt's boss Bert (Julian D Christopher) rounding out the supporting cast, the show ensures that Skye is no token.

    Nina Lisandrello (Tess) and Kristin Kreuk (Cat) in Beauty and the Beast Beauty and the Beast Beauty and the Beast is outstanding in terms of the casting of POC. Catherine Chandler (Kristin Kreuk) and Tess Vargas (Nina Lisandrello) are partnered homicide detectives in New York. Not only do they immediately subvert the old detective partner trope by being women, but they further subvert the Cagney & Lacey, Rizzoli & Isles trope by being WOC. Their boss Joe Bishop is played by Brian White. The show seems to have actively decided to cast POC in central roles. (Either that or the unicorn of colour-blind casting finally exists.) During Kreuk’s Smallville years, there was a certain amount of consternation when both of Lana Lang’s biological parents turned out to be white. The CW seems to have paid attention to that criticism and in Beauty and the Beast, Kreuk undeniably plays a WOC. Genre shows on the CW have never been as racially diverse as those that began to air in the 2012-2013 season. Supernatural, now nearing the end of its 8th season, is as white as ever. Kevin Tran and his mother are the only recurring non-white characters, since Gordon, Rufus and Agent Henriksen are all dead. Ellie, about to face the consequences of her crossroads deal in episode 8.14 (“Trial and Error”), was played by Cuban actress Danay García, but it’s highly unlikely we’ll see her again. The Vampire Diaries, now in season 4, holds fast to its tradition that all black characters are witches. As well as becoming tedious, the association of POC with magic—particularly the dark magic or “expression” now practiced by Bonnie—is fundamentally problematic and something the show really needs to re-evaluate. There is no question that the casting in these shows is still predominantly white, but it’s good to see that maybe there are some changes occurring in the casting of sci-fi/fantasy/thriller/superhero type genre shows produced by the CW. There’s a long way to go, but it’s a start. There still seems to be a problem with casting male POC in lead roles; Matt Davis (Cult), Stephen Amell (Arrow) and Jay Ryan (Beauty and the Beast) all fit the handsome white male lead mould. Maybe that’s the next mould the CW should try breaking.

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Review: Skyfall

Anna Martin reviews the 23rd Bond outing and finds it entertaining, but troubling.

To think about Skyfall, it seems necessary—and apt, for a film about origins—to go back to Casino Royale. Casino Royale is a film about the forging of the weapon. Bond, on his first double-0 mission, falls in love with Vesper, goes through symbolic castration (remember the chair?), and then, in the end, must reject that emotional, feminine, “castrated” side of himself (the line “the bitch is dead” isn’t just about Vesper) to become Bond, James Bond, the man who is the perfect phallic weapon, all guns and cock. Which leads us to Quantum of Solace, a film so forgettable that no one I know can remember what it was about. (Something about oil? Was some of it set in Venezuela?) The problem Quantum of Solace faced was the fact that its hero was already formed, and now he was much the same as any other action hero. What is Quantum of Solace but an action movie in a sea of action movies? What is this James Bond but an action hero among ranks of action heroes? What is the point of Bond when he’s just the same as everybody else? And this is what we owe Quantum of Solace: without its mundanity and ordinariness, Skyfall would never have had to ask, how is Bond relevant anymore? That’s the central theme of this film. How does an old man play a young man's game? How do you make a relic from the 1960s interesting among modern action films?

Bond meets Q. A beautiful sequence in Shanghai follows, with cinematography strangely reminiscent of Bladerunner, followed by a sequence in Macao in which Bond is paired with Eve, the agent who shot him. They reconnect. You get the idea. In a casino in Macao he meets Sévérine (Bérénice Marlohe), a woman who has been in sex slavery since she was twelve. When later that evening he joins her in the shower, unexpected and uninvited, for some reason she doesn’t push him out and ask him what he thinks he’s doing. No, of course they have sex. It feels as if it’s by rote at this point. We’re all expecting it, so the film sighs and obliges. Then, finally, we meet bad guy ex-MI6 agent Silva (Javier Bardem). He is now seeking revenge against his "mother", as he calls M, for that betrayal and abandonment. He’s from a mould we’ve seen before: the camp, blond Eurovillain who tries to tempt the hero into joining him. And who flirts outrageously. “There’s a first time for everything,” he says, stroking Bond’s thighs. “Who says it would be my first time?” replies Bond. Intriguing. (Note to Barbara Broccoli: if you want to make the sex scenes interesting again, show us that. Daniel Craig has better chemistry with men, anyway.)

Silva flirts with Bond. With Silva’s capture, the film returns to London, to an MI6 forced underground (literally, not figuratively) and an M forced to defend herself against government ministers who believe that the era of espionage is over. Here the franchise gives us its new manifesto: no longer are nations our enemies, says M, but individuals in the shadows, and in the shadows is where we must fight them. This new darkness is possibly what Skyfall intends to usher into the franchise. For the first time, a Bond film allows M to reflect on all the dead agents she has left in her wake. The camera reveals all the lines and wrinkles etched not just on M’s face, but on Bond’s, too. They are both a little worn out by the weight of what they do. And what they do, in the form of the revenant Silva, ends up killing M. Skyfall ends at the beginning: in London, Bond enters the new MI6 offices. Eve greets him and remarks that they have never been properly introduced. “My name is Eve,” she says. “Eve Moneypenny.” She takes a seat behind a desk and opens a laptop. Fieldwork isn’t for everyone, she says. Tanner (Rory Kinnear) enters through a door and says, “He’s ready for you, Bond.” In the inner office is Gareth Mallory—now merely M—in wood-panelled surroundings we immediately recognise. The scene is the end of Skyfall but the beginning of so many Bond movies. Here, the franchise is saying, is where we begin again. But where exactly is that beginning? It seems to be here: female M is dead, and male M has taken her place. Moneypenny is brought in from the field and put behind a desk. The villain is a camp gay man with serious mother issues. Does it seem to anyone else that the franchise has actually gone back in time? The film makes jokes about it; after Q’s quip about not going in for the old-fashioned gadgetry anymore, it’s a 1960s Aston Martin with an ejector seat and machine guns in the front that Bond makes good use of in fighting Silva’s men. But that’s just a wink, a joke. Far less funny, it seems to me, is the tethering of Moneypenny and the return of the old-boys-club feel of a male M ensconced in a wood-panelled office. On top of that, something just doesn’t sit right that the "mother" has to be killed for the old status quo to be reinstated.

The classic Aston Martin reappears. Skyfall is an excellent film, expertly structured and interestingly layered. Daniel Craig continues to be an excellent Bond. The action sequences are ridiculous and flawless. It's entertaining, thrilling and funny. But underneath all that, it’s slightly troubling. Despite Bond’s quip, the only gay character is the villain, and even at that he's the surely outdated stereotype of the mother-obsessed gay man. The death of Sévérine is gut-wrenching in its callousness, and I don’t mean on the part of Silva. Callous on the part of the film itself: she serves her purpose in the plot and then she is discarded. And the death of M and subsequent return to the old gender status quo is questionable, to say the least. It remains to be seen where the franchise will take this new-old arrangement. For now, though, I find myself stuck in that familiar place of loving the film and being troubled by it at the same time. The typical cognitive dissonance of a female fan of action movies. The glorious liberation from the norm in Casino Royale, a film whose delicious objectification of its male lead is essential to its narrative, was an anomaly, it seems. So where next for 007? If they’re serious about this whole bisexual thing, maybe it’s time to start thinking of casting a Bond guy for the next movie? My vote has always been for Gael Garcia Bernal, but I’d also be perfectly happy for Bond and Q to have a bit of a fling. Hell, he’s slept with Moneypenny, so why not? For now, all that remains is to say farewell, Dame Judi Dench, you were a phenomenal M.

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Teen Movies All About...

Why It Apparently Really Really Sucks to be Christian by Morgan Jones

Number 3: "Saved!"(2004)

OK, so this is pretty basic stuff for the teen-movies-about-why-it-sucks-to-be-Christian-subgenre; nice, Christian girl Mary (Jenna Malone) tries to do the right thing, i.e. straighten out her gay boyfriend Dean by sleeping with him, and it doesn't quite work out, i.e. she ends up pregnant. Will her friends at her ultra Christian high school, not to mention her Christian pop girl group "The Christian Jewels," turn on her? You bet they will. Will she find help, solace, acceptance, etc., among the school's misfits (aka, the gothy Jewish girl and kid in the wheelchair)? You bet she will. Will they eventually triumph over Hilary Faye, the Christian Regina George of the school, and do some top notch hugging and learning? You bet they will.

CONTINUE READING...

For more great teen movie reviews, check out Morgan's blog, All the Teen Movies a Girl Could Want!

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REVIEW: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

By Anna Martin

After the splash of The Avengers, I wasn’t sure I was ready for Nolan’s trademark grim take on a superhero movie.  But as time went by, I became excited again, and went to see The Dark Knight Rises with reasonably high expectations.  And for the first hour or so, those expectations were met.  But at some point--and I can’t quite pinpoint when--my interest waned significantly.  Why should this happen during the final film of such an excellent superhero trilogy?  I have a couple of theories.

Massive spoilers after the cut...

The first problem, I felt, was Bane himself.  The Joker is terrifying because he doesn’t have a grand plan.  A man who’ll cut your face just because it’s fun, that man is scary on a visceral level.  A man with a very large nuclear bomb and some convoluted plan for Gotham is beyond any visceral sense of fear.  As with much of Nolan’s work, I felt I was supposed to wonder at the predicament of the characters rather than actually sympathise.  Had any of the policemen trapped under Gotham been characters I had actually come to know, had the victims of the Scarecrow’s kangaroo court been faces I recognised, perhaps then I would have cared about Gotham’s chaos.  But instead of being sympathetically engaged, I was just a spectator. This is the second problem with this film, and with Nolan’s Batman as a whole.  When do I sympathise with Batman?  When is he vulnerable enough to allow me to really feel for him?  Even broken over Bane’s knee, I find myself more interested in solving the puzzle of how Batman will prevail rather than actually feeling the despair I think I should feel at a moment like this.  Nolan loves cerebral engagement: Inception is a puzzle box, Memento is a riddle, and The Prestige is a magic trick.  But, trite as it may sound, what is a superhero movie without heart? The third problem is one that also plagues most of Nolan’s work, and that is Dead Wife/Fridged Girlfriend Syndrome.  Does Nolan only have one single idea when it comes to character motivation?  “Kill a woman close to them,” he says to himself.  “That’ll motivate their entire lives.”  Memento and Inception are driven by men with dead wives; The Prestige hangs a woman to show her husband’s dedication to his craft after drowning another to initiate the central feud of the film; Batman Begins gets a pass because Bruce Wayne’s dead mother is canon, but then The Dark Knight kills Rachel to motivate not only Bruce’s despair but Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face.  And now in The Dark Knight Rises, R’as al Ghul is one more male character with Dead Wife Syndrome, and her rape and death motivates Talia out of that pit.  You’ve got to wonder when Nolan will think up something new (and less sexist).  Not yet, that much is clear. And let’s talk about the pit.  Where is it?  It seemed as if Bane walked there and Bruce walked back, and yet it is apparently supposed to be in some undefined “Orient.”  A despotic and nameless “Orient” in which people are treated with brutal finality.  An “Orient” from which Talia al Ghul, a woman of mixed race, emerges, portrayed by a white Western actress.  An “Orient” in which Liam Neeson is cast as an Arabic man.  I can’t decide whether or not I am glad R’as and Talia al Ghul were whitewashed.  Two non-white faces threatening the “decadent West” might be more sickening than two whitewashed faces.  When your choice is between one kind of racism or another, I think it’s time to accept the fact that something has gone very wrong with your movie. There were things I liked:

Selina Kyle.  Though her origins were murky, I felt she was well-developed as a character.  Having said that, I would have liked to see more of her relationship with her girlfriend.

I liked that Bruce and Selina ended up together, even if they had pretty much zero chemistry throughout the film.  Again, this is a flaw in Nolan’s work.  As spectators, we recognise their attraction, but it’s difficult to feel it.

Robin.  Blake taking up the cowl is a good ending.  Though one does have to wonder how he will fare without Alfred.  And Wayne wealth.  And Bruce Wayne’s particular skillset when it comes to technology.  I hope Bruce left some passwords taped under the desk, as well as several User’s Manuals.

The brief moments of humour, though in the cinema I was in, no one laughed.  “So that’s what that feels like.”  That was funny, guys!  Come on!  No?  ...Oh, okay.

Spot the TV actor: Teal’c from Stargate: SG-1!  Deb’s ex-boyfriend from Dexter!  That policeman from Grimm!  The Yellow-Eyed Demon from Supernatural!  Littlefinger from Game of Thrones!  It would be a good drinking game.

At no point in this film did Cillian Murphy have a sack over his head.

There were also things I disliked:

It’s been said before, but Bane’s accent and voice were ridiculous.  I was certain his first line was delivered by Sean Connery.  Speaking of that scene, why did Aiden Gillan bring three guys onto his plane without uncovering their faces first?  And why did he then proceed to threaten them without looking into their eyes?  Who does that?  Amateur.

Catwoman’s heels.  Were we supposed to believe that she could run and leap around in those?  Forget it.  Put Batman in heels, see how he manages.

If you’re a fan of rough-voiced, barely comprehensible mumbling, your ship has come in with this movie.  I’m not, though.

Randomly ditching Commissioner Gordon’s wife and children.  What a lazy way to avoid Gordon having to think about them while Gotham was under siege.  Though I guess we should just be grateful that he wasn’t yet another man with Dead Wife Syndrome.

Blake figuring out that Bruce Wayne was Batman.  Come on.  "I saw you this one time and figured it out."  Really?  Could he not maybe have also done a little detective work?  There were pretty obviously some lines cut from that scene; I'd love to know if the cut lines actually made the scene make sense.

On the whole, I'm giving this movie three stars out of five.  Not great, not terrible.  Just... a Christopher Nolan film.

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Mary Hamilton finds that sex, in fantasy RPGs, can get really, really messy... Let's get something clear right from the start. This article is going to contain references to anal circumference, being sexually aroused by candles, non-consensual sexual encounters, and copious use of the word "harlot". I'm sorry in advance. So, Dungeons and Dragons is a high fantasy role-playing game that's played by groups sat around a table, pretending to be characters inhabiting a world of magic, taverns and mythical beasts. Random encounters and other interesting random effects are fairly frequent occurrences. The rule books are full of tables that let you roll a 20-sided die to find out how much treasure there is in a room, or what sort of monster attacks the players on their way through Gribbly Dark-wood, or what that mysterious magical artefact actually does.  In the first edition of D&D, along with wasp lobsters, owlbears and animated murderous bridges, there was the harlot table. You enter a tavern. Your games master rolls two 10-sided dice, and you're confronted with one of 12 harlot options. You can have a cheap trollop, a saucy tart or even, if you're very lucky, a rich panderer. My personal favourite, the haughty courtesan, shows up on a roll of 86-90. The rulebook helpfully mentions that harlots have a 30% chance of knowing valuable information, 15% likely to make something up for a reward, and 20% likely to be, or work with, a thief - wouldn't want you to think they were only there for one thing, after all. The game leaves it quietly up to you, the players, to work out how precisely you're going to role-play the encounter if you do decide to try and have sex. These days, now that it's widely acknowledged that female gamers are not akin to unicorns, the harlot table is jarring to come across. It feels subtly archaic, representative of an attitude that women didn't really belong in the D&D universe, or that when they did appear they were somehow special. Since these harlot archetypes were invented, we've had dozens of sex-at-the-gaming-table jokes, and the random approach seems kind of quaint. Certainly, it does in comparison with some of the things that have followed it. FATAL, a one-man epic high-fantasy rules-packed game that manages to be entirely, 100%, utterly creepy and wrong in literally every way you can imagine and probably about 47 more that would never have crossed your mind. For instance - the spells. Where D&D has fireballs and magic missiles, FATAL has spells that transform any bodily orifice into both an anus and a mouth at the same time, and spells that force women's vulvas to swell and may make them incapable of standing up. Then there's the series of complicated equations you use to work out the precise tightness - and hence pleasure - of any given sexual encounter. And the fact you can sacrifice people with mental disabilities in order to gain magical power. And the fact that the lowest possible score for vocal charisma in the game gives you a rating of "gay". (I mean, it's not like any gay men have ever been particularly charismatic. Whatever happened to that Graham Norton bloke, anyway?) Issues of consent can get complicated at the gaming table. Sample thought process: would my character have sex with your character? I mean, I don't want to have sex with you at all, but my character's kind of pushy and a total ladies' man and yours is a lady with, like, 18 charisma. But if my character comes on to your character and you say yes does that mean we're going to be talking squelchy bits, because I don't really wanna do that with you because you're my best mate's girlfriend ... But there's nothing complicated about FATAL. Rape is part of the game - so much so that there's a handy table that lets you check out the potential penis size of any given race, compare it with the possible anal circumference of your character, and decide precisely how much damage the random encounter did in physical terms. The point where your brain literally melts and falls out of your ears, though, is the table you roll on if you mis-cast a spell. Possible results include itchy buttocks, being sexually aroused by candles, being forced to try and fist-fuck the next woman you see, the appearance of a magical 3ft 10in dildo that tries to rape pretty characters, and your guts falling right out of your arse. Oh, and becoming a serial rapist. The sad thing about FATAL isn't so much its existence (which is pretty fucking sad, don't get me wrong) but the fact that it's possible for tabletop games to do sex well. The harlot table didn't just spawn abominations made of rape jokes and fail - it also gave birth to the Book of Erotic Fantasy which, while schmaltzy as hell in places, manages to make D&D sex an interesting option without invoking the ick factor. And there are games like Boy X Girl, based loosely on anime conventions, where one player plays a shy high school girl and other players play 3-5 boys vying for her affections. The harlot table managed to introduce sex into a fantasy world where magic exists, where spells can change the shape, size and appearance of a person. It also put sex squarely into the context of the gaming room, and gently nudged open the door that led to games that explore sexual themes gently, in interesting ways that push boundaries without involving giant ogre dong. And it's paved the way for deeply upsetting monsters in horror games like Fear Itself, playing on themes of consent and motherhood and unwanted sexualisation. It's enabled tabletop gaming to grow up and get some serious adult themes, and for those of us who love the medium, that's definitely a good thing. Shame we had to go through such a lot of ogre dong to get here.

