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Grateful to be Grateful: Thanksgiving 2015

November 30, 2015 in Age Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Spirit Matters, Travel Matters

For as long as I can remember, Thanksgiving weekend has been difficult—often the most trying time of the year. In general, I have never been much for official holidays. Valentine’s Day is drek; the “parent holidays” are the emotional equivalent of an emergency root canal; New Year’s Day is amateur hour layered upon the fake birthday of Jesus. I even find Groundhog’s Day to be unhappily charged, though this stems from a personal coincidence.

But Thanksgiving has always loomed as the worst.

It’s not just that it is a blithe celebration of the worst strain of colonialism. It’s not just that a yearly gratitude practice rings as false as a Hallmark sympathy card. (Gratitude is a daily—hourly!—value in my cosmology.) It’s that no other day is so much about biological/nuclear family, and I became a conscientious objector to these institutions for very real, very painful reasons. Continue Reading →

All Hail ‘The Hunger Games’

November 21, 2015 in Book Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

Overall, I like “In a World,” actress Lake Bell’s comedy that indicts sexism in the voice-over industry, but it contains one problematic scene. In it, a studio bigwig played by women’s rights activist Geena Davis critiques a thinly disguised version of “The Hunger Games” films. “Let me level with you,” she says. “This pseudo-feminist, fantasy-tween, chick-lit bullshit is a devolution of the female mission and a cancer to the intelligence of young women.”

As “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2,” the final (and hyper-punctuated) installment in the four-film series adapted from Suzanne Collins’s best-selling book trilogy, hits theaters this week, I thought about how much I disagreed with these words. To usurp Bell’s titular phrase, in a world in which young girls – everyone who identifies as female, really – are routinely condescended to and manipulated by popular media, the “Hunger Games” franchise stands out as a shining exception. More than that, it charismatically instructs a new generation (one for whom the activism of the 1960s is but a twinkle in their grandparents’ eyes) that hegemonies can be toppled if we behave courageously and selflessly. Continue Reading →

Fairy Tale, Cautionary Tale: ‘Mustang’

November 19, 2015 in Country Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

I keep thinking about “Mustang,” which opens this week in limited release. It has been described as a Turkish-Syrian “Virgin Suicides” but that comparison would be much more apt if Sofia Coppola had a penchant for female liberation rather than pink Converse. About a group of orphaned sisters (age 12-16) who are imprisoned in their grandmother’s home after getting caught playing with local boys, this is a horror movie about patriarchy on one level and the fiercest of fairy tales on another. Here is the text of a talk I delivered about it last weekend to the Westchester Cinema Club.

Really it’s impossible to discuss “Mustang” without discussing its director. Deniz Gamze Ergüven is a 37-year old-woman raised in Turkey and France. She identifies as a French film director though, and, indeed, though this is set in Turkey with a Turkish cast and in Turkish language, it is technically a French production. The French woman Alice Winocour is her co-screen-writer, and Ergüven counts among her mentors the legendary French director Olivier Assayas, who’s done such extraordinary films as “Summer Hours” and “Clouds of Sils Maria,” which is one of my favorite films of 2015.

That said, this film is very much inspired by the restrictiveness of Turkish life for women. When Deniz was 10, she had the same experience as the girls—she was caught playing on the shoulders of boys and was severely punished for it. As she’s said in interviews, Turkey was one of the countries to give women the vote; now they can barely get abortions and nearly everything coded as feminine is reduced to a shameful reference to sex. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy