unholygrail

[unholygrail]

What hating ‘GIRLS’ said about us

HBO’s Girls - which, for six years, amassed reams of critical and media attention but few actual viewers – means a lot to me for many reasons. First of all, the show spanned perfectly my young adulthood. 

Filming began in 2011, the year I turned 18, and the final episode aired on Sunday. The world does not need another opinion on Girls. Enough exist. But I have loved the show, I think it’s important and I’m bored of hearing the same old complaints about it from all kinds of people in my life. I have always maintained the show is a masterpiece. Slagging off Girls or, at best, nit-picking the show for its perceived failures, is easy. It is chaotic, discomforting and deliberately difficult to digest. But it’s exactly these qualities that make it brilliant.

1. ‘She looks so shit when she’s naked’

It doesn’t matter who you are: the nudity probably bothers you. Dunham is naked, with the tenacity to not match the ideal body type that we are bombarded with every day (because - God knows - we need another one of those). People disagree with Dunham’s nudity because it’s self-obsessed, it’s narcissistic, it’s needless. I’ve spoken to men and women, old and young, Liberal and Conservative who all find the nudity uncomfortable. But all of this is missing the point. Part of the genius of the show is that it provokes the question: why do we need Hannah Horvath to put a shirt on? What does it say about us?

2. ‘But it’s not about anything’

Like yeah. That’s the point. Girls captures that awkward ennui of being a privileged twenty-something. It’s about that gap between your fantasy life, and the world as it actually is in reality. 

The show delves deep into themes like sexual assault, abortion and pregnancy, mental illness, sexuality and addiction. 

3. ‘They’re all SO awful I can’t watch it’

The show challenges the assumption that women on television – as in life – must always be diplomatic, generous, smiling and uncomplicated. As a woman, you are supposed to care what other people think and in a world that will judge you for anything you do. Marnie Michaels, arguably the show’s most controversial character, is terrible in a multitude of ways. But Marnie’s sins (narcissism, selfishness, terrible music) don’t even nearly equal that of Walter White, Tony Soprano and countless over beloved – and deeply troubled – TV heroes. Yet she, and the other girls, are universally reviled. It isn’t really that complicated. They are disliked because they are dislikable. Yet it is more than that. They are not awful in a way that is cool or alluring or somehow respectable. They are annoying and jarring in ways that women are not allowed to be.

   4.   ‘But Lena Dunham’s just the worst’ For some reason, the world understands that Larry David on TV is not Larry on Curb Your Enthusiasm. We understand that Larry David is aware that comedy comes from a lead character who lacks self-awareness. We don’t see women in a complex way. Hannah Horvath is an invented character. The comedy of Hannah comes from the distance between how others see her and how she views herself. The show, which Dunham writes, is filled with other characters commenting on her worst attributes: her narcissism, her entitlement, her indolence. It is a self-aware show about tone-deaf people.

Of course, Dunham is not perfect, and like any public figure who is vocal, she makes mistakes. 

But the swarths of resistance to her - calling her a paedophile, a racist, a spoiled entitled brat, a bad dresser - veer more towards misogynist bile than informed critical disagreement. It’s far more ‘ew look at her’ than ‘I don’t agree with her opinions’. The critical response to the Girls episode ‘One Man’s Trash’, in which Dunham spent a heavenly weekend with a very good-looking doctor (Patrick Wilson), focused on the fact that someone like her could never sleep with someone like that. Film and television, from time immemorial, has depicted beautiful women and less-than-attractive men. But the reverse is unthinkable. 

But, for whatever reason, critics and audiences are not sophisticated enough to recognise Lena and Hannah as distinct beings. This is yet another uncomfortable truth the show reveals. The way we see women is too simple. We put them in a box and don’t like them to move around.

5. Omfg kill it please…

- She is a pedo…look it up - Omfg kill it please… - Didn’t Lena Dunham sexually abuse her younger sister?  So who is she to complain about sexual assault when she admitted to rape herself. - Feminist: an unsightly woman who becomes angry at men because they won’t date her. - Why are people making this political? I think we can all agree no matter what political side you are on all people can hate this ugly untalented wreck of a person. - Lena Dunham is cancer [34 people ‘like’ this one] - Does Lena have downs? Honest question.

I picked a Lena Dunham video at random (her recent appearance on “The View”) and these were some of the comments, unedited.

The depth of the malice against Dunham online is unsettling. She was forced to leave Twitter because of regular death and rape threats and a barrage of abuse appendixes every online video. Dunham bothers people, both left and right. 

Girls rarely bowed to any of these criticisms, becoming more unwieldy, bold and extreme as it went along. 

I think the problems we have with Girls (big G) says a lot about the problems we have with girls (small g). We cannot stomach their behaviour if it doesn’t fit with our idea of how they should be. We don’t like them to take risks or make us uncomfortable. We don’t like them to be sleep openly with people more attractive than they are. And we really don’t like them to wear a crop top if they’ve got a fat stomach.

Goodbye Girls.

Thanks for not being shit.

[unholygrail]

A letter to my some day daughter

12th November 2036

Dear Daughter,

When you’re a child, we try to make your world fair. If you work hard at something, you are praised. If you do something bad, you are punished. If you put your heart and soul into a creative project, you are loved and rewarded for it. The marks you get in school are, largely, based on your effort and your brains, not the way you look, whether you’re a girl or a boy, or how much pocket money you get.

Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work this way.

As I write this letter, the world is reeling from the horribly unfair decision to elect Donald Trump as President of America over his rival Hillary Clinton. When you read this, he will seem distant and small to you. But right now, he is very big and very scary. When you see pictures of him and hear about the things he once said, he will seem like the baddie in a storybook. He says terrible things about the people who need him the most. But, the truth is, ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ don’t exist in real life. We all have some good in us and some bad. Deep down, almost all of us want to be good. But the thing is, the fear you have now about ghosts and ghouls and monsters won’t ever really go away. It just becomes a different kind of fear: a fear of people who look different to you or sound different to you or come from a different place. Please don’t let that fear control you when you become a grown-up. You might be wondering how Donald Trump, saying the things he says, was ever able to become so popular. The answer is that people are afraid, and he was clever enough to see it and use it.

This fear of anything that is unfamiliar or unusual is also why being the first person to do anything is very, very difficult. As I write this letter, there has never been a girl president of the United States. That might be strange for you to imagine, as I know - by the time you read this - there will probably have been a few: President Beyoncé, President Michelle Obama, President Miley Cyrus. Hillary Clinton wanted to be the first woman ever to be in charge of America. She, like anyone trying to do something for the first time, has had to deal with people being very mean to her, and saying nasty things about the way she is and the things she does. It’s easy to look at how people like her are treated (particularly women and people who don’t have white skin) and to decide that it’s not really worth trying. But you must not ever think that. Anything truly important you ever do will be met with anger because people are scared of what they haven’t seen before.

Progress, in your own life and in the world, is a constant back-and-forth movement. So, if it seems as if things are moving backwards, please don’t ever lose heart.

To me, you are the most clever and beautiful girl in the world. Not everyone will think this – that is okay too. What other people think of you doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you think of yourself. Decide that you are strong and beautiful, clever and good, and you take the power away from others to decide that for you. You deserve respect and food to eat and hospital care when you’re sick. But, beyond these basic things, you aren’t entitled to anything or anyone. If you want something, you will have to work very hard and, above all, you must be fearless.

Be kind above all else. But if you feel like something wrong is happening, speak. Even if you don’t get the reaction you hope for, you can at least feel smug knowing that you’re on the right side of history.

At times you will want to quit but don’t ever do it. The world is terrible and hard and horrible and unfair but, the beauty is, it does get easier. Because life teaches you to live it.

Also: don’t eat yellow snow, don’t pierce your tongue and please don’t look at my old Facebook pictures.

All my love,

Mum x

[unholygrail]

The Disappearing Self-Love of Teenage Girls

Take a girl at 10.

So often, she will be chatty, confident and aware of her talents. I work with ten-year-olds nearly every day and I am stunned – and envious – of their self-assurance.

“I’m the best in my whole class at Maths!” she’ll announce with gusto. “I’m amazing at P.E!” a little girl will state with all the confidence and swagger of Boris post-Brexit. “I’m the best at English even though it’s my fourth-favourite subject!”

In short, 10-year-old girls are a rare and wonderful breed. They have little self-consciousness when it comes to their own movement, bodies or behaviour. For the most part, girls of this age don’t mind if their clothes clash. They want to try things out. They know deep within themselves they will be President one day, or an Astronaut, or a Chocolate Taster, or a Philosopher. They are full of possibilities for the future. They don’t worry if you think they’re fat.

Now skip forward five years. The same girl is 15. Too often, she will be quieter, shyer, and less present in the room. One thing is certain: she will be unhappy with some aspect of her appearance. Almost every girl of this age has an internal list. An on-going, ever-extending catalogue of everything ‘wrong’ with the way she looks.

This change matters. It matters because she hates her body she’ll start to hate herself. She’ll hold herself back. She’ll lose confidence in her work. Often, she’ll begin to hedge herself, beginning or ending sentences with ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘it’s probably not important’. She’ll try everything to make herself smaller, and this matters.

Rachel, now in her early twenties, was an assured child. “I was always the kind of kid to make friends easily and talk to anyone and everyone. I was very happy in my own skin.” But as she got older, “being confident and the kind of person who always reached out became more and more difficult. I started getting the usual teenage body confidence issues and eventually personality confidence issues too. I started feeling like I was too much for people and became anxious to turn it down”.

A new survey from the Department of Education has revealed that more than a third of middle-class teenage girls in the UK now experience symptoms of psychological distress. According to statistics obtained by the organisation, 37% of female 14-year-olds feel unhappy, worthless or unable to concentrate: double the amount of boys at the same age.

Think about that for a second. A THIRD of middle-class teenage girls exhibit signs of serious mental health problems. Sure, puberty is bad. But compared with most of the universe, life is pretty sweet for your average middle class teenage girl in this country. She’ll never look better in her life. She probably has a beach holiday every year. She has no dependents or taxes. She probably gets a good education. She probably lives in a nice house with that thing built into her fridge that gives out ice. But there is a one in three chance she’s clinically miserable. Something is wrong.

The obvious scapegoat is social media. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Ask.FM are a constant full-time gig to maintain. A social media presence is permitted after the age of 13. Thereafter, it is near compulsory, and requires constant maintenance. “People think it’s weird if you don’t have a Facebook or one type of social media” Alicia, 15, tells me. “Very few people don’t have Instagram, it’s seen as ‘off’”. Apparently, some of her friends maintain two Instagram accounts simultaneously: one for their shinier ‘public’ self, and one more personal account for family and close friends.

Many of these sites lead to worrying levels of comparison between a teenage girl and her friendship group, school year and wider social network.

“It’s not a nice feeling”, says Alicia. “When you don’t have Wi-Fi for a while and you look at your feed all the messages and posts, they’re overwhelming, like physically.”

“It’s so easy to look at a photo and think I look nothing like that, I’m fat, her skin’s perfect, she’s got so many friends. It’s so easy to get to these photos when you’re feeling bad. Sometimes you look at your best friend’s profile and you know it’s fake. But it’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just something we all have to do.”

Often, social media compounds pressures that already exist. “If someone’s lied to you, the truth can come out on social media, and that hurts”, says Louise, 16. “Lots of my friends feel anxious all the time. Maybe it’s because a friend didn’t speak nicely to them that day, maybe exams and school stress, home stress, it can be anything. Anxiety is really common. Subconsciously, you need to look a certain way. You need to be a certain way. Having to record everything is also stressful.  You’re not in the moment, you’re not enjoying where you are”.

I turned 14 in 2007, the year Facebook went mainstream. Suddenly everything that had been subtext rose to the surface. Of course there are joys to social media usage. I loved (and still love) so many aspects of the experience. And of course boys aren’t immune to the pressures. But popularity, suddenly, was a game of Top Trumps. Looks could be measured. Friends could be measured. Parties could be measured. Holidays could be measured. I didn’t measure up, and my self-love suffered for it.

I was educated at an all-girls independent school that dined out on some of UK’s best exam results. But depression, anxiety and eating disorders were rife, and the pastoral care available to us was ill equipped. So many of the young women my school produced into the world had impossible numbers of A*s but were exceptionally insecure in most areas of their life. The great pressure to be “Little Miss Perfect” in everything – perfect body, perfect face, perfect boyfriend, perfect grades, perfect holidays, perfect life – was immense.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard these female-only school environments dismissed as ‘bitchy and two-faced’, while rational, level-headed boys ‘sit down and talk about problems out in the open or fight it out physically’. So often, teenage girls are disregarded as catty backstabbers, their interests called frivolous, their speech patterns called stupid. I’m not saying, necessarily, that this isn’t true. But we don’t stop for a moment to question why girls behave in this way, why vicious backstabbing is so often the only course of behaviour.

We need to show compassion towards girls at this age, not judgement. We need to use social media to open up the world for them, not ram it shut. We need to give teenage girls the opportunity to channel their feelings creatively. There needs to be more focus on pastoral care, so that a girl knows that being fine isn’t looking fine or sounding fine or doing fine in school. It’s being fine.

But yeah. It’s, like, probably not that important anyway.

[unholygrail]

we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars

[unholygrail]

Why Netflix is Life

I think television is important because it is one of the closest art forms to real life. However, up until very recently, TV has been real life bound by very strict guidelines. 

Content must be squeezed into 30 minute or 1 hour slots. The characters cannot say certain words. They cannot show certain body parts. There cannot be too much sex. Sex can only be shown in certain ways. Creators must decide, from the get-go, whether their show is a ‘comedy’ (haha) or a ‘drama’ (boohoo). The content must be adeptly structured around ad breaks.

The makers of ‘Breaking Bad’ on AMC were told they were only allowed one showing of breasts and one use of the word 'fuck' per season. This is not life. Thankfully, we are not allowed one 'fuck' and one viewing of breasts per year.

Enter: streaming television. As new formats do not come with the same caveats, they can be closer to real life. Netflix and Amazon Prime, who have only been creating content for the past couple of years, have been hitting it out of the park. Why? Because they give artists free reign. 

The experience of watching TV has changed drastically. Thirty years ago, it was a small square box in the corner of the room. Now, it is a screen that you can pull right up to your face. We do not hold these characters at an arms length, like a stranger or acquaintance. We take them right into our personal space. We do not see them once a week; with the same regularity we might see a doctor, a therapist or a dentist. We see them like a new boyfriend in the first flushes of love. TV is no longer a communal, formalised act. It is deeply personal.

So, what is the best of the new crop of shows on these formats?

1. Orange is the New Black (Netflix)

Orange is a comedy-drama set in a women’s prison. Piper Chapman, the pretty, thin, middle-class blonde around which the series was centred, was the creator’s 'Trojan Horse'. The series moved away from her and toward the cast of characters in the prison, who are incredibly diverse in age, body shape, race and social class. 

At times hilarious, at times heart-shattering, the series posits an obvious but essential truth; none of us are bad, but only the result of the events and people that made us.

2. Transparent (Amazon Prime)

Transparent, the story of a trans parent coming out to her three children in her seventies, is breath-taking. The show received attention in part because it tapped into transgenderism, the cause du jour. But Transparent is not just a symptom of this fad. It is a family drama at its most important and compelling.

The show captures so perfectly and gracefully the essential nature of a family: the little in-jokes have that no-one understands, the strange little rules that no-one questions, the impossible, nonsensical, desperate love. It is startlingly original, exquisitely shot and genuinely funny. The second series, just released yesterday, is just as brilliant and daring as the first.

3. Master of None (Netflix)

Master of None is the comic Aziz Ansari’s series inspired by his book Modern Romance. The show has received a great deal of attention and praise for its radical use of characters who aren’t white. But that is not the best thing about it. It is unflinchingly accurate in how we relate to each other. It dares to ask provocative and uncomfortable questions about race, age and gender.

Masters of None is confident enough to change. Each episode has a filmic quality, with a different flavour, texture and theme: from innate gender differences to minority representation on TV. 

4. One Mississippi (Amazon Prime)

It is perhaps unfair to compare 'One Mississippi' to the other three. There are, to date, only 28 minutes of content. However, the show deserves a mention because it is stunning. A semi-autobiographical piece, it follows the great and, until recently, severely underrated comic Tig Notaro as she travels home to say goodbye to her mother on her deathbed. She has recently undergone a double mastectomy. Sound fun? Not particularly. But the show, while hard-hitting, is a genuinely funny and fearless vehicle for a significant comic talent.

                                                    --

These series are important because they are showing us new perspectives. 

These points of view are not exactly new, they have always existed. But the emergence of these new formats has timed perfectly with a cultural impetus towards diversity of experience.

The creators of these shows have realised that their status as NOT the white-straight-man we have seen a billion times before, in a billion different ways, is not a handicap. It is an advantage. These kinds of stories have never been told before, which means they are original and important.

Life does not fit into convenient 30-minute slots with one instance of ‘fuck’ and a white-straight-man conveniently placed at the centre of everything. Life is colourful and dirty and scary and unpredictable and awfully tragic. These shows embrace life in its complexity and complications, and for so doing, have landed.

[unholygrail]

The feminism of Friends

Marta Kauffman, co-creater of the world-conquering show Friends, said recently that she had to constantly defend the storylines of her female characters to TV executives. Namely, they were uncomfortable with lead character Monica engaging in casual sex. Kauffman’s response to the exec’s concerns? She continued much the same, and sent him a package of pantyhose, tampons, lipstick and nail polish.

My parent’s generation were the first to take television seriously as an art form. They were right to. The power of TV to shape our worldview cannot be understated. So much of the way my generation talk and joke with one another comes directly from Friends. Most days as a pre-teen, I watched two episodes of Friends on E4 after school. The women on the show were my role models. I thought they were beautiful and hilarious and had impossibly shiny hair. I’ll never forget watching the episode where Ross and Rachel hire a male nanny for their daughter Emma. Joey’s response is outrage. ‘That’s weird. A man can’t be a nanny’ he says. ‘That’s like a woman wanting to be a…’ ‘What is the end of that sentence!’ says Monica, her eyes wide. There’s a pause. ‘A penis model!’ he responds.

It was really funny, obviously. But the way Monica’s eyes widened was also my first experience of feminism.

The set-up of Friends feels tired now. It stars a group of down-on-their-luck - but hopelessly charismatic and attractive - men and women in their late twenties. Together, they navigate the trials of work and love. They have minimum wage jobs and live in an inexplicably beautiful and airy Greenwich Village apartment. They seem to have a couple of hours every day set aside to eat muffins and drink coffee. On the surface, the show couldn’t feel more mainstream. In no small part, this is because it has been so widely copied and parodied.

Beneath this wholesome surface, though, lies an undercurrent of quite radical feminism. The show starred three men and three women. The women weren’t wives or girlfriends or assistants. They were equal counterparts to the men on the show. Rachel, Monica and Phoebe were just as funny, just as bold, just as loveable, and just as flawed as Joey, Ross and Chandler. Their storylines were just as meaty, if not more. They were smart but made stupid decisions. They were unafraid to sleep around. All three dated a huge number of men over the course of the series, but weren’t apologetic. All three spent a number of years as single women, but weren’t devastated. They just got on with things. They pursued their dreams and worked hard at their careers. They defended themselves, but weren’t shrews. They were genuinely supportive of one another. They didn’t talk about feminism. They lived it.

Yes, the show brought the term ‘friendzoned’ to the mainstream. But I’ll forgive that. It introduced the drastic idea that yes, men and women can be genuine friends, because women have more to offer than their sexuality. They can be quite good company too. Women can be beautiful and successful without their likeability suffering. Yes, Phoebe is a touch quirky, but she’s no manic dream girl. She has a job and an apartment and is a functioning member of society.

I don’t believe in feminists telling other feminists how to be better feminists. It’s hypocritical and counterproductive. Feminism is the notion that women can do whatever we want: it lets ‘you do you’. For me, though, modern feminist activism can be a bit humourless. Of course, there are some feminist issues far too serious to joke about. The limits of this can, of course, be debated. But that is too complex an issue to go into here. My point is that online feminists can waste a lot of energy quibbling over pedantic details, with a lot of ‘activism’ coming down to pointless semantics.

Often, super-liberal websites like Tumblr and feminist Facebook pages punish commenters, often male, who are curious about feminism, but don’t know the ‘correct’ language. They respond with aggression, often using the catchall term ‘problematic’, to anyone who doesn’t entirely agree with their way of thinking. They create a culture of fear around speaking out about feminism without having read up on every detail. Some women might be offended and bruised by catcalls on the street. Others might be flattered. Everyone is allowed to react to things in their own way. There is no such thing as a ‘correct’ emotional response.

This kind of talk is not activism. It has the opposite effect. These keyboard warriors are making people who might consider being feminists too afraid to speak out. They are not allowing people to come to their own decisions, and think in slightly differing ways.

By being so aggressively, unerringly liberal, they are not liberal at all.