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Fighting crime - and monsters, zombies, time, space, and reality - isn’t just the remit of male characters. There are plenty of awesome women in the worlds of film and TV. But sometimes, the media’s idea of what makes a good, strong, kickass female character is, well, a little bizarre. Lucy V Hay finds examples of screenwriters getting it right - and wrong - sometimes even in different portrayals of the same character... Crime scene investigators:

 RIGHT: Catherine Willows in Crime Scene Investigation

Starting out as a Las Vegas show dancer, Catherine clawed her way out of the seedy club scene and knows full well the dangers that lurk behind the bright lights of the city. She’s strong, capable, and does her job well. 

A single mother, Catherine feels guilty that her daughter Lindsay is brought up by babysitters as she works nights, but she’s proud she still manages to take Lindsay to school most days. Catherine is no saint; she has been badly affected by her life and is deeply flawed. She makes consistently poor choices with men and she’s still angry and bitter about Lindsay’s father Eddie’s betrayal years later, often letting her personal feelings get in the way of cases.

What’s more, Catherine can be cruel: she delights in baiting Grissom and has a big problem with his authority – not because he is in any way defective at his job, but because she simply doesn’t like him as a person. In subsequent series, however, she forms a grudging respect not only for his leadership, but for his personal integrity, especially when dealing with his deafness.

WRONG: Catherine Willows in Crime Scene Investigation

When Grissom left CSI, it was only natural that, as his right-hand woman, Catherine would step up and become supervisor. Remembering Catherine’s rich history of storylines that made her a three-dimensional and believable character, this was a chance for actress Marg Helgenburger’s role to really evolve. 

Unfortunately, Catherine wasn’t to have her moment in the limelight at all. Instead, she was moved aside to make way for new character Langston, played by crowd-pleasing Laurence Fishburne. Before long, Catherine was more or less confined behind a desk or walking the corridors and occasionally yelling at someone, a shadow of her former self, her rich history ignored. 

Cold hard killers:

RIGHT: Ziva David in NCIS

Ziva is that elusive character so many scriptwriters strive to get right: the ass-kicking woman with a heart. There’s no question that Ziva is dangerous: she’s a Mossad assassin. She’s frequently the one who goes into the room brandishing a gun first, and there’s no one – man or woman – she can’t handle. She even killed her own brother when she found he was on the opposite side to her. It would have been so easy to portray Ziva as ice cold as her deadly skillz – but the NCIS writers resisted this temptation and instead made her a rounded, believable character. 

Ziva’s English isn’t great, especially her use of idiom, which her colleague DiNozzo takes delight in correcting (it’s the only time he’s better than her at something). Like many women in real life – and Catherine Willows before her in CSI – Ziva’s taste in men is shocking, largely because she still feels like an outsider, and just desperately wants to be loved. Ziva questions her father’s judgement in raising her to be a Mossad agent, while still believing there could be no other life for her.

A storyline in which she was almost murdered while undercover was particularly well handled: she didn’t just shrug off the experience, but suffered flashbacks to the traumatic event. And not just because she almost died, but because for a brief moment she had hesitated – and crucially, she had never hesitated before. 

WRONG: Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgement Day

This incarnation of Sarah Connor is often celebrated (especially by men) as the iconic strong female character. And certainly she’s got some things going for her. Back in 1992, there hadn’t been any female Arnie equivalents, so we can thank Sarah for putting kickass females on the map. But scratch the surface and the issues with Sarah Connor’s character soon become glaringly obvious.

Planning for the apocalypse? Whoops, you forgot a contingency plan to stop your (very important to the survival of humanity) son being taken into care when you get carried off by the men in white coats. Worse, even though she knows her son is basically the Messiah, she treats him like a commodity while he pleads for affection. Not very inspiring.

While some contradictory elements are desirable in a character, Sarah takes a swinging jump from one side of the scale to the other in the story – why does she even need to go through all that training to get bulked up, when she knows full well she’s already dispatched one of the Terminators through her wits alone in the first film?

And what’s Arnie doing helping her, if she’s so capable? After all, Kyle Reece didn’t need any robot help when he rescued Sarah in the first film, yet even with all that military training, Sarah apparently needs a helping hand from Arnie against the melting guy. Because she’s a woman?

Whatever you think of Sarah Connor, let’s not forget just how she is remembered: in that pose in military combats, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses: not a woman, not a mother, not a saviour, but every inch the killing machine. 

Monster fighters:

RIGHT: Lex in Alien Versus Predator

Plot-wise, AVP was rubbish, but we all watched it anyway, because the idea of a Predator getting into a scrap with an Alien was too much to resist. The surprise bonus is that Lex was actually a pretty decent character. 

Lex has an inflated sense of responsibility, just like her predecessor Ripley (or descendant, if you want to get technical) and draws on Ripley without copying her move for move. She has strong opinions and reasons for doing what she does, reminiscing about her father’s untimely death during a mountain climb – yet she never succumbs to sentimentality.

Even faced with horrifying, shocking monsters, she’s clever and resourceful, realising not only that the Predators are only after the guns the group have taken, but that the Predators might help them survive, too. She accepts she may not ever get out of the pyramid, but tells her colleague they simply cannot allow such creatures to get to the surface. 

Had the actual story of AVP simply hung together better, Lex could have been celebrated as a strong female character.

WRONG: Isabelle in Predators

Isabelle is another Mossad agent: she erupts into the Predators jungle, pointing a gun at protagonist Royce and his dubious friends. She seems capable and even lets slip later she has some knowledge of the creatures, so at least in the first half she looks like maybe she’s an action heroine to be reckoned with. But alas no, it isn’t to be. In fact, her fall from grace in the second half of the movie is so spectacular, you immediately begin to pick holes in her performance from the off. 

Considering Isabelle is so keen to describe herself and the other humans as ‘predators’ as well, there doesn’t seem to be a single solitary predatory thing about her. In fact, she has the ultimate predator failing: compassion. While she’s certainly consistent, it’s a strange character choice. Remember that other famous female Mossad agent Ziva is ruthless in the field; she does not compromise her own safety or the safety of her team, even if it makes her feel bad. Yet we are asked to believe Isabelle will, in the name of a ‘greater good’ – and at the same time, we’re asked to think of her as a ‘predator’, the best in her field, which is why she was chosen for the mission. The two simply do not add up. 

Add to the equation that embarrassingly obvious plot “twist” regarding the fallen comrade she goes back for and suddenly we realise that actually, Isabelle isn’t a serious character at all but stuck in there as the “token female”. Thanks a lot. 

Video game heroines:

RIGHT: Alice in Resident Evil

If the plot holes in this movie were cracks in the wall, director Paul WS Anderson would paper over them, and when the cracks split through regardless he’d move a bookcase in front of them and hope no one would notice. 

But Anderson’s saving grace in this film (not so much the others in the series) is Alice herself. Alice doesn’t just look great in that red dress: she actually has a goal, and problems, and a mental struggle ��� and none of it relates to a man! Nope, Alice’s inner turmoil relates to morality: has she betrayed her contact inside The Hive? Is the zombie outbreak her fault? If it was her fault, was she motivated by greed? 

Happily, it emerges that Alice is an activist, not a money-grabbing capitalist; better still, the antagonist (and money-grabbing capitalist) turns out to be none other than Alice’s fake husband, so we get to see Alice get her bloody revenge (“Missing you already”) just like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall. If anyone is the female version of Arnie, it’s Milla Jovovich.

WRONG: Lara Croft in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Lara Croft has been compared to Indiana Jones, but that’s a stretch. For one thing, Indie was a three-dimensional character: he is capable and educated, yet at the same time afraid of snakes and slightly hysterical about everything he does. So it’s not hard to believe Mr Jones can get himself into such scrapes - but we also believe he can get himself out of them (bar perhaps surviving a nuclear blast by getting in a fridge). 

Lara, by comparison, feels like Indie’s half-sister, brought up by another mother in a different country, who only sees him once a year at Christmas. We’re told she’s well educated, well travelled and privileged, but we see very little evidence of that side of her. Instead, there’s a rather embarrassing encounter with Jolie’s real-life father Jon Voight, spelling out for us that, yet again, this is a female character with issues about her father and his premature death (yawn). 

…and Ripley:

RIGHT: Ripley, Alien and Alien 3

There is no doubt Ripley is a seminal character. We’ve heard a lot about how Ripley was originally a male character, but comparatively little about the fact Sigourney Weaver originally auditioned for the part of Lambert, a character she conceived as a wisecracker, rather than the hysteric that Veronica Cartwright very successfully played her as. Looking back now, Sigourney Weaver would have been the wrong choice for Lambert – not just because of film history and the void it would have left, but because it was the relationship between these two female characters that made the film, and also made Ripley so compelling. Had she been the only woman on the ship, Ripley would have had to tough it out with her shipmates, and might have seemed less three-dimensional; with another woman on board, the problems that arise between two women who clearly don’t like each other can be brought to the fore. 

And let’s face it, problems between two women are very different from those that arise between two men, or between a man and a woman. There’s the sniping (“That’s not our system.” ”I know that.”), the stark looks and averted eyes across the dinner table, and even the catfight in the director’s cut. Small moments, but they all added to the characterisation of both female characters, turning Ripley into something really special. After all, though she had no love for Lambert, as Lambert began to unravel, Ripley grew stronger. When Lambert announces they should all take the shuttle after Dallas’ death, it would have been very easy for Ripley to snap at her, yet Ripley soothes her. As the stronger person, Ripley knew she could afford to be charitable – which is why we love her so much. 

Alien 3 is much maligned by critics and audiences alike, and it’s not difficult to see why: there’s some embarrassingly clunky dialogue; the CGI monster was way too ambitious for its time and looked dated even when it first came out; there was some poor acting; there’s a near-rape scene for Ripley and there’s some static directing. But this is Ripley returned to her position in the first film: alone and up against it, forced to make unpalatable decisions, and, even better, she’s the only woman fighting an all-male establishment like a human metaphor for feminism. Dallas is replaced by Dylan, a reformed rapist and murderer, who sacrifices himself in the lead mill for Ripley in the same way Dallas goes into the vent when it should have been Ripley in the first movie. The character of Eighty Five was an inspired counter to Lambert in the first movie – he too is the weakest link, but in a completely different way.

And finally, Ripley dies rather than give the Company the creature – a fitting end for her character. Even the Alien Queen bursting from her chest isn’t enough to kill Ripley, who grabs the creature and holds it with her as she falls to their mutual destruction.

WRONG: Ripley in Aliens and Alien Resurrection

A lot of attention has been paid to Ripley’s maternal side in Aliens, so let’s deal with that first. Ripley’s lost daughter on Earth and subsequent attachment to Newt is a great start, but the exposition here is so bone-crunchingly on the nose, it’s just embarrassing. Do women really talk to little girls like that? The extended edition adds even more of this dross: by the time Newt is asking about where babies come from in relation to the aliens, I just wanted to jump out of a window. 

That aside, what else drives this version of Ripley? Well, not much. For about three quarters of the movie she defers first to Gorman, then Hicks, only making her one big decision - “Save Newt” - once her knight in shining armour has been despatched by acid and can’t do anything else for her. How’s that for girl power? Ripley is relegated to the sidelines for most of this movie, which is a colossal shame. 

Fast forward 200 years and Ripley’s been dead for a long time in the bottom of that fire pit, yet somehow scientists have managed to scrape out enough of her DNA to grow her – and the alien foetus inside her – in a lab somewhere. It’s a good thing we want to suspend our disbelief for the sake of another Alien movie, or that’d be a tough one to swallow.

Alien Resurrection looks great for the most part, it even has that nightmarescape feel more in keeping with the others, rather than the war games action of James Cameron’s version. But Ripley has changed. Everything we loved about her – her steadfast resolution, her compassion, her warmth – is gone. Instead we’re asked to empathise with Annalee, who turns out to be an android – a nice reversal, but an own goal in terms of taking yet another female character seriously (the half-arsed reference to the sexual revolution - “We burned our modems” - is just embarrassing).

The whole point is that the Alien movies mean Ellen Ripley, and this just … wasn’t Ripley.

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Georgina Voss recommends four of the best autobiographical comics by women Every comic book superhero has an origin story. They tell the reader - this guy here? This is what made him into the flying/surly/razor-clawed dude bent on revenge/fighting/tea that he is today. Origins can be surprising: gentle James Howlett grows up to be the burly, cigar-smoking, adamantium-skeletoned mutant Wolverine (with a little help from the US military). Origins also show how important key events can be in shaping a life: while both Anthony Stark and Bruce Wayne are raised in rich metropolitan families, it takes a terrorist kidnapping and family murder to steer their lives towards high-tech crime fighting as Iron Man and Batman respectively. Most importantly, though, origin stories let readers identify with the protagonists of extremely long-running series. Outside of the realm of spandex-clad crime fighters, autobiographical comics let us enter into the world of another person for a little while – something that can be vitally important when it comes to telling the stories of real women’s lived experiences.  CONTINUE READING.

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Re/Action talked to Peter Dolving, frontman of Swedish metal band The Haunted, about the power of music... Do you think music can work to change the world? I believe music works as a magnifier, something to empower the listener. If a group of people feel strongly about something, music that expresses those emotions makes them feel relieved and empowered, showing that obviously they are not alone in feeling what they feel. In this way I believe music is integral in all and any motion to social change. However, music alone won't do the job. It's merely a wonderful emotional medium that helps us swim rather than sink.  What musicians do you think have succeeded in getting across a positive message?  Fugazi, Prophagandhi, Nina Hagen, Queen, Henry Rollins, Billy Bragg, Ani Di Franco, Radiohead, Patti Smith, David Bowie, Nick Cave, Depeche Mode, Bob Dylan, John Prine, Tegan and Sara, Ministry, Salt n Pepa, Talking Heads, The Swans, The Cure, Siouxsee and The Banshees, Throbbing Gristle, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, The Melvins, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Jesus Lizard...  I could go on forever, but it's a combination of words, music, roles and specific actions at specific times; intentionally or unintentionally. The attitude of non-conformity is not exclusive, it is around in every genre of music, wherever an artist expresses a hunger for liberation, the decision to go against social conformity, to be motion rather than stagnant. It's about gender, social status, physical conditions, drugs, sex, family ties or purely political rants. There are of course artists who do the opposite, who sell the neoliberal chauvinist hyper materialistic world-view. Look and listen. Always listen to the words in context to the music and the actions of artists.  What one prejudice do you think people should take more time to examine? The idea of normality. It is a completely irrational construction built on generalisations and self justification. The concept and word itself is only about a hundred years old, and was created by early sociologists who needed a term when fumbling for reference points in writing. However, the actual concept will always be a completely subjective perspective of a generalised group and their mechanisms. For example, heterosexuality - if it was ‘normal’, we’d have no rock ‘n’ roll, we would have no abstract art and design. We would have no Tom of Finland, etc. Personally, I believe that with time expressions like this will simply fail to be a part of contemporary language as knowledge and understanding in society as a whole grows. There is no general normativity. It's merely a bat we wield to justify ourselves.  What does playing in a band mean to you?  I love the process itself. Everything in it. It's like being a Shaolin monk, but I learn to dance instead of having swords to my neck. With time, the discipline is recreating me as a human being on every level radically, sometimes terribly painfully, sometimes through the sheer immensity. At this point I am completely annihilated by it. I have surrendered to the fact that reality, from the perspective I have now, is nothing whatsoever like what I believed it to be. I am very happy and hopeful. What inspires and provokes you?  Money, violence, religion, sex and love.

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How do you imagine your way into the mind of a person with schizophrenia if you’ve never suffered from mental illness yourself? What about depression, or a phobia? Mary Hamilton looks at how role-playing games deal with mental illness...