When I first got to university, I discovered this feminist rage. Something about the combination of the feminist books I was reading as part of my course - and the way female freshers are judged and fought over like prized cattle - made something click. I was constantly angry. I obsessively read, and absorbed, the university’s feminist Facebook pages. Suddenly, everything was either ‘problematic’ or difficult. The truth was, being so enraged wasn’t really making my life that much better. And I wasn’t persuading anyone else either.

The US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg - or the ‘Notorious RBG’ as she has been dubbed on social media by adoring fans – recently advised young women against this behaviour. Last month, she was awarded the Radcliffe Medal from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her message to young girls living in 2015 was simple. ‘Fight for the things you care about’ she said, ‘but do it in a way that will lead others to join you’. I think the fact that so many young women are using social media to fight for feminism is wonderful. But I think they should pay attention to the second part of the Notorious RBG’s statement. We need to be engagingly feminist to further the cause, fighting in a way that will make others want to join up. Otherwise, we risk alienating those who are on the fence.

The ‘misogyny problem’ on Friends began when Kauffman and David Crane were working on the pilot. “There was a man who was the head of the network at the time, a bit of a misogynist, lovely, lovely man,” Kauffman recently stated. “And he was having trouble with Monica sleeping with a guy on the first date. He handed out a questionnaire and one of the questions was, 'For sleeping with a guy on a first date, do you think Monica is a) A Slut, b) A Whore, c) Too Easy, d) None Of The Above. And it was all none of the above. Nobody cared”.

Nobody cared because Monica is an engaging, funny character. We identify with her, so are less likely to judge. If you want to tell people the truth, you need to make them laugh. Ranting on social media might make us feel better, but it isn’t really helping. Let’s channel our energy more productively, by pursuing excellence in our own lives. Let’s aim to be successful and kind and fun to be around. Then feminism doesn’t need to be defended so aggressively. Because it goes without saying.

[unholygrail]

An etiquette guide to the London Underground

[unholygrail]

The Bakery in a Woman’s Prison

It’s not easy to make a salteña.

The filling must be prepared the night before and refrigerated overnight. Construction is a delicate task: each ball of dough is rolled into an eighth-inch-thick circle, folded over the filling, and the edges sealed and scalloped together.

Twelve women stand together in a large kitchen, learning exactly this process. Their uniforms are brand-new, simple and professional: black chef hats, black chef jackets with red linings, and red aprons. One woman—dressed the same but in white—watches over their work. She advises them on their method and arranges the salteñas neatly on a large tray.

René, a bespectacled man in his early thirties, hovers over them. His candor betrays the enthusiasm of a proud parent at a football match: he is keen to show them off. The women are working hard, but every so often, they share a joke.

‘When the bakery opens, you’re going to get fat!’ Isabella, the loudest and most dominant of the group, shouts at René. The women all laugh affectionately. He protests, but laughs along.

René Estenssoro Torricos is the general director of the Seed of Life Association, or SEVIDA. This is an organisation that has been working in the Obrajes prison for women since 2000, attempting to improve the economic, legal, and psychological situation of inmates.

The twelve bakers around him are female prisoners in the midst of training. This prison bakery–large, flooded with light, technologically advanced—will soon open to the public. It will allow the women to learn employable skills and earn a personal income. Customers from outside the prison will be able to order through a door to the outside.

The economic situation in prison is difficult. Women receive a small breakfast and lunch every day, but beyond that they must largely provide for themselves. They need twenty to thirty bolivianos a day for basic necessities: toilet paper, shampoo, food, anything at all they might need for day-to-day living. If a prisoner has children, either inside or outside the prison, school supplies and other necessities are added expenses.

According to Bolivian law, the only thing a prisoner should be deprived of is her freedom. But in Obrajes, there is scant opportunity to work. The prison economy is in a state of fluctuation because jobs are on a constant rotation, and a prisoner needs to be inside for some time before she can start or join a business.

An inmate and baker-in-training, Isabella, seeks advice from the head chef as she attempts to form the edges of the dough. The economy of the prison, she says, can be frustrating and insecure. Although it is possible to start a small business, this requires an initial investment, and many prisoners must rely on loans. But the interest rates, set by fellow prisoners, can fluctuate wildly. This is why the bakery is so important: it will give the women a fixed income with which to rebuild. Isabella has a husband and son in La Paz’s San Pedro prison and a daughter in Obrajes. She cannot rely on familial support or outside income.