One of the most enjoyable bits about pretending to be somebody else is playing with the nature of humanity. Tabletop games - the sort where you get out funny-shaped dice and character sheets and tell everyone what your persona is about to do - are a great way to escape and immerse yourself in creative, vivid worlds. They’re also brilliant ways to explore issues and ideas you’d never go near in everyday life. But they can be hugely problematic. In these games, groups of people sit down together and play characters, normally exploring situations devised by a storyteller and inventing their characters and the game world as they go. The core mechanic of most tabletop games uses polyhedral dice to resolve conflicts, within systems that model human behaviour, actions and personalities. Some are gorgeously elegant mathematical models that lead to natural resolutions. Others are clunky, messy, weird or downright offensive - especially when it comes to the tricky question of what makes our brains go boom. Fantasy worlds, real ignorance Mental illness isn’t an easy subject to tackle for anyone. Seasoned writers, directors, producers and all sorts of other creative types crash and burn when it comes to sensitive, non-horrendous portrayals of people dealing with depression or schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. So it’s no surprise that games designers also have a tendency to, well, fail in this area.  Some tabletop games - like the ubiquitous Dungeons & Dragons - simply steer well away from the subject, sticking to tried and tested areas like hitting big monsters with swords and firing magic missiles at the darkness. Others - like World of Darkness - manage to offer a fascinating, if upsetting, insight into the stigma against the mentally ill. World of Darkness is an interlocking series of games that have a central core: supernaturals exist and the world is a horrid scary place. The core game includes character creation and gaming rules for humans, with add-on books about vampires, mages, werewolves, changelings and a variety of super- or ab-human things your human character could become if he encounters something horrid. One fundamental thread in the second and current edition of the system is Morality - a 10-point track running from utter immorality and depravity up to glorious goodness of a saintly level. Basically, if a character commits a ‘sin’ of some kind - murder, theft, mocking small children - the player rolls dice to see whether they feel remorse and retain their Morality, or whether they think it’s absolutely fine and hence lose some Morality. The less moral a character is, the more unpleasant the sin has to be before it has an effect - and the less guilt they feel about other things. Morality turns up in other games in the World of Darkness series skewed slightly to reflect the prevailing social norms of the supernaturals using it - in Vampire, for instance, it’s recast as Humanity and tracks how much a vampire loses their soul after the change.  But, as well as losing the ability to feel guilt, characters develop derangements - mental illnesses - on their way down the Morality track. Mental illness, specifically including schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, phobias, fixations and a host of other problems suffered by real people every day, are explicitly included as a sort of punishment for doing bad things. It even includes hysteria - an illness originally believed to be caused by women’s wombs wandering around their bodies - and defines it, system-wise, as one step worse than a phobia. It’s also possible to develop mental illnesses as a linear result of trauma, but by far the most common use of the mechanic is for a character to - for instance - decide to steal something, then not to feel bad about it, and then to suddenly become a kleptomaniac. Loss of morals is intrinsically linked to going nuts – and getting better means getting well by being a better person. Lazy stereotypes There’s a huge stigma against mental illness in modern life. The stereotype of the violent schizophrenic who kills because of his (it’s always “his” not “her”) condition is alive and well in the minds of many – even though schizophrenics are more likely to hurt themselves than others. Other mental illnesses are seen as signs of weakness, narcissism, or other personality defects, or indications that a person is somehow fundamentally broken. World of Darkness as a system reinforces this view of mad and bad being permanently linked, and of mental illness as a scar on a person that can – and should – be healed by behaving well. This is, to put it mildly, not the most sensitive way to handle mental illness. It’s also utterly ass-backwards in terms of characterisation. Playing a schizophrenic character is a very, very serious decision that needs a lot of thinking through - and forcing someone into it because of a casual character action is a recipe for player discontent and an inconsistent portrayal. Not everyone is suited to play a mad character - certainly not everyone who wants to play a bad one. So, in many gaming groups, madness is played as badness, as frothing lunatics or evil serial killers, or it’s played for laughs – the funny schizophrenic is depressingly common, especially in World of Darkness Vampire, where there’s a whole family of the fiends who are completely mad (in that oh-so-amusing wacky way that turns life-threatening illnesses into one big joke).  A better way But including mental health systems in a game can bring depth and intrigue to the world and give players the opportunity to create something truly mesmerising - as it does in Unknown Armies. World of Darkness and Unknown Armies fill the same niche: noir realism, grim supernatural scenes, the chance your character might have to do something horrendous and the near-certainty that they’ll experience something awful. This is a game that’s creepy as hell when you play it well, all about postmodern magic and urban mythologies and genuinely weird shit. And mental health plays a big part in it - it’s a fundamental element of the game. Everyone is a little bit screwed up because of their past, everyone has personal triggers and bad memories, and every character deals with the reality of what their world is becoming in wildly different ways. Authors Greg Stolze and John Tynes list five areas of mental stress: isolation, violence, helplessness, the self and the unnatural. Exposure to things that cause stress in these areas means your character makes a stress check to see how well they cope – and both failing and succeeding have consequences.  Let’s say you’re trapped in a lift for 48 hours – that’s an isolation stress check. If you fail, you start to be slightly scared of being alone. Not much, but it adds up over time. And if you succeed, you get better at coping with being alone – but you start to get worse at relating to other people. Both effects are cumulative, and take real time to build up into something that has a serious effect on your character – which makes them much easier to play out than a sudden on-off switch that gives your character a derangement. Often a character will end up with effects from both failing and being hardened against stress checks, leading to complex, ambivalent reactions to in-game situations. The system not only forces you to think about how mental health really works – a sliding scale with cumulative self-reinforcing effects, in which anyone can slip into unhealthy patterns of behaviour – but also gets you to think about how to role-play the effects of trauma sensitively and intelligently. And what of schizophrenia and multiple personalities? That’s where Unknown Armies really shines - because it tells you not to do it. Deliberately. It even says, “A great many people have misperceptions about these disorders, and we don’t want to reinforce any incorrect information out there.” Although the authors were writing before the term ‘dissociative identity disorder’ became current, they treat multiple personalities as a serious issue, and firmly suggest to players that they should do the same, avoiding caricatures and asking them to research conditions before considering playing them. Playing with ideas In the end it’s down to the players and the storyteller of any tabletop game to create the experience they want to have. Lots of folks are fine with mental illness played for laughs – including those of us who’ve dealt or are dealing with mental health issues – but lots of others aren’t, and a system that builds in cavalier treatment of such a serious issue pushes people away. But more importantly for me, in a system that’s about realism and horror and features elegant models for physical conflicts, I want an elegant model for mental ones too - something that lets me play with ideas and play out difficulties and perhaps, in the end, come to a better understanding of how mental illness works.  Illustration by The Alchemy of Art.

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Women in hip-hop videos by Kat Stevens In a 1997 interview for British television, rapper Ma$e was asked by a female interviewer why his (and many other hip-hop artists') videos contained so much booty-wiggling. He replied in a lazy drawl: "Well, if you don't like the song, then at least you've got something to look at." The song he was promoting at the time, Feel So Good, featured many recognisable hip-hop tropes: a big shiny car, sparkling jewellery, dazzling lights and a large number of scantily-clad women shaking their derrieres in slow motion, for the benefit of a man wearing sunglasses in the dark. Ma$e's comments may have been charmingly self-deprecating in terms of his music, but with one sentence he confirmed a long-suspected view of American hip-hop videos: they are a feminist's nightmare. Hype machine Hip-hop videos weren't always so blinging and bootylicious. In the '80s and early '90s, most hip-hop artists didn't have the budgets or the clout to hire top video directors. Instead the focus was on showing off young talent in an everyday setting: kids spinning around on their backs on pavements, executing tremendous dance routines or bumping their car suspension up and down on the street. Given the racial tensions in LA and other American cities at the time, artists often had a political message and were keen to show an accurate depiction of ordinary life for poor black people. It was only once hip-hop gained mainstream acceptance in the mid-90s that huge record sales, chart success and major label signings translated into a demand for MTV-friendly videos. Step forward Harold 'Hype' Williams, director of over a hundred hip-hop and R'n'B videos between 1995 and 1999, including Ma$e's Feel So Good. He has made videos for LL Cool J, Nas, Blackstreet, Notorious B.I.G., Montell Jordan and P Diddy - nearly every big hip-hop artist that crossed over into the pop charts in the '90s had at least one Hype video. A former graffiti artist, Hype's distinctive shooting style used a fish eye lens to focus in on the central rapper and distort the dimensions of any nubile ladies that happened to be passing, and there were plenty of those.  CONTINUE READING.

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Gay characters of a certain age - i.e. anywhere between 30 and 70 - seem to be curiously absent from TV comedy and drama. Andrew Mickel wonders why...

Like many curious beasts, the full life cycle of a gay man has been carefully documented by television. He first appears when he erupts out of a 16-year-old boy that has shown no previous sign of harbouring such a thing inside them, bar an increased chance of blondness and a tendency to look worried in an 'I can't quite put my finger on why I'm not comfortable in my own skin so I'll just laugh along with my friends and hopefully no-one will notice' kind of way. After first emerging he'll then rarely come into contact with any other of his species, sometimes for several years, devoting his time to supporting his female comrades or perhaps accidentally trying it on with the straights. Eventually he will find another of his own kind, but unfortunately he's a shy sort of animal; they'll normally have one kiss, before then vanishing out of sight altogether, rarely being caught on film again. The few that stay above ground and in full view have presumably been neutered – perhaps the reason they've been shunned by the rest of The Gays off screen – ignoring the other few gay men around and instead spending their time on jaunty commentary about the straights around them. And experimenting with hats. They spend solitary lives living in boxes infested with ticks, before quietly vanishing too.  CONTINUE READING.