The need for money is often the reason behind women’s crimes, René says. ‘For example, a woman has five children’, says René. ‘She has an opportunity to send a package full of drugs for 1,500 dollars. There are lots of conditions that make her fall into crime.’

Their crimes can also be the culmination of years of domestic mistreatment. ‘In Bolivia, there are lots of cultural conditions that mean being a woman in prison is very different to being a man’, René says. Astoundingly, he reckons that 95 percent of the women in Obrajes—and, accordingly, the bakery—have been victims of physical, sexual, or psychological violence.

The importance of the bakery is more than financial. It means the workers are accorded respect, and rewarded for hard work. It’s a chance for women to gain back some control and plan for the future. SEVIDA’s new program is called the Plan for Freedom, and the idea is that, eventually, the women will form their own businesses and create an association. Every salteña sold in the bakery will contribute towards a common pot, from which every baker will receive income. The rest of the money will go toward programs to benefit prisoners such as contracting a doctor to provide gynecological and psychological care.

René is also trying to create a network of family members to sell bread so they can benefit too. The program is still in its early days, but its aims are clear: to empower the women and their family members, and to support the prison.

Signing up to the bakery is a gamble. There is no guarantee that jailhouse salteñas will sell. There are already weaving and laundering businesses within the prison that have enjoyed some success, but a panadería requires a very quick turnaround and a set of regular customers. The women will need a loyal network outside on which to build and extend their reach.

But whether or not the bakery proves lucrative, its significance—purely as a training ground—is clear. There are two handwritten posters tacked up outside the kitchen. One advertises the lessons for making salteñas. The other reads, simply: ‘Porque aprender algo más siempre es bueno’ (Because learning something new is always good).

René says he wants the bakery to ‘let the women know that the lives they have had are not the only reality. I want them to generate and construct a different type of reality.’

The bakery provides a reality of high expectation. The brand-new uniforms and equipment encourage a certain level of behaviour. Professionalism is expected, so the women rise to the challenge. But their individual personalities haven’t been hidden entirely. Just visible underneath their highly professional chef’s coats are long, coloured skirts, flip-flops and socks, heeled boots and Crocs.

And, as the women place their salteñas on a tray in the large oven in the corner, they discuss the party they’re going to have when the bakery finally opens its doors.

‘Can we have stripper clowns?’ roars Isabella. They all laugh as René shakes his head disapprovingly. But he looks away. He can’t help but laugh too.

[unholygrail]

REVIEW: What If

****

What If...being friends has its benefits? asks the tagline. This question is not exactly unexplored territory in cinema. What If, judged by its marketing campaign, is yet another film telling us no, men and women can never be friends under any circumstances, without sexual feelings emerging on one or both sides. However, thanks mostly to its cast, the film is better than the predictability of this conceit.

The acting of Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan transcends their cutesy - even rather affected - dialogue. Kazan is brilliant as Radcliffe’s love interest Chantry. She's funny and sexy and genuinely compelling to watch. Radcliffe, all near-misses and trying-his-best, is witty and charming as the eternally overlooked Wallace. Rather than turning him into the cookie-cutter leading man he is not, What If takes advantage of his appealing nerdiness, his comedic gifts and nervous charm. 

Yet Adam Driver, as Wallace's confidante, is a revelation. His tortured charisma saves the film from drifting into smug sentimentality. The 6 ft 3 Driver should be commended, too, forced to do a lot of leaning-onto-things-to-stay-in-shot when sharing scenes with 5 ft 5 Radcliffe. Rafe Spall,  (Chantry's long-term boyfriend) and Megan Park (Chantry’s slighted sister) both demonstrate their talents for comedic subtlety.

But here's the snag: we've seen it all before. The romantic comedy is a cinematic form so overly-done and overly-parodied that it has very little left of interest to say. These skilled actors are still playing stock characters very familiar to us: the Powerful Boyfriend, the Supportive Best Friend. You can feel the actors straining very hard to say or do anything new at all within this paradigm, to infuse the formula with interest. 

However, perhaps these accusations are unfair. Not every film has to break cultural boundaries or ask new questions. What If has a dramatic authenticity and genuine sweetness. And that should be enough.