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RVIVR's Erica Freas and Kevin Rainsberry chat to Re/Action about punk rock, changing the world, and killer jellyfish... What does playing in a band mean to you? What are the best and worst things about it? Erica Freas: The best part is a steady outlet of expression: an excuse to rock the fuck out physically on a regular basis. A voice that is heard, holy shit! An interesting means of travel, though it's not a vacation to go on tour, and I do miss just scumming around a visiting friends in different cities. A chance to create collaboratively with this amazing group of people. The challenge to try harder and get better as a musician and together as a band.  I guess what's worst about it is that it's hard on my body sometimes. And sometimes we play shows to or with assholes, and I wonder why these are the people drawn to our music, when they are truly not who we have in mind as we're creating it.  I love being in bands, though. The negative aspects are small compared to the ways it makes my life better. Kevin Rainsberry: Yeah, it's a great means of expression. Playing music feels really good, especially when you can connect with and lock in with the people you are playing with. And connecting with other people outside of the band is really great too, though much harder. Playing a show to a room of excited people dancing and singing along is maybe the best feeling in the world. But my wrists hurt really bad sometimes and my fingers are swollen a lot in the morning. Speaking of touring, how was your recent European tour? EF: Our tour in Europe was great. Jan from YoYo Records set us up really nicely and nearly all the shows were fun and filled with interesting people. A highlight for me was conquering the "bro" vibe at the London show, and watching women swarm the pit to fully rock out for the second half of the set. We were asking for people to give up there spots at the front and let shorter people and people who weren't taking as much space as them to come forward if they wanted. We said it so many damn times we were sounding like assholes but finally it worked and it felt awesome.  KR: The tour was amazing. Jan is a dream and getting to travel with him and spend so much time with him was awesome. It was great traveling around new places outside of the US and meeting people doing cool things. The hospitality people showed us was amazing, hanging with Offshore Radio was the coolest; swimming was so fun, except for when I was mauled by a killer jellyfish; playing really great shows every night to people who were truly excited; the alps; the cities; the history lessons; the food... the whole thing was really fun. Erica, you introduced Real Mean at a show by saying that it might seem like fluff, but it's really about taking back your power - could you elaborate on that a bit? EF: Real Mean can be a frustrating song because it is our closest approximation to a standard "love" song, so it's a lot more accessible to people. And it is very much about hetero-sexist power dynamics in a failed relationship. Women are constantly villanized, sexualized, diminished in subtle and overt ways, especially when we hurt someone's feelings by rejecting them or otherwise asserting our power to steer our lives as we wish. All of us are sexist. I get uncomfortable when I think of Real Mean as a anthem for boys shirking accountability for the subtle or overt ways they fucked up with their ex-girlfriends. I'm still figuring out how to get that across on the mic. Stay tuned for a more eloquent version. Do you think there's a lot of sexism/bigotry in the punk scene - and if so, what's the best way to change that? EF: Yes. By confronting it honestly in ourselves first and holding each other accountable. KR: There's so much sexism and bigotry in the punk scene, in all the varied punk scenes everywhere, just like in the rest of the scenes and in the rest of the world. I don't know what to do. I try to start with myself and do my best. How important do you think music is in effecting social change? EF: Very. KR: I think it can be really important but also can so easily fall short. For example, look at the hippies in the 60s. I think that music was so strong then. It really moved people and the songs and the message really made an impact on what was going on. But now it mostly seems like crap to people. Or look at jazz in the 30s and 40s. I think it was able to influence social change, challenge race relations and social norms. Then rock 'n' roll came along and pushed it further.  It's very easy though for people to ignore the message in music. It's so typical to see some conservative assholes singing along to music with really progressive intentions, choosing to ignore the message so they can rock out in their truck or start a fight in the mosh pit. It goes the other way too, with people claiming to be liberal or progressive or something and listening to fucked up, racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever, music. I guess ignoring the message in music is easy. It's still important though. Some people pay attention. What compromises are you willing to make in life (assuming that some are necessary at all) - and what aren't you willing to? Kevin: Oh I don't know. I'm compromising things all the time. For example, I don't particularly like driving all over the place, but playing in bands I'm just driving all over the place. So much gas! Also I'm not crazy about spending my time serving ungrateful a-wipes or washing their dishes or doing some other menial task for nearly nothing so I can barely afford to live, but this is a compromise I've made so that I can live the rest of my life in the way I want to. Tell us about Rumbletown Records, and the ethos behind distributing music that way. EF: Rumbletowne Records is the label that Matt and I started three years ago to put out our own and our friends' music. We distribute that music via snail-mail mailorder, at shows and through other small distros, and through No Idea Records. We also have all our releases streaming and available for free/donation download at our website (www.rumbletowne.com). Those are just the ways that distribution have made sense to us as the label has progressed; it's just a small project. If you could ask people to change one thing about the way they live, what would it be? EF: Consume less. Share more. KR: What's the deal with nationalism? Why should someone born on the other side of some line be treated differently than me? They still need to eat and not be sick and poop and all the things I need. We're all people here.  EF: Yeah. Fuck borders in general. This article was originally published in issue 2 of Re/Action. Photography by Lauren Watson-Darby.

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A Commentary on Desire vs. Emotional Development by Dinah Sheehan Ah, summer. Getting drunk by the pool. Wearing ill-advised shorts and Hawaiian shirts. And watching superhero movies brimming with homoeroticism and women who are more afterthoughts than actual characters. Blockbuster action films and other mainstream movies and TV shows have an implicit (and explicit) hierarchy of acceptable romantic desire. At the top of the hierarchy is, of course, a man falling in love with a woman. That’s the most common romantic set-up that we see, and that makes sense. Most people are heterosexual. Things get a little sticky when it comes to the female characters. While there is room for men to be a little bit quirky (think Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim), there isn’t quite the equivalent for women. While female characters are becoming more competent and there are fewer “damsels in distress,” it still feels like their primary characterization or purpose in most movies is to be the object of the leading man’s desire. Way below on the hierarchy and far less prevalent than straight coupling is the matter of sexual attraction between men. Rarely, if ever, depicted in mainstream media, homosexual desire is relegated to smaller fringe and arthouse pieces, even in a post-Brokeback Mountain world. Brokeback Mountain was supposed to usher in a new era of queer visibility in film, yet half a decade after its release, little has changed on the ground in terms of movies with queer characters anywhere near that caliber. Though desire between women is another matter altogether. On the rare occasions when it is depicted with any manner of emotional gravity and not just for titillation, it often comes to disastrous ends. Willow and Tara of Buffy fame carried off a two-year relationship with normal ups and downs, but let’s not forget for even one moment that Tara was shot to death and Willow then went on a magic-fuelled killing spree to avenge her death, reinforcing the idea that there is something inherently tragic about queer desire. Off-screen in real life, queer people are visible in a way that they never have been before. They are at the grocery store, the bookstore, in the park during the day, and in the audience at the movies, but looking at most mainstream films, you’d never know it. CONTINUE READING

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Feminist crusading … or an extended apology?

by Kirsten Campbell Even if you haven’t read one of Stieg Larsson’s ubiquitous novels from the Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Girl who Played with Fire and the Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest) you cannot fail to have noticed their covers everywhere last year – peeping out at you from the laps of commuters and travellers all over the land.

Similarly, the arresting features of Noomi Rapace, the actress who played Larsson’s ‘Girl with …’ in the Swedish films glowers down from a thousand movie posters, luring even the most incurious among us to wonder: just who is this girl and what’s so fascinating about her feckin’ tattoo? As it turns out, Larsson himself wanted to call the first novel ‘Men who hate women’, but his English-language publishers fought shy of such a confrontational title, and since Larsson died of a heart attack shortly before publication, there wasn’t much he could do to stop them. Certain friends of his insist, however, that he would have been appalled at the change, as part of his intention in writing the books was to publicise the awful effects of violence perpetrated by men against women – sanitising the title would not have been his style.  CONTINUE READING.

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Fiona Campbell-Howes on how tabletop role-playing games can be surprisingly progressive... There is a place where being female isn’t seen as a character weakness, where the glass ceiling doesn’t exist, and where your gender has no bearing whatsoever on your life chances. No, it’s not Iceland. Or Sweden, or any of those socially progressive Scandinavian countries with a lesbian prime minister and a municipal crèche on every street corner. I’m talking, improbable as it may sound, about the world of Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons, you’re thinking. Eurgh, you’re thinking. The last refuge of the irredeemable nerd. Horrible, smelly, teenage boy stuff, for horrible, smelly teenage boys who haven’t mastered any social skills. Or worse, for horrible, smelly adult blokes who haven’t mastered any social skills, other than asking people if they’ve tried turning it off and then turning it on again. I know this is (possibly) what you’re thinking, because in true 21st century investigative reporting style, I asked some people on Facebook. More specifically, I asked 20 girlfriends on Facebook if they’d ever played D&D or another tabletop role-playing game (RPG), and if they hadn't, why not. Most answers were pretty much as I expected. “It’s something only the terminally sad do,” replied Clair. “The thought of playing D&D fills me with horror,” said Jane. “It’s just for nerds and saddos, isn’t it?” Kim had watched boys play at sixth-form college, but never joined in because “it was a boy thing.” Astrid avoided it “because I thought it was just for boys who liked Lord of the Rings, which I thought was the most boring thing imaginable.” Even among the more positive responses, there was an acknowledgment that RPGs aren’t always friendly territory for women. “I never played Dungeons & Dragons for the simple reason that my brother wouldn’t let me,” recalled Annie. Robynn, a regular player while at university, said she’d once met a male player who “told me quite frankly that his mates would never play with a woman as it would totally inhibit their raping and pillaging.” This is only a tiny sample of female-kind, but I don’t think it would be going out on a limb to suggest that fantasy role-playing games tend not to inspire wild enthusiasm among the vast majority of women. That’s probably because the genre as a whole is usually associated with its first and best-known product, Dungeons & Dragons, whose characters, settings and monsters were always going to appeal to more boys than girls. “Tolkien has a lot to answer for here,” says Jessica Tiffin, an active role-player, lecturer in science fiction and fantasy at the University of Cape Town and the author of Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale. “His male-centred heroic narratives horribly marginalise women, and Middle-Earth is an enormous influence on early fantasy games.”  This disdain for women is carried through into the official game scenarios, figurines and artwork that accompany D&D, where, in Tiffin’s words, "the [background] detail is frequently extremely reactionary: women are healers, tavern wenches, occasionally busty heroines or sultry enchantresses or femmes fatales, but in a very high proportion of settings there are trends to minimise well-developed or egalitarian roles for women.” Given this unpromising context, there might seem to be little point even attempting a positive appraisal of D&D and its ilk from a female point of view. But I think it’s worth doing, because there are two core aspects of fantasy RPGs that make them surprisingly progressive on the gender front.  Firstly, at the heart of Dungeons & Dragons, and many other RPGs, is a rules system that makes no judgments or distinctions based on gender. When creating a character, players roll dice to establish that character’s various strengths and weaknesses, but the character’s gender has no bearing on this process.  My most recent D&D character, for example, a retail manager-turned-adventurer called Daisy, is the only female character in the group, but also the handiest fighter against very large monsters. Daisy’s particular combination of attributes and abilities makes her adept at rolling underneath large creatures and stabbing them in their fleshy underparts - a highly valuable skill in many D&D encounters. Similarly, throughout the game, the outcome of any decision or encounter is decided on the roll of the dice, giving each character an equal chance of succeeding or failing. As someone who’s continually frustrated by gender-based discrimination in the real world, I find that quite refreshing. Secondly, one of the best things about tabletop RPGs is that once you have a set of rules, you don’t actually need much in the way of supporting material in order to play the game, which makes it pretty easy to avoid depictions of scantily clad warrior ladies and busty tavern wenches if these don’t interest you. (In three years of role-playing I’ve never so much as leafed through the D&D Player’s Handbook, and have no real intention of doing so.)  Instead, the most enjoyable sessions happen when the players and the GM (the Games Master, who establishes the setting and directs the game) use their own imagination to narrate the game as a collaborative story, using minimal physical props or even no props at all. I’ve had few spookier experiences than a recent winter’s-night session of Call of Cthulhu, a 1920s-set RPG based on the supernatural horror fiction of HP Lovecraft, which had everything to do with a group of friends creating a genuinely terrifying story, and nothing at all to do with elves, orcs or female objectification. It’s this capacity for collaborative storytelling that gives RPGs the potential to create fantasy worlds that aren’t – unlike most of the fantasy fare offered by mainstream film and television – presented from a single, overwhelmingly male standpoint. It’s possibly no coincidence that Joss Whedon, creator of some of the most gender-balanced ensembles in genre television, spent his college years playing D&D. And with hundreds of RPGs to choose from – a campaign I’m playing, in a game called Gamma World, is set in a post-apocalyptic version of my own home town, in which I play a seven-foot female cat/yeti hybrid who has just commandeered a hot air balloon from the wreckage of the local Sainsbury’s – it could be time for geeky-but-RPG-allergic women to check out what they’re missing. As Jessica Tiffin notes: “a good games master and an enlightened group can make whatever the hell they want to out of a system and setting - they'll simply discard the bits which offend their sensibilities, allowing the system to become the mechanism rather than the controller of the role-playing experience they want.” In other words, they can create their own immersive world to play in, which to my mind is a much more entertaining thing to do on a rainy weekday evening than watching Emmerdale. This article was originally published in issue 2 of Re/Action. Illustration by The Alchemy of Art.

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Ian MacKaye is a punk rock legend, and trying to sum him up in a line or two feels impossible, so let’s just say: Minor Threat, straight edge, Fugazi, Dischord Records, The Evens. We caught up with him to talk about how music can change the world…