[unholygrail]

REVIEW: My Night With Reg at the Donmar Warehouse

****1/2

‘You always used to do that, sort of hurl yourself at furniture’, says Guy to his beloved John in the opening scene of My Night With Reg. Contained within this throwaway comment is years of unrequited affection and shared history, expertly unpacked over the course of the production. My Night With Reg is a play in three parts about six gay men, most of whom have known each other since their halcyon days at Bristol University. The reality of AIDs - the play’s unmentioned antagonist - means the only time they seem to meet, now, is at the funeral of one of their own.

The play was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre upstairs in 1994. Happily, the play’s themes, and overt sexuality, are less shocking in 2014 than they were twenty years ago. Yet this play remains one of immense power, given a whole new poignancy by the death of its scribe Kevin Elyot in June of this year.

The most striking aspect of My Night With Reg is the delicacy of its dialogue, coupled with the impressive complexity of its narrative. While the gaudy humour grabs you by the scruff of the neck, the pathos hits you with a dull blow throughout. The play spans an unspecified number of years, and its two time jumps are not made explicitly as they might be in a lesser play, with heavy-handed dialogue or a quick scene change. Instead, Peter McKintosh’s beautiful set remains the same. The leaps in time are executed so subtly that you find yourself, like so often in life, trying to work out what has happened in the years that passed, and how the present scene could have possibly come to be.

Jonathan Broadbent as Guy, the play’s eternal confidante, shows himself to be a brilliant comedic talent. Yet he occasionally morphs into caricature, with certain scenes played for laughs, without the excruciating restraint of the rest of the cast. Julian Ovenden as the handsome-but-flawed John, gives a finely tuned and suitably broken performance. Richard Cant is perfect at the unrelentingly dull Bernie. Yet Geoffrey Streatfeild’s stunning turn as Daniel is on another plain. Streatfeild catapults into the production as an outrageous, goading figure of fun, full of reminiscence of days gone by. He leaves it as a man plagued by grief and agonising self-doubt, his humour drifting from formidable to pathetic.

In David Bowie’s Starman, a song referenced throughout, he sings ‘I had to phone someone so I picked on you’. This line seems to says it all about the friendship of these men. Unbeknownst to them all, they are united by  nights spent with Reg, who picked on them all, one by one, shaping the narrative from his position off-stage. ‘My Night With Reg’ is a fine play, and a slick, perfectly judged production. 

My Night With Reg, directed by Robert Hastie, is at the Donmar Warehouse until Sept. 27.

[unholygrail]

Recipe for the perfect Hollywood rom-com

YOU WILL NEED:

1 goofy-but-loveable lead, with the charm and good looks of bread, but it doesn't matter because he’s loveable and there's enough of him to hug even though he seems like the kind of guy that would always rather be watching sports and re-gifts books. Not Adam Sandler but might as well be.

1 best friend, preferably gay/ethnic enough to be non-threatening to the lead, basically just a vehicle for brilliantly witty and vaguely offensive one-liners for the trailer that just by living your life in the world you will hear about 300 times.

A sprinkle of a wacky parent to add spice, who wears animal prints and still talks about sex even though they’re older than forty because their just so WACKY, usually played by Patricia Clarkson. Appears whenever the story starts to flag to remind lead what is important and be inappropriate.

82 lbs of some shit-I'm-hot girl with perfect hair and expensive clothes but slightly offset by dead eyes and the personality and like-ability of rust. Preferably Katherine Heigl.

1 'bad-guy' fiancee, with good-looks, nice suits and probably a steady job but is so douchey I mean he just doesn't get her and probably doesn't even know the colour of her eyes or the way she brushes the hair off her face when she laughs I mean come on! He's just so douchey! I mean he probably has good credit and a nice apartment and gym membership! Twat.

1 pathetic friend for the leading girl who is bitter and tells it like it is and has a favourite strong drink and is totally wild and sleeps with a lot of men and is bitter. Usually played by Judy Greer. 

OPTIONAL: A friendly pet/critter (to taste), a wise child who says rude things and is wise, a cameo from Jennifer Coolidge/Eugene Levy, an Asian cab driver.

5 smart seven-year-olds to draft the script.

1 tagline. 

$20 million.

Stir the mixture in a New York or Los Angeles setting. Add to heat for about 3 months as the movie is over-advertised and overhyped. Leave to cool when the reviews are released. Serves 15 million.

[unholygrail]

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.

Fran Lebowitz