Do you think music can be a force for social change? Would you say that music has ever changed your life? Music exposes you to all kinds of ideas, and makes you think about things differently. And if you’ve experienced that, then I would say that music is absolutely 100% effective. That’s the thing – music is no joke, music is really serious. Music is a form of communication that probably predates language, and I think music has attended every important moment in history. Music has always played a role: not always for good, but it’s always present.  Take hip hop, for instance. I think that hip hop was this absolutely radical re-imagining what music is. Now people hear hip hop and say, ‘yeah, that’s hip hop,’ but when it first showed up it was like alien music. It was a complete inversion of what everyone had been listening to at that point; you know, most rock music was guitars, bass, drums, maybe some keyboards maybe, but by and large, the way music was written was organised and arranged and very formal and consistent. And then hip hop comes along and it’s totally this weird collage of sounds that someone’s pasted together that somehow equals one picture, and that really was a radical sonic idea. I would say hip hop is a descendent of punk rock. With punk rock, it wasn’t the safety pins that were so captivating, it was the self-determination.  People say ‘well, what did you ever do with music?’ I mean, that’s like saying, ‘well, what does a baker do with bread?’ It’s the people who are important: they make the changes, and music can bring about new ideas, whether it’s in the lyrical content, or it may be a rhythmic thing. I would say music is extremely capable of effecting change - or assisting change, or provoking change. Again, it’s like food: the thing about it is that bad people eat too. It can go in any direction. Do you think there’s a danger that music, particularly when it’s trying to do something radical, can be misinterpreted? Absolutely. But you can’t control an idea. I think my general position is that I should be as mindful as possible about what it is I’m gonna say, or how I’m gonna say it, or where I’m gonna say it, because if the intent is clear, then it’s less likely to be terribly reappropriated. For example, I’ve written a number of songs that I think have been misappropriated. One really obvious example would be a song Minor Threat did called Guilty of Being White. I grew up in Washington DC, which then was 70% black, and I went to public schools where I was really under assault for being a white kid. I was trying to write a song that was sort of an anti-racist song, but singing about it from the perspective of being a white kid who was basically being attacked for being white, when the thing about racism is that it works the other way around.  I wrote it when I was 17 or 18; it was 1980, Washington DC had no musical profile, there were no bands, and I didn’t know it was going to be recorded. I was having a dialogue with my friends, so everyone there understood the context. Guilty of Being White has some very radical language, and I was trying to be radical, but I was being radical to make a point about why racism is wrong. But then years and years later, I had skinheads thanking me for sticking up for the white man, and that’s just not ever, ever, ever what I was thinking of. But I don’t have any control over that. All I can do is try to be more mindful about what I say. Isn’t it frustrating when your work is misunderstood, though? When things are misunderstood, then I think ‘okay, that’s an opportunity to have dialogue.’ Where it gets more complicated is if people are getting hurt. That’s a problem because that’s the last thing I ever would want. But that’s the thing about human beings, you know. If you and I were building a house and I hand you a hammer, you could pound in some nails and make something beautiful or you could pound me in the head and kill me. That’s just the way human beings are: a tool is a weapon and you have to make peace with that. You’ve been a part of the punk scene for 30-odd years now, and you’ve achieved so much. How does it feel to look back? I’m a human being, I’m living, and I make music, and I try to engage life every day and I call it punk rock, but that’s just what I call it. People say that to me, ‘you’ve been doing this for a long time,’ and, yeah, I guess so, but anyone who’s 48 years old has been doing something for a long time. And the way you feel about waking up in the morning – ‘okay, another day!’ – that’s how I feel too. What I find shocking is that people ever approach life thinking ‘okay, this is a phase, I’m gonna be doing this for a while and I’ll get real later on.’ In my opinion, you’re real from day one. Someone once asked me straight up “if you had a kid and you could only teach that kid one lesson, what would it be?” At the time, I didn’t have a kid and I thought about the question for a while, and I said, my answer is that it’s okay to be wrong. I figured if a kid knows that they can be wrong, then they can change. But if it’s not okay to be wrong, then you can never change. So if you get on the wrong path, then you’ll never say, ‘oh, I’m on the wrong path.’ I think kids are not taken seriously, so they don’t take themselves seriously. I remember in the early days of punk rock, people would ask ‘where do you see yourself in five years?’ And I don’t see myself in five years, I see myself right now. I just don’t think like that. I think the future is nothing to be scared of, because either it’s gonna get here, and we’ll figure it out, or it’s not going to get here, and it doesn’t make any difference. I find it an insulting question because it presupposes that what you’re doing now is somehow not legitimate, and I reject that. But you do seem like a person who’s always known what you were going to do. If you stand up and look down, that’s the path you’re on. That’s how I look at it. I don’t know what my path is, I just know where I am. It’s not like I live in a total vacuum; obviously, I know what’s gonna happen in the next few weeks, and I’m working on all kinds of projects, but … okay, right now I’m talking to you and I’m scraping stickers off a filing cabinet. I was in the basement when you called, looking at this thing I found in the trash, this beautiful CD filing cabinet; it can hold 1,000 CDs and it’s in perfectly good condition, and someone just threw it away. It had some horrible stickers on it and I don’t wanna see them, so it’s just been sitting in my workspace area waiting for me to do something with it. So when you called, I was inspired to take off the stickers while I’m on the phone. And it worked perfectly! They’re all gone! Here’s a great thing – if you ever have a sticker residue on something, use a little bit of vegetable oil, it dissolves the adhesive.  That’s my life right there. I always tell people, when you’re depressed, clean your windows! You might not feel better, but goddamn you’ll have clean windows. This is the way I live and do my work, I like to have projects and do things, and then the thing about it is if there’s always something to do, then suddenly you look and you’re like, look what I’ve done! You know? You’re very accessible, too - we didn’t have to go through a publicist to talk to you, we just emailed and you replied. Right, I’m a human being. People with publicists are either shy or they’re misinformed. I think when people go into the music business, there’s all these people who tell you that you need to get a publicist or you need to get a manager, or you need to do this or that and that is just a bunch of crap! People constantly have told me what I need to be doing, but, for instance, if I was on tour somewhere, then there’d be a person who is essentially a publicist who maybe works for the distributors who will arrange interviews, but anyone could write me directly and say ‘can I interview you?’  I don’t need to have a gatekeeper. I think a lot of people have no idea that I’m so accessible – I’m in the phonebook! I think we all assume that there’s a structure that we have to follow. And the whole point of punk rock, for me, was to categorically reject that notion. It strikes me as so odd when people I know who identify as punk rock embrace that, because it’s like, of all the horrible aspects of the music industry, look which one you decide to adopt.  I know a lot of people who are very well known rock stars and they’re my friends, so I’ll just call ‘em up, or they’ll call me, but occasionally I get these contacts from people asking ‘hey, can you help me get in touch with so and so?’ I’ll write back and say no. And they’ll say, ‘well, I tried to get in touch via their publicist and I’m not getting anywhere.’ And I say, well, that’s the way he wanted it, it’s his decision. I can’t be critical because when you go into that hyper famous world, it’s like… you know there’s this phenomenon where people will take a knife or a hammer to a piece of art; there’s this guy Lazlo Toth, and he took a hammer to a Michelangelo statue, and people were like, ‘why would he attack art, what’s that about?’ And the reason is because art has power. And the power that art has is something that’s solely created by people looking at it and talking about it and building entire mausoleums around it.  It can drive you crazy – how can this inanimate object that’s really just a piece of paper with a bunch of ink on it, how could it have so much power? To take an axe to this thing is a blow against power, in a weird way. I think those people are crazy, but that’s one reason why I can understand how people who are very very famous have to take precautions. Because people think of them as having power, and people who are crazy often get very confused about power. Does it scare you, that people might see you as a kind of figurehead? And they have done, actually. I’ve had a couple of really crazy experiences, I had some really unpleasant things happen, but I think that’s life. The way I look at it, occasionally there’ll be some craziness but that’s my life and I’ve made these decisions about doing things a certain way – I can’t be too upset about people calling me if my number’s in the phone book, right? Here’s the thing, if you have an unlocked door, occasionally a few devils will walk in, but if you keep a locked door, then a thousand angels will walk by. Do you get a lot of fans calling you up? No, they’re too scared to! I get a lot of crank calls from drunk guys going [imitates drunk voice] ‘oh my god, it’s fucking Ian MacKaye, holy shit fuck man I’m fucking drunk but I fucking love you!’ I cannot tell you how many calls I’ve had like that over the years. It’s some weird rite of passage: they’re 16, they’re drunk, so they call Dischord House and make fun of straight edge. I don’t get mad about it. It’s just one of those things.  I’ve often said to people: I care, I just don’t give a fuck. People go, ‘how’s that work?’ But that’s just the truth. That’s just the way I am. Like, if somebody wants a leg up, I’m ready to get to work, but if they don’t care, I’m out. I’ve got other things to do. I’m a construction worker, not a destruction worker. This interview was originally published in issue 2 of Re/Action magazine.

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Not So Lovely Film's Jen Moss talks to Re/Action about loving horror movies, the difficulties of low budget filmmaking, and working with Kate Nash... Tell us about your new short film. What’s it about, and when can we see it? The Morning After is my second short film. After my first, Dumped, which was a dialogue-heavy short with very basic shots and camera set-ups, I wanted to make something a lot more visually engaging; something really colourful and with a lot of movement. The film is about a girl called Angel having to deal with the aftermath of her Halloween party. She's hungover, she's tired, her parents are due to pick her up for lunch and she has way more to contend with than just a trashed flat...  We're hoping to get the film finished by October. And how did Kate Nash get involved? One of my close friends is her manager and I was telling her about the short and how much more ambitious I wanted to be with it. I'd already managed to get a really talented crew in place and I thought it would be great if we could have some sort of "name" attached to play Angel as well. Turns out Kate is a massive horror fan, so my friend gave her a copy of the script and she really liked it and wanted to get involved. I was over the moon. You wrote and directed both The Morning After and Dumped. Which of the two disciplines do you prefer?  Directing. As much as I enjoy the writing, it really is the collaborative aspect of filmmaking I love the most. Writing is a very solitary part of the process and I just get a lot more out of bouncing ideas of others, be it in pre-production with the art department or on set with my DoP and everything else in between. I love drawing on other people's talents and using their expertise to help me get the results I want. I definitely want to continue writing my own films but having said that I would love to have a go at directing someone else's script. I think it would be a completely different experience and one I'd like to try one day. Would you like to get involved in any other aspects of film production? By the nature of The Morning After having such a tiny budget, I ended up taking on a few production tasks and, let me tell you, it is really tough. I don't think producers get anywhere near the credit they deserve, mostly I think because people don't actually understand what it is they do (including me before this film!) There is no way I could've done it on my own so I'm incredibly grateful to my producer for taking on a lot of the hard work. In my day job, I work for a record label placing music in films and adverts so music supervision is something I have a lot of experience in and an aspect of filmmaking I really enjoy. I'd also love to develop some editing skills... What inspired you to start making your own movies? It's just something I have always been interested in. When it came time to choose a discipline to study at university, I was torn between film and music. I ended up going with music which, if anything, only made my love for film grow stronger as it never became my job. I think though, it's really been in the past 5 or 6 years of going to Frightfest and meeting and befriending lots of filmmakers that I've been given the confidence and support to finally give it a crack myself.  Have you found people are surprised that you’re working in the horror genre because you’re female?  I guess I don't get it that much because most of my friends are horror fans but yes I do get the odd surprised reaction. But then anyone who spends more than five minutes with me quickly comes to the conclusion that rom-coms are never gonna be my thing!  I think, in fairness, the perception that women don't like horror is one that is changing and that it's less surprising to find female fans of the genre. I get the impression that as the genre has because more mainstream over the years, the audience for it has broadened and so Joe Public is starting to see that horror fans aren't all sweaty middle aged loners living in their parents' basement.  What is it about horror that you love, anyway? Everything! I love that there are so many sub-genres to horror and therefore so many different ways to enjoy a horror film. I love the thrill of being genuinely scared by something, that rollercoaster ride feeling. I also love the comedy that comes from good old over-the-top gore and I also love the ability of certain horror films to really disturb, challenge and make you think. Generally speaking, I just think it's a healthy way of indulging the darker side that all of us have within us... What advice would you offer someone who wanted to start making their own films?  To quote a famous sports brand: Just do it. Pick up a camera, find some people who are willing to help you create something and start filming. It doesn't matter if you don't really know what you're doing or you don't have enough money to make something fancy, it's all about getting hands-on experience. If you find that it's something you're really into then there are loads of great courses and books out there to help you hone your skills and develop your technical knowledge but there's no better way to learn than just getting out there. That's exactly what I did on Dumped: made it on a wing and a prayer with a bunch of film loving/filmmaker friends. I made a million and one mistakes but it's the mistakes I learnt from the most. Find out more about Not So Lovely Films on Facebook and Twitter.